Antennae ISSN 1756-9575 Issue 23 - Winter 2012

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 Story / Kelly Enright1 – 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 / Emma Power -- Kill ‘em dead!” the Ordinary Practices of Pest Control in the Home 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

2 EDITORIAL ANTENNAE ISSUE 23

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 increased popularity of social networks advertising strategies have more and more come to play a pivotal roleT 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 who 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 posters 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 consideration of the use of animal imagery in the advertisements produced by animal advocacy and conservation organisations through a thought-provoking piece by Joe Zammit-Lucia and Linda Kalof, 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

3 CONTENTS ANTENNAE ISSUE 23

6 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 Adele Tiengo and Matteo Andreozzi

9 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 Barbara J. Phillips

20 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 Adele Tiengo and Leonardo Caffo

23 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 Claire Molloy

28 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

31 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 Cluny South

39 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 Iwan Rhys Morus

42 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 Louise Squire

49 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 Gene Gable

51 Evolution and Design The animal as sign has a long evolutionary history, but with the onset of cultural modernity it began to assume new semiotic forms. Foucault describes a new field of increased visibility that emerged in the eighteenth century which gave rise to a complex semiotic system within which the sign began to take on a life of its own. If images could be regarded as living organisms, how could this affect their representational values in society? And, what are the implications for the lives and representation of animals? Text by Sonja Britz

61 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 Hilda Kean

64 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 Katherine Bennett

80 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 John Miller

4 83 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

95 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 Kelly Enright

98 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 Joe Zammit-Lucia and Linda Kalof

112 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 Natalie Gilbert

114 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 travelling show for years. Text and interview questions to Jeremy Smallwood and Pam Mufson by Chris Hunter

120 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 Sabrina Tonutti

123 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 Bettina Richter

132 ‘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 Susan Nance

136 Kill ‘em dead!: the Ordinary Practices of Pest Control in the Home In recent years critical animal geographies have pointed to dearth of stories about the small, the microscopic, the slimy and the abject. The exoskeleton, though painfully present to anyone bitten by a bedbug or disgusted by a cockroach, has been all but absent in dominant animal geographies. Death and the killing of animals is a further notable absence. However, this scholarly absence is not parallel within the popular imagination, where cockroaches, files and dust mites loom large at the centre of a homemaking war focused on the eradication of house pests. Text by Emma Power

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 Adele Tiengo and Matteo Andreozzi

ince the Sixties, ecofeminist philosophical One of the most powerful ecofeminist approach thinking has been underlining the strong to the issue of animal exploitation as a practice S connection between sexist discrimination, focused on – but not restricted to – food is Carol exploitation of nonhuman animals, and abuse of Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat. Published in natural resources. These three phenomena have 1990, Adams’ book combines the author’s been seen as so deeply interconnected, both experience as a feminist activist and her conceptually and historically, that they can be academic researches to formulate the link adequately understood and handled only as a between the perception of nonhuman animals single question. What the ecofeminists state – and women as ‘consumable bodies’, offered to and the image presented in this advert confirms men’s pleasure. Adams suggests that both – is that in Western patriarchal civilization, women and animals are victims of a process of women, nonhuman animals, and the objectification, fragmentation, and environment are categories related to ‘animated consumption, especially in visual, textual, and properties’, or ‘mobile goods’. discursive texts. Through metaphor, a subject is How should these logically fallacious and objectified, then fragmented and separated discriminatory messages be handled, criticized, from its ontological meaning, and consumed as and discouraged? The ecofeminist philosopher an object, existing only through what it Val Plumwood suggests to contrast the represents. In the Meat Lovers advertisement, the patriarchal conceptual framework through a woman/cow is an object of consumption and careful work of revaluation, celebration, and the representation of the patriarchal idea of love defense of what male dominion subdues. On as dominion and possession. the one hand, dichotomical metaphors Many are also the analogies between Adams’ underrate the feminine as related to corporeality, investigation and Derrida’s emotions, intuitiveness, cooperation, care, and carnophallogocentrism. Derrida uses this sympathy; on the other hand, the masculine is neologism to indicate the predominance of celebrated as related to opposed concept, rationality, masculinity, and carnivorous habits. In such as rationality, intellect, competition, his interview ‘Eating Well’, he clarifies this point dominion, and apathy (Plumwood, 1992). admitting that women and vegetarians are

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actually ethical, juridical and political subjects, that use the female body to attract the male as well as men and meat eaters. However, this is meat eaters. In the case of the advertisement a recent achievement, and still «authority […] is here presented, rigorously male meat eaters are attributed to the man (homo and vir) rather than invited to consume their love for a steak on a to the woman, and to the woman rather than to bed of lettuce. the animal». And in fact, Derrida asks, how many However, rather than aggressive and possibilities are there that a head of State pornographic, this kind of love seems tender and publicly and exemplarily declares himself – or devoted. The cow’s head is ridiculously put on herself – to be a vegetarian? (Derrida, 'Eating the body of a sleeping woman and a man Well', or the Calculation of the Subject: An embraces her. The aim of the advertisement is to Interview with Jacques Derrida 1991, 114). arouse a kind of tenderness for the animal killed Both identify meat eating and maleness without putting into question the meat eater’s as crucial elements in determining who is a virility. In fact, the tenderness here displayed is subject. In particular, Derrida states that there are the one that follows the sexual intercourse three fundamental conditions to recognize a between husband and wife, maybe. Curiously subject as such, at least in Western cultures: enough, it is the beloved steak that plays here

La Capannina Amanti della Carne (Meat Lovers), advert
La Capannina being «a meat eater, a man, and an the role of the absent referent. Both the woman authoritative, speaking self» (Calarco qtd in and the cow are visually present in the image, Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat 1990, 6). but the object of the advertisement – meat – is Adams develops this idea in a far more detailed only textually summoned. In fact, the proposed way. In particular she focuses on the implications idea is that meat eating is a behaviour of caring of the perception of animal/female bodies as because the woman/cow wants to be object of ‘consummable’ through butchery and rape, that kind of ‘tenderness’, meaning that she wants underlining the evidences of this analogy in to be eaten/consumed. images, commercials, menu covers, and articles The scene is not one of seduction, but of

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marital love. Carol Adams clearly explains how industry, because they don’t produce anything the sexual politics of meat begins within the during their lives and their meat is considered as exploitation of the reproductive functions of less succulent and tasty. In an analogous way, female animals. Living alone milk and eggs – female human animals are exploited mainly which are products of maternity –, the majority of when they are alive for their sexual and meat comes from adult females and their reproductive function and, basically, to satisfy babies. Female nonhuman animals are men’s pleasure. The Meat lovers image makes it exploited to satisfy human appetites both when clear that not much has changed, since the they are alive and when they are dead, while Sixties: females of all species are ‘objects’ of love male animals are used much less in the food and properties of men.

References

Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat. Twentieth Adele Tiengo is a Ph.D. student in Foreign Languages, Literatures, Anniversary Edition (2010). New York : Continuum, 1990. and Cultures at the University of Milan (Italy), where she graduated in 2012 with a thesis on the relationship between literature and Derrida, Jacques. "'Eating Well', or the Calculation of the ethics in the animal question. In 2011 she spent a period as a Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida" in Who Comes visiting researcher at the University of Alcalà (Spain), thanks to the After the Subject, edited by Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor Susan Fenimore Cooper scholarship. She is currently carrying on and Jean-Luc Nancy, 96-119. New York and London: her research activities in ecocriticism. Routledge, 1991.

Plumwood, Val. "Feminism and Ecofeminism: Beyond the Matteo Andreozzi is a PhD student in Philosophy at University of Dualistic Assumptions of Women, Men, and Nature." The Milan, Italy. His research is mainly on Environmental Ethics and Ecologist 22, no. 1 (January/February 1992). 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 Aete[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 the Study of Religion and the Environment). For further information please visit http://www.matteoandreozzi.it or http://unimi.academia.edu/MatteoAndreozzi.

