Marketing Animals - MAFIADOC.COM

Antennae Issue 23 - Winter 2012

ISSN 1756-9575

Marketing Animals Adele Tiengo and Matteo Andreozzi – Eat Me Tender / Barbara J. Phillips – Advertising and the Cultural Meaning of Animals / Adele Tiengo and Leonardo Caffo – Animal Subjects: Local Exploitation, Slow Killing / Claire Molloy – Remediating Cows and the Construction of Ethical Landscape / Concepcion Cortes Zulueta – His Master’s Voice / Cluny South – The Tiger in the Tank / Iwan rhys Morus – Bovril by Electrocution / Louise Squire – The Animals Are “Breaking Out”! / Gene Gable – Can You Say, “Awww”? / Sonja Britz – Evolution and Design / Hilda Kean – Nervous Dogs Need Admin, Son! / Katherine Bennet – A Stony Field / John Miller -Brooke’s Monkey Brand Soap / Sunsan Nance – Jumbo: A Capitalist Creation / Kelly 1 Enright – None Tougher / Linda Kalof and Joe Zammit-Lucia – From Animal Rights and Shock Advocacy to Kinship With Animals / Natalie Gilbert – Fad of the Year / Jeremy Smallwood and Pam Mufson by Chris Hunter – The Saddest Show on Earth / Sabrina Tonutti – Happy Easter / Bettina Richter – Animals on the Runway / Susan Nance – ‘Works Progress Administration’ Posters

Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

Editor in Chief Giovanni Aloi

Academic Board Steve Baker Ron Broglio Matthew Brower Eric Brown Carol Gigliotti Donna Haraway Linda Kalof Susan McHugh Rachel Poliquin Annie Potts Ken Rinaldo Jessica Ullrich

Advisory Board Bergit Arends Rod Bennison Helen Bullard Claude d’Anthenaise Petra Lange-Berndt Lisa Brown Rikke Hansen Chris Hunter Karen Knorr Rosemarie McGoldrick Susan Nance Andrea Roe David Rothenberg Nigel Rothfels Angela Singer Mark Wilson & Bryndís Snaebjornsdottir

Global Contributors João Bento & Catarina Fontoura Sonja Britz Tim Chamberlain Concepción Cortes Lucy Davis Amy Fletcher Katja Kynast Christine Marran Carolina Parra Zoe Peled Julien Salaud Paul Thomas Sabrina Tonutti Johanna Willenfelt

Copy Editor Maia Wentrup

Front Cover Image: Original image - Pirelli, Atlante, 1954 © Pirelli

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EDITORIAL ANTENNAE ISSUE 23

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his issue of Antennae was developed around the idea that advertising can be much more than a pivotal marketing tool in capitalist societies. Over the past few years, through the increase popularity of social networks advertising strategies have more and more come to play a pivotal role in communication and can be understood as a cultural thermometer of our identities and desires. The conspicuous presence of animals in advertising is therefore a phenomenon that deserves study; it is not a new phenomenon in itself but it is one that nonetheless demands renewed attention and scrutiny through a human-animal studies lens. Whether photographed, illustrated, animated or filmed the ambivalent presence of the animal, initially seems to facilitate the delivery of consumeristic messages. However, things are much more complex. What does the animal sell to us and what do we effectively buy through these instances of visual consumption? What role does the animal play in the persuasions processes enacted by advertisements? In the attempt to provide some answers to these questions and more, besides a traditional call for academic papers, Antennae also solicited short commentaries on advertisements chosen by our readers and contributors. The colourful variety of examples submitted contributes to the outlining of an extremely diverse range of animal appearances in advertising greatly varying on the grounds of what is to be sold and which target audiences are to persuade. These shorter entries have been interposed between longer and more complex analyses of specific animal presences in advertising. One of the unexpected result gathered from the collection of the excellent submissions we received, highlights a perhaps not too surprising, current, overriding interest for mammals against any other animal group. Anthropomorphism may be an inevitable expedient essential to the success of the identification process lying at the core of all advertising intending to sell us commodities. This is rather well demonstrated through the publication of a portfolio of vintage adverts with which this issue comes to a close. For this essential contribution we have to thank Nigel Rothfels whom on a warm June afternoon in 2011 walking lazily around the streets of Zurich came across a very unusual archive. As Nigel recalls, “I was in the city to attend a small conference on science and before long, I found myself staring into the windows of the Swiss National Bank! A quite fascinating exhibit had been organized in the windows by staff at the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich focusing on the history of animals appearing in advertising posters. I went from window to window enjoying the posers, and taking pictures. Through the generosity of Dr. Bettina Richter and Allesia Contin at the Museum, we are now able to bring a selection of this rarely seen and remarkable collection to Antennae’s readers”. Besides considering a range of well known and lesser know advertisements, this issue also looks at the more ethically driven considertation of the use of animal imagery in the advertisements produced by animal advocacy organisations through a thought-provoking piece by Linda Kalof and Joe Zammit-Lucia, whilst an interview with creative teams at Young & Rubicam Chicago demonstrates how the presence of animals in advertising can be used to the advantage of animals through some astonishingly simple but impressive communicational inventiveness. Lastly I would like to take the opportunity to thank all involved in the making of this issue of Antennae.

Giovanni Aloi Editor in Chief of Antennae Project

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CONTENTS ANTENNAE ISSUE 23 5 Eat Me Tender Love can be dangerous when it comes to cooking. In this image, the evidence that a ‘lover’ wants to possess his woman just like a ‘meat lover’ wants to eat his steak is exposed in a grotesque way. Sexist discrimination and animal exploitation are here associated to ‘love’, understood as an abuse mitigated by tenderness and care in the act of possessing and killing. Text by A dele Tiengo and Matteo Andreozzi

8 Advertising and the Cultural Meaning of Animals One explanation for the proliferation of animal trade characters in current advertising practice proposes that they are effective communication tools because they can be used to transfer desirable cultural meanings to products with which they are associated. The first step in examining what messages these animals communicate is to explore the common cultural meanings that they embody. This paper presents a qualitative analysis of the common themes found in the cultural meanings of four animal characters. In addition, it demonstrates a method by which cultural meanings can be elicited. The implications of this method for advertising research and practice are discussed. Text by B arbara J. Phillips

19 Animal Subjects: Local Exploitation, Slow Killing The city of Milan will host Expo 2015, with the theme “Feeding the Planet. Energy for Life”. In view of this occasion, the interest for culinary tradition and the global challenge of food security is rapidly growing. Farming and livestock raising traditions plays a major role in Italy, homeland of the worldwide renowned Slow Food. Text by A dele Tiengo and Leonardo Caffo

22 Remediating Cows and the Construction of Ethical Landscape Concern about the impact of livestock on the environment has generated debates about how best to manage dairy farming practices. Soil erosion and compaction and loss of biodiversity from grazing and silage production, ammonia and methane emissions, as well as high levels of water consumption, have all been identified as direct effects on the environment from dairy farming activity.[i] Whilst the issues have been well reported in the press, there has been little in the way of imagery to accompany the environmental critique of milk production. Instead, much of the popularly available imagery of dairy farming has been generated by advertising which continues to deploy culturally-specific visions of contented cows in rural landscapes. Text by C laire Molloy

27 His Master’s Voice A white dog with brown ears sits in front of a gramophone, head directed to its brass-horn and slightly tilted to one side. The original painting was purchased in 1899, along with its full copyright, by the emerging Gramophone Company from the artist Francis Barraud. Text by C oncepcion Cortes Zulueta

30 The Tiger in the Tank Despite the complexities and inconstancies of the human-animal relationship non-human animals [1] have been intimately interwoven within human culture for thousands of years. Representations of animals exist across many mediums, with roots clearly visible in Palaeolithic cave paintings and early carvings, evolving human language, music and drama, and narrative fables and folk stories. Unsurprisingly then animal representations continue to be rife throughout our modern lives and across much popular media. Text by C luny South

38 Bovril by Electrocution I first came across this illustration whilst browsing through Leonard de Vries’s fascinating collection, Victorian Advertising, about twelve years ago. I was looking for something else at the time – examples of late Victorian electric belt advertisements as part of a project on nineteenth-century medical electricity. Instead, this one jumped out of the page at me. Text by I wan Rhys Morus

41 The Animals Are “Breaking Out”! This paper explores recent TV adverts in which the animals portrayed come to appear before us in new ways. Gone are cosy images of chimpanzees playing house, wearing flat-caps and frocks, and pouring cups of tea. The animals are breaking out! Mary, the cow (Muller yoghurt), is “set free” on a beach to fulfil her dream of becoming a horse. More cows (Anchor butter) have taken charge of the dairy. Text by L ouise Squire

48 Can You Say, “Awww”? Animals have long been a regular theme in advertising, especially when anthropomorphized. Except for obvious ties to products like dog food and pet products, animals usually have nothing to do with the goods or services advertised, but we connect with them and the products nonetheless, and we get a good feeling when a company is associated with cute animals. Text by G ene Gable

50 Evolution and Design In this paper, The evolution of the animal as sign in the mass media and its stylistic classification within the 20th and 21st centuries, cultural representations of animals in advertising and the mass media, with special focus on the corporate arena, will be addressed within the context of Foucault’s notion of the Western episteme and how cultural spaces are governed by it. Furthermore, historical and evolutionary processes will be considered in relation to prevalent sign systems and different approaches to evolutionary systems will be taken into account. Text by S onja Britz

60 Nervous Dogs Need Admin, Son! This advert comes from a British magazine The Tail Wagger, October 1940. The Tail- Waggers Club had been founded in 1928 to promote dog welfare stating, ‘The love of animals, and especially of dogs, is inherent in nearly all Britishers’ and by 1930 numbered some 300,000 members.[i] All dogs were eligible for membership, not just those from established breeds. By July 1930 it had become a general legal requirement that all dogs should wear collars and the club and magazine endorsed such measures.[ii] Text by H ilda Kean

63 A Stony Field Brand representations proliferate reflexive identities of their producers and consumers. These self-advertisements reinscribe commodified identities reproductively back onto the subjects and objects – the represented figures – of consumption. In this paper I argue that the cooption of identity politics by multinational corporations like Stonyfield Farm, Inc. operates within material and virtual domains that conceal fetishized processes of consumption. Text by K atherine Bennett

79 Brooke’s Monkey Brand Soap Brooke’s Monkey Brand Soap was a common, even iconic, presence in the pages of late nineteenth-century illustrated newspapers in Britain. Barely an issue of the London Illustrated News, The Graphic or The Sketch passed without a full or half page spread of Brooke’s ubiquitous monkey, arrayed in one of its many baffling guises: promenading in top hat and tails, juggling cooking pots in a jester’s get-up, strumming a mandolin on the moon, destitute and begging by the side of the road, kneeling to accept a medal from a glamorous Frenchwoman, careering along on a bicycle with feet on the handle-bars, clinging precariously to a ship’s mast, carefully polishing the family china and here in 1891, sliding gleefully down the banisters with legs spread wide and the hint of a smile while two neat Victorian children watch calmly on. Text by J ohn MillerText by L isa Jevbratt

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82 Jumbo: A Capitalist Creation Story Today, a profusion of non-human animals inhabit the world of advertising. Consumers see some of them in person and some as brand icons, team mascots, and other moregeneric endorsers of consumption (sometimes their own consumption, like pig characters decorating BBQ restaurants or matronly cows on dairy product packaging) embellishing countless products, services and entertainments. This zoological cornucopia provides a naturalizing link to the non-human world, promising us that to absorb advertising messages and spend is to participate in an inevitable and emotionally authentic activity because, as the belief goes, animals don’t lie (Shukin 2009, 3-5). Text by S usan Nance

94 None Tougher Rhinoceroses are rarely anthropomorphized making this American magazine advertisement from the 1950s an unusual specimen. Armstrong, a rubber and tire company, found the tough exterior of rhinoceroses the prime comparison for its most durable automobile tires, dubbed “Rhino-Flex.” Text by K elly Enright

97 From Animal Rights and Shock Advocacy to Kinship with Animals The visual cultures manifested in the advertising and communication activities of animal rights activists and those concerned with the conservation of species may be counter-productive, creating an ever-increasing cultural distance between the human and the animal. By continuing to position animals as subjugated, exploitable others, or as creatures that belong in a romanticized ‘nature’ separate from the human, communications campaigns may achieve effects that are contrary to those desired. The unashamed, cheaply voyeuristic nature of shock imagery may win headlines while worsening the overall position of the animal in human culture. We offer an alternative way of thinking about visual communication concerning animals – one that is focused on enhancing a sense of kinship with animals. Based on empirical evidence, we suggest that continued progress both in conservation and in animal rights does not depend on continued castigation of the human but rather on embedding in our cultures the type of human-animal relationship on which positive change can be built. Text by L inda Kalof and Joe Zammit-Lucia

111 Fad of the Year At the end of 2010 one of the UK’s commercial television channels, ITV, selected twenty of the most popular TV adverts from the year and entered them in to their own competition to find the television ‘Ad of the Year’. The winning advert was one featuring a rescue dog called Harvey who is in kennels, hoping somebody will come along and adopt him. Text by N atalie Gilbert

113 The Saddest Show on Earth Since 1884, children across the United States have been dazzled by the sequined wonders of the Ringling Bros. Circus. For many a youngster the spectacle of costumed elephants performing myriad tricks under the big top is a highlight of the show. Yet the bright spotlight of the center ring casts a dark shadow across this American institution. Persistent allegations of elephant abuse have trailed the traveling show for years. Text and interview questions to Jeremy Smallwood and Pam Mufson by C hris Hunter

119 Happy Easter Even if we are talking about this image as an “advertisement”, it is clear that its scope is not business, but to inform and raise consciousness about the slaughtering of animals. The message itself is rather peculiar: it’s obviously about animals, but without including any image of them in the picture. If a contradiction exists, it has nothing to do with the message conveyed by the advertisement, but rather with ambiguous attitudes of humans towards animals. In this case, it’s the lambs who are not portrayed in the advertisement. Text by S abrina Tonutti

122 Animals on the Runway The discussion of animals in graphic art has radically changed since about 1950. In contemporary performances and installations, even living animals are displayed, which often leads to ethical discussions. Recent work, however, reflects a new societal view of animals: A strictly anthropocentric view has had its day, now animals have come to be seen as equal creatures and have emancipated themselves in artistic representation. Text by B ettina Richter

131 ‘Works Progress Administration’ Posters In 1933 and 1934, as part of the “New Deal” economic plan for the United States, President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration created a new federal agency called the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to hire artists to document and promote American cultural life. Text by S usan Nance

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EAT ME TENDER

Love can be dangerous when it comes to cooking. In this image, the evidence that a ‘lover’ wants to possess his woman just like a ‘meat lover’ wants to eat his steak is exposed in a grotesque way. Sexist discrimination and animal exploitation are here associated to ‘love’, understood as an abuse mitigated by tenderness and care in the act of possessing and killing. Text by A dele Tiengo and Matteo Andreozzi

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One of the most powerful ecofeminist approach to the issue of animal exploitation as a practice focused on – but not restricted to – food is Carol Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat. Published in 1990, Adams’ book combines the author’s experience as a feminist activist and her academic researches to formulate the link between the perception of nonhuman animals and women as ‘consumable bodies’, offered to men’s pleasure. Adams suggests that both women and animals are victims of a process of objectification, fragmentation, and consumption, especially in visual, textual, and discursive texts. Through metaphor, a subject is objectified, then fragmented and separated from its ontological meaning, and consumed as an object, existing only through what it represents. In the Meat Lovers advertisement, the woman/cow is an object of consumption and the representation of the patriarchal idea of love as dominion and possession. Many are also the analogies between Adams’ investigation and Derrida’s carnophallogocentrism. Derrida uses this neologism to indicate the predominance of rationality, masculinity, and carnivorous habits. In his interview ‘Eating Well’, he clarifies this point admitting that women and vegetarians are

ince the Sixties, ecofeminist philosophical thinking has been underlining the strong connection between sexist discrimination, exploitation of nonhuman animals, and abuse of natural resources. These three phenomena have been seen as so deeply interconnected, both conceptually and historically, that they can be adequately understood and handled only as a single question. What the ecofeminists state – and the image presented in this advert confirms – is that in Western patriarchal civilization, women, nonhuman animals, and the environment are categories related to ‘animated properties’, or ‘mobile goods’. How should these logically fallacious and discriminatory messages be handled, criticized, and discouraged? The ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood suggests to contrast the patriarchal conceptual framework through a careful work of revaluation, celebration, and defense of what male dominion subdues. Dichotomical metaphors underrate the feminine as related to corporeality, emotions, intuitiveness, cooperation, care, and sympathy; on the other hand, the masculine is celebrated as related to opposed concept, such as rationality, intellect, competition, dominion, and apathy (Plumwood, 1992).

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that use the female body to attract the male meat eaters. In the case of the advertisement here presented, rigorously male meat eaters are invited to consume their love for a steak on a bed of lettuce. However, rather than aggressive and pornographic, this kind of love seems tender and devoted. The cow’s head is ridiculously put on the body of a sleeping woman and a man embraces her. The aim of the advertisement is to arouse a kind of tenderness for the animal killed without putting into question the meat eater’s virility. In fact, the tenderness here displayed is the one that follows the sexual intercourse between husband and wife, maybe. Curiously enough, it is the beloved steak that plays here

actually ethical, juridical and political subjects, as well as men and meat eaters. However, this is a recent achievement, and still «authority […] is attributed to the man (homo and vir) rather than to the woman, and to the woman rather than to the animal». And in fact, Derrida asks, how many possibilities are there that a head of State publicly and exemplarily declares him – or herself – to be a vegetarian? (Derrida, 'Eating Well', or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida 1991, 114). Both identify meat eating and maleness as crucial elements in determining who is a subject. In particular, Derrida states that there are three fundamental conditions to recognize a subject as such, at least in Western cultures:

La Capannina Amanti della Carne (Meat Lovers), advert
La Capannina

the role of the absent referent. Both the woman and the cow are visually present in the image, but the object of the advertisement – meat – is only textually summoned. In fact, the proposed idea is that meat eating is a behaviour of caring because the woman/cow wants to be object of that kind of ‘tenderness’, meaning that she wants to be eaten/consumed. The scene is not one of seduction, but of

being «a meat eater, a man, and an authoritative, speaking self» (Calarco qtd in Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat 1990, 6). Adams develops this idea in a far more detailed way. In particular she focuses on the implications of the perception of animal/female bodies as ‘consummable’ through butchery and rape, underlining the evidences of this analogy in images, commercials, menu covers, and articles

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industry, because they don’t produce anything during their lives and their meat is considered as less succulent and tasty. In an analogous way, female human animals are exploited mainly when they are alive for their sexual and reproductive function and, basically, to satisfy men’s pleasure. The Meat lovers image makes it clear that not much has changed, since the Sixties: females of all species are ‘objects’ of love and properties of men.

marital love. Carol Adams clearly explains how the sexual politics of meat begins within the exploitation of the reproductive functions of female animals. Living alone milk and eggs – which are products of maternity –, the majority of meat comes from adult females and their babies. Female nonhuman animals are exploited to satisfy human appetites both when they are alive and when they are dead, while male animals are used much less in the food

References

Adele Tiengo is a Ph.D. student in Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Milan (Italy), where she graduated in 2012 with a thesis on the relationship between literature and ethics in the animal question. In 2011 she spent a period as a visiting researcher at the University of Alcalà (Spain), thanks to the Susan Fenimore Cooper scholarship. She is currently carrying on her research activities in ecocriticism.

Adams, C. J. (1990). The Sexual Politics of Meat (Twentieth Anniversary Edition (2010) ed.). New York : Continuum. 1991'Eating Well', or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques DerridaNew York and LondonRoutledge Feminism and Ecofeminism: Beyond the Dualistic Assumptions of Women, Men, and Nature1992The Ecologist 221

Matteo Andreozzi is a PhD student in Philosophy at University of Milan, Italy. His research is mainly on Environmental Ethics and Movements, with a special focus on the analysis and the developing of the intrinsic value concept. He is author of the book Verso una prospettiva ecocentrica. Ecologia profonda e pensiero a rete[Heading toward an ecocentric mindset. Deep ecology and reticular thinking], 2011 and editor of the book Etiche dell’ambiente. Voci e prospettive [Environmental Ethics. Voices and Perspectives], 2012. He is also representative member of ENEE (European Network for Environmental Ethics) and MAnITA (Minding Animals Italy) and member of ISEE (International Society for Environmental Ethics) and ESFRE (European Forum for Science, Religion and the Environment). For further information please visit http://www.matteoandreozzi.it orhttp://unimi.academia.edu/M atteoAndreozzi.

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ADVERTISING AND THE CULTURAL MEANING OF ANIMALS

One explanation for the proliferation of animal trade characters in current advertising practice proposes that they are effective communication tools because they can be used to transfer desirable cultural meanings to products with which they are associated. The first step in examining what messages these animals communicate is to explore the common cultural meanings that they embody. This paper presents a qualitative analysis of the common themes found in the cultural meanings of four animal characters. In addition, it demonstrates a method by which cultural meanings can be elicited. The implications of this method for advertising research and practice are discussed. Text by B arbara J. Phillips

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for a product, and achieve promotional continuity (Phillips 1996). However, one of the most important reasons for the use of trade characters in advertising may be that they can be used to transfer desired meanings to the products with which they are associated. By pairing a trade character with a product, advertisers can link the personality and cultural meaning of the character to the product in the minds of consumers. This creates a desirable image, or meaning, for the product. The first step in supporting this explanation of trade character communication is to show that these characters do embody common cultural meanings that can be linked to products. Research has shown that animal characters are one of the most commonly used trade character types in current advertising practice (Callcott and Lee 1994). Animals have long been viewed as standard symbols of human qualities (Neal 1985; Sax 1988). For example, in American culture,

merican popular culture has quietly become inhabited by all sorts of talking animals and dancing products that are used by advertisers to promote their brands. These creatures, called trade characters, are fictional, animate beings, or animated objects, that have been created for the promotion of a product, service, or idea (Phillips 1996). Commercials with these characters score above average in their ability to change brand preference (Stewart and Furse 1986). It appears, then, that trade characters can be effective communication tools. However, it is unclear why this is so. Although trade characters are popular with advertisers and consumers, their role in communicating the advertising message has been generally taken for granted without investigation. It has been hypothesized that there are several reasons why advertisers use trade characters: to attract attention, enhance identification of and memory

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desirable emotions and ideas (McCracken 1986). For example, the image of a child may invoke feelings of pleasure, nostalgia, and playfulness. By showing a product next to such an image, advertising encourages consumers to associate the product with the image. Through this association, the product acquires the image's cultural meaning. Trade characters may be one type of image that advertisers use because these characters possess learned cultural meanings. These meanings are similar to the personalities that consumers associate with characters from other sources such as movies, cartoons, and comic books. For example, Mickey Mouse is viewed as a "nice guy," while Bugs Bunny is seen as clever, but mischievous. Individuals do not invent their own meaning for cultural symbols; they must learn what each symbol means in their culture (Berger 1984) based on their experiences with the character. For example, consumers' ideas about the meaning of "elephant" are shaped by Dumbo movies and African safari TV programs, and are colored by news stories about a rampaging elephant that trampled its trainer. Consequently, although each individual brings his or her own experience to the meaning ascription process, consensus of character meaning across individuals is possible through common cultural experience. In advertising, trade characters' meanings are used to visually represent the product attributes (Zacher 1967) or the advertising message (Kleppner 1966). For example, Mr. Peanut embodies sophistication (Kapnick 1992), the Pillsbury Doughboy symbolizes fun (PR Newswire 1990), and the lonely Maytag repairman stands for reliability (Elliott 1992). However, the consumer must correctly decode the trade character's meaning before it can have an impact (McCracken 1986). Therefore, characters' meanings must be easily understood by consumers if they are to correctly interpret the character's message. As a result, advertisers frequently use animal trade characters (Callcott and Lee 1994) because consumers are thought to have learned the animals' cultural meanings, and consequently are likely to correctly decode the advertising message. The first step in examining the association between animal trade characters and the products they promote is to explore the symbolic meanings conveyed by the animals used in these advertisements. That is, if an advertiser places a bear (e.g., Snuggle) or a dog (e.g., Spuds McKenzie) next to his product, what do these

"everyone" knows that a bee symbolizesindustriousness, a dove represents peace, and a fox embodies cunning (Robin 1932). It is likely that advertisers use animal characters because consumers understand the animals' cultural meanings and consequently can link these meanings to a product. Therefore, the cultural meaning of animals may lie at the core of the meanings of animal trade characters. This paper describes a method for eliciting character meanings, presents a qualitative analysis of the cultural meanings of four animal characters, and discusses the broader implications that these results have for advertising research and practice. This qualitative study of animal meanings is motivated by several issues: Understanding the cultural meanings that consumers assign to animal characters will assist in developing successful advertising campaigns; practitioners can create characters that embody desired brand meanings while avoiding characters with negative associations. In addition, by highlighting an underutilized research method by which the cultural meaning of characters can be elicited, this paper presents a way for practitioners, researchers, and regulators to understand what messages specific characters are communicating to their audiences. This method may be useful in other types of advertising research as well. Researchers have, in the past, asked for measures of cultural meaning for celebrity endorsers (McCracken 1989) and for symbolic advertising images (Scott 1994), as well. Finally, by showing that animal characters have common cultural meanings, this paper builds support for one of the first empirical explanations of how trade characters "work" in advertising, and creates a foundation for future trade character research. The next section of the paper will present the theories used to illuminate the research question: Do there exist shared meanings that consumers associate with specific animal characters? If so, how can these meanings be elicited, and what are their common themes? The third section will introduce a method by which the cultural meanings of characters can be elicited, and will present the procedures used in this research study. The fourth section will discuss the results of the study, and the last section will draw general conclusions. Conceptual Development of the Research Question It has been suggested that advertising functions, in general, by attempting to link a product with an image that elicits

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imposed on subjects to limit their responses C a primary draw-back of quantitative research. The word association method is not new; other marketing and advertising researchers have used it to understand how consumers perceive products (Kleine and Kernan 1991) and to determine a product's attributes to aid in product positioning (Friedmann 1986). However, perhaps because it is "old hat," this method has been consistently overlooked and underutilized in consumer behavior research. In the present study, informants were asked to respond to verbal animal names during the word association task (e.g., "bear") rather than to visual images of the animal. Verbal animal names are thought to elicit broad responses that reflect much of the information that an individual has learned to associate with the category, "bear." In contrast, the way an animal is visually portrayed can narrow its meaning (Berger 1984). A realistic picture of a bear may elicit a different part of the core meaning of "bear" than a cartoon bear. Images of actual trade characters, such as Smokey Bear or Snuggle, may elicit even narrower meanings associated only with those characters. Therefore, verbal animal names were used to generate broad, complete responses. However, it is possible that advertisers could use both verbal and visual animals in a word association task when creating characters. Responses to the verbal animal name would provide core meanings, while responses to the visual character would provide a measure of how successfully the particular representation of an animal captured desired meanings. This possibility will be discussed further in the conclusion section of this paper. The informants for this study were 21 male and 15 female undergraduate students enrolled in an advertising management course at a major state university. Students participated in the study during their regular class time. Of these respondents, 92% were between the ages of 20 and 25. The use of this student sample precludes concluding that the results of this study reflect the "true" cultural meaning of each animal. However, this sample is useful to show that a common cultural meaning for each animal exists in a homogeneous population and can be elicited through research, whether that population is composed of undergraduate students or other target markets of interest to advertisers. Each informant received a package containing a cover page, an instruction page, and five word association sheets. The instructions for the word association task were read aloud and informants' questions

animals represent to the audience? Rather than examine individual animal characters, however, it is necessary to first study an animal's general cultural meaning. This is because the animal category (e.g., bear, dog, etc.) provides the primary, or core, meaning of an individual character. Although an advertiser can choose to highlight certain animal meanings over others (e.g., "softness" for Snuggle Bear and "wildness" for Smokey Bear), the core set of animal meanings dictate what is possible for that character to express. Snuggle fabric softener would not find it easy to use a porcupine, pig, or flamingo to express "softness." In addition, by studying the broad animal category to which the character belongs, it is possible to make generalizations that can help practitioners create and use animal characters effectively. For example, if advertisers know that the animal "cat" shares several positive core meanings, they can create cat characters that capitalize on those meanings. Alternatively, if "cat" meanings contain negative attributes that reflect badly on the associated product, advertisers may want to use a different character. M ethod It is difficult to explore the perceived meaning of a trade character by asking subjects directly, as their responses tend to be superficial and descriptive. "Smokey Bear? Oh, he's brown and wears a hat." Other qualitative methods, such as in-depth interviewing, tend to be time- and laborintensive C features that advertisers may want to avoid. As an alternative, word association is an easy and efficient method for exploring psychological meaning. It can be administered to a group and can elicit the meanings of more than one animal per session, yet provides rich information regarding cultural meaning. Szalay and Deese (1978) state that because a word association task does not require subjects to communicate their intentions, it decreases subjects' rationalizations, and it taps associations that are difficult to express or explain. Further, word association does not require thoughts to be expressed in a structural manner. Instead, this technique produces expressions of thought that are immediate and spontaneous, and this spontaneity, along with an imposed time constraint, is thought to reduce subjects' selfmonitoring and conscious editing of responses. Finally, the method reduces experimenter bias because no organization or categories are

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regarding the task were answered. For each word association task, respondents had one minute to write one-word descriptions of whatever came to mind when they thought about the animal listed at the top of the page (Szalay and Deese 1978). Informants were instructed to write these words in the order in which they came to mind and it was stressed that there were no wrong answers. The first animal listed in the package was lobster, which was used as a practice task to familiarize students with the word association method. After completing the practice task, informants' remaining questions about the task were answered. Respondents then completed four more animal word associations, responding to the words: penguin, ant, gorilla, and raccoon. The particular animals were chosen to reflect the interests of the author; other animals could illustrate the commonality of animal meanings as well. The order in which the four animals were presented was randomized to control for order effects. The words generated by informants in response to the animal word association were grouped into categories, or themes that emerged from the data. Each animal was analyzed separately, except lobster, the practice task, which was not coded. For each animal, words that were similar in meaning or that had a common theme were grouped together. Each informant's responses were added to the tentative themes discovered in the previous informants' responses, thus supporting those themes or allowing them to be changed (Strauss and Corbin 1990). Guidelines suggested by Szalay and Deese (1978) were followed when identifying common themes. Words that could not be placed into any category were placed into an "other" category. These words did not have an identifiable association with the animal; they are thought to be associations to words other than the animal (i.e., chain associations) or words that show that the respondent was thinking of something other than the task at hand. There were only 10 to 16 of these words for each animal. A second researcher re-classified all of the response words into the categories to check the soundness of the themes. There was an initial 86% agreement between researchers; disagreements were resolved through discussion and re-analysis of informant responses. The response words for all of the animals are available from the author.

COG NITIVE M AP O F PENG UIN THEM ES The themes elicited in response to each animal were illustrated using cognitive maps, representing a pictorial overview of each animal's meaning. The cognitive map summarizes the objects and ideas that informants collectively associate with each animal, and organizes these associations into meaningful themes (Coleman 1992). The cognitive map also identifies the number of times each theme was mentioned, giving an idea of the relative importance of each theme to the animal's shared meaning. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIO N G eneral Results Informants mentioned between 315 and 386 words in response to each animal, or approximately 9 to 11 words per individual. It was surprising that more than 90% of informants' responses could be classified into six or seven main themes for each animal. In addition, informants' words were easily coded into these themes, reflecting a high degree of similarity between respondents. Also, words with the highest frequencies were mentioned by 8 to 25 individuals, which suggests a high degree of consistency across individuals' responses. These results support the idea that there exist shared cultural meanings that consumers generally associate with animals, and that these meanings can be elicited through word association. Interestingly, although it was not the intent at the outset, the themes that emerged from the data were remarkably similar between animals. The primary themes mentioned by informants include: (a) Appearance, (b) Habitat, (c) Personality, (d) Human/animal interaction, (e) Popular culture, and (f) Behavior. These six categories seem to be most salient for consumers, and may offer the greatest help in creating animal characters for use in advertising campaigns. Appearance summarizes informants' mental images of the animal C how they expect the animal to look; Habitat describes informants' expectations of where these animals live and the objects that surround them; Personality represents the personality traits that informants associate with each animal; Human/animal interaction describes how humans coexist and interact with these animals; while Behavior describes their typical actions. Popular culture highlights cultural references that already exist for each animal,

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Fig. 1.

Habitat includes a natural habitat made up of the subthemes of: (a) ice and snow, (b) cold, (c) places such as Antarctica and the South Pole, and (d) water. Informants also listed other inhabitants of this environment such as fish, polar bears, and whales. Informants also mentioned Appearance as an important penguin theme, focusing on the subthemes of: (a) color, which was mostly black and white, (b) body parts such as wings, beaks, and feet, and (c) the formal tuxedo that penguins seem to be wearing.

including sources such as television programs, movies, books, and ads. The themes for each animal are given below in greater detail. Penguin A cognitive map of the themes associated with "penguin," along with the frequency with which they were mentioned, are shown in Figure 1. The dominant themes that emerge from the data are Habitat and Appearance.

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Fig. 2.

Behavior was mentioned 44 times, suggesting that respondents frequently visualize the penguin in motion.

Tuxedo was the most often mentioned word, with 23 mentions. This strong association seems to have affected other themes, as discussed below. Both of the dominant themes suggest that a penguin is associated with rich visual imagery. When confronted with the word "penguin," it appears that individuals conjure up an image of a penguin, and describe him (Appearance) and his surroundings (Habitat). This interpretation is supported by a third theme, Behavior, which was mentioned less often. This category includes the subthemes of: (a) waddle, (b) swim, and (c) other actions, which also contribute to visual imagery.

