Frances to William with thanks in advance... There are a few recent books issued on the practical subject of variously applying either semiotics or semiology to the commercial graphic industries of designing and advertising and promoting and publicizing. (It seems that many theorists and authors insist on calling semiology by the name semiotics for some reason, which can be confusing because these are different approaches to sign study; but that is another debate.) The books "Visible Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics in the Visual Arts" from Ava Publishing in Britain about 2010 and "This Means This, This Means That: A User's Guide to Semiotics" from Laurence King Publishing in Britain about 2007 seem to be typical examples. The book "Creating Effective Advertising: Using Semiotics" from Consultant Press in America about 1994 is seemingly now out of print, but upon a quick library reading of its mainly semiological approach it motivated me to try and define advertising. This little task of writing a text entry about advertising turned out to be more difficult than it first appeared. The thorn was not semiology as an explanatory tool, but was rather the business field of advertising itself. The word advertising is simultaneously and ambiguously used as an adjective and a verb and a noun. This was the first thorn that emerged for me. Then there was the negative connotations found with both haters and lovers of advertising. The usual thrusts and stabs were hurled at advertising because of its assumed manipulations and deceptions. The finding for me however was that adverting seems to be diversely negative and positive, yet it can be used well and for good reasons. My growing collection of definitions about advertising is culled from several published sources, but they are all inadequate, because the authors tend to stick narrowly and justly to the specific fields they are writing about. Since you stated to have been in advertising, perhaps you could kindly offer a short general definition of advertising, assuming it can be defined in that way.
My own initial semiotic approach to a define of advertising is to tentatively align advertisements with say statements and announcements and arguments, then offer a guess on how these signs might differ. It seems that an advertisement must be practical and public and acknowledged and persuasive, but regardless of whether its offered claims are false or true. -----Original Message----- From: William Conger [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, 10 February, 2011 10:01 AM To: [email protected] Subject: advertising-art For a few years in the early 1960s I enjoyed successful career in advertising, saving money for my long-planned breakaway into the dissolute life of an unemployed artist. I didn't realize then that I was an early postmodern artist. The ads I created for hardware and power tools were immersed in very subtle affirmations and creation of middle-class suburban life. The "aesthetic" of my ads was to aim the products to the new imaginary, booming white-collar consumer class male: the fellow who had completed college, usually majoring in economics, had married a pretty girl, bought a suburban ranch in the boonies, drove a family sedan or station wagon, had a few beautiful kids, and was eager to prove himself as a new "do-it-yourself" pioneer by finishing the basement, adding a sunroom or building a fence to safeguard the family puppy. The ads not only served that consumer but more important, created him (definitely a him). Here was theory adding aesthetic value -- an imagined, improved, better -- morally better -- selfness to be experienced when using an electric drill, or doing the jobs that handy blue-collar guys used to do. This view, the aggrandizing of mundane skills as idealized symbols of the all-American "can-do" male, was central to the postwar mythologizing of middle-class values. I didn't create ads for the simple tasks that saw blades and electric drills could do but what they made of their users. If a good suit, a new car, an office job, a pretty wife, crispy smart kids, and a white clapboard house made the man, the drill or saw in his hand made him a real man, an up-to-date Abraham Lincoln log-splitter. (Don't just show the tool but show the man at home in his sporty weekend clothes using the tool amidst his admiring family). Having saved my money, I gave up my postmodern life to create unfashionable, overworked and troubled modernist art works. But It took ten years and plenty of inflation for me to earn as much as an artist as I did as a fantasy-creating ad man. Now, fifty years later, the art world has long since discovered the power of mid-century consumer advertising. Many of today's artists are ad-people. They take something very ordinary and present it as the affirmation and realization of materialist dreams, a way of life, the road to happiness, the promise that anyone can be not only well-off but better, morally and culturally better. Today's white cube museum is only yesterday's empty concrete basement awaiting the man with the right tools, a place of awe and ambitious fantasy of a perfect future.