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 Barbara J. Phillips

merican popular culture has quietly for a product, and achieve promotional become inhabited by all sorts of talking continuity (Phillips 1996). However, one of the A animals and dancing products that are most important reasons for the use of trade used by advertisers to promote their brands. characters in advertising may be that they can These creatures, called trade characters, are be used to transfer desired meanings to the fictional, animate beings, or animated objects, products with which they are associated. By that have been created for the promotion of a pairing a trade character with a product, product, service, or idea (Phillips 1996). advertisers can link the personality and cultural Commercials with these characters score above meaning of the character to the product in the average in their ability to change brand minds of consumers. This creates a desirable preference (Stewart and Furse 1986). It appears, image, or meaning, for the product. The first step then, that trade characters can be effective in supporting this explanation of trade character communication tools. However, it is unclear why communication is to show that these characters this is so. Although trade characters are popular do embody common cultural meanings that can with advertisers and consumers, their role in be linked to products. Research has shown communicating the advertising message has that animal characters are one of the most been generally taken for granted without commonly used trade character types in current investigation. It has been advertising practice (Callcott and Lee 1994). hypothesized that there are several reasons why Animals have long been viewed as standard advertisers use trade characters: to attract symbols of human qualities (Neal 1985; Sax attention, enhance identification of and memory 1988). For example, in American culture,

9 "everyone" knows that a bee desirable emotions and ideas (McCracken 1986). symbolizesindustriousness, a dove represents For example, the image of a child may invoke peace, and a fox embodies cunning (Robin feelings of pleasure, nostalgia, and playfulness. By 1932). It is likely that advertisers use animal showing a product next to such an image, characters because consumers understand the advertising encourages consumers to associate animals' cultural meanings and consequently the product with the image. Through this can link these meanings to a product. Therefore, association, the product acquires the image's the cultural meaning of animals may lie at the cultural meaning. core of the meanings of animal trade Trade characters may be one type of characters. This paper describes a method for image that advertisers use because these eliciting character meanings, presents a characters possess learned cultural meanings. qualitative analysis of the cultural meanings of These meanings are similar to the personalities four animal characters, and discusses the that consumers associate with characters from broader implications that these results have for other sources such as movies, cartoons, and advertising research and practice. This comic books. For example, Mickey Mouse is qualitative study of animal meanings is viewed as a "nice guy," while Bugs Bunny is seen motivated by several issues: Understanding the as clever, but mischievous. Individuals do not cultural meanings that consumers assign to invent their own meaning for cultural symbols; animal characters will assist in developing they must learn what each symbol means in their successful advertising campaigns; practitioners culture (Berger 1984) based on their experiences can create characters that embody desired with the character. For example, consumers' brand meanings while avoiding characters with ideas about the meaning of "elephant" are negative associations. In addition, by shaped by Dumbo movies and African safari TV highlighting an underutilized research method by programs, and are colored by news stories about which the cultural meaning of characters can a rampaging elephant that trampled its trainer. be elicited, this paper presents a way for Consequently, although each individual brings his practitioners, researchers, and regulators to or her own experience to the meaning ascription understand what messages specific characters process, consensus of character meaning across are communicating to their audiences. This individuals is possible through common cultural method may be useful in other types of experience. advertising research as well. Researchers have, In advertising, trade characters' meanings in the past, asked for measures of cultural are used to visually represent the product meaning for celebrity endorsers (McCracken attributes (Zacher 1967) or the advertising 1989) and for symbolic advertising images (Scott message (Kleppner 1966). For example, Mr. 1994), as well. Finally, by showing that animal Peanut embodies sophistication (Kapnick 1992), characters have common cultural meanings, the Pillsbury Doughboy symbolizes fun (PR this paper builds support for one of the first Newswire 1990), and the lonely Maytag repairman empirical explanations of how trade characters stands for reliability (Elliott 1992). However, the "work" in advertising, and creates a foundation consumer must correctly decode the trade for future trade character research. character's meaning before it can have an The next section of the paper will present impact (McCracken 1986). Therefore, characters' the theories used to illuminate the research meanings must be easily understood by question: Do there exist shared meanings that consumers if they are to correctly interpret the consumers associate with specific animal character's message. As a result, advertisers characters? If so, how can these meanings be frequently use animal trade characters (Callcott elicited, and what are their common themes? and Lee 1994) because consumers are thought The third section will introduce a method by to have learned the animals' cultural meanings, which the cultural meanings of characters can and consequently are likely to correctly decode be elicited, and will present the procedures used the advertising message. in this research study. The fourth section will The first step in examining the association discuss the results of the study, and the last between animal trade characters and the section will draw general conclusions. products they promote is to explore the symbolic Conceptual Development of the meanings conveyed by the animals used in these Research Question It has been suggested that advertisements. That is, if an advertiser places a advertising functions, in general, by attempting bear (e.g., Snuggle) or a dog (e.g., Spuds to link a product with an image that elicits McKenzie) next to his product, what do these

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animals represent to the audience? Rather than imposed on subjects to limit their responses C a examine individual animal characters, however, primary draw-back of quantitative research. The it is necessary to first study an animal's general word association method is not new; other cultural meaning. This is because the animal marketing and advertising researchers have used category (e.g., bear, dog, etc.) provides the it to understand how consumers perceive primary, or core, meaning of an individual products (Kleine and Kernan 1991) and to character. Although an advertiser can choose to determine a product's attributes to aid in product highlight certain animal meanings over others positioning (Friedmann 1986). However, perhaps (e.g., "softness" for Snuggle Bear and "wildness" because it is "old hat," this method has been for Smokey Bear), the core set of animal consistently overlooked and underutilized in meanings dictate what is possible for that consumer behavior research. character to express. Snuggle fabric softener In the present study, informants were asked would not find it easy to use a porcupine, pig, or to respond to verbal animal names during the flamingo to express "softness." word association task (e.g., "bear") rather than to In addition, by studying the broad animal visual images of the animal. Verbal animal names category to which the character belongs, it is are thought to elicit broad responses that reflect possible to make generalizations that can help much of the information that an individual has practitioners create and use animal characters learned to associate with the category, "bear." In effectively. For example, if advertisers know that contrast, the way an animal is visually portrayed the animal "cat" shares several positive core can narrow its meaning (Berger 1984). A realistic meanings, they can create cat characters that picture of a bear may elicit a different part of the capitalize on those meanings. Alternatively, if core meaning of "bear" than a cartoon bear. "cat" meanings contain negative attributes that Images of actual trade characters, such as reflect badly on the associated product, Smokey Bear or Snuggle, may elicit even narrower advertisers may want to use a different meanings associated only with those characters. character. Therefore, verbal animal names were used to generate broad, complete responses. However, it Method is possible that advertisers could use both verbal and visual animals in a word association task It is difficult to explore the perceived meaning of when creating characters. Responses to the a trade character by asking subjects directly, as verbal animal name would provide core their responses tend to be superficial and meanings, while responses to the visual character descriptive. "Smokey Bear? Oh, he's brown and would provide a measure of how successfully the wears a hat." Other qualitative methods, such as particular representation of an animal captured in-depth interviewing, tend to be time- and labor- desired meanings. This possibility will be discussed intensive C features that advertisers may want to further in the conclusion section of this paper. avoid. As an alternative, word association is an The informants for this study were 21 male easy and efficient method for exploring and 15 female undergraduate students enrolled psychological meaning. It can be administered in an advertising management course at a major to a group and can elicit the meanings of more state university. Students participated in the study than one animal per session, yet provides rich during their regular class time. Of these information regarding cultural meaning. Szalay respondents, 92% were between the ages of 20 and Deese (1978) state that because a word and 25. The use of this student sample precludes association task does not require subjects to concluding that the results of this study reflect the communicate their intentions, it decreases "true" cultural meaning of each animal. However, subjects' rationalizations, and it taps associations this sample is useful to show that a common that are difficult to express or explain. Further, cultural meaning for each animal exists in a word association does not require thoughts to be homogeneous population and can be elicited expressed in a structural manner. Instead, this through research, whether that population is technique produces expressions of thought that composed of undergraduate students or other are immediate and spontaneous, and this target markets of interest to advertisers. Each spontaneity, along with an imposed time informant received a package containing a constraint, is thought to reduce subjects' self- cover page, an instruction page, and five word monitoring and conscious editing of responses. association sheets. Finally, the method reduces experimenter bias The instructions for the word association because no organization or categories are task were read aloud and informants' questions