COG NITIVE M AP O F ANT THEM ES In analyzing the dominant themes, it seems that penguins are viewed as having little interaction with humans. The penguin appears to be isolated from all but a few Eskimos (according to two informants) except when viewed in a man-made habitat (e.g., "Sea World"), and even that type of interaction is rarely mentioned (2% of the time).

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blank word task (i.e., "ant____"). The same cannot be said for penguin (e.g., "penguin ice," "penguin cold," etc.). Some imagery is associated with ant, though, as seen in the Habitat subtheme of (c) picnic. For the most part, however, other themes support verbal, non-imagery based associations for ant. For example, the ant's image-based themes, Appearance and Behavior, contain far fewer words (31 and 7) than do these same categories for penguin (103 and 44). Also, many of the words in Appearance, such as antenna, thorax, and abdomen, seem associated with knowledge propositions, rather than image. Surprisingly, even the Popular culture theme supports a verbal view because many of the responses in this category make use of word play such as "Aunt Bea" and "antichrist." A dominant theme for ant that did not exist for penguin is Human/ant interaction. This focus on interaction is understandable given that ants are usually part of informants' daily environment and experience. In this category, ants interact with humans by annoying them and causing them pain; "bite" was mentioned 19 times by respondents. Humans interact with ants as exterminators; we kill them. It is surprising then, that under the theme Personality, ants are personified as having more positive than negative qualities. Words like "strong," "hard-working," and "determined" are used by respondents. Perhaps individuals have learned to associate these positive qualities with ants through stories, songs, and fables, such as "The Grasshopper and the Ant," while negative associations, such as pest, come from informants' own experiences. As is the case with penguin, there is a duality in the ant's perceived personality C industrious and diligent, yet irritating and better off dead. These strongly negative associations may signal advertisers to use caution in utilizing this animal in ads. Advertisers must be sure that only desirable characteristics are transferred to the brand.

This lack of human/penguin interaction is not surprising given penguins' remote location in the world, and the fact that they are removed from informants' daily experiences. Another theme, Personality, is characterized by a duality; for the most part, penguins are personified as silly creatures (e.g., cute, funny, goofy, playful, etc.), but they also can be viewed as formal animals (e.g., distinguished, classy, behaved, mannered, etc.), even by the same individuals. This contradiction may stem from the fact that penguins are strange-looking members of the bird family and waddle comically instead of flying, but also appear to wearing a tuxedo, a cultural symbol of formality and manners. The remaining penguin themes are Popular culture and Categories. Penguins are associated with a surprisingly large number of popular culture references including movies, videogames, mascots, and cartoons. Categories refers to the hierarchical categorization of objects, in which an object can be placed in a superset (generalization hierarchy) or a subset (part hierarchy) (Anderson 1990). For example, a penguin is a bird (superset), and a type of penguin is an emperor (subset). In the same way, a group of penguins is called a flock, or a herd (at least for one respondent). Ant A cognitive map of the "ant" themes is shown in Figure 2. The three dominant ant themes are: Categories, Habitat, and Human/ant interaction. Categories includes: (a) type of ant, such as red or army; (b) name of ant, such as worker or queen; (c) group of ants, such as colony; and (d) classification of ant, such as insect. The importance of this theme for ant contrasts sharply with that for penguin; Categories was mentioned 104 times for ant, but only 16 times for penguin. This suggests that the ant themes are less associated with images, and more associated with verbal or propositional knowledge (Anderson 1990). That is, when asked to respond to the word "ant," it appears that respondents retrieve verbal information that they have learned in the past, such as: the head ant is called the queen; the male ant is called the drone; ants live in colonies; etc. This interpretation is supported by another dominant theme: Habitat, where the subthemes of (a) hill and (b) man-made habitat also appear to contain verbal associations. For example, the most-often mentioned words in each subtheme, "hill" and "farm," could be elicited with a fill-in-the-

COGNITIVE MAP OF GORILLA THEMES G orilla A cognitive map of "gorilla" themes is presented in Figure 3. The dominant themes that emerge from the data are Habitat, Appearance, and Personality. Gorilla's dominant themes, like those of penguin, are rich in visual imagery and appear to be visually based. For example, Habitat contains images of: (a) natural habitats, such as the jungle; (b) man-made habitats, such as zoos

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Fig. 3.

battling other monsters, received 15 direct and indirect mentions, while "Gorillas in the Mist," the movie that portrays gorillas as human-like, endangered creatures received 12. Human/gorilla interaction appears as another gorilla theme (as it did for ant), even though the gorilla, like the penguin, is remote and removed from respondents' daily lives. While the interaction between humans and ants was concrete and experience-based, the interaction between humans and gorillas is viewed more symbolically by informants, with the subthemes: (a) ancestor, and (b) research. As our ancestors,

and cages; and (c) other inhabitants, most notably bananas and monkeys. In the same way, Appearance is composed of: (a) hairy; (b) colors; (c) size; and (d) body parts, like big hands and big teeth. Gorilla is the first animal in this study to have Personality as a dominant theme. As with penguin and ant, gorilla is personified in two different ways C as a fierce monster with negative attributes, and as a gentle giant with positive ones. The theme Popular culture gives a possible reason for this duality. "King Kong," the movie(s) that portrays a giant gorilla destroying cities and

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COG NITIVE M AP O F RACOON THEM ES

gorillas were associated directly with humans through Darwin's theory of evolution. Informants also recognized the research link between gorillas and humans as we study them for their benefit (e.g., "endangered") or for ours (e.g., "sign language").

Respondents generated six common themes of interest to advertisers in response to each animal: Appearance, Habitat, Personality, Human/animal interaction, Popular culture, and Behavior. It is clear that these themes have practical applications in advertising. The themes of appearance, habitat, and behavior can help define a "natural" look for an animal and its environment in an ad, while other popular culture references in response to the word association task can warn the advertiser if the animal has already been linked to another product or idea. The most meaningful themes for advertising use, however, are personality and interaction. Through these themes, an advertiser can explore the core meanings that consumers associate with a specific animal. If advertisers understand this core meaning, they can appropriate all or part of the animal's meaning for their products. Advertisers can match positive qualities to the product attributes or the advertising message, or avoid using the animal if it elicits negative associations. The benefit of eliciting core animal meanings is that by using the associations that already exist in our culture, advertisers do not have to educate consumers as to what their animal characters mean. Consequently, an ad's message will be more quickly and easily decoded and understood. Many advertisers intuitively take advantage of shared meanings to create suitable characters; this paper presents a method for explicitly capitalizing on the shared cultural meanings of animals in trade character advertising. This study has theoretical implications for trade character research as well. By showing that animals have common cultural meanings, the results support the idea that animal-based trade characters also embody these shared meanings. Therefore, it is possible that trade characters can be used to transfer a common meaning to a product. Future trade character research should focus on the transfer process by testing the ability of trade characters to influence product meanings. In addition, the results of this study suggest interesting avenues for future research regarding visual trade character meanings. How does the core meaning of an animal character (as determined through consumer response to a verbal animal name) relate to the meaning of the character's visual image? For example, a study could compare teens' responses to the word "camel" on a word association task with their responses to an image of Joe Camel. Does Joe

Raccoon A cognitive map of "raccoon" themes is shown in Figure 4. The dominant themes that emerge from the responses are: Appearance, Habitat, and Personality, suggesting that a raccoon’s personality is an important part of its collective meaning, in the same way as a gorilla's. The words associated with raccoon also appear to be imagery-based, like those for penguin and gorilla. Unlike the observations made for other animals, there is no separate theme of human/raccoon interaction. The reason for this is that the idea of interaction is woven throughout each category. For example, informants listed both trees and rooftops, wilderness and drainage ditches as raccoon habitats. Food included crawfish and trash, and other inhabitants were likely to be both possums and coon dogs. This suggests that the raccoon is not seen as having a separate environment, like ant (e.g., "hill") or gorilla (e.g., "jungle"), which can sometimes overlap with a human environment. Rather, the raccoon shares our habitat in an integrated way. The theme Personality includes: (a) thief; (b) positive qualities, like cute and playful; and (c) negative qualities, such as sneaky and troublesome. Although informants listed both negative and positive attributes for raccoon, its personality does not appear to be a duality, unlike the other animals studied. This is because respondents viewed the raccoon as possessing both positive and negative qualities at the same time as part of the same personality role. Raccoon is personified most often as a bandit (10 mentions), and also is called a rascal or a scoundrel. It appears that we admire a raccoon’s intelligence and audacity, while deploring the mess they make when they intrude on our property. CONCLUSIO N This study has supported the view that consumers associate shared meanings with animals and has provided a description of the common themes found in the cultural meanings of four specific animals. In addition, the results of this study support the use of the word association method to elicit those cultural meanings.

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Fig. 4.

Given its success in eliciting the cultural meaning of animals, the word association method seems suited to explore the cultural meanings of celebrities and symbolic images in advertising as well. In conclusion, this study has shown that consumers associate shared cultural meanings with animal characters. These meanings can be elicited through the word association method, and contain common themes that can be used to further advertising theory and practice.

different? How do Joe's meanings, as an animal, compare to the meanings of the human Marlboro cowboy? The meanings of many existing animal characters could be explored using these methods. The use of the word association method has applications beyond trade character research. McCracken (1989, p. 319) calls for the creation of an instrument to "detect and survey" the cultural meanings that are present in celebrity endorsers. Scott (1994) states more generally that an exploration of how symbolic advertising images are interpreted in consumer culture is needed to advance consumer behavior research.

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References Stewart, David W. and David H. Furse (1986), Effective Television Advertising: A Study of 1000 Commercials, Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.

Anderson, John R. (1990), Cognitive Psychology and Its Implications, Third Edition, New York, NY: W.H. Freeman and Company, 123-135.

Strauss, Anselm and Juliet Corbin (1990), Basics of Qualitative Research: Grounded Theory Procedures and Techniques, Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.

Berger, Asa (1984), Signs in Contemporary Culture: An Introduction to Semiotics, New York: Longman. Callcott, Margaret F. and Wei-Na Lee (1994), "A Content Analysis of Animation and Animated Spokes-Characters in Television Commercials," Journal of Advertising, 23(4): 1-12.

Szalay, Lorand B. and James Deese (1978), Subjective Meaning and Culture: An Assessment Through Word Associations, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Coleman, Laurence J. (1992), "The Cognitive Map of a Master Teacher Conducting Discussions with Gifted Students," Exceptionality, 3: 1-16.

Zacher, Robert Vincent (1967), Advertising Techniques and Management, Homewood, IL: Richard D. Irwin, Inc.

Elliott, Stewart (1992), "Loneliness in a Long-Lasting Pitch," The New York Times, May 15, C1. Friedmann, Roberto (1986), "Psychological Meaning of Products: Identification and Marketing Applications," Psychology and Marketing, 3: 1-15. Kapnick, Sharon (1992), "Commercial Success: These advertising figures have become American icons," The Austin American-Statesman, April 25, D1. Kleine, Robert E. and Jerome B. Kernan (1991), "Contextual Influences on the Meanings Ascribed to Ordinary Consumption Objects," Journal of Consumer Research, 18: 311-323. Kleppner, Otto (1966), Advertising Procedure, 5th edition, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc. McCracken, Grant (1986), "Culture and Consumption: A Theoretical Account of the Structure and Movement of the Cultural Meaning of Consumer Goods," Journal of Consumer Research, 13: 71-84. McCracken, Grant (1989), "Who Is the Celebrity Endorser? Cultural Foundations of the Endorsement Process," Journal of Consumer Research, 16(December): 310-321. Barbara Phillips is Professor of Marketing at the University of Saskatchewan, where she teaches branding and advertising courses. She received her MA and PhD in Advertising from the University of Texas at Austin; her undergraduate degree in Marketing is from the University of Manitoba. Dr. Phillips’ research program focuses on visual images in advertising and their influence on consumer response. She has won several teaching awards and has published in peer-reviewed journals, books, and conference proceedings, such as the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Advertising and Marketing Theory. Along with Dr. Edward McQuarrie, she has received the "Best Article" award in the Journal of Advertising and the Dunn Award from the University of Illinois for "excellence in advertising research."

Neal, Arthur G. (1985), "Animism and Totemism in Popular Culture," Journal of Popular Culture, 19(2): 15-24. Phillips, Barbara J. (1996), "Defining Trade Characters and Their Role in American Popular Culture," Journal of Popular Culture, 29(4): forthcoming. PR Newswire (1990), "Oh Boy! Pillsbury Doughboy Turns 25!" September 20. Robin, P. Ansell (1932), Animal Lore in English Literature, London: John Murray. Sax, Boria (1988), "Anthromorphism in Animal Encyclopedias of Nineteenth Century America," New York Folklore, 14(1-2): 107-122.

Barbara J. Phillips (1996), "ADVERTISING AND THE CULTURAL MEANING OF ANIMALS," was originally published in ‘Advances in Consumer Research’ Volume 23, eds. Kim P. Corfman and John G. Lynch Jr., Provo, UT : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 354-360.

Scott, Linda M. (1994), "Images in Advertising: The Need for a Theory of Visual Rhetoric," Journal of Consumer Research, 21(September): 252-273.

The text is here reprinted with kind permission of the author and with many thanks to the ASSOCIATION FOR CONSUMER RESEARCH, Duluth, MN.

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ANIMAL SUBJECTS: LOCAL EXPLOITATION, SLOW KILLING

The city of Milan will host Expo 2015, with the theme “Feeding the Planet. Energy for Life”. In view of this occasion, the interest for culinary tradition and the global challenge of food security is rapidly growing. Farming and livestock raising traditions plays a major role in Italy, homeland of the worldwide renowned Slow Food. Text by A dele Tiengo and Leonardo Caffo

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between the eater and the eaten, underlining that this kind of food is traditional and healthy. The images seems to claim that there is no need to worry, animals are treated just as we would like them to be, healthily and humanely. Cows, pigs, and ducks would put their face on this business, so why don’t we just put ours? The campaign is directed both to organic and local food industry and it profit from the ‘green’ image of the good shepherd who personally takes care of his animals, granting them the well-being that is necessary to keep them healthy and, obviously, tasty. Ethical dilemmas on the exploitation and killing of animals are washed away by localism, sustainability, and tradition. In the greening of the food industry, slaughterhouses can actually have glass walls, because the consumer is ethically numbed and convinced that animals must die to feed people, and farmers are working to do it in the best possible way. Animals are no more ‘absent referents’ (Adams 1990), but in their presence their ‘sacrifice’ is legitimized by tradition. There can be many different speciesist approaches to the animal otherness, but they all usually fall under two main categories: those that recognize animals as subjects, and those that do not. The latter has been highly discussed by philosophers that, like Descartes, see animals as automata, as matter at human beings’ disposal. On the

low Food’s aim is to foster an ethical reflection about food consumption and waste, encouraging people to become more careful consumers with regards to the environmental crisis and to culinary local traditions. In this perspective, animals are not mere objects, but sentient beings living in a complex web of relations with human beings and the environment, and carefully looked after by wise and skilled farmers. Healthy and sustainable meat means happy meat, coming from happy animals. In line with this philosophy, there are many initiatives in Italy aimed at restoring the relationship between people and their food, to improve their health and more sustainable eating practices. People are able to meet happy pigs, cows, chickens, to visit their farms without a sense of revulsion for their imprisoned lives, and to experience a relationship with them, sentient and social beings as they are, just like us. After all, it is not only Hannibal the Cannibal’s privilege to have friends for dinner. The advertising campaign The young face of agriculture, launched by the Lombardy Region for the exhibition at the Museo nazionale della scienza e della tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci, profits from the ‘happy meat philosophy’ as a communicative strategy of the rural development in Lombardy. The aim is to create a bond

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Regione Lombardia L’Agricoltura Cambia Faccia alla Tua Vita (Agriculture Changes the Face of Your Life)
Regione Lombardia

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diet. Their diet certainly opposes the negative effects of globalization, but in doing so it appeals to a pastoral ideal of pure and local based lifestyle that has never existed and that – provided that it is more environmentally sustainable – certainly it would not sustain the ever-growing nutritional needs of the human population. As Vasile Stnescu (2009) clearly shows, Pollan argues against organic meat because it «represents a false pastoral narrative, something produced by the power of well crafted words and images yet lacking ethical consistency, reality, or ultimately an awareness of animals themselves» (Stnescu 2009, 9), but he can easily be accused of using the same false pastoral narrative in his defense of local meat. In the image the human-animal hybrydization is exploited to assure the consumer that the milk or salami they would like to buy are perfectly safe and approved by their ‘providers’: cows and pigs are the young faces of the agricultural business, willing to feed human beings’ voraciousness. On their part, human beings become well aware of the origins of their food. The absent referent – a concept that makes the massacre of the animals invisible and the disregarded eating of meat possible – is present again. Animals are subjects again and the advertisement, even though displaying an hybridization of human and animal bodies, is not perceived as ridiculous or outrageous. Nonetheless, animals do not deserve an ethical treatment that overcomes mere considerations of utility and profit.

Regione Lombardia L’Agricoltura Cambia Faccia alla Tua Vita (Agriculture Changes the Face of Your Life)
Regione Lombardia

contrary, the former perspective, according to which animals are recognized as sentient subjects and living others, is assumed by the new category of the ‘bio-carnivores’, people increasingly informed about the risks for their health and, sometimes, for the environment. The approach of this group of well-informed people makes it easier to digest the exploitation and killing of animals, because their suffering and privation is made less apparent by claims of tradition and sustainability. Moreover, since the relationship with animal subjects is restored, the killing is a much more serious act in ethical terms. Along with the bio-carnivores, this advertisement appeals to the category of the locavores. The locavores are those people that eat only local and seasonally available food. The word was coined in 2005 by four women in San Francisco and in 2007 it was elected as Word of the Year by the New Oxford America Dictionary[1]. Many locavores follows the arguments proposed by Michael Pollan (2006) in his widely known The Omnivore Dilemma, in which he claims that sustainable raised local meat is more environmental friendly than a vegan/vegetarian

References Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat. Twentieth Anniversary Edition (2010). New York: Continuum, 1990. Cole, Matthew. "From 'Animal Machines' to 'Happy Meat'? Foucault’s Ideas of Disciplinary and Pastoral Power Applied to ‘Animal-Centred’ Welfare Discourse." Animals 1, no. 1 (2011): 83-101.

OUPblog. Oxfor University Press, http://blog.oup.com/2007/11/locavore/ (accessed March 6, 2012). Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore Dilemma. A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin, 2006. Stnescu, Vasile. "'Green' Eggs and Ham? The Myth of Sustainable Meat and the Danger of the Local." The Journal of Critical Animal Studies VII, no. 3 (2009): 18-55.

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REMEDIATING COWS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF ETHICAL LANDSCAPE Concern about the impact of livestock on the environment has generated debates about how best to manage dairy farming practices. Soil erosion and compaction and loss of biodiversity from grazing and silage production, ammonia and methane emissions, as well as high levels of water consumption, have all been identified as direct effects on the environment from dairy farming activity.[i] Whilst the issues have been well reported in the press, there has been little in the way of imagery to accompany the environmental critique of milk production. Instead, much of the popularly available imagery of dairy farming has been generated by advertising which continues to deploy culturally-specific visions of contented cows in rural landscapes. Text by C laire Molloy

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imagination that is markedly removed from the urban industrial experience. In reality, eighty per cent of the UK landscape has been shaped by farming practices.[ii] As a result, the industry has a major impact on both the management of land and the development of the landscape. In 2006, agriculture accounted for seventy-seven per cent of land use in the UK, amounting to 18.5 million hectares, of which, around thirty-eight per cent is grass and thirty per cent is land, given over to rough grazing for domestic livestock. Employing over half a million people, the value of farming to the UK economy is substantial, generating around £5.6 billion per year, of which the livestock industry accounts for £7,351 million of output.[iii] The combined UK cow population numbers, around 3.8 million, and of these the larger proportion, slightly over 2 million, are dairy cows. Decreases in the dairy cow population over fifty years from 2.6 million, in 1956,[iv] reflect changes in livestock management, policy,

ith little actual access to farmed animal spaces, the majority of western urbandwellers’ experiences of livestock and farming practices are heavily mediated, often through food advertising. In such cases, the discourse of farming and the spaces in which animals are farmed are constructed to appeal to the consumer, and both implicitly and explicitly offer reassurance that farmed animals are healthy and emotionally satisfied. Advertisements for dairy products offer imagery that relies on previously established associations between cows and green fields to sustain meanings, such as “natural” and “healthy,” which are then assigned to dairy products. In turn, the imagery reinforces associations between cows and their freedom to roam in natural surroundings, maintaining connections between dairy cows’ lack of confinement and their willing productivity. Dairy farming thus maintains strong cultural associations with natural landscapes and rural tranquillity, and such practices occupy a zone in the cultural

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Ed Edwards and Dave Masterman Made by Cows Since 1886, Anchor Original Butter Co. CHI and Partners, London
CHI and Partners

problematic, process of “grass in- butter out.” Each advertisement in the “lucky cow” campaign included some manner of enclosure, which ranged from white picket fencing, to wooden ranch-style fencing, and traditional British hedgerows. This changed in the next campaign which sought to reflect the company’s awareness of consumer concerns about welfare standards. As a result, the meanings of green spaces and landscape were re-worked to operate within a discourse of welfare. Repositioned as the “freerange butter company,” Anchor advertisements replaced live action commercials with animated cows that appeared to be made from “Fuzzy Felt:” soft fabric shapes that were popularly recognisable and sold as a children’s toy in the UK. No longer restricted to representations of Jersey cows, the advertisements also depicted black and white and brown cows, references to Holstein-Freisans and Ayshire breeds. In the television advertisements, an animated cow kicked its way out of a shed, with an accompanying voice-over that stated: “There’s no such thing as the great indoors. Only our cows are free to roam all year round.” In other ads, two cows studied a map of their extensive available space and another kicked off human footwear whilst a voice-over declared “If cows were meant to be kept indoors they’d be born with slippers.” Intertextual references to the film The Great Escape were used in a further advertisement that depicted a cow on a

regulation, and farming practices. In short, fewer cows are now producing more milk. Indeed, dairy cows deliver the greatest proportion of output generated by livestock farming in the UK, which, in 2006, accounted for £2,501 million worth of product. In terms of land management, UK dairy farms continue to use hedges and dry stone walls to divide fields and, consequently, milk production shapes the rural landscape. Although it is a New Zealand brand, Anchor Butter, advertising in the UK that has utilised a range of meanings derived from the symbolic relationships between cows and the landscape. Throughout the campaigns of the 1990’s, the television advertisements featured Jersey dairy cows, despite the fact that the majority of New Zealand’s four million dairy cows were black and white Holstein-Freisans.[v] With a “softer” and more appealing “look,” Jersey cows were referred to as “lucky cows,” depicted in lush green fields dancing, singing and proclaiming their good fortune at being able to “chew the cud and browse.” An emphasis was placed on the consumption of “green green grass” as the relationship between cows and spaces reworked the production cycle of milk so that the quality of the final product, butter, was entirely dependent on the consumption of high quality pasture. Such imagery short-circuited the realities of the processes by which cows are farmed and bovine lactation is managed, and instead reduced the cycle to a simplified, and less ethically

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Ed Edwards and Dave Masterman The Great Escape, Anchor Original Butter Co. CHI and Partners, London
CHI and Partners

motorcycle trying to jump a fence to escape from farmers armed with pitchforks. The advert used the film’s title music and the setting, although visually stripped-back to incorporate impressions of snow topped peaks; reminiscent of the familiar alpine setting used for the original motorcycle chase scene with Steve McQueen. Print advertisements that accompanied the freerange campaign used Polaroid pictures of cows in front of well-known landmarks such as the Eifel Tower and a pyramid, with the strapline: ”Our cows are free to roam.” Concerns were raised about the company’s depiction of “happy cows,” and the free-range campaign received public criticism in 1997 when an advert that depicted a calf “hatching” from an egg then relaxing with its mother amongst other contented Jersey cows attracted fifty-four viewer complaints to the Independent Television Commission. Public objections to the advertisement were reported by the ITC as including:

b)

(Some farmers amongst the complainants pointed out that cattle in New Zealand traditionally have their tailsdocked); that Anchor butter is no more natural or pure than other brands; (ITC, 1997, ”Anchor Butter”)

None of the complaints were upheld by the ITC, which, in its assessment of the objections, stated that the advertiser had confirmed that “the New Zealand cows used to produce Anchor Butter were kept in pasture all year round which justified the use of the term ‘free-range’” (ITC, 1997). The complaints regarding the implication that calves stayed with their mothers received no response from the ITC, although the issue of tail-docking was accounted for in the following way: “The animals shown in the commercial had not had their tails docked but the ITC did not think that inaccuracy was significant enough to make the advertising misleading” (ITC, 1997). Furthermore the report noted that “The ITC did not think the commercial implied that Anchor is better than other brands, rather that being in pasture all year is a more ‘natural’ existence” (ITC, 1997). Although consumer objections to Anchor Butter advertising were directed toward the misrepresentation of

a) that the use of the term "free-range" implied the cows used to produce Anchor are allowed to keep their calves with them, are in pasture all year round or are more humanely treated than usual.

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landscapes at daybreak and sunset. In this way, a nostalgia discourse framed butter-making as traditional and the company as having authenticity through the rather surreal imagery of cows being happily complicit in their own exploitation. A challenge to the Anchor campaign came in the form of a counter-campaign by Country Life Butter, which used the former member of the 1970’s punk band The Sex Pistols, John Lydon, to front its advertising. The central message of the campaign was that Country Life Butter is British and Anchor Butter is from New Zealand. The Country Life campaign underscored how robust the associations were between the Anchor Butter brand and national identity, and the counter-campaign sought to dismantle those meanings and reclaim imagery of “British” cows and countryside. The television advertisement showed John Lydon experiencing various aspects of British rural life: the British countryside was depicted as sheep on a country lane, and the concept of “British milk” was represented by black and white cows chasing Lydon through an expanse of green fields. The pack shot at the end of the advertisement returned to the image of open green fields. The print adverts that were placed in broadsheets and the popular press used an image of Lydon bursting through the page of the newspaper under the “headlines:” ”Revealed: Anchor Butter is from New Zealand” (broadsheet advertisement, July 2010); and “Anchor’s from New Zealand” (tabloid advertisement, July 2010). The campaigns mounted by Anchor and Country Life revealed the high investment of meaning in cows and the landscape, and by extension, the commercial value of both. Macnaughten and Urry argue that representations of natural space are socially and symbolically produced and that “different features of the landscape are celebrated within different societies” (Macnaughten and Urry, 1998, p.182). The spaces appropriated in advertising by Anchor Butter, for the UK market, and Country Life, borrowed from established conventions of representing “the countryside” as peaceful, green and fertile, and symbolically opposed to the industrialisation of towns and cities. In this way, the production of meanings around cows and landscape are mutually reinforcing. Landscape can operate through a multiplicity of discourses as a form of nostalgia that recalls an idealised past and as a symbol of freedom, of “naturalness,” and in opposition to industrialisation. Each of these meanings

WPP Agency Grey London It’s Not About Great Britain
WPP Agency Grey London

farming practices and demonstrated tensions between interpretations of the advertisement and concerns over the implied meanings about cow welfare, the ITC’s response made it clear that what was at issue was the representation of the product and not the misrepresentation of the realities of the lives of dairy cows. In an attempt to recover butter-making within the discourse of tradition, a 2010 Anchor Butter commercial returned to live action and depicted cows leaving the fields to work in a factory with the strapline: “Made by cows since 1886.” The aim of the £10 million campaign was to position the company as the “Original Butter Co.”[vi] A country music version of the Guns N’ Roses song Paradise City with the lyrics: “Take me down to a paradise city, where the grass is green and the girls are pretty, oh won’t you please take me home” accompanied images of cows “clocking-on,” operating production machinery, performing quality checks, and packaging the butter for delivery in a nineteenth century factory setting housing contemporary industrial technologies. In the simulation of nineteenth century factory production, the advert reimagined the relationship between cows and milk by excluding the process of milking. Rather than “producing milk,” cows “make butter.” In constructing new associations between the company and tradition, Anchor Butter also shed its “free-range” identity. And although the advertisement placed cows within the confines of the factory setting, taking on the humanised roles of operatives, the concept of the advertisement suggested that butter-making retained links with traditional agricultural and industrial practices. The opening and closing images still drew directly on the aesthetic traditions of nineteenth century British landscape painting with large romanticised

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translates into context for the bovine body, which is then understood as part of a cultural and social heritage, and which, in turn, reproduces the sense that cows have always had freedom to roam and have always been apart from industrialisation. Locating cows within the idealised landscapes of a particular country or region thus reinforces symbolic associations between a sense of place, conceived through the highly organised imagery of the natural world, and the ”naturalness” of the life of a dairy cow. In doing this, the connections allude to milk production as a wholesome process that takes place in only the most ideal of locations. A proliferation of cow imagery in UK advertising suggests that, at a symbolic level, some animals are more economically significant than others. This concurs with a 2002 survey in which cows appeared as the eighth most effective animal for advertising purposes. One reason for the popularity of cows (as images) may be that their meanings within the circuits of capitalism have a legacy in nineteenth century landscape painting, where benign bovine bodies have long been associated with a calm and tranquil British rural life - a culturally imagined antidote to industrialisation and urbanisation. In this way, the reality of the bovine experience has been mediated by landscape painting and remediated by the advertising discourses discussed here. The landscapes take on new meanings in the light of welfare discourses. Open spaces that signalled nonindustrialisation are transformed by welfare discourses which reconfigure the landscape as an ethical space through associations with the meanings of “free-range” and “free-to-roam.” As a result, in advertising for dairy-related products, agricultural spaces overlap with the meanings and values that are assigned to nature and “the countryside,” and these in turn close down the opportunities for questions about welfare standards and reduce dairy farming practices to an extremely narrow range of representations.

[v]

Source: NZ Government website, “Dairy cattle numbers

1895-2005” online at http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/dairyingand-dairy-products/10/1/1 [accessed 4 May 2010]. Source: Marketing Week, 26 February 2010 online at http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/news/anchor-launches%C2%A310m-ad-push-to-support-brandrepositioning/3010501.article [accessed 3 March 2010]. [vi]

References [i]

Dr Claire Molloy has been appointed as Senior Lecturer in the Department of History, Politics, Media and Communication at Liverpool Hope University. Following a career in commercial photography and communications, she began teaching media and film in 1997 and previously held posts at University of Brighton and Edge Hill University. She is the author of Memento and Popular Media and Animals and co-editor of Beyond Human: From Animality to Transhumanism and American Independent Cinema: Indie, indiewood and beyond.

Source: Defra (2008) The Environmental Impact of Livestock

Production [ii]

Source: The National Trust (2001) Farming Forward

[iii]

Source: Defra (2008) The Environmental Impact of Livestock

Production. [iv]

Source: Miller & Robertson, 1959, p.432.

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HIS MASTER’S VOICE

A white dog with brown ears sits in front of a gramophone, head directed to its brass-horn and slightly tilted to one side. The original painting was purchased in 1899, along with its full copyright, by the emerging Gramophone Company from the artist Francis Barraud. Text by Concepcion Cortes Zulueta

Francis Barraud His Master’s Voice, Oil on Canvas, 1899
His Master’s Voice

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T

to be fooled by the machine. However dogs, poor little dogs, were suspected of not being so smart. So maybe Nipper did recognise his master’s voice, and sat there interested, wondering, head titled to one side. Nevertheless, apparently he never reached any final conclusion. For what we know, he may be puzzled by the event in the same way that he may not recognise his own reflection on the brass-horn, or in a mirror. This scene was a harmless alternative to persuade about the fidelity of the recorded sound without the risk of offending the intelligence of the human - male?customers, and strengthening simultaneously their confidence and dominant position back at home, sweet home. Maybe this was not just a portrait of man as master of animals and creation. After all, one could be the master not only of his own dog, but also of servants, children, wife and the whole household. The success of the main strokes of this scheme can be validated by the existence of recent variations, very similar although focused in sight instead of hearing. Like two 2011 Samsung Galaxy commercials that show a hen and a little girl deceived by the smart-phone vivid images. The hen, brooding the eggs in a screen, and the girl dropping the gadget inside a goldfish bowl trying to save a clownfish that was not really there. There are also plenty of Internet videos with dogs tilting their heads when faced with persons in online videochats. This may be possibly because we find that charming, as well as the floppy and genetically selected neotenic ears that may partially cause so much tilting in order to avoid the obstruction of the sound waves. Beyond the puzzlement that we attribute to the dog, there is another strong emotional content in the painting. Is Nipper aware of what death is? Is he mourning his beloved master? Perhaps to feed our human pride we would feel tempted to answer that he is, but we don’t know for sure. On the other hand if the depicted vignette were a scientific experiment to check if Nipper possessed a death concept, nowadays it probably would have been considered as ethically unacceptable like the experiment in which Colin Allen and Mark Hauser described and then challenged, consisting on studying the reaction of a female monkey when listening to a recorded call of her dead infant. However, the brown and white dog can be labelled as an update of the Victorian topic of the mourning dog. A topic also found in other times and cultures. For instance, in Japan, where a statue remembers Hachiko the faithful.

here seems to be some confusion regarding the early history of the painting: if it was made while Nipper, the dog, was still alive; if it is based or not on a photograph; what was Barraud’s initial plan; what was the phonograph, then replaced by a gramophone, supposedly playing, or whose idea was its final title, among others. What remains obvious, though, is the worldwide diffusion of an image that acted and has been used both as a brand and as an advertisement by several companies, past and present. Apart from the mystery surrounding its historical details, the legend accompanying this domestic scene shared more or less the same features everywhere. In fact this myth is what fascinates me the most. As for its overall content I feel inclined to keep the version offered by my Spanish parents, born in the fifties, when feigning ignorance I asked them if the phrase “la voz de su amo” - literally, “his master’s voice”- sounded familiar to them. Both burst out: “of course!”, talked about records and then took turns to explain the touching story of the dog who froze close to a gramophone playing the voice of his late master, seemingly recognising it and maybe trying to make sense of what was happening. Besides the cuteness of the little dog, it is plausible a considerable chunk of the strength and virality of the picture lie in the questions pointed out by those two words, seeming and maybe. Do dogs identify the sounds coming out of gramophones as someone’s voice? Many people, common people, guided by the slightly cocked head and their own experiences would answer positively, stating that dogs do identify people’s voices in recordings and react to them, in some way or another. But are dogs able to understand these recorded sounds as such, and not as an actual person? To what level do they understand what is happening? This is, in fact, a more complex issue. In any case, the development of devices that recorded our audiovisual environment prompted comparisons between our senses and perception, and those of animals. For example, to what degree they were tuned to each other, if animals saw, heard and perceived as we did or not. Recorders interposed another step between the actual world and perception. A level which could be easily manipulated and played with, fabricating products, such as photographs, films or audio-recordings, that in some circumstances even posed as reality. But knowing what a gramophone was and what it did, kept ourselves aware and complicit with its secrets, and safe not

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All these melodramatic associations seem especially suitable for a company devoted to music, which entangles love, life and death. Matters perfectly captured in what looks like a plain homey scene. If we mix together these with the human-animal perception riddle, the shameless compliment to our amazing human abilities and the appeal of the dog’s slightly tilted head, what else could we ask for in an ad?

