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Narrenproduktion (Fools‘ Production)
The visualisation of protest as an entertaining advertising drama (2004)
Rudi Maier, Mediologische Vereinigung Ludwigsburg
In 1971, as people all across the world took to the streets to demonstrate against the Vietnam War, against authority structures, one-dimensional models of relationships, against the stuffiness under official robes etc., the German airline Lufthansa campaigned to win young and youthfullythinking customers as passengers. To those interested, the ad promised a "specially prepared purple brochure", which would be "sent in a neutral envelope". A few years later, Dick Hebdige wrote in Subculture the Meaning of Style that the exponents of this revolt were "alternately repudiated, denounced or canonised". They were presented either as actors "who threatened the public order or as harmless fools".
Advertisements are always an expression of concrete social relations or, in other words, there is no ideology without signs. The old and new "logoscapes" are constituted from a rich regime of signs and are meant to show protest, uprising and revolt, especially in commercial ads, as part of a great Punch and Judy show. Narrenproduktion (Fools‘ Production) shows the history of this (embattled) relation.
Thirty advertisements from the last 35 years illustrate the visual strategies of playing-down and taming protest and of the attempt to re-integrate the "actors" into the dominant hegemonic fabric of society. They are taken from the collection So geht Revolution (this is how revolution works), a project of the Medialogical Association of Ludwigsburg (MVL). Part of the collection has been on tour for two years as a travelling exhibition in leftist centres, self-governed schools, open-minded art galleries, cinemas, art spaces and cultural contexts. It shows more than one hundred advertisments, all of which operate with the signs, symbols, slogans, watchwords and icons of the (radical) left. The entire collection presently comprises of about 1,500 pieces.
The MVL is a loose group of people who are particularly interested in the (commercial) pictorial world of neo-liberalism and who engage themselves in various exhibition projects - among these the function of the title pages of daily newspapers (Tagespop, "Daily Pop"), the iconographic presentation of the World Trade Centre (Mein WTC, "My WTC"), "revolutionary" iconoclasms (So geht Revolution) and, on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of Che Guevara‘s birthday last year, the "pop icon" Che (Das Konterfei des Comandante, ‘The Likeness of the Comandante‘). Some members of the MVL also lecture on these topics. Further information, also about the exhibition So geht Revolution on loan, is available at www.demoz-lb.de/inis/mv.htm
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An early form of "payback card" and "stinginess is sexy"
("Geiz ist geil"): revolution with discount (1971)
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