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regarding the task were answered. For each word COGNITIVE MAP OF PENGUIN THEMES association task, respondents had one minute to write one-word descriptions of whatever came to The themes elicited in response to each animal mind when they thought about the animal listed were illustrated using cognitive maps, representing at the top of the page (Szalay and Deese 1978). a pictorial overview of each animal's meaning. Informants were instructed to write these words in The cognitive map summarizes the objects and the order in which they came to mind and it was ideas that informants collectively associate with stressed that there were no wrong answers. The each animal, and organizes these associations first animal listed in the package was lobster, into meaningful themes (Coleman 1992). The which was used as a practice task to familiarize cognitive map also identifies the number of times students with the word association method. After each theme was mentioned, giving an idea of completing the practice task, informants' the relative importance of each theme to the remaining questions about the task were animal's shared meaning. answered. Respondents then completed four more animal word associations, responding to the RESULTS AND DISCUSSION words: penguin, ant, gorilla, and raccoon. The particular animals were chosen to reflect the General Results interests of the author; other animals could illustrate the commonality of animal meanings as Informants mentioned between 315 and 386 well. The order in which the four animals were words in response to each animal, or presented was randomized to control for order approximately 9 to 11 words per individual. It was effects. surprising that more than 90% of informants' The words generated by informants in responses could be classified into six or seven response to the animal word association were main themes for each animal. In addition, grouped into categories, or themes that emerged informants' words were easily coded into these from the data. Each animal was analyzed themes, reflecting a high degree of similarity separately, except lobster, the practice task, between respondents. Also, words with the highest which was not coded. For each animal, words frequencies were mentioned by 8 to 25 that were similar in meaning or that had a individuals, which suggests a high degree of common theme were grouped together. Each consistency across individuals' responses. These informant's responses were added to the tentative results support the idea that there exist shared themes discovered in the previous informants' cultural meanings that consumers generally responses, thus supporting those themes or associate with animals, and that these meanings allowing them to be changed (Strauss and Corbin can be elicited through word association. 1990). Guidelines suggested by Szalay and Deese Interestingly, although it was not the intent (1978) were followed when identifying common at the outset, the themes that emerged from the themes. data were remarkably similar between animals. Words that could not be placed into any The primary themes mentioned by informants category were placed into an "other" category. include: (a) Appearance, (b) Habitat, (c) These words did not have an identifiable Personality, (d) Human/animal interaction, (e) association with the animal; they are thought to Popular culture, and (f) Behavior. These six be associations to words other than the animal categories seem to be most salient for (i.e., chain associations) or words that show that consumers, and may offer the greatest help in the respondent was thinking of something other creating animal characters for use in advertising than the task at hand. There were only 10 to 16 of campaigns. Appearance summarizes informants' these words for each animal. mental images of the animal C how they expect A second researcher re-classified all of the the animal to look; Habitat describes informants' response words into the categories to check the expectations of where these animals live and the soundness of the themes. There was an initial 86% objects that surround them; Personality represents agreement between researchers; disagreements the personality traits that informants associate with were resolved through discussion and re-analysis each animal; Human/animal interaction of informant responses. The response words for all describes how humans coexist and interact with of the animals are available from the author. these animals; while Behavior describes their typical actions. Popular culture highlights cultural references that already exist for each animal,

12

Fig. 1.

including sources such as television programs, Habitat includes a natural habitat made up of the movies, books, and ads. The themes for each subthemes of: (a) ice and snow, (b) cold, (c) animal are given below in greater detail. places such as Antarctica and the South Pole, and (d) water. Informants also listed other Penguin inhabitants of this environment such as fish, polar bears, and whales. Informants also mentioned A cognitive map of the themes associated with Appearance as an important penguin theme, "penguin," along with the frequency with which focusing on the subthemes of: (a) color, which they were mentioned, are shown in Figure 1. The was mostly black and white, (b) body parts such dominant themes that emerge from the data are as wings, beaks, and feet, and (c) the formal Habitat and Appearance. tuxedo that penguins seem to be wearing.

13

Fig. 2.

Tuxedo was the most often mentioned word, with Behavior was mentioned 44 times, suggesting that 23 mentions. This strong association seems to respondents frequently visualize the penguin in have affected other themes, as discussed below. motion. Both of the dominant themes suggest that a penguin is associated with rich visual imagery. COGNITIVE MAP OF ANT THEMES When confronted with the word "penguin," it appears that individuals conjure up an image of In analyzing the dominant themes, it seems that a penguin, and describe him (Appearance) and penguins are viewed as having little interaction his surroundings (Habitat). This interpretation is with humans. The penguin appears to be isolated supported by a third theme, Behavior, which was from all but a few Eskimos (according to two mentioned less often. This category includes the informants) except when viewed in a man-made subthemes of: (a) waddle, (b) swim, and (c) other habitat (e.g., "Sea World"), and even that type of actions, which also contribute to visual imagery. interaction is rarely mentioned (2% of the time).

14

This lack of human/penguin interaction is not blank word task (i.e., "ant____"). The same cannot surprising given penguins' remote location in the be said for penguin (e.g., "penguin ice," "penguin world, and the fact that they are removed from cold," etc.). Some imagery is associated with ant, informants' daily experiences. Another theme, though, as seen in the Habitat subtheme of (c) Personality, is characterized by a duality; for the picnic. For the most part, however, other themes most part, penguins are personified as silly support verbal, non-imagery based associations creatures (e.g., cute, funny, goofy, playful, etc.), for ant. For example, the ant's image-based but they also can be viewed as formal animals themes, Appearance and Behavior, contain far (e.g., distinguished, classy, behaved, mannered, fewer words (31 and 7) than do these same etc.), even by the same individuals. This categories for penguin (103 and 44). Also, many contradiction may stem from the fact that of the words in Appearance, such as antenna, penguins are strange-looking members of the thorax, and abdomen, seem associated with bird family and waddle comically instead of knowledge propositions, rather than image. flying, but also appear to wearing a tuxedo, a Surprisingly, even the Popular culture theme cultural symbol of formality and manners. supports a verbal view because many of the The remaining penguin themes are responses in this category make use of word play Popular culture and Categories. Penguins are such as "Aunt Bea" and "antichrist." associated with a surprisingly large number of A dominant theme for ant that did not exist popular culture references including movies, for penguin is Human/ant interaction. This focus on videogames, mascots, and cartoons. Categories interaction is understandable given that ants are refers to the hierarchical categorization of usually part of informants' daily environment and objects, in which an object can be placed in a experience. In this category, ants interact with superset (generalization hierarchy) or a subset humans by annoying them and causing them (part hierarchy) (Anderson 1990). For example, a pain; "bite" was mentioned 19 times by penguin is a bird (superset), and a type of respondents. Humans interact with ants as penguin is an emperor (subset). In the same way, exterminators; we kill them. It is surprising then, that a group of penguins is called a flock, or a herd under the theme Personality, ants are personified (at least for one respondent). as having more positive than negative qualities. Words like "strong," "hard-working," and Ant "determined" are used by respondents. Perhaps individuals have learned to associate these A cognitive map of the "ant" themes is shown in positive qualities with ants through stories, songs, Figure 2. The three dominant ant themes are: and fables, such as "The Grasshopper and the Categories, Habitat, and Human/ant interaction. Ant," while negative associations, such as pest, Categories includes: (a) type of ant, such as red come from informants' own experiences. As is the or army; (b) name of ant, such as worker or case with penguin, there is a duality in the ant's queen; (c) group of ants, such as colony; and (d) perceived personality C industrious and diligent, classification of ant, such as insect. The yet irritating and better off dead. These strongly importance of this theme for ant contrasts sharply negative associations may signal advertisers to with that for penguin; Categories was mentioned use caution in utilizing this animal in ads. 104 times for ant, but only 16 times for penguin. Advertisers must be sure that only desirable This suggests that the ant themes are less characteristics are transferred to the brand. associated with images, and more associated with verbal or propositional knowledge (Anderson COGNITIVE MAP OF GORILLA THEMES 1990). That is, when asked to respond to the word "ant," it appears that respondents retrieve verbal Gorilla information that they have learned in the past, such as: the head ant is called the queen; the A cognitive map of "gorilla" themes is presented in male ant is called the drone; ants live in colonies; Figure 3. The dominant themes that emerge from etc. This interpretation is supported by another the data are Habitat, Appearance, and dominant theme: Habitat, where the subthemes Personality. Gorilla's dominant themes, like those of (a) hill and (b) man-made habitat also appear of penguin, are rich in visual imagery and appear to contain verbal associations. For example, the to be visually based. For example, Habitat most-often mentioned words in each subtheme, contains images of: (a) natural habitats, such as "hill" and "farm," could be elicited with a fill-in-the- the jungle; (b) man-made habitats, such as zoos