Concepción Cortés Zulueta is a PhD candidate in art history at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain. Her thesis project, interdisciplinary in its scope, focuses in the presence of non human animals in contemporary art from the '60s to the beginning of the XXIst Century. She explores issues of animal agency, perception, creativity, and changes in the attitudes of contemporary artists towards animals. Specially in their attempts to collaborate with them. She has being doing research stays at National Art Library, V&A, London; New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies (NZCHAS), University of Canterbury, Christchurch, and she is currently at MIT, Cambridge, until January 2013.

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THE TIGER IN THE TANK

Despite the complexities and inconstancies of the human-animal relationship non-human animals [1] have been intimately interwoven within human culture for thousands of years. Representations of animals exist across many mediums, with roots clearly visible in Palaeolithic cave paintings and early carvings, evolving human language, music and drama, and narrative fables and folk stories. Unsurprisingly then animal representations continue to be rife throughout our modern lives and across much popular media. Text by C luny South

P

between product and animal, and finally whether our understanding of the meaning of a product or an animal is likely to be fundamentally altered by association with the other. This latter point, the potential power of popular media to shape the human-animal relationship, has been notably considered by Spears et al. (1996), who constructed a symbolic communications model (SCM) in order to examine how a culturally constructed world (CCW) might interact with representations of animals in marketing contexts. Such was the backdrop to the study I decided to carry out when my curiosity was ignited by a parallel advertising research project. My previous industry experience background in factual animal programming had already amply fuelled my interest in popular animal representations. For some time I had wondering if animals suffered in the popular media, a little like typecast actors, constrained by culturally constructed roles - roles that were generated by human stereotypes and biases of what it was like

revious academic research looking at how animals have been portrayed in popular culture – specifically the tabloid press (Herzog and Galvin, 1992), greetings cards (Arluke and Bogden, 2010), visual arts (Kalof et al. 2011), and T.V. and print adverts (Lerner and Kalof, 1999; Phillips, 1996; Spears et al. 1996) - has generated a number of themes, or roles, in which animals are frequently cast. The popular media has often used animals as a symbolic and allegorical short hand to quickly conjure up simple constructs; loved one, saviour, pest, object of wonder, attacker, and victim, to name a few. Animals have also been repeatedly presented in roles such as that of human tool and emblem of nature at large. However, there are additional, more complex, factors affecting representation that have also been identified by previous research. These include the degree of anthropomorphism of the animal, whether social or moral valuations are made regarding the animal, if any transformative effects can be seen

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Fig. 1. Symbolic communications model (SCM)
Nancy Spears

translate (if it was not originally in English); that the advertisements were available using web based search engines (Google, Bing) or through advertising agency archive site searches; that the category was auto or bike related; and finally, that at least one animal was featured as an integral part of the advertising message.

to be a given species? For example, did hyenas ever get cast as anything but the bad guys in adverts; were dogs always “mans best friend;” and were butterflies ever anything but beautiful? Added to this, I now wondered if there were any signs of changing uses of animals in advertising, and whether different products used animals in different ways. Finally I wasn’t just interested in how the media was portraying the outside world, like Spears et al., I also wondered if stereotyping in the media could have an impact on an animal’s real life world? Perhaps this project would give me a chance to find out more. I set about a review and content analysis of animals in car advertising to see if the use of animals in a single product category displayed any of the themes previously noted by researchers, or revealed interesting new trends. Over several months I documented and analysed over 500 car advertisements that had aired globally during the period of 2000 to 2012. My limitations were as follows: The adverts must have been in print advertising (as opposed to video or web); any contextual copy (text) crucial to meaning must be translatable using Google

Bulls pull… .but Cheetahs are G o! What I found confirmed past research, but also provided interesting variations, perhaps some unique to car advertising. The symbolic themes previously identified: threat, victim, tool use, pest, imaginary person, wild nature and object of wonder, could all be seen fairly consistently across depictions of animals in car advertising over the last ten years. For example, sharks and crocodiles were nearly always coded as attacking or threatening, and likewise brown and black bears were frequently cast in a threatening role. However, there were also unexpected nuances. Polar bears were often depicted as victims, perhaps due to associations with melting polar ice caps and sensitivities regarding climate

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Leo Burnett France 500 Black Jack, 2009
Leo Burnett France

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Leo Burnett Istanbul How Far Can You Go?, 2010
Leo Burnett Istanbul

this category of symbolic use. While tigers, and to a lesser extent leopards, jaguars and pumas, were often used to indicate a powerful ride, the cheetah, as a single species, appeared the most frequently representative of “fast” across the adverts surveyed. Cheetahs were linked to acceleration and speed time and again in car advertising, to the extent that even the smallest hint of some spots or the blur of its feline shape was often enough to suggest a sports car model.

change from an auto related industry. Another bear exception was the teddy bear, widely used to represent cute and cuddly, and one that provides one of the more thought-provoking contributions regarding representation of animals in auto advertising through its depiction in the 2009 Fiat Blackjack campaign. Moving away from animal threat use, elephants and hippos were consistently popular animals for symbolising both wild nature and large size/carrying capacity in car advertising. Rhinos were synonymous, likewise, with toughness across a range of auto related products, and bulls were without exception representative of unbridled engine power. When it came to power in general, however, there were other animals waiting in the wings. Horses, in contrast to bulls, were often used to discuss bridled, controllable, even intelligent, power; a concept that appears to be growing in popularity, perhaps in reference to increasing concerns of responsible energy use and a potential move away from the heady days of raw power, as one of the main selling features in auto advertising. Despite this move, however, acceleration, speed and power continue, to date, to be attributes that feature prominently in car advertising and, not surprisingly, big cats excel in

M ore cam els, pandas and frogs… As much as cats seem eternally popular in car advertising, there were some clear shifts to be seen in terms of animal popularity in the adverts over the decade reviewed. While bulls have seen a representative decrease in car ads, there appears to have been a rise in adverts containing polar bears, penguins, frogs, fish, butterflies and pandas; all of which were frequently associated with environmental vulnerability and habitat concerns within the adverts. Increasing environmental awareness has, in all likelihood, also contributed to another animal’s popularity levels - the camel. This species, clearly on the rise in the adverts surveyed, was almost always

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DDB Berlin The Golf GTI Edition 30, 2007
DDB Berlin

associated with fuel efficiency. The camel’s newfound popularity across many types of vehicle is perhaps not surprising in a world of changing car priorities. On a more specific level, the increase of the 4x4 SUV market has hailed a trend shift in certain animal usage, with ”surefooted” goats, and animals traditionally associated with wild nature (elephants, hippos, lions, to name a few), seeing increased exposure. Perhaps most notably, all the rising consumer expectations of car attributes, combined with increasing audience sophistication in terms of advertising language, has also heralded the birth of animal combinations. Assisted by improvements in computer graphics, these animal combinations have allowed several aspects of a car, such as fuel economy and speed, or ruggedness and beauty, to be promoted in a single advert. This in turn has resulted in more complex characterisations in terms of animal usage, and will be an interesting trend to follow.

Seriously not like us. In terms of areas in which car advertising appeared to diverge from other advertising, anthropomorphism somewhat stood out. Animals were occasionally portrayed as human-like but more often the reverse was true. When animals are used anthropomorphically in popular culture humour is often a part of the equation, and this understandably sits uncomfortably with car publicity. Cars are a serious purchase and this was reflected in how animals were associated with the product in car advertising. It was generally rare for an anthropomorphic animal to be shown representing the product itself. Rather, car advertisers, as we have noted, showed a tendency to trade on the powerful transformative potential of animal symbolism and preferred making their products seem more animal-like. The hope was frequently that associations between a favoured animal’s attributes and the car would improve the perceptions of the car’s features in this category, even when links were fairly tenuous. For example,

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McCann Erikson Opel Astra, 2007
McCann Eriksson

colouring how we understand them as an animal species within a wider cultural framework. The lot of animals in car advertising is similar to that of animals in other advertising categories, as well as that of non-animal characters, in this respect. For better or worse, advertising, along with much popular media, uses shorthand to efficiently evoke meaning and mood, with minimal explanation. Animals are a useful tool in this undertaking, and one that has been utilised for decades. While the good guys and bad guys are typecast in roles that are rarely, if ever, questioned, the degree to which movement may be possible, in terms of altering these associations in popular culture, is an interesting debate. Recent research into the improving North American public perceptions of ceteans (whales and dolphins) following the popular TV series “Flipper,” as well as the shifting North Korean categorization of dogs, from food item to pet animal, suggests that attitudes towards animal groups can alter surprisingly quickly and dramatically under certain circumstances, bringing a ray of hope that one

an elephant image might be used to make a family car appear more spacious, and a cheetah image could suggest racy, even if in reality these attributes in the product were relatively minor. Looking at how transformation might happen in reverse drew me into the area of social moral valuations. A number of animals have historically become so tightly associated with certain human values that this association may be considered to have had a transformative effect on cultural perceptions of the animal itself. Butterflies and doves have historically been the beneficiaries of an association with the human values of freedom and hope, and in adverts these animals are rarely seen in a negative light. Likewise ants and bees have frequently been associated with human constructions of industriousness, and are favourably considered as a result, whilst conversely bats and wolves have lost out for centuries due to our cultural tendency to link them with human notions of darkness and evil. The badges of honour, or dishonour, we dish out, unfortunately tend to “dog” the recipients,

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David&Goliath Fast and Fuel Efficient, 2009
David&Goliath

more complex and intrinsically valuable, both as species and individuals. Like many marginalised out-groups, animals will likely benefit from a deeper scrutiny, and perhaps this will prove the best way to tackle one of the last major challenges of human prejudice – that of speciesism.

day the hyena may indeed star as a film’s happy hero! So, finally, my last question - does the representation of animals in advertising matter in terms of human attitudes to animals in the real world? For me it’s a clear “yes,” for the reason that the repeated casting of animals in stereotyped roles across the popular media inevitably serves to reinforce and perpetuate the prejudiced constructs we have amassed around non-human species, as evinced by Spears et al. The effects of species bias based on the “charm effect” are surprisingly pervasive, and even academic researchers admit to preferencing charismatic animals in scientific research (Lorimer, 2007). While a tendency to categorize animals into “good and bad” and “them and us” may be a natural product of the human-animal relationship, and our very anthropocentric worldview, it comprehensively fails to evaluate and understand animals as they really are. An appreciation of the natural world is not served by portraying certain animal species as harmless emblems of peace and innocence whilst casting others as dark villains of nature, since these are projected human constructs. Animals are clearly

Notes: 1) Non-human animals from now on will be referred in this text to simply as animals for reasons of brevity.

References: Arluke, A. and Bogdan, R. (2010). Beauty and the Beast: Human-Animal Relations as Revealed in Real Photo Postcards, 1905-1935. Syracuse University Press. Herzog, H.A. and Galvin, S.L. (1992). Animals, Archetypes, and Popular Culture: Tales from the Tabloid Press. Anthrozoos. Vol. 5 (2). Pp. 77-92. Kalof L., Zammit-Lucia, J., and Kelly, J.R. (2011). The meaning of animal portraiture in a museum setting: Implications for conservation. Organization & Environment. Vol. 24 (2). Pp. 150-174.

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Jung von Matt They Will Survive
Jung von Matt

Lerner, J.E., and Kalof, L. (1999). The animal text: Message and meaning in television advertisements. The Sociological Quarterly. Vol. 40 (4). Pp. 565-586.

Cluny South is currently working on an Interdisciplinary PhD at the University of British Columbia, in the area of Conservation Psychology and Marketing. Her PhD research looks at how attitudes to animals are shaped, and what effect perceiving animals as “in-group” or

Lorimer, J. (2007). "Nonhuman charisma." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. Vol. 25(5). Pp. 911 – 932.

“out-group” members has for preferences towards them. Previously she worked for over a decade as a Natural History producer in the UK, primarily creating factual programming for the BBC NHU. She has

Phillips, B.J. (1996). Advertising and the cultural meaning of animals. Advances in Consumer Research. Vol. 23. Pp. 354360.

a B.A. in Fine Art from Central St. Martin’s School of Art and worked with live animals in installations and performances in London in the late ‘80’s. She has experience in journalism, production design, publishing and freelance writing, and currently works part-time as a

Spears, N.E., Mowen, J.C., and Chakraborty, G. (1996). Symbolic role of animals in print advertising: Content analysis and conceptual development. Journal of Business Research. Vol. 37. Pp. 87-95

researcher and consultant in the area of public attitudes to animals, the environment and conservation. She lives in Vancouver with her partner, two children, a dog and two gerbils.

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BOVRIL BY ELECTRICUTION

I first came across this illustration whilst browsing through Leonard de Vries’s fascinating collection, Victorian Advertising, about twelve years ago. I was looking for something else at the time – examples of late Victorian electric belt advertisements as part of a project on nineteenth-century medical electricity. Instead, this one jumped out of the page at me. Text by I wan Rhys Morus

Kessanlv Bovril by Electricution from The Graphic, Christmas Number, 1891

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E

lectric belt advertisements have a certain charm all of their own and can be extremely informative, but this illustration fascinated me – and still does. It seemed to capture in one rather quirky scene the whole curiosity, complexity and contrariness of electricity’s place in late Victorian culture. The picture itself is an advertisement for Bovril – a thick, dark brown, gloopy beef extract, usually consumed either as a spread on toast or diluted to make beef tea – that appeared in the popular magazine The Graphic in 1891. The ad shows some remarkably complacent looking cattle about to be sacrificially electrocuted in order to manufacture that wonder-working product. The date is significant of itself of course, being only the year after the first electrical execution of a human being took place in New York on 6 August 1890. The Graphic, in which the advertisement appeared, had been established in 1869 as competition for the relatively well-established Illustrated London News. Both publications took advantage of the Victorian proliferation of industrialized printing technologies, particularly those that made the mass-production of relatively cheap high-quality illustrations possible. For researchers who spend much of their time delving into Victorian journals, magazines, and newspapers the visual transformation of print culture between the 1830s and the 1860s is remarkable. Illustrations in 1830 are crude and few and far between. By the end of the ‘60s they are both sophisticated and everywhere. The same goes for advertisements. New technologies, new markets and new audience expectations transformed them from being a few lines of closely packed text in columns during the 1830s to the sort of visually dense representation you can see here. So why is this such a great picture? In the first place, it’s because it’s advertising Bovril, a substance that needs some introduction to a nonBritish audience. It was first manufactured in 1886 and was the sort of thing I was still being given as a child in the 1970s after being ill. The name has an interesting etymology that helps explain why this advert is so fascinating for a historian of electricity. In his 1871 novel, The Coming Race, the English pulp writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton introduced the “vril-ya,” a race of subterranean super-beings that did everything through the power of vril. Vril, as Bulwer Lytton’s description made quite clear, was electricity, and animal electricity at that. Manipulating it, the vril-ya “by operations, akin to those ascribed to mesmerism, electro-biology, odic force, &c., but applied

scientifically, through vril conductors ... can exercise influence over minds, and bodies animal and vegetable, to an extent not surpassed in the romances of our mystics.” So, Bovril was meant to be understood as bovine vril, the concentrated animal electricity of beef. It was named in order to invite its consumers to draw the link between the life-enhancing and health-giving virtues of Bovril and the virtues of the mysterious electrical vril. That’s what makes this picture so peculiar – and so clever. It shows Bovril, which the Victorian consumer is meant to imagine as being some sort of electrical essence of bovine life, being produced through electrocution. It elides together the life-giving and death-dealing connotations of electricity, a nice example of postmodern slipperiness a century before postmodernism. By the 1890s, the tradition of electricity as life was well-entrenched. From James Graham’s Celestial Bed in the 1780s, to Giovanni Aldini’s and Andrew Ure’s experiments on electrified corpses, to Andrew Crosse’s electrical insects, to medical electricity and the electropathic belt, the connection seemed secure. By the early 1890s, advertisements for electric belts and corsets manufactured by C. B. Harness and his Medical Battery Company were everywhere, though Harness was to find himself in court and at the beginning of the slippery slope to bankruptcy within the year. After all, if the connection weren’t so obvious to The Graphic’s readers, the Bovril advert would make no sense. After 1890, though, electricity had acquired a quite different connotation as the latest technology for dealing scientifically administered death. The link between death and electricity wasn’t entirely novel; professional electricians, as part of their discipline’s folk tradition, had wild tales of intrepid natural philosophers experimenting on the Leyden Jar. From the 1880s, as towns and cities across Europe and North America electrified, there was a steady stream of newspaper reports of incautious workers killed by touching the electric wires. William Kemmler’s death, as the first victim of the electric chair – and the invention of the word electrocution to describe the process – made the link between electricity and death just as secure in late-Victorian minds as the connection between electricity and life. There were debates in electrical and medical journals about just how, in practice, electricity killed. The advert shows us the multiplicity of ways in which electricity might make sense for the Victorians. It was life, it was death. It represented

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progress and humanitarianism. It was thoroughly embedded in consumer culture making it a wonderful illustration to use with students. If nothing else, it’s a great talking point and a way to start conversations about electricity’s place in Victorian culture and the importance of doing cultural history of science in general. What it suggests is that such cultural histories never stop. You can always dig a little deeper, see things from another angle, and follow another lead to come up with a new perspective. The transitions from science to technology and culture in this picture are seamless. You can’t tell exactly where they merge into one another. Most important of all, it’s funny, or at least I think it is. There’s an old truism that if you want to understand a culture you need to laugh at its jokes.

Iwan Rhys Morus MA, MPhil, PhD (Cantab) is a historian of nineteenth century science, technology and medicine. He also has interests in the history of the body and nineteenth-century popular culture. He has published widely on these topics and recent books include Shocking Bodies (History Press, 2011), When Physics became King (Chicago, 2005), Michael Faraday and the Electrical Century (Icon Books, 2004) and Frankenstein's Children (Princeton, 1998). His current research projects focus on nineteenth-century optical illusions as philosophical and experimental practices as well as the more general history of scientific performances in the nineteenth century. Dr. Morus is the editor of History of Science. He is also the Project Director for the ‘Memory and Media in Wales’ JISC-funded research project and a senior collaborator on the John Tyndall Correspondence Project at Montana State University. This piece was originally published by the HSS Newsletter www.hssonline.org and is here reproduced with permission of the author and thanks to the kind help of Jay Malone

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THE ANIMALS ARE “BREAKING OUT”!

This paper explores recent TV adverts in which the animals portrayed come to appear before us in new ways. Gone are cosy images of chimpanzees playing house, wearing flat-caps and frocks, and pouring cups of tea. The animals are breaking out! Mary, the cow (Muller yoghurt), is “set free” on a beach to fulfil her dream of becoming a horse. More cows (Anchor butter) have taken charge of the dairy. An elephant (LG) climbs a tree, breaking through the forest canopy to view the world from a new perspective, and a car is given magnificent new tyres (Michelin), enabling it to screech to a halt to allow creatures to cross ”the sad stretch of road” unharmed. What has happened to our conceptions of animals? Why at this particular point in time – a time perceived as one of “environmental crisis” – do we find ourselves gazing from our sofas upon these representations of boundarybreaking animals? From what are they breaking out? And, more to the point, what kind of shift renders such portrayals valuable tools in the world of commodity, wherein the conduits linking supply-and-demand assume some general need to envision animals as “free-agents?” While we are accustomed to seeing animals presented to us as “free-agents” in books or films, the use of such portrayals is a notable development in the world of television advertising. This paper considers how this phenomenon might be linked to the challenges we face wherein an environmental “crisis” of our own making calls us to radically rethink our modes of being in relation to the world about us. Text by L ouise Squire

T

emphasis added). If both “freedom” and “agency” require capacities beyond the wherewithal of animals, rendering them incapable of either, then our various constraints of them would appear unproblematic. On this view, we might say that the adverts selected, in portraying animals thus, take a merely whimsical approach to enrolling the viewer – and no doubt, to an extent, they do. We might add to this the more telling notion that the adverts serve – or at least seek – to counter issues related to animal welfare, especially where the utilisation of animals lies behind the products marketed. This countering in itself, arising in part from the work of

here are several difficulties to consider in relation to this investigation of animals as “free-agents,” not least of which is how we conceptualise the terms “freedom” and “agency.” Such terms, of course, participate in the ways, within a Western paradigm, that we have historically defined humanity. Both terms, once we investigate them, are heavily dependent (at least traditionally so) on a capacity for “rationality” (for example Kant, 1959), and the established view has been, as Mullin remarks, that “Humans might be animals, but humans alone possessed rationality, language, consciousness, or emotions” (Mullin 1999, 206;

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VCCP Muller “Thank You Cows”, 2010
VCCP

VCCP Muller “Thank You Cows”, 2010
VCCP

Overview: This first advert features Mary the Cow who “has always dreamed of being a horse.” We watch as she is “released” to gallop freely on a beach, thus her dream is made to come true. Cows, collectively, are then “thanked” for the natural goodness of their milk, which they provide for Muller’s fruit corner yoghurts. Comment: Three points are of particular note for our discussion: (a) the act of “release,” setting Mary free; (b) the act of thanking cows generally; and (c) the statement that Mary has “always wanted to be a horse.” The portrayal of Mary as “thanked,” as Jonas notes, at least acknowledges that there is some “cost” to the cow (Jonas, 2010 Survey), signalling a shift in the ways we think about farmed animals; on the other hand, as Cole has noted, this kind of “discursive reconfiguring” of “the relationships between humans and farmed animals” is also “incidental” to the real welfare of the animal (Cole 2011, 84). That Mary has “always wanted to be a horse” further separates the real from the farfetched, yet also performs an interesting function: horses, we might note, possess a more privileged position in human (Western) society than do cows; they “participate in ... society in the capacity of subjects;” we converse with them and give them personal names (Sahlins 1976, 174). A horse, therefore, has a degree of “personhood” which the cow, in becoming horse, is portrayed as moving closer towards. The portrayal of cows as “free-agents” in our second advert is quite different: Anchor’s “Made by Cows”. Overview: A herd of cows bring themselves into the dairy to be milked and then proceed to carry out the production process from start to finish, giving their “approval” to the packs of butter which appear on the final conveyor. We watch as they “man-handle” the pallets of

the likes of Regan (1983) and Singer (1977), begins to implicate the adverts as signifiers of shifting attitudes towards animals, indicative of the “reassessments of the capacities and status of animals coming from environmental philosophy” (Jones 2003, 294-295). However, we can take this further. The era within which we currently dwell has profoundly challenged and is currently shifting our thinking about our place in the world. The modernist project for which “[t]he scientific domination of nature promised freedom from scarcity, want, and the arbitrariness of natural calamity” (Harvey 1989, 12), as founded upon the assumption of an infinitude of “natural resources,” has of course grossly misfired. The devastating losses of countless species and their habitats add up to “disappearances” which now endlessly “reappear” on our television screens in programmes such as BBC’s Last Chance to See (2009). This is no mere aesthetic loss, nor is it confined to the ethical; it takes on the scale presently defined by anthropogenic climate change, in turn threatening our own survival – not to mention that of endless non-human beings. This environmental “crisis” appears not only “out there,” but manifests as a phenomenon of our living rooms, where the world of commodity continues to reach out to entice us with its products. Seen in this light, in “setting animals free” these adverts, regardless of their location in the realm of commodity, seem to signify a new desire to return animals “to landscape;” a desire which, I intend to show, has resonance beyond issues of animal welfare, which it nonetheless includes. The first two adverts for consideration both feature animals that are commonly contained within human systems of production – cows: Muller’s “Thank You Cows”

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CHI & Partners Made by Cows, 2010
CHI & Partners

CHI & Partners Made by Cows, 2010
CHI & Partners

product, operate the gadget that dispenses brown packaging tape, stack up the boxes on pallets and then load them into a lorry for distribution. Comment: That the cows take on the roles of human workers purports to render them “freeagents” to the extent that we, as citizens of our socio-economic framework, are free-agents. While this advert makes less of an imaginative leap from traditional anthropomorphic portrayals of animals, the “message” here is clear: cows participate actively in the production process and give their approval to the end product – butter. This, as Kali notes, gives the appearance that they are “complicit in the use of their bodies” for production (Kali, 2010 Survey). Growing popular concern for the wellbeing of animals, of course, poses particular challenges for those companies whose products are entangled with the rural, which as Jones points out, is “the space where much of the subjegation of animals on behalf of modern society takes place” (2003, 287). In both adverts, we can see that the matter of subjugation, mentioned here by Jones, is reworked (thus concealed) via its own antonyms for the viewer’s own comfort or amusement, presenting the animals as set free and thanked, or rewarded and in control. Whatever concerns we may have about the wellbeing of farmed animals, these adverts seek, on some level, to allay them. At the same time, this move to portray animals as “freeagents” might lead us to consider more specifically what a growing popular concern for animals might seek to see animals freed from. As Cranston notes, in order to discern what is meant by “freedom” in any given application, we should ask the question “Freedom from what?”[i] (1967, 5-

6). We can explore this in terms of two kinds of limitations: (a) our “physical” constraining of animals; and (b) our “ethical valuing” of them. In terms of the first, Foucault provides a useful means to view the “constraint” of animal bodies in human systems. He claimed that it was out of the longstanding struggle to relieve humans from the constraints of the natural world that a shift in the use of power arose, changing emphasis from one of absolute power (controlling the “right to life”), to one of “discipline” – emerging as finely tuned and subtly rendered control over the living body at the level of life itself, giving “power its access even to the body” (Foucault 1984, 265). The models of governmentality applied to cities were then extended to police the “whole territory” – a “historical rupture,” which Darier describes as becoming” a condition for environmental “crisis” (Darier 1999, 23). Farmed landscapes thus translate as designated food-resources for “livestock”; “shady meadows” function alongside buildings designed to “... ensure the successful enrolment of domesticated animals into humandriven networks” (Jones 2003, 294-296); and through this enrolment, the living body of the animal, as described by Noske, becomes alienated in a number of ways: once steered by the animal, the body is now controlled by others “and is actually working against the animal’s own interests.” An animal is thus alienated from the natural life of his or her species, from the ecosystem within which he or she evolved, and often also from his or her own fellow animals (Noske 1997, 18-19). Regarding the second limitation, our ethical valuing of animals has, of course, long been clouded by our assessments of their mental

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TBWA/Chiat/Day New York Sad Stretch of Road, 2009
TBWA/Chiat/Day New York

TBWA/Chiat/Day New York Sad Stretch of Road, 2009
TBWA/Chiat/Day New York

from is the very idea itself that they cannot be free. The next two adverts provide a means to consider the “free-agency” of animals that lie outside our direct containment or control: Michelin’s “Sad Stretch of the Road” and LG’s “Clever Elephant”. Overview: this rather gruesome advert features a “sad stretch of road” littered with “roadkill” casualties. As a pink rabbit begins to cross the road one dark night, the headlights of a blue car rapidly approach. Will the rabbit be killed? No – because the Michelin Man throws out a set of tyres for the blue car, enabling it to screech to a halt and leaving the pink rabbit unharmed. Comment: What is striking about this advert is that the agency of the animal manifests at the point where the car responds to it by screeching to a halt. When learning to drive, we are taught, in relation to the UK’s Road Traffic Act,[ii] not to swerve or stop for animals such as badgers, foxes, rabbits etc. for fear of endangering “persons.” If in swerving for an animal we harm a “person,” we have driven “dangerously,” which amounts to a criminal offence. This advert therefore appears to suggest that animals might be “persons” too. Overview: Here, an elephant steps gracefully through an Amazonian forest landscape. We watch as he or she reaches a tall tree and proceeds to climb up it, step by step, branch by branch. Reaching the top, he or she emerges from the canopy to encounter a vast and beautiful vista of the landscape at large – a view from on high. Comment: In climbing a tree, the elephant breaks out from his or her own

“capacities.” due in part to the philosophical difficulties with ascribing them rationality or powers of conceptual thinking. But possesing a “concept of freedom” or no, it is not hard to see that animals, when constrained, strive to be free (Ingold 2000a; Jones, 2003). As Ingold notes, our relations with animals have produced a whole range of “tools of coercion, such as the whip or the spur, designed to inflict physical force and very often acute pain” (2000a, 307). The presence of this need to coerce clearly reveals the countering by the human of some otherwise free movement of the animal. Williams adds the point that such coercive practices often do, in fact, recognise the sentience of the animal, a recognition which can boost the success of coercion (Williams, 2004). Successful coercion, of course, benefits production, but as Carr states: “coercion, it is all but universally agreed, is antithetical to freedom. To be coerced to do (not do) something is to have one’s freedom abridged” (Carr 1988, 59). What this highlights is the tenuous nature of the links between our valuing of animals and the matter of their capacity to be “free.” Interestingly, so-called “human” capacities have, in turn, informed the very concept of “freedom” itself. Kant, for example, and very influentially, argued that it is only in the rational actions of a moral agent that true freedom can exist (Kant, 1959). Philo and Wilbert point to this “long-standing human belief in a basic distinction between” the rational human and “base passions and instincts,” which, they observe, “allegedly obliterate a being’s potential for agency” (2007, 14-15). This provides a curious situation, in which what we may actually desire animals to be free

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Y&R New York Clever Elephant, 2010
Y&R New York

Y&R New York Clever Elephant, 2010
Y&R New York

limitations; but who really climbs trees? The elephant, we might note, has borrowed the skills of primates, who in turn we conceive of as dwelling at the borders between human and nonhuman animal (Mullin 1999, 213). Jonas (2010 Survey) very eloquently describes this advert as “a Plato’s Cave image,” in which “climbing out of the world of shadow, the elephant reaches the awesome light of pure reason.” In terms of the rational requirements for freedom and agency, this reveals the elephant as therefore breaking free from our very conceptions of him or her as animal. These two adverts portray animals not as integrated into systems, but as dwellers of the wider landscape. Within a Western mode of being, we have long had a habit of objectifying our world, so that “the meaning or identity of a thing is given in itself alone, rather than the ‘living’ context of which it is a part” (Taussig 1977, 153). If we look at (or think of) an animal and only see “the animal,” we have objectified it. The animal is at once put at risk, for we can reposition it into whatever context we choose – literally so in the case of farmed animals, where a pig is an animal that “lives in a sty,” cows “give us milk,” and so on. But the emergence of our adverts coincides with an era wherein which “environment” has become an arena of contention and intense examination. New awarenesses of ourselves as impacting upon the natural world raise a parallel shift in our understanding of “animal,” from animal “as object,” to animal as active participant in the wider landscape. In his work on “Dwelling” (2000b), Ingold views landscape as “continually coming into being through the combined action

of human and non-human agencies” (2000b, 155). He states: “The most fundamental thing about life is that it does not begin here or end there, but is always going on ... Environments are never complete but are always under construction” (Ingold 2000b, 172). This temporal “becoming” of landscape, in which many agents participate, can be considered as a Latourian Actor Network, wherin which it is “no longer just the human who transports information through transformation, but the nonhuman as well” (Latour 1999, 122), underscoring the function of association between a range of heterogeneous, agential elements involved in any coming-to-be (Latour 2005, 5). When viewed as an ecological construct, this positively demands the recognition of non-human “agents” as “acting” dwellers in the wider landscape. From within the climate change era of “environmental crisis,” a phenomenon evoking responses that range from alarmism or zealousness to apathy or even denial, the retreat of the “natural,” together with the decline of its non-human dwellers, appears as one of the more palpable of major concerns. While such a recognition might further the valuing of the animal per se, it does so within a broader context of risk to the wellbeing and survival of not only the natural world and its parts, but in turn of the human species. My contention, then, that the portrayals of animals as “free agents” in these four adverts indicate a desire to return animals to landscape, is on these grounds. Where Lerner and Kalof, in a survey of television commercials during the late 1990’s, noted that animals used or consumed by humans tend to be portrayed as “distanced” by avoiding “humanising” them

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appears unproblematic to reposition them within our systems, provided that they are “properly looked after.” But if the “becoming” of landscape requires the involvement of both human and nonhuman agencies (Ingold 2000b, 155), then our assumptions start to look flakey. The “free-agency” of animals contains a wider good, even under the terms of those who are unable to see it as a benefit for the animal him or herself. The four adverts between them clearly evoke a poignant message, one to which viewers seem largely to be attuned. Expanses of rainforest (through which a “clever elephant” strides); endless natural habitats across the world; the animals themselves, once living creatures strewn across our (“sad stretches of”) roads; whole species of “wild” animal – all are vanishing, it seems, before our eyes (Franklin 1999, 58, Serpell 1996, 233). We seem at a loss as to how to “remake” disappearing “nature,” for whatever we “make” by human hand appears to us as no natural thing, but rather artefact. In distilling the animal out of ourselves (e.g. Midgley 1994) we seem to have lost our way and thus now need that “animal” to be “free.” Hence these adverts, while they are incontrovertibly tools of the world of commodity (together with all that this implies), and while they assuredly function to obfuscate the real lives of animals (Cole 2011), on the other hand do point to a profound shift in popular thinking. What these adverts, I suggest, portend – and in this sense encouragingly – is at least a growing popular “desire” to rematerialise, through the release of the “animal,” the disappearing natural world. The question of course is ... how to render “desire” dynamic, so that it enters the deeply exigent sphere of change.

