Images in Tourism and Consumer Culture

CHAPTER 6 Selling a “Dutch Experience”: Images in Tourism and Consumer Culture Dellmann, Sarah, Images of Dutchness. Popular Visual Culture, Early | 265 Cinema, and the Emergence of a National Cliché, 1800-1914. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 doi: 10.5117/9789462983007_ch06 ABSTRACT This chapter investigates early tourist discourse (1875-1914) on the Nether- lands through material of mostly British, German, and Dutch origin – travel brochures from Thomas Cook, the Vereeniging voor Vreemdelingenverkeer (VVV), and the Centraal Bureau voor Vreemdelingenverkeer, as well as guide- books and travel writings. It traces the emergence of commercial tourism to the Netherlands by bringing together earlier forms of leisure travel to the Netherlands and the discovery of the Netherlands as a place worthwhile visit- ing by painters and writers of the Romanticist movement. In tourist discourse, information is linked to the advertising or purchase of a service or commodity – a travel arrangement, a postcard, or a souvenir. These commodities serve as mediators for experiencing the visited country; hence other visual media of consumer culture are investigated as well (advertising trade cards, picture post- cards). Images in tourist discourse and consumer culture mostly use the form of the cliché, regardless if these images were produced by Dutch or foreign people. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Dutch reactions to the cliché, which calls for rethinking the divide between self-image and outsiders’ image. KEYWORDS visual culture; consumer culture; tourism; visual media; nineteenth century; twentieth century; cliché; self-image and outsider’s image; landscape paint- ing; Romanticism; Picturesque 6.1 INTRODUCTION: DISCOVERING THE AUTHENTIC Information from promotional material in tourist discourse is often met with suspicion. In contrast to anthropology or geography, tourist discourse is not primarily concerned with acquainting the learning world with the customs, history, and landscape of faraway people and places according to the time’s standards of objectivity and truthfulness. In tourist discourse, information is linked to the advertising or purchase of a service or commodity – a travel 266 | arrangement, a postcard, or a souvenir. These commodities serve as mediators for experiencing the visited country or town.1 Suspicion about the reliabil- ity of information notwithstanding, tourist discourse and consumer culture are relevant sources of supposed common knowledge about the Netherlands. The term “tourism” entered French, English, German, and Dutch dic- tionaries between the last quarter of the nineteenth century and 1914. In this chapter, I use the term to refer to a special form of travel in the age of consumer culture, in which a commodified experience of “other people and places” is advertised (and sold) by emphasizing differences between the everyday life of the traveller and the tourist destination. While some studies use the term “tourism” as a synonym for travel or, anachronistically, for any practice of vol- untary travel to places in leisure, I will distinguish between “travel for leisure” and “tourism” and use the latter term exclusively for business-supported forms of travel for leisure for a limited time. This conceptualization implies limiting tourism to practices in industrialized societies. Industrialization profoundly changed organization, methods, and understanding of the concepts of work and leisure. One of the characteristics of Western industrialized societies is the existence of distinct places and times for working, living, and leisure. The means to sustain life were increasingly earned in the form of money, accumulated at one place during working hours, and spent elsewhere during leisure time. Purpose-built places for spending leisure time popped up in the decades around 1900 – restaurants and bars, hotels and seaside resorts, dance halls, theatres and later also movie palaces. These specialized leisure places were situated in public spaces and implied the consumption of goods and services. Consequently, spending leisure time increasingly took the form of consuming commodities; this development went hand in hand with strategies of the emerging leisure industry that adver- IMAGES OF DUTCHNESS tised its goods as personal experiences. Experiences thus were mediated via the consumption of commodities. As such, the advent of tourism as a special form of travel is closely tied to the advent of consumer culture in industrialized societies. Before I turn to the discussion of the archival material, I will briefly intro- duce key aspects in studies that respectively investigated the relation between tourism and authenticity and tourism as experience of difference. After that, I will sketch how authenticity is connected to selling a product. Typically and Authentically Dutch Tourism and tourist discourse have attracted a great number of studies from different disciplines; the dynamics between tourism and the image-shaping of other people and places have been investigated across the humanities and | 267 the social sciences. Jonathan Culler, John Fiske, and John Urry have investigated the processes and dynamics of meaning-making that the travelling tourists ascribed to the places visited (Culler 1988; Fiske 1989; Urry 2009). The connection of “typicality” (a defining category) with “authenticity” (an evaluative category) in the description of realist images of people and places is one characteristic of tourist discourse. Once the selected elements of the “typically and authentically” Dutch are used in tourist discourse to represent pars pro toto all people and all things Dutch, it becomes impossible to main- tain the idea that realist images of selected elements are an exclusively docu- mentary affair. On the one hand, such images document bits of reality; on the other hand, the generalizations based on these selections are not valid for the entirety they claim to cover. This, obviously, stands in tension with the prom- ise of tourist discourse that these images “simply show what was there”. Next to documenting bits of observable phenomena, tourist discourse produces certain bits as sight-worthy, authentic, and typical. Jonathan Culler writes in “The Semiotics of Tourism” that tourists who “set out in quest for the authentic” (Culler 1988, 158) needed signifiers that signpost the authenticity of certain places and sites in order to perceive their authenticity. Rejecting the opposition between “tourist trap” and “the real thing”, he concludes: Boorstin and his like assume that what is reproduced, represented, writ- ten about, is inauthentic, while the rest is authentic: tourists pay to see the tourist traps while the real thing is free as air. But “the real thing” must be marked as real, as sight-worthy; if it is not marked or differenti- ated, it is not a notable sight, even though it may be Japanese by virtue of SELLING A “Dutch EXPERIENCE”: ImAGES IN TOURISM AND CONSUMER CULTURE its location in Japan. The authentic is not something unmarked or undif- ferentiated; authenticity is a sign relation. (Culler 1988, 161, emphasis added) Following Culler, tourists set out to see particular sites, objects, and buildings as signs: in the eye of the tourist, every beer garden in Munich is considered a typical German beer garden, and every windmill is considered typically Dutch. This way of looking, according to Culler, turns tourists into semioticians who look for markers at the destinations, which have already been established in discourses of travel and tourism. Authenticity is then revealed as a discursive effect – and so is typicality. In line with Culler, Verhoeff points to another issue: if the typical and the authentic must be presented as typical and authentic, we find ourselves in the domain of interpretation, of ascription of meaning to the things in the world. 268 | The perception of something as typical and authentic requires an established system of signification that had already produced certain elements as such. The typical and the authentic then turn out to be relational categories because they can never be typical and authentic in and of themselves. Seen this way, typicality and authenticity are the opposition of what the terms came to stand in for in tourist discourse: these terms do not refer to an objective, realist documentation of “things that are there” (and have been so for a long time) but they are an effect, created in the rhetoric of realism and authenticity (Cf. Verhoeff 2006, 252–253). Understanding authenticity and typicality in this way opens the possibil- ity to investigate the processes with which typicality and authenticity were ascribed to certain phenomena (and not to others). Such an investigation is at the core of this chapter. The Experience of Dutchness In the section above, I briefly mentioned the search for differences as intrinsic to the search for typicality in tourist discourse. Unlike some other forms of travel, tourism is motivated by the expectation that the destination has inter- esting experiences to offer that differ from the tourist’s everyday life. From a tourist’s standpoint, what is considered “typical” and “authentic” also needs to be “different” from their everyday life in one way or another. John Urry even goes so far as to say that difference was the key feature of tourism, and not authenticity (Cf. Urry 2009, 12). As I stated above, tourist discourse advertises goods and services by prom- ising, both directly and indirectly, a certain experience.

Load more