15

Fig. 3.

and cages; and (c) other inhabitants, most battling other monsters, received 15 direct and notably bananas and monkeys. In the same way, indirect mentions, while "Gorillas in the Mist," the Appearance is composed of: (a) hairy; (b) colors; movie that portrays gorillas as human-like, (c) size; and (d) body parts, like big hands and big endangered creatures received 12. teeth. Human/gorilla interaction appears as Gorilla is the first animal in this study to another gorilla theme (as it did for ant), even have Personality as a dominant theme. As with though the gorilla, like the penguin, is remote and penguin and ant, gorilla is personified in two removed from respondents' daily lives. While the different ways C as a fierce monster with negative interaction between humans and ants was attributes, and as a gentle giant with positive concrete and experience-based, the interaction ones. The theme Popular culture gives a possible between humans and gorillas is viewed more reason for this duality. "King Kong," the movie(s) symbolically by informants, with the subthemes: that portrays a giant gorilla destroying cities and (a) ancestor, and (b) research. As our ancestors,

16

COGNITIVE MAP OF RACOON THEMES gorillas were associated directly with humans through Darwin's theory of evolution. Informants Respondents generated six common themes of also recognized the research link between gorillas interest to advertisers in response to each animal: and humans as we study them for their benefit Appearance, Habitat, Personality, Human/animal (e.g., "endangered") or for ours (e.g., "sign interaction, Popular culture, and Behavior. It is language"). clear that these themes have practical applications in advertising. The themes of Raccoon appearance, habitat, and behavior can help A cognitive map of "raccoon" themes is shown in define a "natural" look for an animal and its Figure 4. The dominant themes that emerge from environment in an ad, while other popular culture the responses are: Appearance, Habitat, and references in response to the word association Personality, suggesting that a raccoon’s task can warn the advertiser if the animal has personality is an important part of its collective already been linked to another product or idea. meaning, in the same way as a gorilla's. The The most meaningful themes for advertising use, words associated with raccoon also appear to be however, are personality and interaction. Through imagery-based, like those for penguin and gorilla. these themes, an advertiser can explore the core Unlike the observations made for other animals, meanings that consumers associate with a there is no separate theme of human/raccoon specific animal. If advertisers understand this core interaction. The reason for this is that the idea of meaning, they can appropriate all or part of the interaction is woven throughout each category. animal's meaning for their products. Advertisers For example, informants listed both trees and can match positive qualities to the product rooftops, wilderness and drainage ditches as attributes or the advertising message, or avoid raccoon habitats. Food included crawfish and using the animal if it elicits negative associations. trash, and other inhabitants were likely to be both The benefit of eliciting core animal possums and coon dogs. This suggests that the meanings is that by using the associations that raccoon is not seen as having a separate already exist in our culture, advertisers do not environment, like ant (e.g., "hill") or gorilla (e.g., have to educate consumers as to what their "jungle"), which can sometimes overlap with a animal characters mean. Consequently, an ad's human environment. Rather, the raccoon shares message will be more quickly and easily our habitat in an integrated way. decoded and understood. Many advertisers The theme Personality includes: (a) thief; intuitively take advantage of shared meanings to (b) positive qualities, like cute and playful; and (c) create suitable characters; this paper presents a negative qualities, such as sneaky and method for explicitly capitalizing on the shared troublesome. Although informants listed both cultural meanings of animals in trade character negative and positive attributes for raccoon, its advertising. personality does not appear to be a duality, unlike This study has theoretical implications for the other animals studied. This is because trade character research as well. By showing that respondents viewed the raccoon as possessing animals have common cultural meanings, the both positive and negative qualities at the same results support the idea that animal-based trade time as part of the same personality role. characters also embody these shared meanings. Raccoon is personified most often as a bandit (10 Therefore, it is possible that trade characters can mentions), and also is called a rascal or a be used to transfer a common meaning to a scoundrel. It appears that we admire a raccoon’s product. Future trade character research should intelligence and audacity, while deploring the focus on the transfer process by testing the ability mess they make when they intrude on our of trade characters to influence product property. meanings. In addition, the results of this study suggest CONCLUSION interesting avenues for future research regarding visual trade character meanings. How does the core meaning of an animal character (as This study has supported the view that consumers determined through consumer response to a associate shared meanings with animals and has verbal animal name) relate to the meaning of the provided a description of the common themes character's visual image? For example, a study found in the cultural meanings of four specific could compare teens' responses to the word animals. In addition, the results of this study "camel" on a word association task with their support the use of the word association method responses to an image of Joe Camel. Does Joe to elicit those cultural meanings. 17

Fig. 4.

different? How do Joe's meanings, as an animal, Given its success in eliciting the cultural meaning compare to the meanings of the human of animals, the word association method seems Marlboro cowboy? The meanings of many existing suited to explore the cultural meanings of animal characters could be explored using these celebrities and symbolic images in advertising as methods. The use of the word association method well. has applications beyond trade character In conclusion, this study has shown that research. McCracken (1989, p. 319) calls for the consumers associate shared cultural meanings creation of an instrument to "detect and survey" with animal characters. These meanings can be the cultural meanings that are present in celebrity elicited through the word association method, endorsers. Scott (1994) states more generally that and contain common themes that can be used an exploration of how symbolic advertising to further advertising theory and practice. images are interpreted in consumer culture is needed to advance consumer behavior research. 18

References

Stewart, David W. and David H. Furse (1986), Effective Anderson, John R. (1990), Cognitive Psychology and Its Television Advertising: A Study of 1000 Commercials, Implications, Third Edition, New York, NY: W.H. Freeman and Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Company, 123-135.

Strauss, Anselm and Juliet Corbin (1990), Basics of Qualitative Berger, Asa (1984), Signs in Contemporary Culture: An Research: Grounded Theory Procedures and Techniques, Introduction to Semiotics, New York: Longman. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, Inc. Callcott, Margaret F. and Wei-Na Lee (1994), "A Content Szalay, Lorand B. and James Deese (1978), Subjective Analysis of Animation and Animated Spokes-Characters in Meaning and Culture: An Assessment Through Word Television Commercials," Journal of Advertising, 23(4): 1-12. Associations, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Coleman, Laurence J. (1992), "The Cognitive Map of a Zacher, Robert Vincent (1967), Advertising Techniques and Master Teacher Conducting Discussions with Gifted Students," Management, Homewood, IL: Richard D. Irwin, Inc. Exceptionality, 3: 1-16.

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 Neal, Arthur G. (1985), "Animism and Totemism in Popular Saskatchewan, where she teaches branding and advertising Culture," Journal of Popular Culture, 19(2): 15-24. courses. She received her MA and PhD in Advertising from the University of Texas at Austin; her undergraduate degree in Marketing Phillips, Barbara J. (1996), "Defining Trade Characters and is from the University of Manitoba. Dr. Phillips’ research program focuses on visual images in advertising and their influence on Their Role in American Popular Culture," Journal of Popular consumer response. She has won several teaching awards and has Culture, 29(4): forthcoming. published in peer-reviewed journals, books, and conference proceedings, such as the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of PR Newswire (1990), "Oh Boy! Pillsbury Doughboy Turns 25!" Advertising and Marketing Theory. Along with Dr. Edward McQuarrie, September 20. 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." Robin, P. Ansell (1932), Animal Lore in English Literature, London: John Murray.