(Lerner and Kalof 1999), the four adverts in this analysis distance us from the animals in varying ways and, in doing so, simultaneously tap into an overarching popular concern, that of the security of the natural world – a concern which includes the wellbeing of animals via their “release” from our physical and ethical constraints.[iii] This “camouflaging” (Grauerholz 2007) and repositioning of the real animal both removes responsibility from the consumer (Grauerholz 2007, 347-348), in terms of commodity and ongoing consumer status, and yet offers the consumer an ersatz opportunity to participate in the reinstatement of animals as “free-agents,”[iv] and thus to “contribute” to the safeguarding of the natural world. If to reposition animals in landscape is to render them “free-agents,” then advertisers are clearly tasked with the reversal of our assessments of them as incapable of free-agency. How does this work? The main difficulty, as noted, is that of ascribing animals rational thought. Yet our conceptions of freedom and agency can be challenged, for example, by the work of Thrift who points out that cognition functions at the level of the body (and the senses) much of the time (Thrift 2003, 314). He uses this point to extrapolate the notion of body at the imparting moment of its existence, “bare life,” which, unfolded, becomes “a vast biopolitical domain” (2003,313). Conceiving bodies this way, he argues, highlights “new paths along which we move,” creating relations with the world about us that become “exfoliations of the space of the body that can be treated separately” (2003,114, quoting Gil: 1998, 127). On these terms, the “exfoliations” of a cow confined in a dairy turn out to be dairy (or meat) products, while the “exfoliations” of an animal “in the wild” emerge via the animal’s participation in the ongoing construction of landscape. In both cases, the animal is therefore an agent, but only in the second case is the animal “free.” Kant’s claim (1959) that it is only in the rational actions of a “moral” agent that true freedom can exist, points to “morality” as a further difficulty for animals and free-agency. Whilst it has been shown that animals may in fact possess altruistic behaviours (e.g. Bekoff 2004; de Waal 2010), the idea of “morality” remains grounded, philosophically, in our notions of human minds. We can, however, take a different approach to this and think instead in terms of a “capacity to achieve the wider good.” As long as we are content to believe that animals possess no such capacity, nor a capacity for “rationality,” then it

Research Statem ent This paper originates from a larger dissertation, the research for which included two short qualitative surveys (2010),[v] each straightforwardly requesting a response to three or four of the adverts. One survey, via H-Animal.net, collected responses from scholars with interests in animal studies; the other was distributed to a range of individuals across different professions, a portion of whom had environmental interests generally (e.g. members of Transition Town, RSPB, HDRA, Greenpeace, and so on). While only some aspects of the findings are included in this shorter piece, I nonetheless wish to thank all who participated in these surveys for their comments, and in particular Eric Jonas of Northwestern University and Dr. Audrey Kali

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Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell.

of Framingham State University whose comments, with their permissions, I have cited.

Grauerholz, Elizabeth. (2007). Cute Enough to Eat: The Transformation of Animals into Meat for Human Consumption in Commercialized Images. Humanity & Society 31 (4), 334-354.

Notes

Ingold, T. (2000a). From Trust to Domination. In T. Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (pp. 61-76). London: Routledge. Ingold, T. (2000b). The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge.

1

As Cranston points out, if someone were to approach us on the street and claim “I am free,” we would have little idea what they meant (1967, 3). Have they just walked out on their partner? Have they been let out of jail? Is it a political statement? We are obliged to ask the question “freedom from what?” if there is to be any hope of our ascertaining what is meant by “freedom” in a given application (Cranston 1967, 5-6).

Jones, O. (2003). “The Restraint of Beasts:” Rurality, Animality, Actor Network Theory and Dwelling. In P. Cloke, Country Visions (pp. 283307). Essex: Pearson. Kant, I. (1959). Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. (L. W. Beck, Trans.) USA: The Liberal Arts Press.

2 The Highway Code: “Dangerous driving” is an offence; “dangerous,” according to the Road Traffic Act 1991, means “danger either of injury to any person or of serious danger to property” (RTA Part 1, Section 1, No’s 1-3).

Last Chance to See (2009), website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/lastchancetosee/.

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In the 2010 qualitative surveys undertaken as part of the research for this project, those directly expressing concerns in relation to animal welfare tended to be alert to the gaps between the real and the portrayed lives of animals, whereas roughly two thirds of those disclosing no such concerns took a supporting or even celebratory stance towards the “release” of animals depicted. Both groups therefore support the “release” of animals from human constraints, while a third, but smaller group, actively defended farming practices.

BBC

Latour, Bruno. (1999). Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. London: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno. (2005). Reassembling the Social: an Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. UK: Oxford University Press. Lerner, Jennifer and Linda Kalof. (1999). The Animal Text: Message and Meaning in Television Advertisements. The Sociological Quarterly, 40 (4), 565-86. Midgley, M. (1994). Beasts, Brutes and Monsters. In T. Ingold (Ed.), What is an Animal? (pp. 35-46). London: Routledge.

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Even the child participants of the survey noted the “cover-ups;” one, for example, stated: “Having animals in this advert [LG’s “Clever elephant”] defeats how un-environmentally friendly TV’s are, because you are seeing all this nature, which makes people forget how bad it is for the environment.”

Mullin, M. H. (1999). Mirrors and Windows: Sociocultural Studies of Human-Animal Relationships. Annual Review of Anthropology, 28, 201-224. Noske, B. (1997). Beyond Boundaries: Humans and Animals. London: Black Rose. Philo, C., & Wibert, C. (2007). Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-Animal Relations. (C. Philo, & C. Wilbert, Eds.) Oxon: Routledge.

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Conducted in accordance with the ASA Ethical Guidelines for Good Research Practice (1999); website of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth.

Bibliography Bekoff, Marc. (2004). Wild Justice and Fair Play: Cooperation, Forgiveness and Morality. Animals, Biology and Philosophy, 19, 489520.

Regan, T. (1983). The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sahlins, M. (1976). La Pensee Bourgeoise: Western Society as Culture. In M. Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (pp. 166-204). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Carr, C. L. (1988). Coercion and Freedom. American Philosophical Quarterly , 25 (1), 59-67.

Serpell, J. (1996). In the Company of Animals (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cole, Matthew. (2011). From “Animal Machines” to “Happy Meat?” Foucault’s Ideas of Disciplinary and Pastoral Power Applied to “Animal-Centred” Welfare Discourse. Animal, 1, 83-101.

Singer, Peter. (1977). Animal Liberation. New York: Avon.

The Highway Code. (n.d.). Retrieved November 12th, 2010, from DirectGov: http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/TravelAndTransport/Highwaycode/DG_06 9858

Cranston, M. (1967). Freedom (3rd ed.). New York: Basic Books. Darier, Eric (Ed.). (1999) Discourses of the Environment. Oxford: Blackwell.

Taussig, M. (1977). The Genesis of Capitalism Amongst a South American Peasantry: Devil’s Labour and the Baptism of Money. Comparative Studies in Society , 19, 130-155.

De Waal, F. (2010). The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society. London: Souvenir Press.

Thrift, N. (2003). Still Life in Nearly Present Time: the Object of Nature. In P. Cloke (Ed.), Country Visions (pp. 308-331). Essex: Pearson.

Ethical Guidelines for Good Research Practice. Retrieved September 25th, 2010, from Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth: http://www.theasa.org/ethics/guidelines.shtml

Louise Squire has an MA with Distinction in Philosophy (Nature Pathway), from the University of Wales, the present article being based on Louise's MA dissertation: 'The Animals Are ‘Breaking Out’! Critical Analysis of a Discerned Shift in TV Advertising Towards Representations of Animals as ‘Free-Agents’' (2011). Louise is currently registered as a PhD Candidate at the University of Surrey, and her thesis examines the problem of "death" in relation to "environmental crisis" in Contemporary Literature. Louise has primary interests in Literary Theory, Poststructuralism, and Contemporary (especially 21st Century) Literature, within English Literature, whilst also having an interdisciplinary background, with additional interests mainly in Environmental Philosophy and Anthrozoology. Louise's central concern is in exploring the value of the works of the French thinkers--and Continental Philosophies more generally--to the analysis of literary and media sources in the contemporary "environmental crisis" world.

Foucault, M. (1984). Right of Death and Power over Life. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault Reader. London: Penguin. Franklin, A. (1999). Animals in Modern Cultures: A Sociology of Human-Animal Relations in Modernity. London: Sage. Gil, J. (1998). Metamorphoses of the Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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CAN YOU SAY, “AWWW”?

Animals have long been a regular theme in advertising, especially when anthropomorphized. Except for obvious ties to products like dog food and pet products, animals usually have nothing to do with the goods or services advertised, but we connect with them and the products nonetheless, and we get a good feeling when a company is associated with cute animals. Text by G ene Gable

I

often wonder what the meetings at an ad agency are like when the topic of animals comes up. It must be hard to think of anything new to do with them, although special effects have allowed us to make animals seem to talk, dance, and do other human-like things. And we always seem to fall for animals (or talking babies) with an irreverent or comical persona. So I wasn’t surprised to find a great series of print ads featuring animals from the Eastern Corporation, a paper maker in Bangor, Maine, for its line of Atlantic bond printing paper. They all appeared in a series from 1946 that ran in American Printer magazine. Click on any image for a larger version. The company managed to vaguely connect the animals to the product through small poems that appeared with each illustration, which then tied in loosely to the ad copy. But like many paper company ads, the main point was to simply show off the paper and the printing quality you could achieve with it.

Eastern Corporation Atlantic, 1946
Eastern Corporation

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Eastern Corporation Atlantic, 1946
Eastern Corporation

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EVOLUTION AND DESIGN

In this paper, The evolution of the animal as sign in the mass media and its stylistic classification within the 20th and 21st centuries, cultural representations of animals in advertising and the mass media, with special focus on the corporate arena, will be addressed within the context of Foucault’s notion of the Western episteme and how cultural spaces are governed by it. Furthermore, historical and evolutionary processes will be considered in relation to prevalent sign systems and different approaches to evolutionary systems will be taken into account. Text by S onja Britz

R

between humans and animals. The animal as signifier has assumed many roles and identities throughout history, often at the expense of the animal. The apparent evolution of the animal as signifying element in design, could rather be described as one which has been subjected to an inverse process, an involution, that denotes a retrograde action turning in on itself. Foucault assigns three major divisions to his notion of the Western episteme: firstly Renaissance, secondly Classical and lastly Modern. The latter is governed by scientific inquiry as well as urbanization. The resulting changing perceptions of natural history, provide, to my mind, a framework wherein views on animals could be located. His exposition of natural history and sign systems serve to inform cultural representations of animals: importantly, culture never admits unmediated access to actual animals. (Baker 2001:10). The culture of design provides a good example of how urban experiences of the animal are mediated by means of semiotics and technology and, thus, how either prejudices, or sympathies and other

epresentations of animals in advertising are persuasive constructions of how animals are perceived. They can convey notions as disparate as the domestic, the exotic, or the ‘natural’. Certain animals such as cows and pigs conventionally appear as commodities, whereas others such as pet cats and dogs are presented as individuals with their own specific likes and dislikes. And across the world the corporate arena tends to favour charismatic animals, particularly the Lion. I wish to consider the use of animals in advertising through the lens off Foucault’s notion of the Western episteme and how cultural spaces are governed by it. However Foucault was writing in another era and, as Bill Mitchell has observed ‘….’cyberspace and biospace’ have introduced new frontiers for ‘technical innovation, appropriation and exploitation‘ (2005, p. 309). Current Posthumanist discourse challenges the tenets of five hundred years of normative Humanist thinking which postulated the centrality of human consciousness. Post-humanist thinking foregrounds the question of the animal by critically re-assessing established boundaries

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Albrecht Dürer Indian Rhinoceros, 1515, The British Museum, London

played a minor part in 16th century representations of animals: the normative, which fitted into the cultural matrix, rather than the observed animal, was represented. A good example of this would be Dürer’s rhinoceros (1515) (which became the acceptable icon/emblem of the animal - even though it differed from existing contemporary empirical observations and studies of the actual animal. On another level, there was a great curiosity for the visual relationship of one thing to another - which favoured the symbolic - and stood in opposition to the 16th century rhetoric of science, which has been described as “diminished in visibility” ( Baker 2001: 20) due to its fascination with the hidden, organic structural connections between things.

stereotypical attitudes towards animals filter quite seamlessly through these representations. The producer, designer and viewer (the latter as intended consumer) are forced into complicity. In order to establish an acceptable evolutionary model, it is important to compare our episteme to preceding ones with regard to natural history and representational strategies. According to Foucault, the first division of the Western episteme, namely the Renaissance, consisted of a complex system of similitudes, in which the concern was not so much related to the animals themselves, but to what they signified for human beings. Developing from Medieval bestiaries, strange and exotic animals were assimilated into an existing cultural order which was based on an emblematic, imperialist visual tradition. The results of empirical observation

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order to fulfil the requirements as set out in the consumer industry. W.J.T. Mitchell compares the iconologist to a natural historian: images and pictures are compared to species and specimens in order to explain how new images appear in the world, what these effect , what they mean and how they change (Mitchell 2005: 86-87). According to this theory, images could therefore be subjected to extinction, mutation and evolution or, exist, at least, as co- evolutionary entities with human beings. Darwinian evolutionary theory propounds that common ancestral stock adapts to existing conditions and are susceptible to gradual modification over time. Populations are held in check through natural selection and survival of the fittest, the latter fulfilling the demands of the “ economy of nature” (White & Cribbin 1995:2000). Transmutation is a resultant process in which the modified offspring of all dominant and increasing forms tend to become adapted to many and highly developed places within the economy of nature. An interesting view developed by Deleuze and Guattari explodes the old model of the evolutionary tree of descent. They introduce - as they themselves call it - a schema of aparallel evolution; I quote from A thousand plateaus: “rhizomes operating already in the heterogeneous and jumping from one already differentiated line to another” (2004: 11). It follows that evolutionary processes are not judged, but simply are: a species is neither good nor bad (Mitchell 2005:86). By contrast to evolutionary theory, historical analysis is traditionally linear, a process of analogue and chronology. An historical survey of the animal as sign will be helpful in identifying certain classificatory paradigms in which the animal had been manifested. Abject representations of the animal as exotic other can be traced from Roman times through to the 19th century and early 20th century circus productions (Figure III). More recently, to use Steve Baker’s term, “disnification” of animals in representation, has led to animals being trivialized, signifying cuteness, humour and disempowerment. “Disnification” immediately conjures up its prime referent – signification – a term which is employed to bestow meaning and credibility on the subject. By juxtaposing these two concepts, Baker points to the trivializing nature of animal representation wherever it occurs in the mass media. It is a common phenomenon to notice that marginalized, disempowered groups are often metaphorically classified as one of a

In the second section of the Western episteme, called the Classical, the great tripartition between observation, document and fable (differences between, firstly, what one sees; secondly, what has been observed and thirdly, what others imagine or believe) did not yet exist, and the reason for this was that signs were then regarded as part of things themselves. In the 17th century they became modes of representation (Foucault 2002:140-141) evolving their own sign systems. In the 18th century, Linnaeus (Systema Natural, 1759) initiated a new system of connecting things in the world to observation and to discourse: the strangeness of animals was no longer regarded as spectacle (as in the 16th century) but became the object of study for taxonomic purposes. The causal relationship between this view and the birth of natural history as we know it today, is quite obvious. It was clearly not the result of a new interest in nature and its creatures (because the origins of this interest can be traced back to pre-history) but really the construction of a new field of increased visibility which depended on both exclusion and systematisation (Foucault 2002:144-145). That which could not be seen, was utilized as a classificatory tool, giving rise to the development of complex sign systems, dislocating the sign from the thing itself. Signs began to take on a life of their own. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the positioning of the human species in nature can be described as heavily mediated by technology. As both visual and audio-visual media govern most mass media imagery, including that of the animal, there should be no problem to present the consuming public with accurate, in situ representations of animals. Verisimilitude, rather than similitude in some representations, serves as ersatz quality for contact with actual animals. To a large extent, for human urban populations, biological diversity has definitively become a pure virtual reality: one that has its origins in, and also is constructed by and given content by three communication forces, namely computer generated imagery, television documentaries and branding strategies. It is a fact that, in their daily living, current human urban populations are exposed to a very limited number of animal species. The viewer’s experience of the animal therefore happens to be primarily a mediated one. The consequent simulation/representation of the animal, therefore divorces the animal from its proper life context in

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Fig. 1. Albrecht Dürer Indian Rhinoceros, 1515, The British Museum, London Fig. 1. Albrecht Dürer Indian Rhinoceros, 1515, The British Museum, London

54 Barnum, Bailey and Hutchinson Jumbo, colour lithograph 1896

to as icons of species loss. A recent Reuters report states that: “ As world wealth tends to grow, willingness to pay to protect species is growing even faster” (The Star, 11 May 2006:11). “However, spending money to save is not as important or valuable as not spending money to not destroy” (The Star, 11 May 2006:11). A UN report in March 2006 (The Star, 11 May 2006:11) stated that: ”humans were causing the worst spate of extinctions since the dinosaurs vanished 65 million years ago.” In the section to follow, I will be discussing 3 examples of animal representation as they appear in advertising material. I will pay attention to the following four tropes respectively employed in each of the chosen examples: metaphor, metonymy, anthropomorphism (or personification) and totem. My first example: The computer generated figure for the cellular phone company, Vodacom, named “ Mo”, is a case in point. The topos of the computer animated meerkat (a species in the mongoose family) finds its roots in the world of Disney entertainment and then matures in Vodacom’s marketing campaign with promises to share profits aimed at benefiting the upgrading of the meerkat enclosure at the Johannesburg Zoo. The image of the computer generated meerkat has enormous eyes and a corrupted, cute appearance. This image can be classified as both anthropomorphic and neotenous. Furthermore, the metaphoric and metonymic dynamics of this representation complicate the strategies employed in the creation of this image. These will be discussed in the paragraph to follow. Anthropomorphic interpretations of animals are common-place in art and the media. The roots of the attribution of human motives and behaviour to animals can be traced to traditions like Greek mythology, fables, children’s stories and, more recently, the banality of Disneyworld and movies like Ice Age. This phenomenon most often conflates with that of metaphoric language and sign. John Berger argues that: “it is not unreasonable to suppose that the first metaphor was animal” (Berger 1980:90).The animal as metaphor proposes a relationship between humans and animals which may not at first glance seem exploitative, and in many, especially literary examples, actually are not. However, when the animal is used as metaphor denoting the Other, binary oppositions are activated and the animal is usually

number of animal species, because in the hierarchy of the “anthropological machine” (Agamben 2004:37) the animal is seen as humanity’s lowest denominator . The metapicture suggested by Mitchell, of regarding images as living organisms, opens up an important arena of debate around the value of representations in a social context. Biologists also question the certainty of things, within their field of knowledge, and the worth and validity of their classificatory systems. Similar to biologists, one cannot evaluate species/images but needs to consider the values introduced into the world by new forms. These might possibly contest existing criteria and effect a change of mind. Images are therefore not merely passive entities requiring human hosts to activate them. They “refunction our memories and imaginations, bringing new criteria and new desires into the world” (Mitchel 2005:92). The question that needs to be asked here, is whether the images that do survive the cultural evolutionary process are necessarily beneficial to the iconotype of its life form, in this case being the animal. Walter Benjamin reminds us of this danger when he says: ”For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its concerns, threatens to disappear irretrievably” (1999:247). It is also important to identify and recognize the semiotic structures underlying these survivor images, not so much for purposes of classification as for clarification. The cultural matrix imposed by economic forces in society on the representation of animals can ironically be metaphorically equated to the “economy of nature” – a concept I borrow from the field of evolutionary theory. Large corporate companies in S.A., like Vodacom, Investec, Hollards and Impala Platinum, each employ their choice of animal in order to enforce a specific brand image. This brand image ostensibly implies environmental awareness and sustainability; or at worst, it suggests a false metaphor which is de facto harmful to the animal. Large corporations - as mentioned above - often willingly write blank cheques to protect certain animal species. In fact, policies in regard of sustainability and social responsibility are today essential strategies for economic exchange. This willingness to pay may be on the increase, thereby posing the following risk: businesses like mining and other industries, might feel less burdened by the fact that their particular industries may be affecting less visible habitats or less attractive animals that are usually not referred

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Unknown Artist The Orang-Outang Carrying Off a Negro Girl, in Nederveen Pieterse 1992:38 56

2001:181). This kind of representation encourages sentimental adult response, thereby assuring involvement from the consumer. The neotenous character of Mo displaces the distancing effect of otherness as achieved through metaphor. His proximity to the familiar world of humans and their interests, calls for a metonymic reading. Being part of human society, his participatory relationship to the company’s credibility as a conserver of the environment and indigenous animals, as well as one of the fastest expanding markets in Africa, is ensured. A second example: Investec refers to the actual - as opposed to the animated, technologically engineered - animal in its branding strategy. The Zebra is utilized as a living icon of the company’s progressive vision for sustainability, partnership and strength. At first glance it has probably been selected for its aesthetic appeal, geographical habitat and behavioural characteristics, but the sub-text spells a belief in an absolutist view of nature, which can be defined as one of plenitude, adaptability and survival. Selected features of the Impala are isolated, such as its adaptability, alertness and mutualism, in order to highlight and impress in a metonymic fashion the company’s image. But what is this image signifying? Does it represent the organic living substance within nature in opposition to culture, in the culturenature debate? Or can it be termed in Foucault’s words: “forms of animal visibility” (Mitchell 2005:177) - real objects in the world, but which are also images and verbal expressions (Mitchell 2005: 176). Could one therefore refer to it as a totem, a sign which occupies a strategic position at the nature-culture frontier? Totems can take on several forms: one of them being the animal itself. However, the image as such is always more sacred than what it represents (Mitchell 2005: 178). In this case, not under imminent threat of extinction as yet, but a successful commercial, corporate image, which hardly touches upon the existence of the actual animal. My last example: The Hollards branding strategy takes this notion of the animal as brand symbol into the biocybernetic domain.By combining two diverse species –the horse and the cheetah that you can see here, as well as the image of the duiker buck joined with the caracal I showed in my introduction - the notion of the original two animals is displaced. A sense is created that the modification is an improved version - rather than a weakened copy of the

2006. Image showing advertisement for Vodacom’s advertisement for cellular technology. ‘Mo’ Vodaworld: Autumn.

represented as negative or inconsequential. In this case, Mo is neither human nor animal, but created through technology, operating in the realm of the cyborg. He is a metaphor for gobetween vis-à-vis consumer and what is being consumed. The actual animal - its appearance and nature – is, to a large extent, ignored. His attire, reminiscent of the tourist and the safari, immediately places him on the opposite side of the animal world with its connotations of the big, white hunter and trophies. With camera in hand and safari hat jauntingly pulled over his one eye, he seductively gazes at the viewer. This vaudeville aspect of his manipulated personality is further revealed by his animated actions in the TV adverts, namely to jive along in a downtown setting while being followed by a constantly increasing crowd of fans, reminiscent of the Pied Piper and his mesmerised followers. Only in this case the rapid growth of the crowd and its increasing noise levels, exposes, as Canetti (1981:20) claims, the inherently destructive potential of the crowd, transforming it into a scene which is more frightening than entertaining. Neoteny is employed as a popular device in animal representation in the media. Neoteny refers to “a condition in which there is retention of youthful characteristics in the adult form” (Baker

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Ivestec Here Tomorrow
Investec

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Morrisjones & Company Unique Partnership, 2006
Morrisjones & Company

natural organisms are not just entities in themselves but a system of natural signs , living images, a natural language of zoographia or ‘animal writing’ that, from ancient bestiaries to DNA and the new book of Life, continually reintroduces religion – and animation - into things and their images.”

original. Digital manipulation ensures improvement and flawlessness. The representation of this newly constructed image, can also be interpreted as providing a symptomatic example of “image anxiety” (Mitchel 2005:12) pointing to an uncertainty regarding the future – including the possible extinction of species. Here, the potency of the cloned image becomes a central concern , because it exemplifies the uncertainty of the future while fulfilling the dream of creating living forms which lead to living images - a viable simulacrum of a living organism (Mitchel 2005:1213). In conclusion, the representation of the animal is central to the history of animals – “because that history is fully shaped by human documents” (Fudge 2004).The repercussions of this plethora of documentation, which includes design, are central also to ethical debate focusing on the question of the animal. As Mitchell states (2005:178-179):

In conclusion, current Posthumanist discourse does indeed challenge the tenets of 500 years of Humanist thinking. Instead of adopting a position supportive of an idea that can be used to attempt to illustrate the evolutionary development of the animal as sign in design, I by contrast - prefer the notion of a rhizomatous change as expounded by Deleuze and Guattari (2004:12) - stemming from a cultural matrix which embraces diversity, collaboration and multivocality in order to represent that which can never be adequately represented.

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Bibliography Agamben, G. 2004. The Open: man and animal. Stanford University Press: Stanford. Baker, S. 2001. Animals, Representation and reality. Society and animals. Volume 9: no. 3. Available;http//www.pyseta.org/sa/sa9.3/baker.shtml. [0]. Baker, S. 2000. The postmodern animal. Reaktion Books: London. Baker, S. 2001. Picturing the beast: animals, identity and representation. University of Illinois Press: Urbana. Benjamin, W. 1999. Illuminations. Pimlico: London. Berger, J. 1980. About Looking. Vintage Books: New York. Canetti, E. 1981. Crowds and power. Penguin Books: Harmondsworth. Clark, K. 1977. Animals and men. William Morrow and Co:New York. Counting the cost of preserving biodiversity. 2006.The Star 11 May: 11. Darwin, C. 2003. The origin of species. Signet Classic: New York. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. 2004. A thousand plateaus. Continuum: London. Foucault, M. 2004. The order of things. Routledge: London. Ground, I. 2011. “Only in the application that a Living Being makes”:Wittgenstein Signs and Animal Minds.Tartu:Zoosemiotics conference. Gröning, K. & Saller, M. 1999. Elephants: a cultural and natural history. Köneman: Cologne. Maclennan, B. 2003. The wind makes dust: four centuries of travel in southern Africa. Tafelberg: Cape Town. Mitchell, W.J.T. 2005. What do pictures want? University of Chicago Press: Chicago. Morrisjones&company. Horse:Johannesburg.

2006.

Hollards

Duiker,

Hollards

Cover picture. 1994. National Geographic (186, no. 6), December. Sonja Britz is a painter and writer born in Durban, South Africa . She studied painting at the University of Natal, completing her MFA Between 1991 and 2009 she was based in Johannesburg, whilst also undertaking artist’s residencies and exhibiting in Europe. She is interested in the socio-cultural aspects of animal representation and have explored subjects such as the predicament of the African wild dog and urban animals. She is represented in a variety of public and corporate collections including the World Wildlife Fund. In 2009 she moved to the UK and now lives on the coast of Cumbria. She has recently completed on an Arts Council England funded project, Companion Species: Portrait of a Community. Current interests are animal portraiture and contemporary wunderkammer.

Nederveen Pieterse, J. 1992. White on Black: images of Africa and Blacks in Western popular culture. Yale University Press: New Haven. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, v.1. 1973. Sv “evolution” and “involution”. Oxford University Press: Oxford. Thompson, N. 2005. Becoming animal: contemporary art in the animal kingdom. Mass Moca: North Adams. White, M. & Cribbin, J. 1995. Darwin: a life in science. Simon & Schuster: London.

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NERVOUS DOGS NEED ADMIN, SON!

This advert comes from a British magazine The Tail Wagger, October 1940. The Tail- Waggers Club had been founded in 1928 to promote dog welfare stating, ‘The love of animals, and especially of dogs, is inherent in nearly all Britishers’ and by 1930 numbered some 300,000 members.[i] All dogs were eligible for membership, not just those from established breeds. By July 1930 it had become a general legal requirement that all dogs should wear collars and the club and magazine endorsed such measures.[ii] Text by H ilda Kean

T

emphasised by the language: ‘sir’ and ‘son’. However this particular ‘bulldog’ would not have been eligible for show since he has no testiclesthis absence is clearly displayed given the angle of the image. Despite his firm four-footed stance and iconic status this great British bulldog has no balls, rather like the depiction of the former deputy prime minister John Prescott in Steve Bell’s The Guardian cartoons. In the image of an emasculated bulldog ‘full of sound and fury and signifying nothing’ with collar but no balls Prescott’s crucifixion on croquet mallets was a particular delight- I always knew I was reading a stand-in for a blustering man. [v] But here the bulldog is not intended to represent a particular human. The querulous complaint of the puppy plays upon a war rumour. In 1940 measures were taken to regulate food for non-human animals. In Britain a Waste of Food Order obliged animal keepers to act reasonably, while stressing that

he same issue of the monthly magazine included photographs of Winston Churchill patting a Great Dane and of a Kerry Blue champion. There were adverts including those for Hackbridge Kennels to which dogs could be evacuated for ‘the duration’, Spratts dog food ‘still carrying on!’ and canine gas masks and gas –proof kennels. The editorial written at the height of the so-called Battle of Britain was headed with the much-used epithet ‘We can take it’, endorsing the myth of a resilient Britain standing alone. [iii] This jocular advert is aimed at dog lovers. The cartoon bulldog, recognised as a specific breed by the Kennel Club from the 1870s, wears its regulation collar and acts symbolically for Britain reassuring the nervous puppy. As Steve Baker has argued ‘any understanding of the animal is inseparable from the knowledge of its cultural representation’: Britain and bulldogs go together.[iv] The dogs’ male gender is

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Admin Cooper Dog Products, The Tail-Wagger Magazine, 1940

that German dogs were being killed because Germans allegedly liked eating dog meat. [viii] This rumour has been exposed as such.But I do not read this cartoon as a serious comment on

pets could still be fed.[vi] At a similar time there were (inaccurate) reports that Hitler had ordered all dogs to be killed since they were taking food from humans.[vii] However, there was a rumour

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alleged Nazi dietary habits. The magazine contains a serious article critical of the fascists’ utilitarian approaches to dogs and does not mention this rumour at all. The advert de-bunks the rumour by treating it jocularly - and we know that it is jocular since the ‘dogs’ are not dogs but cartoon characters. The text also debunks the idea that animals were anxious because of bombardment – although some clearly were - [x] stating ‘Nervous dogs are usually the victims of wrong feeding’. Importantly this problem (unlike bombing!) was soluble with Admin vitamins. An irony of the ad is that it is published in 1940 because of the war but the war itself (aside from the Nazi speech bubble) is not mentioned explicitly. Even potential meat shortages are only alluded to elliptically. The puppy who is too young to know better ‘speaks’ about the war but his comments are dismissed with a ‘stand firm’ message. While playing to the Nazi-dog-eating story the advert simultaneously undermines it. The young puppy has ‘got it wrong’. However it is surely the puppy who articulates human anxieties. The anxiety is responded to by another, older, dog. The human /puppy is being calmed by an older dog. Arguably the reader is expected rationally to identify with the older dog but emotionally with the puppy. (If Admin powders were given to real dogs, it would apparently benefit the anxious dog as well as the human anxious about the dog.) Paul Wells has approached cartoon animals to suggest that they should be read as animal depictions: ‘… animation demonstrates an intrinsic respect for animals, and rather than making them safe through humor, it actually begins to articulate relevant narratives to support their cause’.[xi] We are not expected to take the advert seriously on one level since it is juxtaposed with journalism about ‘real’ dogs: but we are also intended to read the cultural representation of the bulldog as a national icon. But my use of the word ‘we’ is inaccurate and ahistorical. This was neither aimed at the twenty first century reader nor was the product for contemporary dogs. The product, the advert and the intended reader were all rooted in the lived experience of war some 70 years ago. The animal-human relationship (and its representation) was of a very particular time and this advert helps remind us of this.

References [i]

The Tail-Waggers Club, Tailwaggers, nd 1931

[ii]

An Urgent and Important Notice for all Tail-Waggers and dog

owners generally! Tailwaggers Club June 1930 [iii]

Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz, Pimlico,1991

[iv]

Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast, Manchester University Press,p.25

[v]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/slideshow/page/0,,1974790,00.html

[vi]

RSPCA, Annual Report, RSPCA,1940

[vii]

Animals Defender, NAVS, July 1940. The Home Office believed

dogs were being killed to provide glycerine and fertilisers. TNA:HO 186 /1419 [viii]

Veterinary Record, October 1940. Also The Times of 18

November 1940 [ix]

Mieke Roescher The Nazis and their animals (unpublished paper).