Sax, Boria (1988), "Anthromorphism in Animal Encyclopedias Barbara J. Phillips (1996), "ADVERTISING AND THE CULTURAL MEANING OF ANIMALS," was originally published in ‘Advances in Consumer of Nineteenth Century America," New York Folklore, 14(1-2): Research’ Volume 23, eds. Kim P. Corfman and John G. Lynch Jr., 107-122. Provo, UT : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 354-360.

Scott, Linda M. (1994), "Images in Advertising: The Need for a The text is here reprinted with kind permission of the author and with Theory of Visual Rhetoric," Journal of Consumer Research, many thanks to the ASSOCIATION FOR CONSUMER RESEARCH, Duluth, 21(September): 252-273. MN.

19

ANIMAL SUBJECTS:

LOCAL E XPLOITATION,

SLOW K ILLING

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 Adele Tiengo and Leonardo Caffo

low Food’s aim is to foster an ethical between the eater and the eaten, underlining reflection about food consumption and that this kind of food is traditional and healthy. The S waste, encouraging people to become images seems to claim that there is no need to more careful consumers with regards to the worry, animals are treated just as we would like environmental crisis and to culinary local them to be, healthily and humanely. Cows, pigs, traditions. In this perspective, animals are not and ducks would put their face on this business, mere objects, but sentient beings living in a so why don’t we just put ours? The campaign is complex web of relations with human beings and directed both to organic and local food industry the environment, and carefully looked after by and it profits from the ‘green’ image of the good wise and skilled farmers. Healthy and sustainable shepherd who personally takes care of his meat means happy meat, coming from happy animals, granting them the well-being that is animals. necessary to keep them healthy and, obviously, In line with this philosophy, there are many tasty. Ethical dilemmas on the exploitation and initiatives in Italy aimed at restoring the killing of animals are washed away by localism, relationship between people and their food, to sustainability, and tradition. improve their health and more sustainable eating In the greening of the food industry, practices. People are able to meet happy pigs, slaughterhouses can actually have glass walls, cows, chickens, to visit their farms without a sense because the consumer is ethically numbed and of revulsion for their imprisoned lives, and to convinced that animals must die to feed people, experience a relationship with them, sentient and and farmers are working to do it in the best social beings as they are, just like us. After all, it is possible way. Animals are no more ‘absent not only Hannibal the Cannibal’s privilege to have referents’ (Adams 1990), but in their presence friends for dinner. their ‘sacrifice’ is legitimized by tradition. There The advertising campaign The young face can be many different speciesist approaches to of agriculture, launched by the Lombardy Region the animal otherness, but they all usually fall for the exhibition at the Museo Nazionale della under two main categories: those that recognize Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci, animals as subjects, and those that do not. The profits from the ‘happy meat philosophy’ as a latter has been highly discussed by philosophers communicative strategy of the rural development that, like Descartes, see animals as automata, as in Lombardy. The aim is to create a bond matter at human beings’ disposal.

20

Regione Lombardia L’Agricoltura Cambia Faccia alla Tua Vita (Agriculture Changes the Face of Your Life)
Regione Lombardia 21

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 Regione Lombardia the disregarded eating of meat possible – is L’Agricoltura Cambia Faccia alla Tua Vita (Agriculture Changes the Face of Your Life)
Regione Lombardia present again. Animals are subjects again and the advertisement, even though displaying an hybridization of human and animal bodies, is not On the contrary, the former perspective, perceived as ridiculous or outrageous. according to which animals are recognized as Nonetheless, animals do not deserve an ethical sentient subjects and living others, is assumed by treatment that overcomes mere considerations of the new category of the ‘bio-carnivores’, people utility and profit. increasingly informed about the risks for their health and, sometimes, for the environment. The References approach of this group of well-informed people makes it easier to digest the exploitation and Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat. Twentieth Anniversary Edition (2010). New York: Continuum, 1990. killing of animals, because their suffering and Cole, Matthew. "From 'Animal Machines' to 'Happy Meat'? Foucault’s Ideas of Disciplinary privation is made less apparent by claims of and Pastoral Power Applied to ‘Animal-Centred’ Welfare Discourse." Animals 1, no. 1 (2011): 83-101. tradition and sustainability. Moreover, since the relationship with animal subjects is restored, the OUPblog. Oxfor University Press, http://blog.oup.com/2007/11/locavore/ (accessed March 6, 2012). killing is a much more serious act in ethical terms. Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore Dilemma. A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin, Along with the bio-carnivores, this 2006. advertisement appeals to the category of the Stnescu, Vasile. "'Green' Eggs and Ham? The Myth of Sustainable Meat and the Danger of locavores. The locavores are those people that the Local." The Journal of Critical Animal Studies VII, no. 3 (2009): 18-55. eat only local and seasonally available food. The Leonardo Caffo is Phd Candidate at University of Torino (Italy), word was coined in 2005 by four women in San member of Labont: laboratory for ontology andAssociate Fellow Francisco and in 2007 it was elected as Word of of Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. Is editor in chief of "Animal the Year by the New Oxford America Dictionary[1]. Studies" - his latest book is La possibilità di cambiare: azioni umane e libertà morali (Mimesis: Milan 2012). Many locavores follows the arguments proposed by Michael Pollan (2006) in his widely known The For Adele Tiengo’s biography please see page 8 Omnivore Dilemma, in which he claims that sustainably raised local meat is more environmental friendly than a vegan/vegetarian

22

REMEDIATING COWS

AND THE

CON STRUCTION OF

ETHI CAL 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 Claire Molloy

ith little actual access to farmed animal imagination that is markedly removed from the spaces, the majority of western urban- urban industrial experience. W dwellers’ experiences of livestock and In reality, eighty per cent of the UK farming practices are heavily mediated, often landscape has been shaped by farming through food advertising. In such cases, the practices.[ii] As a result, the industry has a major discourse of farming and the spaces in which impact on both the management of land and animals are farmed are constructed to appeal to the development of the landscape. In 2006, the consumer, and both implicitly and explicitly agriculture accounted for seventy-seven per cent offer reassurance that farmed animals are of land use in the UK, amounting to 18.5 million healthy and emotionally satisfied. Advertisements hectares, of which, around thirty-eight per cent is for dairy products offer imagery that relies on grass and thirty per cent is land, given over to previously established associations between cows rough grazing for domestic livestock. Employing and green fields to sustain meanings, such as over half a million people, the value of farming to “natural” and “healthy,” which are then assigned the UK economy is substantial, generating around to dairy products. In turn, the imagery reinforces £5.6 billion per year, of which the livestock associations between cows and their freedom to industry accounts for £7,351 million of roam in natural surroundings, maintaining output.[iii] The combined UK cow population connections between dairy cows’ lack of numbers, around 3.8 million, and of these the confinement and their willing productivity. Dairy larger proportion, slightly over 2 million, are dairy farming thus maintains strong cultural associations cows. Decreases in the dairy cow population over with natural landscapes and rural tranquillity, and fifty years from 2.6 million, in 1956,[iv] reflect such practices occupy a zone in the cultural changes in livestock management, policy, 23

Ed Edwards and Dave Masterman Made by Cows Since 1886, Anchor Original Butter Co. CHI and Partners, London
CHI and Partners regulation, and farming practices. In short, fewer problematic, process of “grass in- butter out.” cows are now producing more milk. Indeed, dairy Each advertisement in the “lucky cow” cows deliver the greatest proportion of output campaign included some manner of enclosure, generated by livestock farming in the UK, which, which ranged from white picket fencing, to in 2006, accounted for £2,501 million worth of wooden ranch-style fencing, and traditional British product. In terms of land management, UK dairy hedgerows. This changed in the next campaign farms continue to use hedges and dry stone walls which sought to reflect the company’s awareness to divide fields and, consequently, milk of consumer concerns about welfare standards. production shapes the rural landscape. As a result, the meanings of green spaces and Although it is a New Zealand brand, landscape were re-worked to operate within a Anchor Butter advertising in the UK has utilised a discourse of welfare. Repositioned as the “free- range of meanings derived from the symbolic range butter company,” Anchor advertisements relationships between cows and the landscape. replaced live action commercials with animated Throughout the campaigns of the 1990’s, the cows that appeared to be made from “Fuzzy television advertisements featured Jersey dairy Felt:” soft fabric shapes that were popularly cows, despite the fact that the majority of New recognisable and sold as a children’s toy in the Zealand’s four million dairy cows were black and UK. No longer restricted to representations of white Holstein-Freisans.[v] With a “softer” and more Jersey cows, the advertisements also depicted appealing “look,” Jersey cows were referred to as black and white and brown cows, references to “lucky cows,” depicted in lush green fields Holstein-Freisans and Ayshire breeds. In the dancing, singing and proclaiming their good television advertisements, an animated cow fortune at being able to “chew the cud and kicked its way out of a shed, with an browse.” An emphasis was placed on the accompanying voice-over that stated: “There’s consumption of “green green grass” as the no such thing as the great indoors. Only our cows relationship between cows and spaces reworked are free to roam all year round.” In other ads, two the production cycle of milk so that the quality of cows studied a map of their extensive available the final product, butter, was entirely dependent space and another kicked off human footwear on the consumption of high quality pasture. Such whilst a voice-over declared “If cows were meant imagery short-circuited the realities of the to be kept indoors they’d be born with processes by which cows are farmed and bovine slippers.” Intertextual references to the film The lactation is managed, and instead reduced the Great Escape were used in a further cycle to a simplified, and less ethically advertisement that depicted a cow on a

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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 (Some farmers amongst the from farmers armed with pitchforks. The advert complainants pointed out that cattle used the film’s title music and the setting, in New Zealand traditionally have their although visually stripped-back to incorporate tailsdocked); impressions of snow topped peaks; reminiscent of b) that Anchor butter is no more natural or the familiar alpine setting used for the original pure than other brands; motorcycle chase scene with Steve McQueen. (ITC, 1997, ”Anchor Butter”) Print advertisements that accompanied the free- range campaign used Polaroid pictures of cows None of the complaints were upheld by the ITC, in front of well-known landmarks such as the Eifel which, in its assessment of the objections, stated Tower and a pyramid, with the strapline: ”Our that the advertiser had confirmed that “the New cows are free to roam.” Zealand cows used to produce Anchor Butter Concerns were raised about the were kept in pasture all year round which justified company’s depiction of “happy cows,” and the the use of the term ‘free-range’” (ITC, 1997). The free-range campaign received public criticism in complaints regarding the implication that calves 1997 when an advert that depicted a calf stayed with their mothers received no response “hatching” from an egg then relaxing with its from the ITC, although the issue of tail-docking mother amongst other contented Jersey cows was accounted for in the following way: “The attracted fifty-four viewer complaints to the animals shown in the commercial had not had Independent Television Commission. Public their tails docked but the ITC did not think that objections to the advertisement were reported by inaccuracy was significant enough to make the the ITC as including: advertising misleading” (ITC, 1997). Furthermore the report noted that “The ITC did not think the a) that the use of the term "free-range" commercial implied that Anchor is better than implied the cows used to produce Anchor other brands, rather that being in pasture all year are allowed to keep their calves with is a more ‘natural’ existence” (ITC, 1997). Although them, are in pasture all year round or are consumer objections to Anchor Butter advertising more humanely treated than usual. were directed toward the misrepresentation of

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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

WPP Agency Grey London Zealand. The Country Life campaign underscored It’s Not About Great Britain
WPP Agency Grey London how robust the associations were between the Anchor Butter brand and national identity, and the counter-campaign sought to dismantle those farming practices and demonstrated tensions meanings and reclaim imagery of “British” cows between interpretations of the advertisement and and countryside. The television advertisement concerns over the implied meanings about cow showed John Lydon experiencing various aspects welfare, the ITC’s response made it clear that of British rural life: the British countryside was what was at issue was the representation of the depicted as sheep on a country lane, and the product and not the misrepresentation of the concept of “British milk” was represented by black realities of the lives of dairy cows. and white cows chasing Lydon through an In an attempt to recover butter-making expanse of green fields. The pack shot at the end within the discourse of tradition, a 2010 Anchor of the advertisement returned to the image of Butter commercial returned to live action and open green fields. The print adverts that were depicted cows leaving the fields to work in a placed in broadsheets and the popular press factory with the strap-line: “Made by cows since used an image of Lydon bursting through the 1886.” The aim of the £10 million campaign was page of the newspaper under the “headlines:” to position the company as the “Original Butter ”Revealed: Anchor Butter is from New Zealand” Co.”[vi] A country music version of the Guns N’ (broadsheet advertisement, July 2010); and Roses song Paradise City with the lyrics: “Take me “Anchor’s from New Zealand” (tabloid down to a paradise city, where the grass is green advertisement, July 2010). The campaigns and the girls are pretty, oh won’t you please take mounted by Anchor and Country Life revealed me home” accompanied images of cows the high investment of meaning in cows and the “clocking-on,” operating production machinery, landscape, and by extension, the commercial performing quality checks, and packaging the value of both. butter for delivery in a nineteenth century factory Macnaughten and Urry argue that setting housing contemporary industrial representations of natural space are socially and technologies. In the simulation of nineteenth symbolically produced and that “different century factory production, the advert re- features of the landscape are celebrated within imagined the relationship between cows and milk different societies” (Macnaughten and Urry, 1998, by excluding the process of milking. Rather than p.182). The spaces appropriated in advertising by “producing milk,” cows “make butter.” In Anchor Butter, for the UK market, and Country Life, constructing new associations between the borrowed from established conventions of company and tradition, Anchor Butter also shed representing “the countryside” as peaceful, green its “free-range” identity. And although the and fertile, and symbolically opposed to the advertisement placed cows within the confines of industrialisation of towns and cities. In this way, the the factory setting, taking on the humanised roles production of meanings around cows and of operatives, the concept of the advertisement landscape are mutually reinforcing. Landscape suggested that butter-making retained links with can operate through a multiplicity of discourses traditional agricultural and industrial practices. The as a form of nostalgia that recalls an idealised opening and closing images still drew directly on past and as a symbol of freedom, of the aesthetic traditions of nineteenth century “naturalness,” and in opposition to British landscape painting with large romanticised industrialisation. Each of these meanings

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translates into context for the bovine body, which [v] Source: NZ Government website, “Dairy cattle numbers is then understood as part of a cultural and social heritage, and which, in turn, reproduces the 1895-2005” online at http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/dairying- sense that cows have always had freedom to and-dairy-products/10/1/1 [accessed 4 May 2010]. roam and have always been apart from industrialisation. Locating cows within the [vi] Source: Marketing Week, 26 February 2010 online at idealised landscapes of a particular country or http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/news/anchor-launches- %C2%A310m-ad-push-to-support-brand- region thus reinforces symbolic associations repositioning/3010501.article [accessed 3 March 2010]. 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 non- industrialisation 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.

References

[i] Source: Defra (2008) The Environmental Impact of Livestock This piece is adapted with permission from ‘Farmed: Selling Animal Products’ in Popular Media and Animals (Molloy, 2012). Production

[ii] Source: The National Trust (2001) Farming Forward Professor Claire Molloy is Professor of Film, Television and Digital [iii] Source: Defra (2008) The Environmental Impact of Livestock Media at Edge Hill University. Her publications include the books: Production. Popular Media and Animals (2012), Memento (2010), Beyond Human:xfrom animality to transhumanism (2011) and American [iv] Source: Miller & Robertson, 1959, p.432. IndependentxCinema: indie, indiewood and beyond. 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 Concepcion Cortes Zulueta