See too Maren Mohring, Cats and cities. ‘Hygienic helpers’: cats in the cities of the ‘Third Reich’.

library.panteion.gr:8080/dspace/bitstream/.../479/1/M M OHRING.pdf [x]

Measures against this, including medication or ear covering, were

promoted by the RSPCA and National Canine Defence League [xi]

Paul Wells, The Animated Bestiary Animals, Cartoons, and

Culture, Rutgers University Press, 2009, p.11

Hilda Kean PhD, FRHIstS is former Dean and Director of Public History at Ruskin College, Oxford and currently Adjunct Professor at the Centre for Australian Public History at UTS, Sydney. She has published widely on cultural and public history and the position of non-human animals. Her numerous works on animals include Animal Rights. Social and Political Change in Britain since 1800 (Reaktion Books 2000), chapters in several books (most recently in Lest we Forget ed Maggie Andrews 2011 and in Animals and War ed Ryan Hediger 2013) and articles in Society and Animals, The London Journal, International Journal of Heritage Studies, Anthrozoos and History Workshop Journal. She serves as history editor for Society and Animals and on the advisory board for Minding Animals and the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. She is currently researching and writing about the animal – human relationship on the home front during the Second World War. Her latest books are The Public History Reader (edited with Paul Martin) Routledge 2013 and Public History and Heritage Today. People and their Pasts (edited with Paul Ashton Palgrave 2013. http://hildakean.com/

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A STONY FIELD

Brand representations proliferate reflexive identities of their producers and consumers. These self-advertisements reinscribe commodified identities reproductively back onto the subjects and objects – the represented figures – of consumption. In this paper I argue that the cooption of identity politics by multinational corporations like Stonyfield Farm, Inc. operates within material and virtual domains that conceal fetishized processes of consumption. I redeploy Stonyfield’s representational vocabulary in looking to uncover these processes as hidden ‘stones’ in a relational ‘field’ of embodied power. I begin by reviewing selected theoretical literature on material and virtual forms of identity, consumption and power. I then apply these perspectives to a recontextualized ‘stony field’, as figured through the work of artist Michael Mercil. I suggest that his project The Virtual Pasture (2009-11), considered in relation to Judith Butler’s re-readings of Foucault and Hegel, reconditions the proprietary terms of Stonyfield’s cow fetish. Text by K atherine Bennett

Fig.1. Michael Mercil The Virtual Pasture, postcard, 2009
Michael Mercil

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Fig.2. Stonyfield yogurt carton front center, photograph by author.

“M

Stonyfield’s package reproduces the living bodies of cows through multiple levels of abstraction as: representational figures in a pastoral landscape, the iconic brand of a multi-national corporation, a purchaser reward system, a codified market commodity, a matrix for bacterial life, a food product requiring artificial temperature control, a regulated and certified object of consumption, numbered grams of nutrients and percentages of “daily values” for an idealized diet, and an ingredient in a heteronormative ‘family meal’. In this article I question the representational terms and conditions of such abstractions. Their idiomatic reformulations appear in pictures, words and numbers. Their commingled figures produce reductions and multiplications of the bodies of cows in relation to the bodies of people, and of both in relation to their environments. Material bodies are both subjects and objects of the abstractions, reduced by them to caricatures, labels and calorie counts. They are also multiplied, virtually, into new identities and relations through entangled processes of commodification and advertising. I question how these representations proliferate reflexive identities – self-advertisements – of their human producers/consumers, which are then inscribed back onto the cows, the people and their environments. How do these representations naturalize new identities and relations, which are recursively rendered through a marketing spincycle? My inquiry traces materialities and virtualities of its subjects: the cows in a stony field, the field and its stones (where are they?), and the presumed but unpictured human viewer. At issue are the material and virtual embodiments, continually refigured, of animals (including cows and people) and their environments. How can the frames of representation be opened so that a mutuality is seen between these subjects/objects that are

y marketing spend is a rounding error [compared with competitors]," he says. "But you can go on Stonyfield's web site (YoTube), and watch cows chewing their cud”. Gary Hirschberg, Stonyfield CEO (Reingold, 2012)

Stonyfield yogurt carton depicts a pastoral landscape identified as Wayside Farm, Vermont (USA). The reproduced image wraps around a white plastic cylinder. Its colors are polarized and focal depths multiplied. A golden light bathes the verdant pasture and grazing cows in sharpest focus at the center. The curved plastic surface foregrounds the cows spatially and graphically. They are the closest figures in the ‘field’ to me. A picturesque New England barn set in the forested edge some distance back echoes the modeled browns of their bodies. The words “Organic” and “Plain” intrude into the landscape’s middle ground and vertically frame the cows. The font is serifed and traditional but playful. Floating above in a hazy sky, the more stylized torso and head of a cow peep winsomely between flat, primary yellow and blue banners for ‘’Stonyfield” and “Organic”. The same head reappears decapitated and vertically centered in a margin left of the landscape, bearing in its mouth an invitation for “SF Rewards” – an incentive program for “our loyal yogurt eaters" [i]. Aligned above is the product bar code, and below are a list of bacterial cultures attributed to it, a stipulation to “KEEP REFRIGERATED” and two certifications: “Organic” and “Gluten-Free”. A standardized chart quantifying “Nutrition Facts” bounds the image to the right. Text dominates the rear panel, presenting the corporation’s story and environmental ethic. A beaming 'mother' is incorporated into the border for a bacon salad recipe under the caption “Meg’s Recipe Box”. The ingredient list is titled “Our Family Recipe”.

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Fig.3. Stonyfield yogurt carton left, right and back, photograph by author.

cows, people, fields and stones? What I’m after is the responsiveness that Donna Haraway (2008) conditions in terms of “respecere”, drawing on the Latin ‘to look again’, but also “the act of respect” (19) with its combined meanings of consideration, perception and looking back [ii]. The Stonyfield cartoon-cow looks at me, but I am not seen to look back. The more privileged subject that is ‘I’ sits swallowing her yogurt outside the carton’s frame. But I am not alone. Who and what else is out here, beyond the frame, re-producing ‘my’ relationship with the cows and ‘our’ environments? Can these ‘I’s be brought into the frame to stretch, or bend (without necessarily breaking), the reiterative identities of the commodity chain? For a Haraway-inspired response, I begin with Julie Guthman’s chapter on “The ‘organic commodity’ and other anomalies in the politics of consumption” in Geographies of Commodity Chains (Hughes and Reimer, 2004), which takes me briefly back to Marx and Capital on the commodity fetish. From there, I turn to Judith Butler’s investigation through Foucault into political economies of the body in her talk “Bodies and Power, Revisited” (2002). Butler leads me to a reconsideration of materiality and virtuality, examined in relation to contemporary capitalism by James G. Carrier, Daniel Miller, Leslie Sklair and Nigel Thrift in Virtualism: A New Political Economy (Carrier and Miller, 1998). I then look to artist Michael Mercil, whose project The Virtual Pasture (2008-2011) re-forms the frame in a manner suggested by Butler in The Psychic Life of Power (1997).

A cow fetish: W hat is represented? The multiply abstracted cow-commodity is imprinted with domesticated standards of health. Its plastic container fetishizes not only the “Smooth and Creamy” bodily substance within, but also its representations of consumer and environmental protection, localized agricultural practices, and fair trade for small farmers. Guthman (2004, 234) writes of a politics of consumption that centers on eating as 'green', ethical and local. This politics implicates a Marxian commodity fetishism – that is, a concealment of the hierarchical relations productive of commodities. The masking of capitalist interests behind organic certification ascribes to the commodity an innate mystical “preciousness” (245). Yet its valuation and formation in a market-based system of production belies its ethical representations. Guthman shows that the multinational market structure behind the organic label contradicts and in practice de-links it from idioms of “smallscale, populist agrarianism” (240). Organic certification does not limit the scale or mechanics of production, does not inherently or effectively regionalize food systems, does not minimize food processing, and does not promulgate labor or localized trade standards. Rather, ‘Organic’ is now relegated to standards for production practices, and more specifically to ‘organic’ inputs, themselves incorporated into an ‘organic’ market for fertilizers, pesticides, soil modifications, etc. (240-1). An internationalized industry, evolved

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Fig. 4. & 5. The Miracle of Milk and Down to Earth, Stonyfield Farm, Inc, film still
Stonyfield Farm Inc

absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. (165)

from interstate agribusiness, has appropriated the organic label. Stonyfield’s corporate genealogy [iii] exemplifies this tension between ethical standards and market standardization. Its expansion into international markets [iv], big box retail outlets, café chains [v] and an array of processed "food products" asserts a capital growth model that dominates its localized picture of health for cows, people and their 'environment'. Guthman reveals the underlying paradox:

Marx’s insight might return us to the Enlightenment's rational-empirical divide, but for his recognition of the fetishized commodity’s twofold configuration as object and exchange value, yogurt that is $3.49. He points to the self-contained interdependence of its dual value form, and further the “antagonism… developed concurrently within that form itself” (160). Despite – and because of – this inherent self-contradiction, Stonyfield’s twofold formation of ‘organic yogurt’ has led to a 20% annual growth rate and $360 million in sales in 2010 for it and multinational owner Groupe Danone (van Rensburg, 6-7). How does the commodity fetish refigure the bodies of cows and people? The bodies under question here are those of cows, people, and by extension their environments. The social processes at issue are those of capitalized food trade and the marketing practices of Stonyfield. In “Bodies and Power, Revisited” (2002), Butler turns to another model in revisiting Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. The model directly associates bodies and power as terms and conditions of each other. They figure each other. Butler writes of a “constitutive paradox” embedded in recognition (17). This built-in antagonism binds the body to social processes that delimit yet lend it the terms necessary to formulation as a viable subject in the world. Foucault examines “a certain ambiguity between subjects and power” (14). He attaches ‘body’ to both prisoner and prison as material structures. The reiteration articulates his formulation of the body as not exclusively human, or singular. It is, also, social, taking form in the prison. The double reference abstracts at the same time that it rematerializes the term’s signification. It enables a representation that is twofold in its materiality and virtuality. Both subjects, the prisoner and the prison, are quite material things – as are the cow and the (stony) field, the consumer (‘I’) and the grocery store. But their materiality does not represent the full extent of their identities, which are constituted also through their relation with one another. Bodily imprisonment is one configuration of power relations. Capital is another. The

[Organic labeling] fetishizes the process of social change itself, by suggesting that purchasing a commodity is sufficient to effect such change. If organic food was truly an antidote to processes of commodification, the ‘organic commodity’ surely would be seen as an oxymoron. (245) What terms and conditions are operative in the capitalized field behind Stonyfield’s cow fetish? Marx, Guthman notes, writes of a veiling of human-nature relations by exchange value and fetishism. He argues, "the objective appearance of the social characteristics of labour” (Marx, 1990, 176) and its products obscures their social constitution. Marx distinguishes the contradictory, “twofold” form of the commodity, as both physical object of utility (possessing use-value) and virtual depository of exchange-value. Conflation of the physical/natural object (e.g. yogurt) with its value form ($3.49) masks the socially dominant conditions of its production (by Stonyfield Farm, Incorporated). Marx examines the role of seeing in the making of commodities: the products of labor become commodities, sensuous things which are at the same time suprasensible or social. In the same way, the impression made by a thing on the optic nerve is perceived not as a subjective excitation of that nerve but as the objective form of a thing outside the eye. In the act of seeing, of course, light is really transmitted from one thing, the external object, to another thing, the eye. It is a physical relation between things. As against this, the commodity-form, and the valuerelation of the products of labour within which it appears, have

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Fig. 6. Down to Earth, Stonyfield Farm, Inc, film still
Stonyfield Farm Inc

materiality of each subject is an active condition of the other, through which the power of identity is produced and continually reproduced in a taut mutuality. Butler writes, citing Foucault:

exchanges. The power technology that is capital fabricates and sells the product that is yogurt through the institution that is the market. Materiality can then be understood as itself twofold, denoting “the process by which one passes over into the other (or indeed the process by which both ‘institution’ and ‘body’ come into separate existence in and through this prior and conditioning divergence)” (15). So markets, cows, people, fields and stones are embodied and coproduced symbiotically. No one of these subjects, scaled individually or multiply by an incorporated genealogy, appears able to survive without the others. At least, we can’t see how within the currently represented tableau, reproduced within an exclusively capitalized frame. So what else may be out here, reproducing these relationships of bodies and power? Where are the stones in this field? Societal norms are heavily implicated in the terse antagonisms of bodies and power. They operate to filter the communicable, hierarchical terms of

the very materiality of the prison has to be understood in terms of its strategic action upon and with the body: it is defined in relation to the body: '[the] very materiality [of the prison environment is] an instrument and vector [vecteur] of power’ (Foucault, 30). The institutions of power (e.g. the market) and the body (e.g. the cow, the person, 'the environment', the field, the stone) each require the other for recognition. And recognition is essential to persist in the shared context of multiple subjects that is society. The body is the material condition of the social identity and its institution. It serves as the medium through which a “technology of power” (14) acts and activates, produces and

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Fig. 7. Michael Mercil The Virtual Pasture, T-Shirts, 2009
Michael Mercil

recognizable identity. They name, for instance, “Stonyfield”, “Wayside Farm”, "Vermont", and “Meg”. That which is non-normative is not recognizable and cannot be named or perceived. Yet Butler finds in the unrecognized an opening of possibility through “critical distance” (19) from its constraints. This distance lies tellingly, even promisingly, within the constraints and is not independent of them. Power can only have effect, and therefore can only exist, through imposing “norms of recognizability” (17) on a subject. Still, the subject has to desire recognition in those institutionalized terms. S/he must attach to them, be named. Desire figures the precarity, but also the possibility, of the unrecognized subject(s), the cow(s), the person(s), the field(s) and/or the stone(s). The subject wishing to move beyond the surveyed frames of identity opens his/her/its self to questions of what he/she/it might become. Desire animates possibility by exceeding the norm while demanding

recognition. Into a two-sided border between desire and recognition reaches “the limited freedom of not yet being false or true” (19). In relation to the stony problem at hand, Butler’s refiguration of possibility through the very process of desire that fixes – institutionalizes, markets – it, offers the becoming of other identities, other relations, other interdependencies. Haraway, too, invokes the futurity of becoming, and adds a significant ‘with’: “Touch, regard, looking back, becoming with – all these make us responsible in unpredictable ways for which worlds take shape” (36). M aterialities and becom e with?

virtualities:

How

to

So how can those outside the frame re-enter it to embody additional figures of mutuality and produce new bodies of exchange? Can we name technologies of power that might resist

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Fig. 8. Michael Mercil The Virtual Pasture, sheep with visitor, 2009-2011
Michael Mercil

capital? A difficulty remains in identification. Foucault writes in Discipline and Punish that “systems of punishment are to be situated in a certain ‘political economy’ of the body” (cited in Butler, 13). Carrier (1998) ties the political economy of consumer values to a concept of virtualism, “the attempt to make the world conform to an abstract model” (25) and idealized images of reality (5). Desire, abstraction, imagination and conformity are at the core of virtualism’s practice. While it shapes abstracted systems of thought such as neo-classical economics, virtualism also permeates “daily life and practice”, as “practical abstraction” (25). I find Carrier’s ultimate “tale” problematic in its abnegation of “general social relationships like kinship, gender and craft identity” (42). Such “nuances” give way to a static “distinctive logic that springs from the calculations of commercial institutions in a competitive environment” (42). The universal claim deriving from – or driving – his reductive argument, seconded by Miller, is I think precisely the problem. Dismissing agencies of political economy explored productively by Foucault, Butler and many others can only

regenerate new forms of capitalism (19). Still, an integral logic of Carrier’s and Miller’s argument holds: Continual virtualization of abstractions reinforces rather than resists their representational terms and conditions. Miller writes: my critique of postmodernists is not that they raise the spectre of abstraction – a project that this essay clearly shares. Rather, it is that postmodernism is based in large measure upon a misreading of the experience of consumption, that theorists abstract in a way that reinforces abstraction as virtualism. They replace consumption as human experience with the virtual figure of the postmodernist consumer. As such, they contribute to a consequence of economics and auditing, a general experience of alienation from what is viewed as an abstract and distant world. (212)

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Fig. 9. Michael Mercil The Virtual Pasture, detail with temporary signage, 2009, photo: Justin Brown
Michael Mercil

Sklair and Thrift in the same volume find that the practice of virtualism cloaks the practical identities of a fin de siècle bourgeoisie. Sklair links “the transnational capitalist class (TCC)” to a global realm of regulatory bureaucrats “dominated by big business” (144). Thrift finds that the practice-oriented abstractions of contemporary business lurk in a “reflexive capitalism” (170) seeking generic operational tactics. Both Sklair and Thrift, as Carrier notes, suggest “a kind of embeddness for the powerful, abstraction for the weak” (17). All four examine a cooption of Marxian formulations by mutualistic, transnational business and state interests. They presage Guthman’s deconstruction of organic trade and certification oriented to capital growth. But are these members of the elite academic class (which they critique) looking in the right places for resistance to capitalism? For that matter, are they even looking for resistance? Because if so, the glitterati world of the capitalist elite seems hardly the best place to start. I agree with Guthman that “preciousness is a dubious solution” (251). An acknowledged situation of their theoretical positions within the capitalized academy, as Haraway recommended a

decade earlier (1988), would be illuminating. Their stance outside the frame barely dents it. How do I refigure cows through consuming their milk? My routine consumption of yogurt may be said to further virtualize the bodies of Stonyfield’s cows. I say “further” because these cows are already abstracted. Stonyfield ceased to own cows early in its business life, contracting milk from dairy farmers since 1984 (http://www.stonyfield.com/about-us/our-storynutshell/full-story, 10-23-12). A reference to Baudrillard’s fourth phase of simulation and thirdorder simulacrum (1995) is easy here. But following Carrier’s and Miller’s insistence on “actual practice” as model, I brush reiterative simulation aside to look more into the virtualized daily lives of the abstracted cows in Stonyfield’s landscape. Stonyfield.com/yotube, links to videos of family farmers belonging to the Organic Valley Family of Farmers/CROPP collaborative. They portray commitment to the ethics of “populist agrarianism” that Guthman reframes, in particular the health of cows, people and their 'environment' (as if there were only one). The Organic Valley “family” extends to 1,687 members across the United States (1,606),

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Fig. 10. Michael Mercil The Virtual Pasture, site, 2009-11, photo: Justin Brown
Michael Mercil

Canada (61) and Australia (20) (http://www.farmers.coop/producerpools/cropp-producer-map/, 10-23-12). Of these, 1,411 are dairies, representing about 270 organic milk contracts for Stonyfield (Carper, 2010, 36). Notably, Organic Valley’s product line, limited in its yogurt options to a “lowfat smoothie” drink (http://www.organicvalley.coop/products/yo gurt/, 10-23-12), competes minimally with Stonyfield’s yogurt products [1]. CROPP, renamed from Coulee Region Organic Produce Pool to Cooperative Regions of Organic Producer Pools, opened stock options to non-members in 2004. Preferred shares valued at more than $75 million dwarf the voting member shares totaling $42,175[2]. The Organic Valley label exports to at least twelve Asian countries, and plans to grow in China. No wonder CROPP advertises itself as “the nation's largest and most successful organic farmer cooperative” (http://www.farmers.coop/, 10-23-12). The National Organic Program’s regulations for Livestock Living Conditions generally require accommodation of "the health and natural behavior of animals,” and stipulate

year-round access to the outdoors, to uncrowded space and to daily grazing in season. Quality Assurance International (QAI), Inc., a private organic certification company authorized by the U. S. Department of Agriculture, certifies the compliance of Stonyfield yogurt with these regulations. QAI itself holds certifications outside the US in Europe, Canada and Japan, and from the International Organic Accreditation Service. QAI’s founding in 1989 likely anticipated the 1990 federal Organic Foods Production Act. Guthman points out the trade-based origins of the national legislation, an evolution of the California Organic Foods Act. What is now the Organic Trade Association was founded in 1984 by certification agencies and larger-scale producers to define the organic label as primarily “a production standard for farmers (and later processors) rather than as a food safety standard for consumers” (239). She goes on: Certainly it did not represent an alternative system of food provision. The organic movement thereafter evolved into a drive for

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Fig. 11. Michael Mercil Michael Mercil with Shetland lamb at Stratford Ecological Center, Delaware, Ohio, 2010, photo: Matthew Keida
Michael Mercil

poles on a 500 square foot plot outside the university’s Wexner Center for the Arts. It entailed collaboration with the OSU College of Food, Agriculture and Environmental Sciences as well as the Wexner. In his notes for a 2011 talk, Mercil describes it as his cultivation of art as practice and as ‘work’, in its verb form:

institutional legitimacy and regulation of the term ‘organically grown’ in the interests of trade… So although codification arose from multiple intentions, its greatest success was to open up markets. QAI, the third-party certifying agency of Stonyfield, belongs to this capitalized institutional lineage. Its identity lies within the virtualized frame of transnational capital propounded by Carrier, Miller, Sklair and Thrift.

Thoreau’s work at Walden was Walden, or the becoming of Walden through the living/writing/working through of it. Thoreau went to Walden to naturalize himself (to configure his relation to nature) where he then planted a field of beans to socialize himself (to configure his relation to society). His work in the bean field was a working out of conversation with neighbors and passers-by (advice given/advice ignored). Likewise, I planted The Beanfield near the Wexner Center and along College Road to engage in conversation with the society of the university (advice given/advice ignored).

A virtual field “What, however, if human labor power turns out to be only part of the story of lively capital?” (Haraway, 46). I know Michael Mercil as an artist and professor of art at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio where we both work. Mercil situates his practice within the structure and history of the land grant university. A series of projects under his “locally focused forum”[3], The Living Culture Initiative, materializes within the academic institution the instantiation of possibility that Butler proposes. Mercil’s installation The Beanfield (200608) refigured Thoreau’s 2.5 acre beanfield at Walden Pond. The project consisted of 49 bean

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Fig. 12. Michael Mercil Michael Mercil, The Virtual Pasture, detail of Shetland ewe with LED monitor, photo: Matthew Keida
Michael Mercil

The soft veil of nostalgia [for the pastoral] that hangs over our urbanized landscape is largely a vestige of the once dominant image of [America as] an undefiled green republic, a quiet land of forests, villages, and farms dedicated to the pursuit of happiness. (6, Mercil’s annotations)

I asked Mercil at that talk about his use of nostalgia in The Beanfield (2006-08), and in his next Living Culture installation/plantation on the same plot, The Virtual Pasture (2009-11). The latter, three-year ‘work’ involved breeding what became a flock of 16 sheep (from an initial three) at the Stratford Ecological Center, an educational organic farm and nature preserve 25 miles north of campus. Mercil trucked several of his sheep to the fenced campus plot for monthly visits during the school year, a recurring event advertised through a series of postcards. Artist and flock occupied their small 'field' outside the Wexner from 10 am to 3 pm on the "first Mondays". Mercil planted his field with livestock forage grasses, apple trees, and a large LED monitor. The monitor's pixelated screen virtualized the sheep’s country home via continuous live video feed from Stratford. This discussion of the project draws mostly from Mercil’s written response to my question about nostalgia, a Haraway-style response, but also my on-going conversations and co-worker relation with the artist. Mercil begins with a set of quotes from Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (cited in Mercil notes, 2011, n.p.):

[By design] most literary works called pastorals… qualify, or call into question, or bring irony to bear against the illusion of peace and harmony in a green pasture. And it is this fact that will enable us, finally, to get at the difference between the complex and sentimental kinds of pastoralism. (25, Mercil’s annotations) It is industrialization, represented by images of machine technology, that provides the counterforce in the American archetype of the pastoral. (26)

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farm animals we, in fact, do not know what we are talking about.

Mercil goes on to write about his own work: The LED monitor in The Virtual Pasture acts as a counterforce to the rural nostalgia re/presented by the landscape of the central campus Oval (once an actual pasture, then re-engineered in the image of a pasture — without animals)

Yet of all animals it is with farm animals that we have an evolutionary covenant. We have co-evolved together. Farm animals are dependent upon us. We are dependent upon them—not only for food, but for our thinking.

The Virtual Pasture overlooked Ohio State’s traditional campus green, named The Oval. The Boston-based Olmsted Brothers landscape architecture firm integrated the former farm field into a master plan for the university in 1909. The Oval's picturesque scenography inherits a pastoral ideology from the brothers' pater and Central Park's landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted. Mercil, representing The Machine in the Garden, references (Leo) Marx’s account of the pastoral’s elite history in 18th century landscape painting.

From the Stratford Center (where the sheep are kept) to the Wexner Center (where the artwork is located), the image of the farm, its pasture and grazing animals, is captured by remote camera, transferred by satellite, streamed through a computer network and viewed through the screen of contemporary technology. In his notes, Mercil muses on the origins of Cheerios in an unseen and disconnected oat field owned by General Mills Corporation. He considers a recent evolutionary theory on the role of cooking in the development of the relatively large brain and small stomachs of humans:

Returning to Mercil's notes on the project: ... this image of farm animals outside the Wexner Center is spectral. The Virtual Pasture haunts the Oval with images of animals that at one time actually grazed it. When, on the first Monday of each month, I bring my sheep to campus to graze this 500 square foot patch of grass, it becomes a pasture in fact—and it is the Oval that remains a virtual image.

Cooked food is more easily and quickly digested than raw food. Less energy needed by the stomach to digest = more time for the brain to daydream. From this might we suggest that food = culture? At the table (or round the fire) lies the context for conversation = the context for chewing over ideas (e.g. “Try this. You might like it.”).

To encounter (see) an animal’s image is not, however, to experience or to know the animal. To know a farm animal one must handle it. This is what farmers do. At The Virtual Pasture I do not offer lessons in animal handling—even if, at times, it seems the entire university is my classroom there. Yet from encounter we build experience. By making farm animals once again visible within our daily comings and goings, The Virtual Pasture seeks to inform our thinking about them and our talking about them…

I am not speaking here (though I could) of nutritional impacts, but rather I am speaking about the cultural impacts of removing farm animals from our daily living. With no contact with farm animals, how can we come to know them, or what can we know about them? Without contact with farm animals, what kind of conversations can we have either with or about them? So now, if we speak about farm animals that we no longer see and, consequently, we no longer know, then when speaking about

With the rise of industrial scaled

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farming, the animals have disappeared from our sight. Is this a good or a bad thing for the animals? Is this a good or bad thing for us? Is that a stupid question? Might a better question be, whether or not raising animals in sheds is a necessary thing to do? And, if so, what condition(s) make it necessary? While we may choose to raise farm animals in this way, must we choose to do so?

form to our existence, we are in this respect – and irreversibly – vulnerable to exploitation. (Butler, 2002, 9) Guthman applies a concept of "aesthetic illusion" (Fine and Leopold, cited in Guthman, 236) to brand name. The concept addresses the interpretive gap between a commodity's "(physical) use value" and its exchangeable "imputed use value" (236). The gap permits the introduction of rent, a disparity between attainable prices and actual production costs. A consumer culture that fetishizes the organic imaginary enables the production of signs, “voluntary labels”, as a tactic for creating rents. Such signs, though, are “highly ambiguous”, subject to reinterpretation and redeployment. Their openness to unintended, socially reinscribed, values and desires suggests Foucault’s concept of proliferative power. Guthman points to the classed, raced and regionalized economic disparities that produce rent and that rents re-produce. Butler, in her chapter “Stubborn Attachment, Bodily Subjection: Rereading Hegel on the Unhappy Consciousness” (1997, 31 -62), interrogates the reiterative and proliferative exchanges of power that produce disparity. Butler re-narrates Hegel’s “Lordship and Bondage” figures, the lord and the bondsman. Here, I insert into a retelling of Butler's rewriting a parenthetical inscription relating to a stony field. I assume in this uncertified act of re-inscribing an artifice to which Butler might object. But I do this to posit another frame, wrapping around two figures, a person (named Lady Stonyfield) and a cow (named Cow), in a stony relational field (named Commodity). The lord (Lady Stonyfield) and the bondsman (Cow) are figures in a stony field (Commodity). These two appear at first to be opposed and completely different. The Two each co-figure the Other in a singular but not static mutual interdependence. The lord (Lady Stonyfield) depends on the bondsman's (Cow’s) body and products of labor (milk) for the material conditions (yogurt) of his (her) daily life (breakfast). Through this dependence, the lord (lady) produces the bondsman's (Cow’s) body, which he (she) subsumes into his (her) own body. The lord (lady) thus consumes the bondsman's (Cow’s) labor and products of labor (milk and more cows). For this show of power ($360 million in sales in 2010) to work, the lord (Lady Stonyfield) must selectively ‘forget’ his (her) involvement in effecting the bondsman's (Cow’s) body and

Is to pasture raise a cow a (nostalgic) picture of farming, or is it a farming practice? The Ohio Dairy Association describes the pasturing of cows as an “alternative farm management technique.” Alternative to what? Might we think about that? How might we talk about it? What, if anything, might we do about it? Where do we find ourselves? And what is the nature of the culture we produce here now? I am an artist, not a farmer. The substance of my practice is to work from the tangible facts of my world toward a shaping of my experience of/in it. Mercil dismantled The Virtual Pasture and "dispersed" his flock in December 2011. The artist's upcoming film Covenant extends the installation's central question into the human encounter with farm animals. The release description reads:

Covenant (42:35 minutes) is a film about farm animals and us that narrates the fact and the way these animals become food. In it, farmers reflect upon the nature and economy of keeping livestock, while calling our attention to the rewards, anxieties and challenges of the human/farm animal bond. Antagonism and desire, retold If we had no appetite, we would be free from coercion, but because we are from the start given over to what is outside us, submitting to the terms which give

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(food) products. He (she) must ‘disavow’ his (her) dependence on the bondsman’s (Cow’s) work. A paradoxical result is the lord’s (lady’s) disembodiment in assuming the body of the Other, embodying him (her) as bondsman (Cow)! The bondsman (Cow), too, must take part in the substitution (commodification) of his (her) body and products for the lord’s (lady’s) body and possessions (cartons of yogurt to sell for $3.49). The bondsman (Cow) must conspire, is allowed no choice but to conspire, in the concealment (Commodity) of that exchange (commodification). The bondsman’s (Cow’s) recognition or nonrecognition, consciousness or unconsciousness, of the conspiracy (Commodity) do not at first change that relational field. The bondsman (Cow) is embodied (incorporated), without regard for his (her) response (looking back), into the duplicitous simulation of a substitution (Commodity). The bondsman (Cow) is conscripted into the relational field on which he (she) depends for sustenance (grass) and value (exchangeability) by the lord (lady). Butler formulates the substitution (incorporation) rhetorically as: “you be my body for me, but do not let me know that the body you are is my body” (35). Still, the bondsman (Cow), bonded to the lord (Lady Stonyfield), cannot ultimately escape an unhappy consciousness (fear) of selfloss (death). This conscripted reflexivity occurs first when the bondsman (Cow) sees himself (herself), and his (her) own erasure in the course of production. These signs of self he (Cow) must submit, has no power but to submit, to the lord (Lady Stonyfield) and his (her) embodiment (incorporation) of possession (commodification). The submission of identity and agency refigures self as an expropriation and erasure. The bonded (cow) and bonder (Stonyfield) logically converge in a field of disembodiment and “fearful transience” (39). Each is materialized and virtualized through a selfperpetuating process of consumption. My reinscription stops where the bondsman’s and cow’s stories diverge. Butler (Hegel) traces a sequential, reflexive exchange of objectivity and subjectivity between the bondsman (human) and lord (same species). Each subject pursues a desire for permanence (life) represented by her (his) object (product) of labor. The dominated human after many selfrepresenting (self-advertising) acts of exchange is enabled to re-inscribe upon his/her self some, though not full, agency of identity. Through this work, the person concealed within the frame of

bondage is seen, and named. Butler (Hegel) finds desire – the suppressed desire that drives the bondsman’s work – to be operative in the possession of agency (40). But the cow, regardless of her desire, possesses no terms through which to enter the relational field. The (incorporated) person(s) condition the representational terms of relation. For the cow to even appear to her (them) in that field, the person(s) must look back and see her. Butler finds that the socially proliferative process of consumption destabilizes agency and identity in human terms. The proliferation opens possibilities to resist erasure. It binds subject and object together in a recognized interdependence. If Lady (people) and Cow (cows) are each seen as the internalized subject(s) of the Other(s) (ladycow), each can become the desired object of the other. Both can become with. I see in Mercil’s acts of work a desire to know and to respond, respectfully, to the other animals that enable him to think and work, that take part in that thinking and working. His acts are epistemological and ontological, concerned with possible logics of knowing and being. In this work I find an openness to becoming with that Guthman alludes to, but doesn’t get to, in the conclusion of her chapter – despite its critical openings. The chapters by Carrier, Miller, Sklair and Thrift on a reductive virtualism seem to foreclose more possibilities than they open. Butler’s work, in contrast and resistance to that closure, represents new possibilities. I credit it in doing so with making possible. Mercil’s installations and his words, like Butler’s reprinted here, co-figure bodies and power. Mercil, unlike Stonyfield, physically and daily works with animals, including sheep, chickens, cows and people, and their grassy and stony fields. An exchange of subjectivity and objectivity takes place in the work’s refiguration of bodies and environments and their co-scripted relations of power. I suggest that the possibilities Mercil’s work instantiates emerge through its materiality in cooperation with its virtuality. I reiterate here Butler’s and Marx’s materiality as twofold, and Haraway’s “becoming with” as “coflourishing” (41). These shared materialities and flourishings can, should, be manifold. But only two must be seen to start the co-productive reflexivity that Butler and Haraway name. As both demonstrate, and as we already knew, death and fear recur. Some stones remain hidden. But hiding can be constructive or destructive interdependent with situation. And death need not be an erasure, like the

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incorporated subsumption of Stonyfield’s cow fetish.

Miller, Daniel. “Conclusion: A Theory of Virtualism”. Ed. Carrier, James G. and Miller, Daniel. Virtualism: A New Political Economy. Berg. 1998. Print.

Notes

Reingold, Jennifer. “How to sell sustainable foods to the Wal-Mart shopper”. CNN Money.

1

Stonyfield does have a line of organic yogurt smoothies.

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/04/17/boundaries-sustainability/ (24 Oct, 2012). Web.

2

In 2011, the first series was valued at $25,137,147, and the latest,

Sklair, Leslie. “The Transnational Capitalist Class”. Ed. Carrier, James G. and Miller, Daniel. Virtualism: A New Political Economy. Berg. 1998.

closing in 2010, $45,612,958. (CROPP Audited Financial Statement 2011,

http://www.organicvalley.coop/about-us/invest/stock-

prospectus/ 10-23-12). 3

“Stonyfield CEO founder opening NYC organic, natural food cafe concept”

http://www.michaelmercil.com/livingculture.html

References i

Sustainable

Food

News

(2012)

http://sustainablefoodnews.com/story.php?news_id=15988 (26 Oct, 2012) Web.

myStonyfieldRewards.com (15 Oct 2012)

"Stonyfield Comes to Europe, Buys Glenisk". Dairy Industries International 71 (2006). Print.

ii

I refer to Haraway’s usage of “to respond” in her critique of Derrida’s lecture “And Say the Animal Responded” (cited in Haraway, 2007).

Thrift, Nigel. “Virtual Capitalism: The Globalisation of Reflexive Business Knowledge”. Ed. Carrier, James G. and Miller, Daniel. Virtualism: A New Political Economy. Berg. 1998. Print.

iii The French food conglomerate Groupe Danone holds an 85% stake in the US Stonyfield Farm, Inc. (van Rensburg)

van Rensburg, Deryck J. "Strategic brand venturing: the corporation as entrepreneur", Journal of Business Strategy 33:3 (2012). 4 – 12. Print.

iv

e.g. Groupe Danone owns 80% of Stonyfield Europe. The other 20% of Stonyfield Europe is held by U.S. Stonyfield Farm, Inc. (Dairy Industries International, 11) v “Stonyfield CEO founder opening NYC organic, natural food cafe concept” (Sustainable Food News)

Bibliography Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation (The Body, in Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism). Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. University of Michigan Press. 1995. Print. Butler, Judith. "Bodies and power, revisited". Radical Philosophy 114 (2002). 13-19. Print. Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford University Press. 1997. Print. Carrier, James G. “Introduction” and “Abstraction in Western Economic Practice”. Ed. Carrier, James G. and Miller, Daniel. Virtualism: A New Political Economy. Berg. 1998. Print. Guthman, Julie. “The ‘organic commodity’ and other anomalies in the politics of consumption”. Ed. Alex Hughes and Suzanne Reimer. Routledge. 2004. Print. Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet (Posthumanities). University of Minnesota Press. 2007. Print.

Katherine Bennett is an assistant professor in the Landscape Architecture Section, Knowlton School of Architecture at The Ohio State University (OSU), where she teaches design studios, representation workshops and research seminars that investigate interspecies habitat. She is a registered landscape architect and has practiced in Boston, New York, Cape Cod, Savannah, San Francisco, Seoul and Hanoi – the latter while a Visiting Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Seoul. Her degrees in Landscape Architecture and Painting are from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University (MLA) and The University of Georgia (BFA). Katherine has begun research toward a PhD in the Department of Geography at OSU, integrating her collaborative research with agroecologists, anthropologists, artists and architects in the US and Asia.

Haraway, Donna. "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective". Feminist Studies 14:3, Fall (1988). Print. Marx, Karl. Capital Volume I: A Critique of Political Economy. Penguin Classics. 1992. Print. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. Oxford University Press. 1967. Print. Mercil, Michael. "The Living Culture Initiative". http://www.michaelmercil.com/livingculture.html (30 Oct, 2012). Web.

79

BROOKE’S MONKEY BRAND SOAP

Brooke’s Monkey Brand Soap was a common, even iconic, presence in the pages of late nineteenth-century illustrated newspapers in Britain. Barely an issue of the London Illustrated News, The Graphic or The Sketch passed without a full or half page spread of Brooke’s ubiquitous monkey, arrayed in one of its many baffling guises: promenading in top hat and tails, juggling cooking pots in a jester’s get-up, strumming a mandolin on the moon, destitute and begging by the side of the road, kneeling to accept a medal from a glamorous Frenchwoman, careering along on a bicycle with feet on the handle-bars, clinging precariously to a ship’s mast, carefully polishing the family china and here in 1891, sliding gleefully down the banisters with legs spread wide and the hint of a smile while two neat Victorian children watch calmly on.[i] Text by J ohn Miller

M

onkey Brand Soap, Brooke’s boasted, ‘cleans, scours, scrubs, polishes [and] brightens everything’, with one notable exception. The catchphrase ‘won’t wash clothes’ features in the majority of the series (here printed on the stair carpet), offering a guarantee of the otherwise illimitable scope of Brooke’s hygienic pledge. One striking image demonstrates the soap’s extensive powers by posing the monkey gazing with an air of self-satisfaction at his own likeness in a frying pan’s sparkling base, his face altered miraculously from black to white, accompanied by the explanatory note, ‘For Happy BRIGHT reflection, MONKEY BRAND is just perfection’. Significantly, the frying pan generally features somewhere in Brooke’s simian mise-enscène, although it sometimes takes a second look to find it; as if, fascinated by his own protean form, the monkey wishes to always keep to hand the possibility of sneaking a glimpse at his new body, reminding himself of his transfigured skin in the gleaming world Brooke’s promises. Brooke’s monkey is, of course, very much

a political animal. The ‘new imperialism’ of the 1890s saw an intensification of British expansionist energy that gave consistent emphasis to the importance of commerce. Empire provided both an abundant source of industrial raw materials and potential new markets for manufactured commodities. Reflecting and supporting this national endeavour were various forms of popular imperialism. Images of empire were voraciously consumed in music halls and theatres, in copious works of travel writing and adventure fiction, ensuring that the idea of Britain’s civilizing mission became part of the fabric of cultural life. British interests in Africa were particularly prominent in the media at the fin-de-siècle. H. M. Stanley’s 1890 In Darkest Africa, Lord Kitchener’s successful campaign in the Sudan in 1898 and the start of the Second Boer War in 1899 were among the notably newsworthy events that were grist to the mill of writers, artists and illustrators. Hardly surprisingly, therefore, Africa is a recurring theme in Victorian ad pages. Bovril, Eno’s Salts and Guinea Gold Cigarettes were among numerous

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Brooke’s Soap Monkey Brand Wont Wash Clothes , 1910
Lever Brothers

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campaign, except occasionally when the monkey himself is displayed as a labouring subject in images that add social class to race as another category of the animal in human form. As such, Brooke’s offers both an inducement to and an erasure of toil. So, despite the advert’s insistence on Monkey Brand’s cleaning, scouring, scrubbing utility, what matters most is not the substance or effect of the soap, but the glittering ideal it encapsulates: a domestic utopia that derives its political force from its relationship with the Earth’s remote, dark places. Behind the monkey a pot plant’s spreading foliage gestures towards a distant jungle habitat. As he zips down and away from this hint of his past, flying by the seat of his tailored pants, precarious but ultimately secure in his new environment, the monkey represents the triumph of empire, realised in the urbanity of the middle class home that safely contains him. In the deeply conservative Victorian attitudes he announces, Brooke’s anthropomorphic monkey reminds us of the discomforting ideological uses non-human primates have long been put to in the semiotic repertoire of capitalist modernity.

companies that forged a marketing strategy in relation to the myth of the Dark Continent with its familiar ideological pattern of savagery and bestiality inviting in the ‘enlightening’ influence of British rule. Brooke’s monkey is part of this history. As our most proximate and troubling animal relatives, monkeys have long evoked questions of human origins and identity; concerns which, in the context of imperialism, frequently return to ideas of race. Victorian soap advertising drew consistently on an association between otherness and filth: in the logic of imperialism, the animalized African, or the Africanized animal, was a lamentably unsanitary creature. Anne McLintock’s important study Imperial Leather, which explores, among other things, the central connection of ‘commodity racism and imperial advertising’, provides a compelling analysis of the way that ‘soap-making became the emblem of industrial progress’, as ‘soap was invested with magical, fetish powers’.[ii] Britain, the argument ran, was bringing the world cleanliness, washing away degeneracy and backwardness. Dirt was an evolutionary issue. Consequently, Brooke’s monkey is a truly global animal, illustrating the terrestrial scope of imperial ambition, even in one incarnation skipping around a tiny Earth, with his trademark frying pan in paw, a citoyen du monde, heralding a worldwide regimen of spotless civilization. He is, the byline runs, ‘the world’s polisher’; himself a reformed subject of imperial capitalism, lifted from his beastly state to the appearance of a man. Above all, the moral of Brooke’s Monkey Brand is a message of order. ‘The poetics of cleanliness’, McLintock writes, ‘is a poetics of social discipline’,[iii] recruiting us all into rituals of work, consumption and aspiration, redolent with a larger philosophical proposition. This is what it means to be human. At first glance, there is a certain perilousness about the monkey on the stairs. The blond girl’s arm holds back her younger, dark-haired companion, but their faces betray no fear. Rather, they are making space for the spectacle of the monkey’s chaotic nature reconfigured as fun, at worst a case of schoolboyish high spirits. If there is a touch of weepiness about the big-eyed brunette, there is an assurance in the older girl’s poise that keeps the tears at bay. Very little literal connection to the product’s functionality is apparent in the exhilaration of the monkey’s descent, unless perhaps in the polished smoothness of the surface that allows him to glide so effortlessly to the floor. Indeed, the concealment of work is a characteristic trope of the Monkey Brand

References [i]

London Illustrated News, October 3, 1891, p. 453

[ii]

Anne McLintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in

the Colonial Contest. New York and London, Routledge, 1995, p. 217; p. 207 [iii]

McLintock, Imperial Leather, p. 226.

Dr John Miller arrived in Sheffield in September 2012 to take up a lectureship in Nineteenth-Century Literature. He completed his PhD at the University of Glasgow in 2009 and then held postdoctoral research fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, and at the University of Northern British Columbia. He also held a teaching fellowship at the University of East Anglia. He is general secretary of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (UK & Ireland):http://asle.org.uk/ His research focuses on writing about animals, ecology and empire from the nineteenth century to the present, with particular

emphasis

on

the

late

Victorian

period.

His

first

monograph Empire and the Animal Body (Anthem, 2012) explores the representation of exotic animals in Victorian and Edwardian adventure fiction. He is currently working on the co-authored volume

Walrus for the Reaktion Animal series and on his second monograph, Fur: A Literary History. Other work currently in progress includes co-edited collections on Henry Rider Haggard and on globalization and heterotopias, and a special edition of the Journal for Victorian Culture, ‘New Perspectives on Victorian Animals’ (with Claire McKechnie).

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JUMBO: A CAPITALIST CREATION STORY

Today, a profusion of non-human animals inhabit the world of advertising. Consumers see some of them in person and some as brand icons, team mascots, and other more-generic endorsers of consumption (sometimes their own consumption, like pig characters decorating BBQ restaurants or matronly cows on dairy product packaging) embellishing countless products, services and entertainments. This zoological cornucopia provides a naturalizing link to the non-human world, promising us that to absorb advertising messages and spend is to participate in an inevitable and emotionally authentic activity because, as the belief goes, animals don’t lie (Shukin 2009, 3-5). Text by Susan Nance

I

Everybody Needs a Story: Gilded Age Jumbo

t is tempting to take for granted that mature consumer societies are thusly marked by “arkloads of animal figures—realistic and fantastic—which parade a veritable carnival of significations” through our commercial culture, as Reuel Denny noted already a half century ago (1989, lv-lxix). Yet they could not function as such if it were not for the crucial training ground an elephant called Jumbo provided advertisers and consumers over a century ago. He was the primordial case, a Gilded Age signpost showing marketers and manufacturers how to use animal figures to tell emotive stories endorsing a modern consumer subjectivity, stories that could be essentialized and associated with any product. Although an individual with a particular history, over time Jumbo’s tale was boiled down until he became “an adjective” in both colloquial and commercial use (Harding 2000, 11). And, he asks us to think about how animal figures have guided consumers through one hundred and thirty years of economic change by persuading them to internalize a central premise of modern capitalism; namely that one can best achieve personal liberty through ever-expanding consumption and the ethic of “more.”

In the beginning, there was a modest but enthusiastic consumer culture in North America, inhabited by citizens known to expect timely and fashionable things at the lowest possible price (Breen 2004, 131-32). Prominent among the products and services they patronized were itinerant displays of anonymous exotic or wild animals shown in barns and empty lots for a fee. For consumers, paying to see unusual animals spoke of a desire for worldly novelty and security through trade (Somkin 1967, 11-54; Weeks 1994, 485-95). The handbills and newspaper ads employed by showmen provided the first graphic commercial representations of the animals that most North Americans would see, including the young female pachyderm known famously as “The Elephant,” an educational and exotic visitor. That first elephant’s popularity with audiences inspired showmen to spend the next century working out how to use animals and their representations to sell. Phineas T. Barnum would become a crucial pioneer in this art of communicating to

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graphics or grandiose claims, and repeating them until no person could possibly ignore them (quoted in Rowell 1870, 83). Circuses were the most prolific employers on the continent of grand, surreal and colorfully graphic lithographed advertising, which advance men liberally pasted over fences and buildings in cities and the tiniest towns. They easily flattered audiences as a privileged citizenry by exclaiming how much risk a given impresario had taken on to bring the most extraordinary animals to all ticket-payers, regardless of their station in life, illustrating those claims with bizarrely surreal and glamorous images of people and animals in every imaginable pose. Barnum was additionally notorious that century as a master of “Humbug” (today we might say hype). He was an early expert at issuing press releases, interviews to friendly journalists, letters to the editor, and various day-by-day bits of information that contextualized his advertising with a broader controversy or shared public story. Thus, when Barnum considered Jumbo at the London Zoo in 1881, he saw an elephant who might carry a dramatic individual story while serving as the perfect agent for the penultimate execution of mammoth marketing in history. The elephant was then a much-loved resident of the Zoo and a favorite of Queen Victoria herself. Born in 1861, in the French Sudan (Mali), he had resided for a short time after his capture at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris before arriving in London around age four, where he spent plenty of time accepting food from visitors and being driven by his trainer William Scott about the grounds, carrying a howdah filled with the children who paid for a ride. By the late 1870’s, Jumbo was maturing into an adult, and so was experiencing dangerous periods of irritability known as musth (central to elephantine reproduction and social organization in the wild). He had also begun to resist the dominance training used to subdue him by becoming unpredictable when Scott was not immediately present. Jumbo had a strange dual personality as far as the British public could see. As portrayed by citizens and the press, he was at once a friend to children and a dangerous wild animal surely bound to kill someone. Looking to relieve himself of the responsibility of the elephant, London Zoo Superintendent Abraham Bartlett agreed to sell Jumbo to Barnum, who would acquire the largest elephant in the world, as the advertising would insist, as the centerpiece for a show branded “Greatest Show on Earth Combined with the

consumers with animals that promised compelling consumer experience. Barnum was a media genius who instructed his agents to embellish fences and newspaper columns with line drawings, steel plate images and textual depictions of real and invented animals, contextualized with intriguing stories that enticed viewers to visit in order to judge those beings for themselves. At the same time, he invited Americans to determine how, as residents of a largely unregulated capitalist economy, one might wisely evaluate advertising to find the frauds and truths they contained. Americans were willing partners with Barnum in valorizing this idea, hoping that each person would be free to form an opinion and exercise it through spending as a patriotic mode of self-improvement (Adams 1997, 147-63; Cook 2001, 73-126; Harris 1981, 74-75). When he got into the circus trade in the 1850’s, Barnum knew that audience fascination with the notion of abundance, as well as competition between companies, had driven show producers to develop a “MAMMOTH SHOW” (as the ads often read) marketing practice whereby companies strove to create “grandness” and “giantism” in their productions, presaging the brader marketing of excess in the late twentieth century. Bull elephants especially articulated the industry’s overall promotional aesthetic. Circuses were the only ventures that held living elephants at that point, since there would be no network of zoos in North America until the end of the century. With their vast bulk and unique shape, elephants on circus bills and in circus day parades functioned “as an advertisement” for the whole performance genre. “Any alert advertiser [knew] that the elephants were the thing to ‘bear down on hard’” in order to stay in the public eye, as circus press agent Charles Day recalled of the industry wisdom at the time (1995, 66, 69). Later that century, when ad men said “Bill it like a circus,” they referred specifically to the dramatic and colorful promotional techniques developed by early showmen to entertain and amaze just so (Laird 1998, 44). More broadly, the dominant advertising theory of the period advocated for liberal spending on messaging that presented consumers with the same information—usually plain-spoken details on what could be bought, where, and for what price— over a period of weeks or months. Barnum and other aggressive marketers in various trades would develop this practice by piquing audience interest with novel ads offering puzzles, observations on current events, compelling

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Fig. 1. The iconic Jumbo broadside, 1882, Tibbals Digital Collection, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art , Saratosa, FL.

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actual size, and a horse and carriage passing comfortably under his belly.[i] Jumbo’s advertising told viewers that he was an extraordinary and powerful individual reluctantly forced to the United States, a feat only Barnum could produce. That narrative drew its cultural sense from the century’s hunting narratives, a genre that was popular in book publishing, magazines and newspapers. Hunting narratives provided dramatic tales of western men who, with the aid of local servants, tracked, captured or killed wild animals in Asia and Africa. Their prey, including elephants, were routinely portrayed as fierce and noble adversaries of the hunter, beasts who fought valiantly against their pursuers, then died in dramatic fashion—all the better to display the honor and strength of the hunter (here Barnum as financial risk taker) brave enough to initiate the chase (Donald 2006, 5068; Wylie 2008, 83-84). An editorialist in the influential Harper’s Weekly agreed that citizens, too, had “reasons for satisfaction” in Jumbo’s acquisition because he seemed the largest and perhaps the most robust captive African elephant left in a world in which the ivory trade was decimating wild elephant populations.[ii] Soon, he speculated, the American public might possess the last African bull elephant on earth! Barnum’s victory was a victory for the whole nation, the colloquial and promotional wisdom insisted. One Greatest Show on Earth broadside got this point across with an image of Jumbo towering over the preserved skeleton of a North American mastodon, a late eighteenth-century totem of national prestige that people remembered well.[iii] On both sides of the Atlantic, pundits noted frequent public fatigue in the face of such tactics, yet also noted that many Britons and North Americans seemed sincerely interested in Jumbo’s life. So did the naysayers hasten to participate in the Jumbo scandal by lampooning the deftness with which Barnum and his staff were making an international incident out of the sale of a captive animal (a transaction zoos and circuses performed regularly with no public notice). The lampooners probably only heightened Jumbo’s versatility as a “rhetorical animal” since they made cultural space for reticent observers to make their own interpretive use of Jumbo by complaining or taking ironic enjoyment from Jumbo as symbol of consumer credulity (Ritvo 1989, 5-6). Funny Folks, an illustrated humor tabloid supplement added to the British paper, Weekly Budget,[iv] stayed relevant with a cover (in its own way an advertisement for the

Great London Circus,” produced by his merger with the ventures of legendary circus impresarios James Hutchinson and James A. Bailey (Saxon 1995, 284). When news of the sale became public, the British press ignited a public controversy that would lay the groundwork for the elephant’s transformation from mildly famous zoo captive to provocative advertising symbol. In London, the newspapers and plenty of angry citizens, including children, called Barnum and all Americans “Philistines” and “slave-owners” who would make the noble Jumbo mere “chattel” held captive to entertain a “Yankee mob.” (The US had abolished slavery sixteen years earlier, but that cliché along with older suspicions of the America as a degenerate and rebellious nation had stuck) (Harding 2000, 43-45; Harris 1981, 257; Jolly 1976, 57-58; Rubin and Rubin 2005, 3-20). At first, the controversy had little resonance since North Americans could not closely follow the scandal in the London papers. So Barnum encouraged the local press to give over many column inches over to Jumbo’s arrival in New York on April 9, 1882. Thereafter his marketing team used broadsides and show programs to reconstruct media representations of the difficult evacuation of Jumbo from Britain found in newspapers and illustrated magazines like The Illustrated London News and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated, much of which consisted of pseudoevents devised to lengthen and make more theatrical the shipping of the elephant. Barnum’s lithograph broadsides, show programs and newspaper spots certainly billed Jumbo’s journey “like a circus,” with a colorful and dramatic giantism (Figure 1). One iconic poster globalized “THE GIANT AFRICAN ELEPHANT JUMBO” as “The Biggest Elephant in the World” in tapered typeset that evoked the curvature of the earth, reminding viewers that Jumbo’s “Removal” had been “remonstrated against by the whole British nation and was accomplished in the face of seeming insurmountable objections” by Barnum and company. It showed a resistant Jumbo “FORCED INTO HIS BOX” and bracing himself against the outside of the crate. It also portrayed “JUMBO CHAINED,” wearing an angry expression and straining against his halter. Other promotional materials depicted Jumbo’s height and size with great exaggeration, as was Barnum’s frequent practice with animal attractions (Presbrey 1968, 215). One show program offered “All-Famous and Gigantic ‘JUMBO’ The Mighty Lord of all Beasts… The Largest Living Quadruped on Earth…[and] Towering Monster” with Jumbo drawn twice his

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Fig. 2. Funny Folks, 1882. McCaddon Collection, Special Collections and Rare Books, Princeton Library, Princeton, NJ.

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products aimed at women (Laird 1998, 93). Spots for foods and medicines depicted anonymous animals as spirits of transformation representing the power of the product at hand. Some even linked human and non-human life in whimsical and ancient ways by offering amusing animals portrayed in human clothing or, particularly in the case of patent medicines like liniments, assuring viewers they could use the product on a horse’s body or their own (Lears 1994, 145). These promotional animal representations revealed an early industry understanding that advertising should engage the viewer with an open-ended interrogation of some common truth (for instance the complexity of citizens’ constructions of the non-human), the memory of which the customer could link to purchasing the product. Traditionally the circuses had advertised their elephants even more simply as naturalist’s curiosity or happy performer. Jumbo, however, was depicted as a complex individual experiencing a broad range of human-style emotions and personality traits: frustration, love, fear, stubbornness, sadness, anger and melancholy resignation. As much as it asked the viewer to pay to see him at the circus, Jumbo’s advertising also invited consumers to empathize with his feelings over his fate, while imagining themselves as his captors. It was that mediated representation of Jumbo as traveler that gave the elephant his real value. “Men and women are selfish,” Barnum had advised fellow entrepreneurs of why this was so. “We all prefer purchasing where we can get the most for our money,” he explained, knowing that in the case of his animal exhibitions he sold not just the chance to view an animal but an opportunity to participate in a story about the animal that reflected one’s own identity (quoted in Rowell 1870, 82). Barnum had pioneered the “exchange of story for value” in his earlier promotions of human performers as celebrities and freaks, but tread new territory when he extended it to the non-human Jumbo (Twitchell 2000, 25; see also Presbrey 1968, 219-22). And, in fact, it appears that the Greatest Show on Earth circus sold far more tickets than usual because of the fame Jumbo achieved in the US. Barnum boasted, in one of his biographies, that he earned several times over the reported $30,000 he invested in importing and maintaining the elephant (Barnum 1888, 333). Jumbo Mania continued unabated for three years. North Americans immediately began making colloquial use of the elephant’s title, for instance as a name for horses and household

magazine’s contents and character) depicting Jumbo as a figurative and literal vehicle for Barnum’s marketing efforts (Figure 2). Drawn with circus handbills and broadsides glued to his skin, he was a caricature of Barnum’s entrepreneurial persona as an American media monarch. In a satirical Roman or British style, he rides Jumbo with paste-brush scepter in hand while wearing a stars and stripes suit and jaunty crown. Below him, a grumpy looking Jumbo passes a handbill celebrating his own captivity to a small girl. Plenty of people understood that Jumbo had become a living communication medium. He was a figurative billboard onto which, not only Barnum and the British and North American press, but also citizens—the customers of zoos, circuses and the media—were projecting their own needs and identities. Jumbo was then the most famous animal in the world and a turning point in the commercialization of the human habit of using animals “to think”—in this case about nature and national rivalries. And as Jumbo toured the US and Canada with Barnum’s company over the next three years, the public noise around the elephant came to be known as “Jumbo Mania.” Certainly, Jumbo’s arrival in New York in April of 1881 was a moment many saw as a sign of the American public’s right to have privileged access to whatever the world contained. If Barnum wrestled that “whatever” away from the British for his own profit, he did so equally on Americans’ behalf, many believed. In a widely republished telegram to the editor of the London Telegraph, Barnum insisted the elephant was a right owed to “Fifty-one millions American citizens [for whom] my 40 years’ invariable practice of exhibiting [the] best that money could procure makes Jumbo’s presence here imperative.”[v] Here—and this was crucial— Barnum’s bombastic claims of sparing no expense or effort to bring the most gigantic land animal on earth to the American public were not signs of fraud, but elements of an authentically American cultural event. Each citizen-consumer could speak his or her mind about Jumbo’s story and vicariously capture the mighty elephant. In effect, Barnum’s advertising told consumers: Expect more. You deserve it. Jumbo Mania was possible, in part, because the elephant’s ads constituted a radical departure from previous circus advertising for elephants, or any animal for that matter. Since the 1870’s, when it became possible to inexpensively produce detailed illustrations, advertisers had begun experimenting with ads featuring animal and child figures, especially for

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and media reports, probably accurate, that Jumbo liked alcohol)[vii] (Figure 3). A billiard ball company similarly presaged the abstraction of Jumbo as promotional ideal. They ignored the fact that Jumbo had broken off his tusks back in London to offer ivory “Jumbo Billiard and Pool Balls” to consumers in a “Jumbo Catalogue” sent by mail. Linking Jumbo’s notoriety to their the product they offered a simple, opaque profile elephant with the word “JUMBO” superimposed across the hide in white letters.[viii] Indeed, most companies appropriated Jumbo into scenarios divorced from the persona of P.T. Barnum or their even their own company profiles. That is, while many companies had been branding with the rags-to-riches story of their proprietors (which indeed P.T. Barnum did as an impresario and self-declared celebrity), others opted to connect their products to the viewer’s experience of the media blitz around the elephant’s transformation into American pet. The main purpose of Jumbo as celebrity was to empower and endorse an emotional and selfinterested consumerist subjectivity beyond the context of circus advertising. And that act set the stage for all consumers to appropriate the power of Jumbo the bull elephant just as P. T. Barnum had, but with less effort and expense.

Jumbo as the Liberty to Enjoy More Fig. 3. Clark’s O.N.T. Spool Cotton Jumbo trade card series by Buek and Lindner Lithograph, 1883, Historical Collections, Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

Then Jumbo died, hit by a train in the small town of St. Thomas, Ontario. It was 1885. Barnum, Bailey and Hutchinson pressed on, exhibiting Jumbo’s skeleton and taxidermied skin for some years, then donating the former to the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the latter to Tufts College in Medford, Massachusetts. Yet, the idea of Jumbo had been such a great step forward in using animal figures to link spending to the consumer’s symbolic appropriation of the animal’s energy that it did not die. Jumbo first reappeared as “jumbo,” a promotional notion in the 1910’s and 1920’s in the world of music production, seen as a “craze of composers and concert-givers for long compositions and monster performances,” and other works featuring “long-drawn-out arias” and other gimmicks.[ix] Later the word became a term for the marketing of newspapers with sensational stories and “Jumbo editions,” and the drive to produce ever-taller skyscrapers.[x] Early twentiethcentury jumboism—“the tendency to esteem art in proportion to its bulk” (as circuses similarly had in their mammoth marketing programs)—was a sign of gauche excess and imprudent faith in

pets. Consumers identified with Jumbo further because the elephant complimented contemporary technologies for the inexpensive reproduction of images, which were proving a boon to the work of persuasion by way of storytelling with characters (Laird 1998, 69, 93, 149-51). In the spirit of Barnum’s “Jumbo chained” vignette, a Boston thread manufacturer issued a color trade card advocating for the strength of their product, showing a fierce, red-eyed Jumbo being dragged through the streets of London to the ship that would send him to America “Because Drawn by Willamantic Thread!”[vi] Clark’s Spool Cotton company produced a series of ten trade cards showing: Jumbo arriving in America; with suitcase in trunk playing tourist; in a tuxedo at the Opera; in a bathing suit at the beach at Coney Island; in a bow tie, guzzling beer at the bar (here as a male overindulging at the saloon in reference to the reality of manly alcoholism

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Fig. 4. Fruit crate label, ca. 1933. Image courtesy of The Advertising Archives, London

scale.[xi] The phenomenon showed how Barnum’s satire and celebration of American pretensions to greatness was so often repeated that it had become a cliché, now devoid of its original tongue-in-cheek roasting of the public’s fascination for “firsts” and “mosts.” Whether nervous or dismissive of the trend, critics noted that jumboism seemed a peculiarly American aesthetic, acode for lowbrow abundance.[xii] Fueled by the booming consumer culture many urban Americans were experiencing in those decades, it was also promoted by consumers’ groups and ad men determined to establish mass consumption as a basic element of national identity and social participation. In doing so, they were reinvigorating the old “politics of ‘more,’” introduced by trade unions in the 1890’s, as an alternative to radical economic reforms, to offer workers a bigger cut of the wealth they helped to produce (Currarino 2006, 17-36; McGovern 2006).

Meanwhile, advertisers turned to “scientific advertising” campaigns that assumed the emotional pliability of consumers and so associated products with experiences of satisfaction or the creation and display of personality (Marchand 1985, 68-69). In moving from the carnivalesque to realism in their art, ad men emphasized aspirational consumption of home appliances, automobiles, jewelry, clothing, and cosmetics. Anonymous elephants continued to appear in various kinds of advertising in those years, for instance as icons for India (pictured as a decorated Asian elephant carrying riders), or in cartoons, as symbols for the American Republican Party, and (if pink) for a state of intoxication. When the Great Depression hit, the contemporary ethos evoked “Fear and Hoarding,” as one recent interpretation put it, as consumers focused especially on food staples.[xiii] It was also the era of safari-style “tooth

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lifestyles (enacted through specific products) such that jumboism proliferated to a broad array of products promising modernity, joy and liberty in unrestrained consumption, especially for the valuable adult female market segment (Leiss, Kline, Jhally and Botterill 2005, 190-98). The 1955 mail-order catalogue Housewares for Homemakers proposed that the Pearl-Wick Jumbo Shelf Hamper could make post-War laundry storage elegantly functional: “Super giantized hamper with handy built in shelf for cosmetics… Largest hamper ever made.” In the Miss America Pageant Official Yearbook for 1963, an ad for Toni Home Beauty Collection offered, “for the girl who wants just curves, not curls. Big, big jumbo size body curlers.”[xvi] Jumbo had come to mean “enjoy more – you deserve it”—more volume, more options, more convenience—as a sort of consumerist carpe diem. Jumbo as modern abstraction offered acquisitiveness without the taint of gluttony. It reified a corporate, government and popular consensus that North Americans would be defined by what Lizabeth Cohen has called “an economy of inexhaustible abundance,” that many consumers appear to have embraced wholeheartedly as a right they had earned (Cohen 2003, 10). Indeed, every agricultural fair and carnival offered “Jumbo Malts” and milkshakes for carefree summer eating in places of commercial leisure, and so employed jumbo as a food design element evoking relaxed celebration. It made sense for Jumbo to become so abstract. New streams of conceptual advertising were emerging just then to explain products, services, whole companies, and even political candidates with impressionistic and highly symbolic or metaphorical messaging. The Volkswagen Beetle “Think Small” ad miniaturized a Beetle in the upper left hand corner of a blank, white space in order to advertise the car by engaging its critics (resulting in “The most admired print ad of all time,” by one telling) (Tungate 2007, opposite 118). Such advertising asked consumers to do the mental work of interpreting and incorporating promotional communication into a persona evincing membership in subcultures defined by particular modes of consumption. Accordingly, in the context of growing public awareness of the abilities and complex mental lives of elephants publicized by media-savvy ethologists and behaviorists in those years, North Americans soon found advertising bearing trained elephants pictured attempting to crush luggage in order to demonstrate its durability or pictured

and claw” movies and other cultural products that celebrated a forceful and independent manhood in order to reassure Canadians and Americans who saw the men in their lives buckling emotionally under the humiliation of chronic unemployment. Inviting vicarious participation by viewers, in safari films, wild animal wranglers like Frank Buck and Clyde Beatty dominated their animal subjects—tigers, lions, elephants and others—who were noble adversaries because they were equally powerful as their captors. (Stokes 2004, 138-54) Indeed, had it not been so for Barnum and his audience with Jumbo as well? Consequently, for parity products like food, the old aesthetic of abundance became newly important and jumboism as marketing theory for musicians and newspaper men jostled in those days with an archetypical African bull, a generic Jumbo of sorts. He appeared on cans and boxes to give “regenerative” meaning to oversized produce like “Jumbo Olives” (Lears 1994, 157-58). Strength Valencias oranges of California created a series of animal themed labels for their wooden crates featuring rhinos, lions, and others. The Strength-brand African elephant sniffed down his trunk at the viewer with his ears outstretched displaying his size and might (Figure 4). For consumers weary of restraint and uncertainty, this jumbo elephant was a sign of gigantism to be sure, yet not as hype or satire, but as relief. He was a comforting promise for the future and metaphor for citizens’ inner fortitude, mental and physical. (Indeed, the University of Alabama still uses an “angry” African bull elephant as promotional mascot for their sports teams.) Older forms would overlap with these new trends. The formal “Jumbo” still served as a nostalgic stock character of the circus arts, advertising the genre in films and Broadway shows set in circuses. And after the Cole Brothers Clyde Beatty Circus had the gumption to offer an elephant as “JUMBO 2nd – The Only African Elephant with Any Circus” in the 1930’s, there would be more than thirty zoo and circus elephants around the world given that name.[xiv] One 1948 Levi’s ad for working-class men combined jumbo as circus trope and metaphor by portraying two elephants giggling about a third, who vainly struggles to pull his leg free from a stake to which he is tethered with a pair of jeans: “Since they tied him up with those Levi’s – he never gets away,” one explains to the other.[xv] Still, post-War advertising practice expanded to include promotion by the selling of

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Fig. 5. Consumer as astonished innocent. United States Postal Service, “Jumbo Jets,” 1999

Jumbo: “Help Yourself to Happiness”

with home computers as a metaphor for memory [xvii] (Mitman 2006, 175-94). Perhaps the peak of innocent faith in jumbo as product design concept came in 1970 with the advent of commercial travel by the Boeing 747 (Figure 5). The “Jumbo Jet” incorporated the essence of a long-dead animal to express an ethos of “more” by its very form. It evoked a sense of wonder for the can-do-ism in American industrial production, linking consumer emotions and ideology in every flight (Kramer 2006, 156-59). Like the promotional stamp the United States Postal Service would issue in 1999 to celebrate the first commercial flight of the Boeing 747, the aircraft would advertise American power and affluence as it traveled the globe.