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

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here seems to be some confusion regarding to be fooled by the machine. the early history of the painting: if it was However dogs, poor little dogs, were T made while Nipper, the dog, was still alive; if suspected of not being so smart. So maybe it is based or not on a photograph; what was Nipper did recognise his master’s voice, and sat Barraud’s initial plan; what was the phonograph, there interested, wondering, head titled to one then replaced by a gramophone, supposedly side. Nevertheless, apparently he never reached playing, or whose idea was its final title, among any final conclusion. For what we know, he may others. What remains obvious, though, is the be puzzled by the event in the same way that he worldwide diffusion of an image that acted and may not recognise his own reflection on the has been used both as a brand and as an brass-horn, or in a mirror. This scene was a advertisement by several companies, past and harmless alternative to persuade about the fidelity present. of the recorded sound without the risk of Apart from the mystery surrounding its offending the intelligence of the human - male?- historical details, the legend accompanying this customers, and strengthening simultaneously their domestic scene shared more or less the same confidence and dominant position back at features everywhere. In fact this myth is what home, sweet home. Maybe this was not just a fascinates me the most. As for its overall content I portrait of man as master of animals and feel inclined to keep the version offered by my creation. After all, one could be the master not Spanish parents, born in the fifties, when feigning only of his own dog, but also of servants, children, ignorance I asked them if the phrase “la voz de wife and the whole household. su amo” - literally, “his master’s voice”- sounded The success of the main strokes of this familiar to them. Both burst out: “of course!”, scheme can be validated by the existence of talked about records and then took turns to recent variations, very similar although focused in explain the touching story of the dog who froze sight instead of hearing. Like two 2011 Samsung close to a gramophone playing the voice of his Galaxy commercials that show a hen and a little late master, seemingly recognising it and maybe girl deceived by the smart-phone vivid images. trying to make sense of what was happening. The hen, brooding the eggs in a screen, and the Besides the cuteness of the little dog, it is girl dropping the gadget inside a goldfish bowl plausible a considerable chunk of the strength trying to save a clownfish that was not really there. and virality of the picture lie in the questions There are also plenty of Internet videos with dogs pointed out by those two words, seeming and tilting their heads when faced with persons in maybe. Do dogs identify the sounds coming out online video-chats. This may be possibly because of gramophones as someone’s voice? Many we find that charming, as well as the floppy and people, common people, guided by the slightly genetically selected neotenic ears that may cocked head and their own experiences would partially cause so much tilting in order to avoid answer positively, stating that dogs do identify the obstruction of the sound waves. people’s voices in recordings and react to them, Beyond the puzzlement that we attribute in some way or another. But are dogs able to to the dog, there is another strong emotional understand these recorded sounds as such, and content in the painting. Is Nipper aware of what not as an actual person? To what level do they death is? Is he mourning his beloved master? understand what is happening? This is, in fact, a Perhaps to feed our human pride we would feel more complex issue. tempted to answer that he is, but we don’t know In any case, the development of devices for sure. On the other hand if the depicted that recorded our audiovisual environment vignette were a scientific experiment to check if prompted comparisons between our senses and Nipper possessed a death concept, nowadays it perception, and those of animals. For example, probably would have been considered as to what degree they were tuned to each other, if ethically unacceptable like the experiment in animals saw, heard and perceived as we did or which Colin Allen and Mark Hauser described and not. Recorders interposed another step between then challenged, consisting on studying the the actual world and perception. A level which reaction of a female monkey when listening to a could be easily manipulated and played with, recorded call of her dead infant. However, the fabricating products, such as photographs, films brown and white dog can be labelled as an or audio-recordings, that in some circumstances update of the Victorian topic of the mourning even posed as reality. But knowing what a dog. A topic also found in other times and gramophone was and what it did, kept ourselves cultures. For instance, in Japan, where a statue aware and complicit with its secrets, and safe not remembers Hachiko the faithful. 29

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. 30

THE TIG ER 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 Cluny South

revious academic research looking at how between product and animal, and finally whether animals have been portrayed in popular our understanding of the meaning of a product P culture – specifically the tabloid press or an animal is likely to be fundamentally altered (Herzog and Galvin, 1992), greetings cards (Arluke by association with the other. This latter point, the and Bogden, 2010), visual arts (Kalof et al. 2011), potential power of popular media to shape the and T.V. and print adverts (Lerner and Kalof, 1999; human-animal relationship, has been notably Phillips, 1996; Spears et al. 1996) - has generated considered by Spears et al. (1996), who a number of themes, or roles, in which animals constructed a symbolic communications model are frequently cast. The popular media has often (SCM) in order to examine how a culturally used animals as a symbolic and allegorical short constructed world (CCW) might interact with hand to quickly conjure up simple constructs; representations of animals in marketing contexts. loved one, saviour, pest, object of wonder, Such was the backdrop to the study I attacker, and victim, to name a few. Animals decided to carry out when my curiosity was have also been repeatedly presented in roles ignited by a parallel advertising research project. such as that of human tool and emblem of My previous industry experience background in nature at large. However, there are additional, factual animal programming had already amply more complex, factors affecting representation fuelled my interest in popular animal that have also been identified by previous representations. For some time I had wondering if research. These include the degree of animals suffered in the popular media, a little like anthropomorphism of the animal, whether social typecast actors, constrained by culturally or moral valuations are made regarding the constructed roles - roles that were generated by animal, if any transformative effects can be seen human stereotypes and biases of what it was like

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

to be a given species? For example, did hyenas translate (if it was not originally in English); that the ever get cast as anything but the bad guys in advertisements were available using web based adverts; were dogs always “mans best friend;” search engines (Google, Bing) or through and were butterflies ever anything but beautiful? advertising agency archive site searches; that the Added to this, I now wondered if there were any category was auto or bike related; and finally, signs of changing uses of animals in advertising, that at least one animal was featured as an and whether different products used animals in integral part of the advertising message. different ways. Finally I wasn’t just interested in how the media was portraying the outside world, like Bulls pull….but Cheetahs are Go! Spears et al., I also wondered if stereotyping in the media could have an impact on an animal’s What I found confirmed past research, but also real life world? Perhaps this project would give me provided interesting variations, perhaps some a chance to find out more. unique to car advertising. The symbolic themes I set about a review and content analysis previously identified: threat, victim, tool use, pest, of animals in car advertising to see if the use of imaginary person, wild nature and object of animals in a single product category displayed wonder, could all be seen fairly consistently any of the themes previously noted by across depictions of animals in car advertising researchers, or revealed interesting new trends. over the last ten years. For example, sharks and Over several months I documented and analysed crocodiles were nearly always coded as over 500 car advertisements that had aired attacking or threatening, and likewise brown and globally during the period of 2000 to 2012. My black bears were frequently cast in a threatening limitations were as follows: The adverts must have role. However, there were also unexpected been in print advertising (as opposed to video or nuances. Polar bears were often depicted as web); any contextual copy (text) crucial to victims, perhaps due to associations with melting meaning must be translatable using Google polar ice caps and sensitivities regarding climate

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Leo Burnett France 500 Black Jack, 2009
Leo Burnett France 33