Today, Jumbo seems, in many respects, a throwback to simpler times. In our contemporary “fifth frame” of promotional communication, much advertising refrains from telling consumers that products and services are tied to a particular lifestyle, social group or persona; instead offering that it can be a medium for the creation of one’s own meanings (Leiss, Kline, Jhally and Botterill 2005, 563-72). Yet, Jumbo remains more ideologically rigid. It is a tenacious classic that paradoxically speaks of an admiration for “more,” while promoting products and services directed at people for whom more is often less. To be sure, many uses of jumbo remain innocuous enough

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(and thus all the more persuasive because seemingly free of ideology): jumbo paint tray, jumbo raisins, jumbo paper towels, jumbo frame (ethernet network), Jumbotron. This is particularly so with utilitarian products for which “more” is indeed a practical matter of convenience. Yet, as a term, jumbo has become a broadly applicable cloak for the marketing of overindulgence—the post-War consumerist carpe diem taken to the extreme. Some commentators have labeled the resulting phenomenon, “affluenza,” an affliction suffered by “The Overspent American,” strung out on credit and a facile belief in the cheapness of buying in bulk.[xviii] Recent uses of the jumbo idea bear troubling testament to that self-destructive streak in North American consumers. With the economic bubbles North Americans created at the end of the twentieth-century, there came robust modes of consumption and display to celebrate them. The conceptual jumbo became a marker (satirical for some, invigorating for others) of brands encouraging proud rejection of modesty and self-restraint, with food as a particular fixation: Jumbo 2 for 1 Pizza, jumbo hot dog, Super Size meal, Super Big Gulp, Meat’Normous Omelet Sandwich. Jumboism materialized as an entire genre of “all-you-can-eat” restaurants unique to the continent (the most unintentionally depressing slogan being attached to the Golden Corral chain: “Help Yourself to Happiness”). We see it in the branding of box stores and bulk retailers like Costco, Big Lots and the Direct Buy Club that promise the consumer economies of scale but actually burden them with the costs of transporting, storing and financing inventory that supermarkets and department stores once bankrolled. Those patterns were in turn facilitated by the public’s desire for increasingly large vehicles (remember the Hummer?) to carry warehouse shopping finds to spacious “monster houses,” all of it financed by “jumbo loans.” (Figure 6) Eagles, beavers, elk, bison, coyotes and other symbolic species aside, the African bull elephant—the Jumbo elephant—has been the iconic animal of North American capitalism. Unlike the fictionalized and essentialized animal figures that represent human feeling in advertising for cellular companies, zoos, foods, animated films and countless other products, services and experiences, jumbo advertises the overarching ideal by which consumption has constantly expanded. Although embraced sporadically across the population, the ethos of jumbo has been grounded in a simple but very old idea: if

Fig. 6. Asian elephant as stand in for jumbo as suddenly precarious product design concept, 2010. Image courtesy of Diamond Funding Corporation.

some is good, more must be better; North Americans should have the most, and it will be easy. Since Jumbo’s day, images and stories extracted from events around his life seem to have had a mysterious power to communicate manifestly fraudulent claims with a sense of authenticity that have made them seem normative and comforting. The puzzle and power of jumbo as advertising trope is that this effect did not fade as the generations passed. Today he still naturalizes the most unsustainable consumer desires and habits.

Notes [i]

“The Great African Elephant Jumbo,” Strobridge Lithograph Co., 1882, Tibbals Digital Collection, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, retrieved May 2, 2011; http://emuseum.ringling.org/emuseum/view/objects/asitem/search$0040/4/title -asc?t:state:flow=9dc5b092-f73d-4076-ada6-c44123d3e916; “Barnum & London: 8 United Monster Shows,” 1883, C-131a, Circus Poster Collection, Princeton University Library, Princeton, NJ.

[ii]

“Jumbo,” Harper’s Weekly, April 1, 1882.

[iii]

“Barnum & London: Jumbo,” Strobridge Lithograph Co., 1882, Tibbals Digital Collection, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, retrieved May 2, 2011, http://emuseum.ringling.org/emuseum/view/objects/asitem/search$0040/1/title -asc?t:state:flow=04cd6684-1e6b-4674-8c76-74dfb893acc5. [iv]

“History of the Collection – Funny Folks,” British Comics Collection, British Library, retrieved April 17, 2011, http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/findhelprestype/news/britcomics/.

[v]

“Barnum and His Elephant Jumba (sic.),” New York Times, February 24, 1882.

[vi]

The Willamantic trade card is reproduced in Deborah Walk, Jennifer Lemmer and Marcy Murray, “Colorful Circus Paper Traces the Spread of ‘Jumbomania’,” Ephemera Society Articles, retrieved March 21, 2011, http://www.ephemerasociety.org/articles.html. [vii]

Clark’s O.N.T. Spool Cotton Jumbo trade card series by Buek and Lindner Lithograph, 1883, Historical Collections, Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, retrieved March 27, 2011, http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/19th_century_tcard/. The full series can be viewed at http://www.tradecards.com/articles/jumboBL/index.html.

[viii]

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“Jumbo Billiard and Pool Balls,” Puck, June 27, 1883.

Laird, Pamela Walker. 1998. Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lears, Jackson. 1994. Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America. New York: Basic Books.

[ix] “A Few Lines,” Review of Reviews 4 (1891): 289; Henry Theophilus Finck, Songs and Songwriters (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1900), 28. [x]

“Journalism,” The Spectator 114 (June 12, 1915): 805.

[xi]

Finck, Songs and Songwriters, 19.

[xii]

“Jumbomania,” Littell’s Living Age 287 (1915): 187

Marchand, Roland. 1985. Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940. Berkeley: University of California Press. McGovern, Charles F. 2006. Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890-1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

“An American Dream Timeline,” Vanity Fair, March 13, 2009, retrieved May 2, 2011, http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2009/03/an-american-dreamtimeline.html.

[xiii]

[xiv]

http://www.elephant.se/database.php.

[xv]

“Levi’s,” Hoofs & Horns 43, no. 3 (September 1948): 21.

Mitman, Gregg. 2006. “Pachyderm Personalities: The Media of Science, Politics and Conservation” in Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman, eds. Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism. New York: Columbia University Press, 175-94.

John Wanamaker Department Stores, Housewares for Homemakers (Philadelphia: Whipple & Kelley, 1955), 13; Official Yearbook of the Miss America Pageant, 1963, 31, Miss America Programs Collection. Both these sources reside in the Digital Archives of the Hagley Library and Museum, Greenville, DE, http://digital.hagley.org/. [xvi]

[xvii]

For a sampling of http://www.advertisingarchives.co.uk/.

such

advertising

Presbrey, Frank. 1968. The History and Development of Advertising. 1929; repr. New York: Greenwood Press. Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate: The English and other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

see

Rowell, George P. 1870. The Men Who Advertise: An Account of Successful Advertisers, Together with Hints on the Method of Advertising. New York: Nelson Chesman.

At least five books by different authors bear the title Affluenza. Juliet Schor, The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999). [xviii]

Bibliography

Rubin, Barry and Judith Colp Rubin. 2005. Hating America: A History. New York: Oxford University Press.

Adams, Bluford. 1997. E Pluribus Barnum: The Great Showman and the Making of U.S. Popular Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Saxon, Arthur H. 1995. P. T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man. 1989; repr. New York: Columbia University Press.

Barnum, Phineas T. 1888. The Life of P.T. Barnum, Written by Himself. Buffalo, NY: Courier Company.

Shukin, Nicole. 2009. Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Breen, T. H. 2004. The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence. New York: Oxford University Press.

Somkin, Fred. 1967. Unquiet Eagle: Memory and Desire in the Idea of American Freedom, 1815-1860. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Cohen, Lizabeth. 2003. A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. New York: Vintage.

Stokes, John. 2004. “‘Lion’s Griefs’: The Wild Animal Act as Theatre” in New Theatre Quarterly Vol. 20, No. 2, 138-54

Cook, James W. 2001. The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Twitchell, James B. 2000. Twenty Ads That Shook the World: The Century’s Most Groundbreaking Advertising and How It Changed Us All. New York: Three Rivers Press.

Currarino, Roseanne. 2006. “The Politics of ‘More’: The Labor Question and the Idea of Economic Liberty in Industrial America” in Journal of American History Vol. 93, No. 1, 17-36

Tungate, Mark. 2007. Adland: A Global History of Advertising. London: Kogan Page.

Day, Charles H. 1995. “The Elephant as an Advertisement,” Billboard, March 23, 1901 reprinted in Charles H. Day. Ink from a Circus Press Agent. San Bernadino, CA: Borgo Press.

Weeks, William Earl. 1994. “American Nationalism, American Imperialism: An Interpretation of United States Political Economy, 1789-1861” in Journal of the Early Republic Vol. 14, No. 4, 485-95.

Denney, Reuel. 1989. The Astonishing Muse. 1957; repr. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Wylie, Dan. 2008. Elephant. London: Reaktion.

Donald, Diana. 2006. “Pangs Watched in Perpetuity: Sir Edwin Landseer’s Pictures of Dying Deer and the Ethos of Victorian Sportsmanship,” in The Animal Studies Group, ed., Killing Animals. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 50-68. Harding, Les. 2000. Elephant Story: Jumbo and P. T. Barnum Under the Big Top. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co.

Susan Nance is a historian of communication and live entertainment. She is Associate Professor at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario and affiliated faculty of the Campbell Centre for the Study of Animal Welfare. She received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2003 and has since published on the histories of parades, civic festivals and the business of tourism, as well as a book, How the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream, 1790-1935 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), documenting uses of Eastern personae in amateur and professional entertainment. Susan's most recent work, Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and Business in the American Circus (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013) documents the lives and labors of 19th-century circus elephants. She is currently working on the nature of animal celebrity as well as a book-length history of rodeo animals in North America.

Harris, Neil. 1981. Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jolly, W. P. 1976. Jumbo. London: Constable. Kramer, Cheryce. “Digital Beasts as Visual Esperanto: Getty Images and the Colonization of Sight” in Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman, eds. Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism. New York: Columbia University Press, 137-72. Leiss, William, Stephen Kline, Sut Jhally and Jacqueline Botterill. 2005. Social Communication in Advertising: Consumption in the Mediated Marketplace, 3 ed. New York: Routledge.

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NONE TOUGHER

Rhinoceroses are rarely anthropomorphized making this American magazine advertisement from the 1950s an unusual specimen. Armstrong, a rubber and tire company, found the tough exterior of rhinoceroses the prime comparison for its most durable automobile tires, dubbed “Rhino-Flex.” Text by K elly Enright

T

mimic (as today’s biomimicry might) its construction. The comparison is presumptuous. Yet Armstrong’s illustrator makes the point. Look at the tires lined in a neat row of increasingly deep, rugged traction. Then move your eye to the right hip of the rhinoceros. His skin is pocked and wrinkled and has warts that visually resembles the most rugged of the tires (the one at far right). Here is the image of rhino toughness the consumer is meant to buy—figuratively and literally. While this gangster rhino appears as a character in several ads, Armstrong’s logo for Rhino-Flex tires is the smaller rhinoceros seen on the top of the tire rack. Represented here is a comparatively younger, more jubilant member of the species. It is engaged in a carefree jaunt, its tail bouncing in the breeze, its mouth turned slightly upwards in a smile. This rhino, known as “Tuffy,” was printed on several marketing products such as ashtrays, paperweights, and patches, and despite its name hardly conveys toughness. The fiction of the ad creates a world in which a rhino salesman uses another rhino image to sell tires. Tuffy is a rhinoceros representation within a world of personified rhinoceroses. Is the larger one the real rhino? Or is the logo? And which is really selling the tires? While the tough rhino glares at the viewer, Tuffy, the smiles. From toughy to Tuffy, the admen cover all their bases. They convey the durability of Rhino-

he ad for these tires depicts a burly, brash rhinoceros slouching somewhat tauntingly, hat askew, and cigar in hand. He looks like a Hollywood gangster. “Really,” the rhinoceros seems to say, “you’re going to question my toughness?” The slogan “None Tougher” appears as the headline of the ad, intended to sell durable tires to American consumers. Armstrong’s advertising strategy meshes a presumed toughness of rhinoceros skin with an imagined toughness of rhinoceros personality. Yet the imagined “personality” of this rhinoceros has more to do with a stereotype of a car salesman or auto mechanic than of actual rhinoceroses. He is made human through bipedalism, clotheswearing, and cigar-smoking. This is, in fact, a very human version of toughness; it says nothing about the natural traits of rhinoceroses that might make them good examples of robustness. Armstrong’s advertisement is selling both nature and artifice. First, the product itself, RhinoFlex tires, are constructed from rubber. Rubber is a natural product, though it is likely that Armstrong also used artificial ingredients available at the time, perhaps even artificial rubber. While they make no claims to the tires’ composition, they use a second natural product as a sales pitch: rhinoceros skin. The tires are not made from rhino skin nor, as far as we can tell, do they directly

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Keith Ward Armstrong Rhino-Flex Tires, 1953

plantations decreased rhinoceros habitat. Thus, Armstrong had to separate product from its place of origin. The rhino image, perhaps unwittingly, is both tribute and façade. By not showing anything resembling a real rhino, consumers disassociate product and place. Yet the product itself is a tribute to the genius of nature, wanting to replicate the skin of a rhino as industrial product. Referring to real rhinos would have also

Flex tires and employ a charismatic image of an animal to ensure likeability. So where is the animal in this animal ad? Why not just depict a real rhino looking as if he were about to charge the viewer? Would that not convey toughness? Perhaps Armstrong could not commit to a realistic rhinoceros representation because it would be too real. The destruction of tropical forests, specifically in Asia, for rubber

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forced Armstrong to confront the actual vulnerability of the species. Rhinoceroses may have tough skin and confrontational attitudes (though their charges are usually bluffs), but they are increasingly unable to survive in the wild. They are extremely susceptible to environmental changes, breed slowly, and despite legal protections suffer from excessive poaching. What is most striking about this advertisement is that it promises something—longevity, durability—that rhinos, in fact, are not. The irony is further evident in the ad’s subtitle: “unconditionally guaranteed!” What can a vulnerable animal

Kelly Enright is the author ofThe Maximum of Wilderness: The Jungle in the American Imagination, Osa & Martin: For the Love of Adventure, and Rhinoceros. She has a doctorate in American history and a master’s in museum anthropology. Her work focuses on portrayals of nature in American culture, human-animal relationships, museums, explorations, and travels.

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FROM ANIMAL RIGHTS AND SHOCK ADVOCACY TO KINSHIP WITH ANIMALS The visual cultures manifested in the advertising and communication activities of animal rights activists and those concerned with the conservation of species may be counter-productive, creating an ever-increasing cultural distance between the human and the animal. By continuing to position animals as subjugated, exploitable others, or as creatures that belong in a romanticized ‘nature’ separate from the human, communications campaigns may achieve effects that are contrary to those desired. The unashamed, cheaply voyeuristic nature of shock imagery may win headlines while worsening the overall position of the animal in human culture. We offer an alternative way of thinking about visual communication concerning animals – one that is focused on enhancing a sense of kinship with animals. Based on empirical evidence, we suggest that continued progress both in conservation and in animal rights does not depend on continued castigation of the human but rather on embedding in our cultures the type of human-animal relationship on which positive change can be built. Text by L inda Kalof and Joe Zammit-Lucia

B

survival. The animal rights focus on sentience as the main criterion for awarding rights to animals leads to the following position: “What the rights view denies, at least in its current articulation, is that plants and insects are ‘subjects-of-a-life;’ and it denies as well that these forms of life have been shown to have any rights, including a right to survival” (Regan 2004, xl) – a position that is anathema to the conservation biologist and the environmental philosopher. For the animal rights advocate, on the other hand, conservationists are more concerned with science and with abstract technical concepts such as “species” and “ecosystems” than they are with the actual animals. The keeping of animals in captivity, the chasing, sedating, tagging, biopsy-ing and constant studying, monitoring and otherwise harassing animals in the wild causes pain and suffering, subordinating the very real everyday lives of individual animals to intangible and uncertain species and ecosystem benefit – not to mention that a significant proportion of studies are of doubtful benefit to the animals themselves, but rather serve either to feed the publication requirements of the involved researchers or the

ad Marriage, Quick Divorce.

The above subtitle from a paper by Marc Sagoff (1984) summarizes the state, then and now, of the relationship between the animal rights community and those concerned with the recovery and protection of endangered species. Accusations of flawed views and unreasonable behaviour flow both ways, reflecting seemingly irreconcilable values and ways of seeing. Different Worlds For the biologist interested in wildlife and habitat conservation, animal rights advocates are irresponsible, single issue activists who have failed to take on the issue of species extinction and who embark on emotionally driven activities without due consideration of their consequences. For instance, the “liberation” of thousands of farmed animals (such as mink) contributes to the already precipitous decline to near extinction of native species. Almost total opposition to captive breeding and scientific research on animals harms, in the long run, the chances of species

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perpetuation of the self image of the conservation biologist as intrepid field explorer. The sanctioned culling of animals in the interests of preserving “ecosystem integrity” is difficult to reconcile with the rights view. The animal rightist would also argue that beyond abstract and farfrom-convincing arguments, the wildlife conservation community has, to date, failed to come up with persuasive ethical and philosophical underpinnings for the preservation of endangered species. Absent such underpinnings, it is unacceptable to subordinate the rights of individual animals to abstract and intangible concepts. Our aim in this paper is not to enter into, or take sides in, the above debate. Rather, our intention is to show that, in spite of fundamentally different underlying values, there are similarities in the visual cultures of animal rights activists and those concerned with the preservation of natural species and spaces, and that, in both cases, those visual cultures may be counterproductive to their goals of persuasion. Based on the results of a study of animal imagery, we offer an alternative approach to visual communication that, we believe, can have important positive implications for human-animal relationships to the benefit of both animal rights advocacy and endangered species preservation and recovery. The Hum an vs. The Anim al The narratives and visual cultures of animal rights groups and wildlife conservation groups reveal similar attitudes about the relationship between humans and other animals. Much of the visual

language adopted by animal rights groups highlights the sorry plight of the animal at the hands of the human. Images are largely designed to be distressing to the viewer and to engender support through a combination of outrage and guilt. This is a visual culture that

Fig. 1. The Humane Society International Seal slaughter. Image courtesy of The Humane Society International

Fig. 2. & 3. 99 Human destruction of Indonesian forests as the cause of orphaning orangutans and leading to their decline towards extinction. Left: Photography by David Gilbert, Rainforest Action Network (Creative Commons). Right: Photography by Lam Thuy Vo (Creative Commons)

Fig. 4. Joe Zammit-Lucia I Am Series #1, photography, 2007
Joe Zammit-Lucia

Is this visual culture the optimal way to encourage the sort of human-animal relationships that might lead to altered human behaviours that bring unnecessary pain and suffering to other animals?

creates a divisive dichotomy – and a distance – between the Human and the Animal: the Human as the callous aggressor; the Animal as the helpless victim. A similar set of principles governs the conservationist’s visual culture. Here the Animal occupies an idyllically untamed space – the animal “running free in our imaginary and mythical wild” (Baker 1993, 294). This is part of a romanticized vision of a “Nature” that is separate from Culture, with the Human as the intruder, aggressor and destroyer of spaces and species that need to be protected. While coming at the issues from almost opposite poles, the animal rights and the wildlife conservation movements end up in essentially the same place. The animal is portrayed as something separate and distant from the human – in one case separate as a captive or persecuted victim, in the other, separate as part of a romanticised nature – and, in both cases, a casualty of an undesirable human disposition and reprehensible human activity.

Using Anim al Portraiture To address this question, we examined a different approach to animal representation and the impact that approach has on viewers. “Animal Portraiture” is a broad term that can cover a multitude of artistic approaches, each having potentially different effects on viewers. We evaluated the specific approach taken to animal portraiture by photographic artist Joe ZammitLucia. Zammit-Lucia explores the use of animal portraits to examine the human ability to see animals as individuals with character and personality, rather than as generic specimens of species (see also Zammit-Lucia 2008a). Rather than traditional animal imagery, the artist uses, as his starting point, the techniques of classical human studio portraiture and applies them to animals.

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The Hum an Portrait Portraiture is deeply embedded in human culture. When viewing a human portrait, we reflexively project imaginings of personality onto the subject portrayed. We “see” characteristics like wisdom, vulnerability, power, glamour, and so forth, depending on the particular portrait. The portrait has been used over the ages as a powerful propaganda tool. From the sculpted portraits of Roman emperors, to the recent, and now infamous, Shepard Fairey/Associated Press “Hope” image of presidential candidate Barack Obama, the portrait has been used to create strong, positive images of the subject portrayed. In achieving such positive projections, the physical likeness of the portrait to the subject is a small and largely insignificant part of the whole. Rather it is the overall form and content of the portrait that constitute the repository of the message being conveyed. For instance, in the Obama “Hope” poster, the message is largely conveyed by the overall composition of the image. The central positioning of the portrait combines with the tilted stance of the face to create a diagonal composition that leads to a feeling of strength and dynamism (Condit, 2010). The use of repeating blocks of red and blue not only heighten the diagonal composition, but are used to evoke the American flag and, in Fairey’s own words, “convey the idea of blue and red states, Democrats and Republicans, converging” (Fairey and Gross, 2009, p7). Context, on the other hand, conveys the message in Jacques-Louis David’s famous “Bonaparte Crossing the Great St Bernard Pass.” Here Napoleon’s “greatness” is implied as he follows in the footsteps of Hannibal and Charlemagne - the unstoppable hero on a symbolic white horse (Welch, 2005). The individuality, or what Pope-Hennessy (1979) describes as “The Cult of Personality” that we read in a portrait, is not a result of physical likeness, but is transmitted through symbolism – be that symbolism contained in physiognomic codes and ciphers; in the carriage, bearing or gestures of the individual portrayed; or in the ancillary elements of dress, jewellery, context, or allegorical or other symbols.

Fig. 5. Shepard Fairey Hope, 2008
Fairey/Garcia

people’s support for protection and conservation. More support is expressed for large animals and those who resembled humans (Gunnthorsdottir 2009). However, traditionally, “animal art” has been about humans not about animals. In large part, animals have been shown as symbolic icons, as decorative items, or as human companions. “Portraits” of companion animals or working animals provide a commentary on human achievement or human possession. In contemporary art, many artists are concerned with social commentary. Again, much of this engages with human behaviours in relation to animals, and with human social and cultural frameworks as they affect animals rather than with the essence of the animal. The animal becomes more central in genres such as wildlife photography, wildlife illustration, and in art which is concerned with the natural world. Here the animal is predominant, but in a way that is detached from the human. Scientific illustration objectifies the animal as a subject of study, whereas wildlife photography, while glorifying the animal, treats him as a

Anim al Im agery Animal images can also create strong, positive values. For example, experimental work has established that animal “attractiveness” increases

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Fig. 6. Joe Zammit-Lucia Nobility #2, photography, 2008
Joe Zammit-Lucia

setting), and (ii) frames the animal representation to mimic a human studio portrait (i.e., in a way that is culturally more often associated with human representation). The idea of animal individuality in these images, therefore, does not depend exclusively (nor even primarily) on the representational form of the animal – the recognition of the specific features of the individual animal – but rather on the appropriation of the general style of the human studio portrait and the impact of that style on the viewer’s spontaneous reactions to the imagery. This approach builds on the fundamentals of human portraiture where, as we have discussed above, individuality, personality and status are not communicated through uniqueness of features, but through the overall form, composition, context, and other features of the complete portrait. Zammit-Lucia uses other devices to influence the subject-viewer interaction. Direct eye contact is common and can create a tension between the observed and the observer in the viewer-portrait interaction. The subject’s

specimen of species and, as we shall see later, places him or her in a “nature” that is separate from the human. Few artists depict animals as “specific individuals.” Instead they “use animals as metaphors or symbols for the human condition, or as generic signifiers for the natural world” (Watt 2010, 77). In fact, “most forms of contemporary animal representation, whether or not in lensbased media, fail effectively to communicate an animal’s individuality, singularity or particularity” (Baker 2000, 179)[1]. Zammit-Lucia’s animal art focuses unashamedly on animals as unique individuals in the same way as the human studio portrait focuses on the individual portrayed. The artist’s hypothesis is that our embedded, reflexive reaction to human portraiture can be turned to an advantage when used in animal representation. Focusing largely on threatened or endangered species, the artist adopts a representational approach that (i) alters the context in which the animal is presented (i.e., a studio-like setting vs. in the wild or in a captive

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Fig. 7. Joe Zammit-Lucia Hunted, photography, 2008
Joe Zammit-Lucia

stance is also chosen to allow viewers to project character and personality on the individual animal portrayed, while the overall composition – central composition or, alternatively, the use of large negative spaces – are used to enhance visual impact, substituting for the ancillary elements contained in human portraiture. A further important element distinguishes animal portraiture from human portraiture: Human portraiture suffers from a strong undercurrent of inauthenticity, driven by the fact that the subject tends to engage in a performance. As Roland Barthes (1981) puts it: “I do not stop imitating myself, and because of this, each time I am (or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture.” (p13-14). What has been variously described as “Fictions of the Pose” (Berger, 1994) or the “The Theatre of the Face” (Kozloff, 2007) is absent from the portrait of the animal. Such a subject is not complicit in the creation of his or her own image, thereby lending the portrait an unavoidable feeling of authenticity absent from the human portrait.

Using this approach, Zammit-Lucia hypothesizes that such images emphasize the very animality of the subjects portrayed, using our own embedded cultural responses to human portraiture to enhance the viewer’s sense of kinship with animals, while maintaining respect for the animal for what he or she is (Zammit-Lucia 2008b). In his artist’s statement, Zammit-Lucia (2010) states: In creating images of animals, I have little interest in what the animal looks like; in the animal merely as observed object. Rather my interest is in the deeper reality of what the animal might possibly be. Through these images, I am interested in exploring questions: How do I feel in relation to this animal? Can I relate to this animal as an individual rather than as a mere specimen of species? And, more interestingly, what could be the experience of being this animal?

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Fig. 8. Joe Zammit-Lucia Untitled, photography, 2010
Joe Zammit-Lucia

approach to the study have been described elsewhere (Kalof, Zammit-Lucia and Kelly, 2011). Here we focus on the main findings and their potential implications for animal rights and other forms of animal imagery. Our findings showed that the widespread traditional imagery and methods of communication about endangered species in Western Culture do seem to convey the expected messages. Prior to viewing the animal portraiture exhibit, visitors defined animals primarily as wild, free and sometimes violent and dangerous creatures that are part of “Nature.” Pre-exhibit, the thematic cluster of “Nature,” “Wild/Free” and “Violence” accounted for 60% of respondents’ overall perceptions of the Animal. After viewing the exhibit, visitors gave a different meaning to the word “Animal” compared to the meanings they expressed before entering the exhibit. The biggest single change was seen in the significant increase in the attribution of “Personality” to animals. However, the impact of this artwork was seemingly much broader than the increased attribution of

Does it Work? We were interested in testing whether the artist’s hypotheses were borne out when viewers interacted with these animal portraits. While animal visual imagery has been the focus of a substantial body of research, to our knowledge there are no studies that have collected empirical data on whether animal visual imagery has the potential to change cultural perceptions of animals. Indeed, given the widespread use of visual material to persuade audiences to change attitudes and behaviours, it is surprising that there is a paucity of research on the impact of visual material on the public’s view of any single issue (Joffe 2008). Our study was designed to fill some of the gap in our knowledge of the impact of animal imagery on viewers’ perceptions of animals. We evaluated visitor experiences of the artist’s work mounted as an exhibit entitled Monde Sauvage: Regards et Emotions, which was displayed during Fall 2008 and Winter 2009 at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France. The detailed methodology and

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Im plications for Anim al Rights Im agery In the case of endangered animals, we believe that, in the long run, it is counterproductive to perpetuate a visual culture that portrays animals as wild, free creatures who are part of a Nature that is not only separate, but in conflict with human culture. We believe that this simply embeds the classical Cartesian dichotomy of the animal as inferior “other,” creating a sense of distance between the Human and the Animal – a sense of distance that is increased further by the scientism that is so prevalent in the conservation culture. We suggest that this dualism between the Human and the Natural has no productive future. Successful conservation efforts can only be built on a greater sense of closeness and kinship between the Human and the Animal (and the Natural) – a sense of kinship that fosters support for expanded conservation efforts and sees such efforts in a positive cultural light, rather than as the result of the job-killing, economystifling efforts of an environmental lobby wedded to the politics of “No.” There are similar questions to be considered in evaluating the long-term effectiveness of the visual culture associated with animal rights. There is little doubt that the heartrending images that form the staple diet of animal rights groups represent effective fund raising fodder. Indeed, research has found that animal rights protestors are directly recruited to the animal rights agenda by moral shocks from visual imagery (Jasper and Poulsen 1995), and empirical work confirms that animal advocacy messages intensify pre-existing dispositions toward animals and animal abusers (Scudder and Mills 2009). Animal rights advocacy images are based on good versus evil, with clubbed baby seals and neurotic monkeys presented as the innocent victims of evil. Victimized animals who are furry, whimpering, crying, and spilling red blood arose more sympathy because viewers can more easily anthropomorphize them (Jasper 1997). Yet, animal rights organizations that use images of animal abuse in their own campaigns have also been critical of picturing animal suffering when they consider it gratuitous or when they do not feel that the context justifies it. In 2008, the artist Adel Abdessemed exhibited a video that included footage of six animals being bludgeoned to death with a sledgehammer on a farm in Mexico. His exhibition was closed down after protests from animal rights groups (Watt

Fig. 9. Animal Portraiture Exhibit Flyer
Image courtesy Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Paris .

Personality to the concept of “Animal.” We saw a wholesale shift from the Animal being perceived as something wild, natural and hostile – and therefore separate from the Human – to a perception of closeness and kinship between animal and human. Post-exhibit, the relevance to visitors of the thematic cluster of “Nature,” “Wild/Free” and “Violence” fell to 25% from the pre-exhibit level of 60%. Conversely, the combination of “Personality,” “Kinship” and “Vulnerable” now accounted for a full 75% of the aggregate intensity scores (a measure of the depth and emotion in the visitors’ perception of “Animal” based on the degree of elaboration and detail given in their response). These changes suggest that the effect of the exhibit went beyond isolated changes in perceptions around individual themes, to changes in the overall cultural perception of the Animal with possible implications for the nature of the relationship between the Human and the Animal.

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2010). The web site for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) encourages people to take action against portrayals of animal cruelty on the internet, but makes a clear distinction between animal cruelty imagery that is “educational, depicting the cruel behind-thescenes reality of industries that thrive on animal exploitation and abuse” and “(o)ther sources (that) are merely depicting cruelty for shock value” (PETA, 2011). When is shock advocacy legitimately “educational?” When does art that depicts animal cruelty as part of its social commentary become simply gratuitous? Surely it is not simply a question of who is doing the dissemination that determines the acceptability of shock imagery. There is no doubt that picturing the suffering animal has legitimacy as part of what we might call investigative journalism. Exposing – and documenting – animal abuse must be an essential component of the work of animal rights organizations. But it is a big step from that to creating a visual monoculture of grisly imagery and justifying its widespread dissemination as educational. What are the long-term effects of these shock advocacy images on the cultural relationship between the human and the animal – particularly now that exposure to acts of animal cruelty has moved beyond the still image to the almost ubiquitously available graphic video? In the context of exhibiting captive animals in a zoo setting, it has been argued that such a setting only serves to convince visitors that dominate the

natural world (Kellert, 1997) and substantiates “the dualism at the very origin of the relation between man and animal” (Berger 1980, 28). Is this effect also possible when we are bombarded with constant imagery showing human domination of animals in other contexts – such as images of factory farming, seal culls, or dog fighting? Could these images serve to undermine further the standing of animals in human culture by confirming them as the objects of human subjugation, entertainment and cruelty? It could be argued that generating shocking visual imagery is the easy option. It takes little thought and gets attention – and sometimes headlines – simply by its sheer awfulness. Yet it does so because of its unashamed, cheaply voyeuristic nature. To paraphrase Randy Malamud’s commentary about the zoo-going experience (1998), these images of animal abuse can be considered minimally imaginative, cheaply vicarious and inhibitive, rather than generative of a positive experience of the animal and its valued place in human culture. Further, according to Sontag (2003, 109) “our capacity to respond to our experiences with emotional freshness and ethical pertinence is being sapped by the relentless diffusion of vulgar and appalling images.” It may be undeniable that outrage is an important element in the fight against continued cruelty to animals. But how does it work and for how long? Myers (2006) points out that imagery, particularly highly disturbing imagery, is not

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Fig. 10. Animal farmed for his fur in Kemijärvi, Finland. This photograph was published by the Finnish animal rights organisation Oikeutta eläimille ("Justice for Animals") after an undercover investigation of Finnish fur farms (Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oikeutta_el%C3%A4imille_-_Fur_farming_in_Finland_02.jpg)

Fig. 11. Sharks after Finning (Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Shark_finning.j pg)

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Fig. 12. A baby monkey before being removed from the University of California, Riverside (Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Britches.jpg)

Fig. 13. Pig and piglets in a gestation crate (Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Schweine-lsz61.jpg)

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Fig. 14. Elephant killed by poachers, Voi area, Kenya (Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/53/Elephant0567.JPG) Fig. 14. Edith, a chimpanzee born in the Saint Louis Zoo, found by a PETA investigator 37 years later in a roadside zoo in Texas called the Amarillo Wildlife Refuge

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(Source:http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edith,_PETA.jpg)

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position animals as our kin, while having their own “personality” and their own visible worth based on their unique animality, are more likely to encourage the development of the sort of human-animal relationships that could resolve some of our most devastating animal exploitations. This approach finds support in the philosophy literature. It has been suggested that humans have “nested communities” of relations to others, some of which are closer to us and some further away (Callicott 1992). An ethics of care approach to this issue would suggest that it could be productive to explore ways that encourage humans to extend their more intimate circles of care outwards, developing greater kinship with animals – be they farm animals or those who are threatened or endangered. “Appropriate” animal representation may be a valuable tool to achieve kinship with animals with whom we cannot so easily develop a day to day relationship based on direct contact. A similar concept arises in Warwick Fox’s Theory of General Ethics where, as part of a much broader theory of ethics, he proposes that we have “an obligation to offer saving help only to supersignificant and significant others” (Fox 2006, 3838). He includes companion animals in these categories. While it is unlikely that we can elevate animals, other than companion animals, to the status of significant others, cultural constructs that emphasize concepts of personality, kinship and vulnerability are more likely to move us in that direction than the more distancing concepts of the animal as a dominated, violated other, or as a wild, free and violent creature who belongs in a distant, nonhuman Nature. Some animal advocacy groups are moving away from, or trying alternative approaches to, shock imagery as the bread-andbutter approach to highlighting and communicating the very real issues in animal exploitation that need to be tackled. We could not find any shock imagery on the web site for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (www.aspca.org). The web site for The Humane Society of The United States (www.humanesociety.org) contains number of sections clearly targeted at building positive relations with animals – though many of these sections still contain embedded videos of animal abuse. PETA has for some time added a “glamour” approach to broadcast their animal advocacy messages – especially when these messages are targeted at younger audiences. We have shown that one particular

immune to having unintended consequences. Such imagery may generate a form of mild posttraumatic stress disorder in viewers and evoke selfprotective responses. These responses are both immediate (turning away, shutting the eyes, etc.) and long-term adaptation mechanisms that may involve pre-emptive avoidance of such imagery as well as habituation to it. “(T)he “reality” of the image will count for nothing if that reality seems too horrific to be countenanced” (Baker 2001, 220). Further, at the emotional level, the effects of such imagery become attenuated over time and/or, at the cultural level, the idea of violence may become normalized. Myers points out that such imagery does not work on its own, but as part of a complex interaction with people’s moral and cultural values. He suggests that “(e)ven ‘hard hitting’ images need to be analyzed for their nuanced meaning in the context of the moral narrative that is constructed” (Myers 2007, 30). Absent such understanding, one may end up only appealing to those who are essentially already convinced. Conclusions Although animal rights groups and conservation groups are seemingly at odds on many of their fundamental values, they display remarkable similarities in their visual cultures and narratives. Both display the animal as separate from, and a victim of, the human. In an attempt to gain attention through shock, outrage and guilt, visual imagery constantly reinforces the negative aspects of human behaviour, and creates an ever-increasing cultural distance between the human and the animal. We believe that such approaches are, in the long run, counterproductive as people adapt, tune out, or even accept, the portrayed negativity both emotionally and culturally. Worrisome trends in the direction of cultural adaptation can already be seen. For instance, mobile platforms using the Android operating system have recently seen the release of KG Dogfighting - a video game application that allows players to “feed, water, train and fight” their virtual dog against other players (Android Market, 2011)[2] . We suggest that continued progress both in conservation efforts and in animal rights advocacy does not depend on continued castigation of the human, but rather on embedding in our cultures the type of humananimal relationship on which positive change can be built. Rather than positioning animals as subjugated, exploitable others, we believe that visual and narrative approaches that culturally

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4 The publishers of this application make the following comments: “We are confident this game will be a net benefit to dogs as it has been in our operating agreement from the start of this project that a portion of the proceeds go to animal rescue organizations. Further, this is a satire about the ridiculousness of dog fighting and we believe in the power of a modern media tool to educate and raise awareness of the real horrors.”

Bibliography Android Market. 2011. https://market.android.com/details?id=kagegames.apps.KG_AppD1 &feature=search_result Baker, Steve. 2000. The Postmodern Animal. London: Reaktion Books. Baker, Steve. 2001. Picturing The Beast. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections of Photography. trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. Berger, John. 1980. About Looking. New York: Pantheon Books. Berger, Harry Jr. 1994. Fictions of the Pose: Facing the Gaze of Early Modern Portraiture. Representations 46, 87-120. Callicott, J Baird. 1992. Animal Liberation and Environmental Ethics: Back Together Again. In Hargrove, Eugene C. (ed.). The Animal Rights/Environmental Ethics Debate: The Environmental Perspective, 249-261. Albany: SUNY Press. Condit, Anne. 2010. Hope: Propaganda and the Portrait of a President. Compass – A Journal of Leadership and Service at Birmingham-Southern College XII, 16-19. Fairey, Shepard and Jennifer Gross (eds.). 2009. Art for Obama: Designing Manifest Hope and the Campaign for Change. New York: Abrams Image.

Fig. 15. Edith, a chimpanzee born in the Saint Louis Zoo, found by a PETA investigator 37 years later in a roadside zoo in Texas called the Amarillo Wildlife Refuge

Fox, Warwick. 2006. A Theory of General Ethics: Human Relationships, Nature and the Built Environment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Kindle Edition.

(Source:http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edith,_PETA.jpg)

approach to animal imagery has the potential to promote a shift in how the animal is perceived. Our aim is not to promote any one approach over others, but rather to use our findings to raise questions about how different visual cultures may affect the human-animal relationship over the long term. We suggest that animal advocacy groups, like wildlife conservation groups, could usefully examine different approaches to their visual cultures and narratives. There may be opportunities to create more productive approaches before the easy option of shocking, voyeuristic imagery beats our audience into numbness and runs out of steam, even as it continues to embed the Animal’s position as a subjugated, exploitable object in our society.

Gunnthorsdottir, Anna. 2001. Physical Attractiveness of an Animal Species as a Decision Factor for its Preservation. Anthrozoos 14(4), 204-215. Jasper, James. M. 1997. The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jasper, James M. and Jane D. Poulsen. 1995. Recruiting Strangers and Friends: Moral Shocks and Social Networks in Animal Rights and Anti-Nuclear Protests. Social Problems 42(4), 493-512. Kalof, Linda; Joe Zammit-Lucia and Jennifer Rebecca Kelly. 2011. The Meaning of Animal Portraiture in a Museum Setting: Implications for Conservation. Organization and Environment 24(2), 150-174. Kellert, Stephen R. 1997. Kinship to Mastery: Biophilia in Human Evolution and Development. Washington DC: A Shearwater Book published by Island Press. Kozloff, Max. 2007. The Theatre of the Face. New York: Phaidon Press Inc. Malamud, Randy. 1998. Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity. New York: New York University Press.

Notes 1 Baker also argues that the self-consciously serious post-modern artist may fear that attempts at individualizing the animal will be read as a sentimental over-investment in the animal’s appearance, thereby undermining the perceived “seriousness” of a piece of art based on rationality with a rather distasteful indulgence in emotional content.

Myers, Eugene Olin. 2006. The Psychology of Photographic Imagery in Communicating Conservation. Unpublished contribution to the International League of Conservation Photographers.

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PETA 2011. http://www.peta.org/action/get-active-online/cruelty-onthe-internet.aspx. Pope-Hennessy, John. 1979. The Portrait in the Renaissance: The AW Mellon Lectures in Fine Arts. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Regan, Tom. 2004. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Sagoff, M. 1984. Animal Liberation and Environmental Ethics: Bad Marriage, Quick Divorce. Osgoode Hall Law Journal, 22, 297-307. Scudder, Joseph N. and Carol Bishop Mills. 2009. The Credibility of Shock Advocacy: Animal Rights Attack Messages. Public Relations Review, 35, 162-164. Singer, Peter. 1998. Interview on Start the Week, BBC Radio 4, 11 May 1998. Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador. Watt, Yvette. 2010. Art, Animals, and Ethics, In Marc Bekoff (ed.), Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare, Volume 1, 7781. ABC-CLIO. Welch, David. 2005. Painting, Propaganda and Patriotism. History Today 55(7), 42-50. Zammit-Lucia, Joe. 2008a. First Steps: Conserving Our Environment. New York: Matte Press. Zammit-Lucia, Joe. 2008b. I AM - Musings on Animal Portraiture and Its Role as a Conservation Tool. Unpublished. www.jzlimages.com. Zammit-Lucia, Joe. 2010. Artist Statement. Unpublished. www.jzlimages.com

Linda Kalof is Professor of Sociology and Founding Director of Michigan State University’s interdisciplinary doctoral specialization in Animal Studies (http://animalstudies.msu.edu). She has published widely in animal studies and currently edits The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies (Oxford University Press) and The Animal Turn (Michigan State University Press). She is serving a three year appointment to the National Academy of Sciences’ National Research Council Committee to review the US wild horse and burro management program, and is co-curator of Interspecies, an exhibit on cross-species cooperation at The Gallery Project, Ann Arbor, MI.

Dr Joe Zammit-Lucia is an artist, author and independent scholar. Working at the intersection of many disciplines he explore issues relating to the relationship between how we organize human societies and our interaction with the non-human world around us. A widely recognized animal portrait artist, his work has been featured in the leading fine art photography magazines worldwide and his exhibition of photographic art entitled “Experience, Personality, Emotion” is currently touring across museums and public exhibition spaces in Europe. He is the President of WOLFoundation.org, a member of the Dean’s Advisory Board at the College of Arts and Sciences, Florida International University, and has served as Special Adviser to the Director General of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. He is a Board Member of the African Rainforest Conservancy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

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FAD OF THE YEAR

At the end of 2010 one of the UK’s commercial television channels, ITV, selected twenty of the most popular TV adverts from the year and entered them in to their own competition to find the television ‘Ad of the Year’. The winning advert was one featuring a rescue dog called Harvey who is in kennels, hoping somebody will come along and adopt him. Text by N atalie Gilbert

Thinkbox Harvey, 2010
Thinkbox

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through the bars of their kennels, clearly looking make a choice about which of them they will adopt as their pet and take home. They reach Harvey’s kennel and the dog turns on a TV behind him to show them his own advert: in the advert he cooks, cleans, mows the lawn, washes the windows, collects the children from school,

o be clear, a dog rescue centre did not make the advert, it was made by an advertising agency called Thinkbox who use Harvey as an example to demonstrate how powerful TV advertising can be. In the advert a young couple visit a dog rescue centre. They look at each dog in turn

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Thinkbox Harvey, 2010
Thinkbox

Thinkbox Harvey, 2010
Thinkbox

their resources gives them a greater chance of detecting an approaching lion than any one would have on its own,” (ibid.).

entertains them and tucks them in at night; he is also seen using the human loo. In essence, Harvey is the ‘perfect dog’ in the eyes of most domesticated households. His advert impresses the couple and he packs his bag ready to leave the kennels. The advert is of course meant to be light hearted and humorous, but its very existence tells a much deeper story about our relationship with dogs and the outcome of their domestication – the advert could not be a success if there were not a strong foundation to this story that engaged a TV viewing audience. Thinkbox has naturally chosen an animal and a situation to maximise impact and Harvey did just this: “Thinkbox’s TV ad has seen Thinkbox.tv traffic increase by over 400%, Harvey’s Facebook page attract over 7,000 fans... It has also attracted over a million online views following 260 million broadcast TV views” (thinkbox.tv: 2010) and won the ‘Ad of the Year’ competition. It’s doubtful that a cockroach called Harvey could generate such an enormous surge of interest and likeability, or the tagline for the ad: ‘Every Home Needs a Harvey’. Harvey is the very idea of domesticated bliss between Man and Dog where the essence of domestication is to operate as part of a team. This “cooperative behavior” (Budiansky, 1992: 54) is merely a reflection of what happens in the wild:

Harvey is forming a contract with his new owners in a domesticated setting where there is washing to be done, clothes to be ironed and children to be fed. He knows that new owners will feed him and offer him shelter so, in return and to convince them to take him, he advertises his ability to help around the house. However, in reality, humans are not keeping their part of the bargain. It is a sad fact that in the UK in 2009 the RSPCA found new homes for 90,493 abandoned or rescued animals (rspca.org.uk, 2011) and “investigated 141,280 cruelty complaints” (ibid.). Battersea Dogs & Cats Home looks after 10,600 cats and dogs every year (battersea.org.uk, 2011), whilst The Dogs Trust is looking after a further 16,000 dogs (dogstrust.org.uk, 2011). The advert may be imaginative and effective, but it only forms a contract between Thinkbox and its clients. Harvey is only a tool for entertainment and to generate sales. His situation, however, is very real.

“In mixed-species flocks, such as the herds of giraffe, zebra, and wildebeest that are always grazing on African savannas in picture postcards and wildlife documentaries, the members of the group gain an added advantage because the especially acute senses of one species can make up for the deficiencies of another... Pooling

Natalie Gilbert has worked professionally in online, marketing and editorial in diverse capacities for sixteen years across many different industries, but has always found her feet firmly in language, creation and progress. She takes every opportunity to explore the realms of artistic, literary and visual possibility. With volunteer experience at animal care centres around the world, a degree in Wildlife Photography and a postgraduate in Anthrozoology, she has followed a keen interest in the human-animal bond and artistic portrayals of animal beings in modern society, on and offline.

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THE SADDEST SHOW ON EARTH

Since 1884, children across the United States have been dazzled by the sequined wonders of the Ringling Bros. Circus. For many a youngster the spectacle of costumed elephants performing myriad tricks under the big top is a highlight of the show. Yet the bright spotlight of the center ring casts a dark shadow across this American institution. Persistent allegations of elephant abuse have trailed the traveling show for years. Text and interview questions to Jeremy Smallwood and Pam Mufson by C hris Hunter

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ensitive to the rising influence of the animal rights movement and challenged by an increase in local governments who have enacted bans on animal acts, Ringling Bros. has adopted what it considers to be a transparent approach to its training methods. On its website the circus portrays itself as a responsible, ethical purveyor of animal entertainment, claiming its training is “…based on reinforcement in the form of food rewards and words of praise. Verbal or physical abuse…are strictly prohibited.” There is even the inference that its elephants enjoy their place before the cheering crowds due to “the mental stimulation of performing.” But according to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), a group dedicated to exposing and ending animal cruelty, Ringling Bros. Circus actively engages in wrongful animal handling. A video obtained and posted to Youtube in 2009 exposes what PETA describes as “relentless abuse”. However, the limitation of such shock videos is that they fail to reach the audience most likely to influence ticket sales: middle income parents who have little inclination to search out gruesome footage exposing such inconvenient truths.

In late 2010 PETA contacted Y&R Chicago, the Midwestern hub of the global Y&R advertising network with an assignment to pull back the curtain on Ringling Bros’ animal cruelty in a way more likely to break through to parents. The response was a series of circus posters that showed a ticket to the Greatest Show on Earth comes at a great price indeed. Recently Antennae spoke with Y&R Creative Directors Jeremy Smallwood and Pamela Mufson, who created the campaign, about the challenges of bringing PETA’s message to moms and dads — and the Cannes awardwinning campaign that resulted. Chris Hunter: W hat are your m em ories of the circus as children? Did you ever go to a circus? Jerem y Sm allwood: I actually have very fond memories of going to the circus as a child. I mean other than the general fear of clowns, I think most kids think it’s a great time. And that's sort of what drove us to make this work. It's difficult for a child to understand exactly what's going on behind the scenes, but if parents know, maybe

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Paul Rückmar Pelzwaren Fourrures, 1924
Paul Rückmar

Sadly, it's almost always the fear of pain being inflicting for an unwanted action. Elephants are very communal animals. Remove them from each other, isolate them, and you completely shatter their nature. That, even more than the physical pain, might be the cruelest part of it all.

they'll skip that activity. Pam M ufson: I actually never went to the circus as a child. But I always wanted to. That's why it's so imperative to inform parents of the truth. After all, they're the ones who decide what entertainment their kids take in.

CH: W hat was the key insight on the creative brief that struck you as the m ost surprising?

CH: Did it occur to you then – or as a parent now – that circus anim als m ay in fact not want to be part of these perform ances?

JS: That such a historicized business hasn't evolved, hasn't even tried. They assume that parents don't care - that the public doesn't care.

JS: I think most parents know that something isn't right. But the idea of depriving their kids of that experience overrules their instincts. With a little push though, and armed with the right knowledge, its an easier decision.

CH: In m any such cam paigns, it’s com m on practice to put up a real photograph of an anim al being abused along with a very straightforward plea. Your cam paign has the look of cheerful circus posters that, on closer viewing, reveal a very dark twist. W hy did you choose this approach?

CH: What happens to elephants when they’re trained by Ringling Bros.? JS: A pretty traumatic experience to start. I mean, it's not a stretch to train an animal, of any kind, to do amazing things with the right motivation.

JS: It's so hard to break through the familiar, the

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that catches you off guard.

already established idea of what the circus is the idyllic vision. We see what we want to see, it makes us feel better, makes buying that ticket a little easier to stomach. The use of the cheerful, celebrated illustration style played into that construct and then turned it on its head.

PM : It all comes down to how you use advertising. We chose to make the poster interact with its surroundings. Just seeing around the corner changes how you see something, in this case the circus. That can be just as powerful as any video.

CH: In a world where Youtube shockvideos and stories of anim al abuse spread like wildfire through social m edia why is traditional advertising — old fashioned posters in this case — still a powerful way to raise awareness of this subject?

CH: Now did PETA and the general public react to your concept? JS: Like most causes worth fighting for, it's not going to be one magical solution that solves the problem, but many. PETA is a great organization that knows you can't just say the same thing, be in the same places all the time and expect the result to change. They are nimble in how they act and flexible with their tactics. They liked, I think, that this was one unique approach to both the problem and target. Hopefully, the folks that saw it decided against buying tickets that year. And maybe instead just had a fun day at the park.

JS: Youtube and most videos online are consumed at such a staggering rate, that it all blends together. We've become desensitized to all those videos, nothing rings authentic and true – just entertainment. I think effectiveness in raising awareness is all about context; that becomes paramount. Where did I see it and how was it served up to me? If I'm expecting the shock and awe video, the message isn't likely to stick in the same way as a less in-your-face approach

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Jeremy Smallwood and Pam Mufson have worked together for nearly 9 years. They met at LBWorks, an agency within Leo Burnett, which specialized in technology and oddly enough, mints. Jeremy was a designer interested in switching to art direction. Pam was a writer who needed a new partner. They joined forces and voilà, a team was born. At Leo Burnett, they worked on many brands including Altoids, Turner Classic Movies, Kellogg’s, Maytag, Nintendo and when they were really lucky, Tampax and Always. After 6 years, they moved to mcgarrybowen. Their first year, they found themselves working on everything from JP Morgan to Kraft Salad Dressings to Chevron. Eventually, they were handed the reigns of Lunchables and Oscar Mayer. They ran the meat business for a year and a half. They enjoyed their time, but no longer eat cold cuts. Currently, They’re Creative Directors at Y&R Chicago. For the past year and half, they’ve managed DieHard Batteries, Greater Chicago Food Depository and most recently, BMO Harris Bank. Every day is filled with adventure, challenges and of course, adjustable interest rates. Chris Hunter is an SVP Group Creative Director at the Chicago office of Y&R Midwest

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HAPPY EASTER

Even if we are talking about this image as an “advertisement”, it is clear that its scope is not business, but to inform and raise consciousness about the slaughtering of animals. The message itself is rather peculiar: it’s obviously about animals, but without including any image of them in the picture. If a contradiction exists, it has nothing to do with the message conveyed by the advertisement, but rather with ambiguous attitudes of humans towards animals. In this case, it’s the lambs who are not portrayed in the advertisement. Text by S abrina Tonutti

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a thing from the start; it is to define the animal as a thing beforehand” (from Theory of Religion). However, despite this process of serial slaughtering being embedded in our sociocultural system, there are many highly controversial elements in it, which have to do with the act of taking the life of a living being, an act that always needs to be culturally legitimized, and “properly” codified within the cultural context. The legitimization process relies on several integrated actions:

hat we see in their place is the red blood which streamed from their slit throats. Thus, in the same way, the lambs who crowd abattoirs before Easter (and not only then) are absent - as living, sentient beings – from the discourses and the consciousness of those who eat them. In other terms, we could say that lambs are either “lamb meat”, “Easter roast”, or do not exist. In antiquity, Marcus Aurelius emphasized the importance of “representations” in guiding our approach to the world: “how marvellous useful it is for a man to represent into himself meats, and all such things that are for the mouth, under a right apprehension and imagination! As for example: this is the carcass of a fish; this is of a bird; and this of a hog (…)” (in Meditations). The way we represent things, think about and speak of them (our metanarratives) is a form of our thoughts in action. Mainly for this reason, farm-animals destined to the abbattoir must be thought of in terms of “slaughterable” objects or food matter. As George Bataille wrote: “(…) to kill an animal and alter it as one pleases is not merely to change into a thing that which doubtless was not

- the classification of animals in specific categories regarding the animals’ use (“meat animals”, “farm animals”, etc.); - the projection onto these categories of utilitarian-mechanistic connotations (these animals are portrayed as, and transformed in, “animal machines”, quoting Ruth Harrison); - the exclusion of any form of familiarization with farm animals (which might enable the emergence of the individual, biographical dimension of animals, and, in the same way,

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Campagne Per Gli Animali Buona Pasqua, 2011
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for meat, animals either do not appear (and so what is shown is only the “products” in which their bodies have been transformed), or are portrayed in a fake bucolic context, evoking a natural, healthy life and freedom. A linguistic dissociation concurs with this same process: people eat pork, not pig, at a supermarket they buy sausages, mince, ham, and so forth, and many are often at a loss when they try to guess which animal some products have belonged to. This process is rooted more deeply in ideology: a teleological representational process operates, in that it implies that animals are “born to” be eaten, no matter what we feel about it, that are “destined” to be used by humans, “ends” of the “creation” (as Aristotle dixit and Kant underlined). Just because lambs are absent from the image above, they allow us to argue, in a metonymic way, about the entire farm-animal category, since we are dealing with animals who share the same status (objects, instead of

stimulate in humans possible forms of empathy); - and, last but not least, the dissociation of different levels and dimensions of reality. Dissociation only works if we compartmentalise elements which belong to the same phenomenon, and concur to the same process. The killing of animals in slaughterhouses enacts several forms of dissociation. A spatial dissociation, to begin with: the processes of raising and slaughtering of animals take place far from the public eye, and remain almost completely unknown to those who don’t belong to the farming sector. Parallel to this, there is an iconic dissociation regarding the presentation of animal food: while in many countries in the past etiquette requested whole animals to be presented on the table, with no need to disguise the origin of the food, nowadays the opposite tendency guides culinary habits and also the planning of food commercials and marketing. In advertisements

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subjects-of-a-life, in Tom Regan’s words), as a consequence of human attitudes and practices towards them. Being “animal” is a condition, not an essence. However, even if we can think of lambs in terms of a species representative of a wider category (farm-animals), their tender age and some relevant morphological and behavioural traits which characterize them add complexity to the legitimization of their slaughtering (and tells us something significant on humans as well): these traits - white vellum (symbolically recalling the idea of purity, and innocence), their cries resembling those of human babies, and also their neotenic morphologies (like rounded heads and features, typical of babies and young animals) - all these elements constitute et-epimeletic signals (appeals for care and protection), which (ought to!) elicit in adult human beings the appropriate epimeletic behaviour: nurturing. To ignore this “appeal” and suppress the potential expressions of human epimeleia (caring behaviour) constitute another obstacle in the dissociation process on which the acceptance of slaughtering is based. The aim of campaigns like “Campagne per gli animali” is to bring “obstacles” and contradictions to the surface, to denounce the silence which surrounds certain practices, such as the sacrificial slaughter of lambs, to give faces, names and voices to animal suffering. Against this background, the choice of not portraying the lambs in an image which speaks about them is unusual, but, at the same time, appropriate, in that it epitomizes the absence of animals per se in people’s thoughts and the cultural removal of those practices which every single person, with their daily choices, contribute either to maintaining or changing.

Dr Sabrina Tonutti is a Lecturer and a Researcher in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Udine, Italy. After a degree in Humanities at the University of Trieste, Italy, in 1996, she specialised in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Padua, and received her PhD in 2006 for a dissertation on the anthropology of the animal rights movement. Her work was published in 2007 as Diritti Animali. Storia e antropologia di un movimento (Forum Ed.). Dr Tonutti is currently working at the Department of Economics, Society and Territory (University of Udine, Italy) and has carried out ethnographic research in Italy, Switzerland, and Great Britain. Her studies focus on human-animal relationships, new social movements (and particularly animal advocacy as a social and cultural phenomenon), biodiversity and local knowledge, anthropology of food, and epistemological reflections on the human-animal divide in anthropology. She is the author more than 30 articles and the following books: Water and Anthropology (EMI 2007); Manuale di zooantropologia (Meltemi, 2007, with R. Marchesini), and Animali magici (De Vecchi, 2000, with R. Marchesini).

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ANIMALS ON THE RUNWAY

The discussion of animals in graphic art has radically changed since about 1950. In contemporary performances and installations, even living animals are displayed, which often leads to ethical discussions. Recent work, however, reflects a new societal view of animals: A strictly anthropocentric view has had its day, now animals have come to be seen as equal creatures and have emancipated themselves in artistic representation. Text by B ettina Richter

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lready very early on in the history of the poster, animals were depicted, mostly in purely illustrative form without educational goals. Still, it is worth examining examples from this medium in order to see in what ways the animal came to be represented, how the view on the animal has changed, and for which products the animal will be seen as suitable for advertising. Be it for alcohol, floor wipes or an evening at the ballet, animals are extremely eye-catching figures in advertisement and often earn the important “ahhh”-effect in a marketing strategy. However, the humanization of the animal world on posters has also been extensively explored. The tooth brushing squirrel and the clothed penguin belong to a former fantasy and fairytale world of illustrated posters. In addition to posters where the animals become the main protagonists, there are also many depictions of the animal-human relationship. The extravagant woman, who advertised for the fur fashion line of Paul Rückmar in 1924, completely tamed her wildcat. She symbolized the dominion of people over animals, which had not been deeply questioned for centuries. In 1913 the PKZ-Mann, with the company of dogs, was her male counterpart, and the trendy punch advertisement from 1960 was her successor.

The dog as faithful friend of man is seen on many poster images. As the devoted guardian of an Olivetti, he stands in the center of the picture, but in passing he mostly appears at the people’s feet. The cat is presented completely differently, based on its assumed characteristic as an independent, individualistic animal. With enormous eyes for the “Black Cat” liquor advertisement, the cat almost appears sinister. The trunk of the mighty, goodnatured elephant is finally not only a picture motif found in children’s books, but also in a particularly original image used by the Pirelli-Reifen tire company. What the cultural scholar Thomas Macho has asserted about the use of animals in contemporary art applies as well to their portrayal in posters: “The animals are not used exclusively for reasons alien to themselves as animals. In many cases, they also demonstrate how much the animal is not merely a fantasy of our minds, but also a possibility of creaturliness, existence, and happiness that we ourselves may have lost.” Dr. Bettina Richter is Curator, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Plakatsammlung. Original Exhibit Co-Curators: Dr. Bettina Richter and Alessia Contin (Registrar), Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Plakatsammlung. The above text was translated by Abigail Gottinger, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. With special thanks to Dr Nigel Rothfels for initiating and co-ordinating this adaptation of the original exhibition project for Antennae.

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Paul Rückmar Pelzwaren Fourrures, 1924
Paul Rückmar

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Schwarzer Kater Garantie für gute Laune, 1966
Schwarzer Kater

Tierschutz! Tierschutz!, 1925
Tierschutz!

Gordon’s It Must be Gordon’s, Gordon’s Dry Gin, 1967
Gordon’s

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PKZ Die Nuance vom Mann zum Gentleman, 1971
PKZ

Co-op Bodenwichse, 1946
Co-op

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Laboratories Ed. Mottier Colle M Elephant, 1952
Laboratories Ed. Mottier

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Zimmerli Tricots Zimmerli Tricots, 1943
Zimmerli Tricots

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PKZ Burgher, Kehl & Co, 1913
PKZ

Lupolen Basf Hausgerät aus Lupolen, 1955
Lupolen Basf

Pirelli Atlante, 1954
Pirelli

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Setter Set Nylons, 1959
Setter Set

Punch Boutique Pumch, 1960
Punch

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Télévision Ducastel Satisfaction réelle, 1955
Télévision Ducastel

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‘WORKS PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION’ POSTERS In 1933 and 1934, as part of the “New Deal” economic plan for the United States, President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration created a new federal agency called the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to hire artists to document and promote American cultural life. Text by S usan Nance

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set in artist’s canvas-style backdrops that eschew detail in favor of stylish efficiency. These advertisements seem aimed at questioning the perceived dividing line between nature and culture, which we often associate with modernity, because they portray nature as culture. Here animals captured from wild or foreign places are extracted from those histories and geographies and presented as living works of art. Being statefunded, with no advertising agency accounting department to answer to, the WPA artists created advertising posters that were indeed experimental and sleek, although they may have seemed too high-minded for many zoo patrons. What is more, the WPA “Zoo” animals come across as works of modern art with speciesspecific personalities. Indeed, the ads depict the conventional characters that each of these species carries even today: panda bear as cute stuffed toy, hippo as rotund comic, herons as silently elegant posers, panther as lithe stalker, polar bear as ice berg, stampeding bull elephant as powerful provocateur who addresses the viewer directly and dares him or her to stare in awe as long as possible before jumping out of the way. Each of these artistic animal essences represents a particular emotion, be it (anthropocentric) paternalism, delight, mirth, or awe. And, here is advertising in its most powerfully efficient and democratic mode. The WPA zoo

ike most New Deal projects, the jobs and government spending of the agency were too modest to end the Great Depression. Nonetheless, the WPA employed a small army of photographers, writers, painters, poets and illustrators that left behind a cache of creative work that is an invaluable window into the culture and politics of the decade. Among that work is the famed WPA art posters and its “Zoo” promotional series, which endeavored to boost the local economy of a given city by promoting the urban tourism of zoo attendance. Housed at the Library of Congress, today these beautiful advertising tools mark out for us the moment in American public culture when zoos and wild animals became modern in a twentieth-century sense. The WPA series ordered American citizens to collect the kids and “Visit the Zoo.” The silkscreened posters offered such institutions as both portal into the natural world and modern entertainment option featuring wild animals as embellishments to urban American life. Indeed, in the “Zoo” series we sense no bars or cement or feces, no stereotypic pacing, no jostling zoo patrons, no man-made noise or overflowing garbage bins, no bread lines or homeless camps, that is, none of the troubling realities of animal captivity, city living or the Depression. What we do see are idealized creatures

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WPA Brookfield Zoo
WPA

To be sure, the WPA zoo was a museum of animals seen as natural art for a deserving public; it was a “New Deal for Animals” zoo. Why portray zoos that way? In those days, many in the zoo business were reimagining captive animal

ads edit out the complexities of product and consumer context in order to get across a simple, user-friendly message about each animal that flatters the viewer as a person amused and enriched by his or her consumption of animals images.

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WPA Brookfield Zoo,
WPA

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displays as a modern entertainment that could help support both local public education and a broader conservation agenda. WPA artists supplied ways of conceptualizing and communicating this linking of show business and uplift in accessible ways that still gave a nod to the American elites, government officials and social engineers who worried that most urban Americans were ignorant of animals. Advocates for conservationism, they believed most city dwellers were unfamiliar with the idea that wild animals were intrinsically valuable parts of national and global ecosystems. If impressed with the artistry of nature—even in a zoo animal— citizens might be less likely to support activities that destroyed habitat and more likely to see a connection between zoos and state-supported conservationism, the thinking went. Of course, the taint of old sins remained as the modern zoo of the WPA was an educational institution advocating for conservation although it remained a net consumer of wild-born living things. Viewed up-close by citizens who saw them on walls in the subway, the post office or the zoo lobby itself, the WPA posters attempted to persuade by portraying tourism at zoos and national parks as patriotic, educational, modern. The WPA would similarly supply workers and funding to various zoos for the repair and expansion of their facilities. That infrastructure development worked in tandem with the enhanced advertising and rebranding provided by the “Zoo” art posters and other WPA funded promotional publications like Who’s Who in the Zoo (1937), a $1.69 gift shop pamphlet that explained the natural history of species common to American zoos. It came with a cover depicting a cartoon monkey smiling at the viewer while hanging by one foot and one hand from the “Z” and final “O” in the title. Thus did many American zoos reinvent themselves during the hard times of the 1930s – perhaps not as famously as the movie theatres in these years – but successfully enough that they flourished by remaining relevant in age when Frank Buck movies and other popular “tamer or wild beasts”-type entertainments offered wild animals, too, although with less modern sensibility and style.

WPA Visit the Zoo
WPA

Back Cover Image: Olivetti, Valentine, 1972

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Antennae.org.uk Issue twenty-three will be st online on the 21 136 of March 2012