Leo Burnett Istanbul How Far Can You Go?, 2010
Leo Burnett Istanbul change from an auto related industry. Another this category of symbolic use. While tigers, and to bear exception was the teddy bear, widely used a lesser extent leopards, jaguars and pumas, to represent cute and cuddly, and one that were often used to indicate a powerful ride, the provides one of the more thought-provoking cheetah, as a single species, appeared the most contributions regarding representation of animals frequently representative of “fast” across the in auto advertising through its depiction in the adverts surveyed. Cheetahs were linked to 2009 Fiat Blackjack campaign. acceleration and speed time and again in car Moving away from animal threat use, advertising, to the extent that even the smallest elephants and hippos were consistently popular hint of some spots or the blur of its feline shape animals for symbolising both wild nature and was often enough to suggest a sports car model. large size/carrying capacity in car advertising. Rhinos were synonymous, likewise, with toughness across a range of auto related products, and More camels, pandas and frogs… bulls were without exception representative of unbridled engine power. When it came to power As much as cats seem eternally popular in car in general, however, there were other animals advertising, there were some clear shifts to be waiting in the wings. Horses, in contrast to bulls, seen in terms of animal popularity in the adverts were often used to discuss bridled, controllable, over the decade reviewed. While bulls have seen even intelligent, power; a concept that appears a representative decrease in car ads, there to be growing in popularity, perhaps in reference appears to have been a rise in adverts containing to increasing concerns of responsible energy use polar bears, penguins, frogs, fish, butterflies and and a potential move away from the heady days pandas; all of which were frequently associated of raw power, as one of the main selling features with environmental vulnerability and habitat in auto advertising. concerns within the adverts. Increasing Despite this move, however, acceleration, environmental awareness has, in all likelihood, speed and power continue, to date, to be also contributed to another animal’s popularity attributes that feature prominently in car levels - the camel. This species, clearly on the rise advertising and, not surprisingly, big cats excel in 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 Seriously not like us. newfound popularity across many types of vehicle is perhaps not surprising in a world of In terms of areas in which car advertising changing car priorities. On a more specific level, appeared to diverge from other advertising, the increase of the 4x4 SUV market has hailed a anthropomorphism somewhat stood out. Animals trend shift in certain animal usage, with were occasionally portrayed as human-like but ”surefooted” goats, and animals traditionally more often the reverse was true. When animals associated with wild nature (elephants, hippos, are used anthropomorphically in popular culture lions, to name a few), seeing increased exposure. humour is often a part of the equation, and this Perhaps most notably, all the rising consumer understandably sits uncomfortably with car expectations of car attributes, combined with publicity. Cars are a serious purchase and this increasing audience sophistication in terms of was reflected in how animals were associated advertising language, has also heralded the birth with the product in car advertising. It was of animal combinations. Assisted by generally rare for an anthropomorphic animal to improvements in computer graphics, these be shown representing the product itself. animal combinations have allowed several Rather, car advertisers, as we have noted, aspects of a car, such as fuel economy and showed a tendency to trade on the powerful speed, or ruggedness and beauty, to be transformative potential of animal symbolism and promoted in a single advert. This in turn has preferred making their products seem more resulted in more complex characterisations in animal-like. The hope was frequently that terms of animal usage, and will be an interesting associations between a favoured animal’s trend to follow. 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

an elephant image might be used to make a colouring how we understand them as an animal family car appear more spacious, and a species within a wider cultural framework. cheetah image could suggest racy, even if in The lot of animals in car advertising is reality these attributes in the product were similar to that of animals in other advertising relatively minor. categories, as well as that of non-animal Looking at how transformation might characters, in this respect. For better or worse, happen in reverse drew me into the area of advertising, along with much popular media, social moral valuations. A number of animals uses shorthand to efficiently evoke meaning and have historically become so tightly associated mood, with minimal explanation. Animals are a with certain human values that this association useful tool in this undertaking, and one that has may be considered to have had a transformative been utilised for decades. While the good guys effect on cultural perceptions of the animal itself. and bad guys are typecast in roles that are rarely, Butterflies and doves have historically been the if ever, questioned, the degree to which beneficiaries of an association with the human movement may be possible, in terms of altering values of freedom and hope, and in adverts these associations in popular culture, is an these animals are rarely seen in a negative light. interesting debate. Recent research into the Likewise ants and bees have frequently been improving North American public perceptions of associated with human constructions of cetaceans (whales and dolphins) following the industriousness, and are favourably considered as popular TV series “Flipper,” as well as the shifting a result, whilst conversely bats and wolves have North Korean categorization of dogs, from food lost out for centuries due to our cultural tendency item to pet animal, suggests that attitudes to link them with human notions of darkness and towards animal groups can alter surprisingly evil. The badges of honour, or dishonour, we dish quickly and dramatically under certain out, unfortunately tend to “dog” the recipients, circumstances, bringing a ray of hope that one

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

day the hyena may indeed star as a film’s happy more complex and intrinsically valuable, both as hero! species and individuals. Like many marginalised So, finally, my last question - does the out-groups, animals will likely benefit from a representation of animals in advertising matter in deeper scrutiny, and perhaps this will prove the terms of human attitudes to animals in the real best way to tackle one of the last major world? For me it’s a clear “yes,” for the reason that challenges of human prejudice – that of the repeated casting of animals in stereotyped speciesism. roles across the popular media inevitably serves to reinforce and perpetuate the prejudiced Notes: constructs we have amassed around non-human species, as evinced by Spears et al. The effects of 1) Non-human animals from now on will be referred in this species bias based on the “charm effect” are text to simply as animals for reasons of brevity. surprisingly pervasive, and even academic researchers admit to preferencing charismatic animals in scientific research (Lorimer, 2007). References: While a tendency to categorize animals Arluke, A. and Bogdan, R. (2010). Beauty and the Beast: into “good and bad” and “them and us” may be Human-Animal Relations as Revealed in Real Photo a natural product of the human-animal Postcards, 1905-1935. Syracuse University Press. relationship, and our very anthropocentric world- view, it comprehensively fails to evaluate and Herzog, H.A. and Galvin, S.L. (1992). Animals, Archetypes, understand animals as they really are. An and Popular Culture: Tales from the Tabloid Press. Anthrozoos. Vol. 5 (2). Pp. 77-92. appreciation of the natural world is not served by portraying certain animal species as harmless Kalof L., Zammit-Lucia, J., and Kelly, J.R. (2011). The emblems of peace and innocence whilst casting meaning of animal portraiture in a museum setting: others as dark villains of nature, since these are Implications for conservation. Organization & Environment. Vol. 24 (2). Pp. 150-174. projected human constructs. Animals are clearly

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Jung von Matt They Will Survive
Jung von Matt

Lerner, J.E., and Kalof, L. (1999). The animal text: Message Cluny South is currently working on an Interdisciplinary PhD at the and meaning in television advertisements. The Sociological University of British Columbia, in the area of Conservation Psychology Quarterly. Vol. 40 (4). Pp. 565-586. 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 “out-group” members has for preferences towards them. Previously Planning D: Society and Space. Vol. 25(5). Pp. 911 – 932. she worked for over a decade as a Natural History producer in the Phillips, B.J. (1996). Advertising and the cultural meaning of UK, primarily creating factual programming for the BBC NHU. She has animals. Advances in Consumer Research. Vol. 23. Pp. 354- a B.A. in Fine Art from Central St. Martin’s School of Art and worked 360. with live animals in installations and performances in London in the late ‘80’s. She has experience in journalism, production design, Spears, N.E., Mowen, J.C., and Chakraborty, G. (1996). publishing and freelance writing, and currently works part-time as a Symbolic role of animals in print advertising: Content analysis researcher and consultant in the area of public attitudes to animals, and conceptual development. Journal of Business Research. the environment and conservation. She lives in Vancouver with her Vol. 37. Pp. 87-95 partner, two children, a dog and two gerbils.

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B OVRIL BY

E LECTRICUTION

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 Iwan Rhys Morus

Kessanlv Bovril by Electrocution from The Graphic, Christmas Number, 1891 39

lectric belt advertisements have a certain scientifically, through vril conductors ... can charm all of their own and can be extremely exercise influence over minds, and bodies animal Einformative, but this illustration fascinated me and vegetable, to an extent not surpassed in the – and still does. It seemed to capture in one romances of our mystics.” So, Bovril was meant to rather quirky scene the whole curiosity, complexity be understood as bovine vril, the concentrated and contrariness of electricity’s place in late animal electricity of beef. It was named in order Victorian culture. The picture itself is an to invite its consumers to draw the link between advertisement for Bovril – a thick, dark brown, the life-enhancing and health-giving virtues of gloopy beef extract, usually consumed either as a Bovril and the virtues of the mysterious electrical spread on toast or diluted to make beef tea – that vril. appeared in the popular magazine The Graphic That’s what makes this picture so peculiar – in 1891. The ad shows some remarkably and so clever. It shows Bovril, which the Victorian complacent looking cattle about to be consumer is meant to imagine as being some sacrificially electrocuted in order to manufacture sort of electrical essence of bovine life, being that wonder-working product. The date is produced through electrocution. It elides together significant of itself of course, being only the year the life-giving and death-dealing connotations of after the first electrical execution of a human electricity, a nice example of postmodern being took place in New York on 6 August 1890. slipperiness a century before postmodernism. By The Graphic, in which the advertisement the 1890s, the tradition of electricity as life was appeared, had been established in 1869 as well-entrenched. From James Graham’s Celestial competition for the relatively well-established Bed in the 1780s, to Giovanni Aldini’s and Andrew Illustrated London News. Both publications took Ure’s experiments on electrified corpses, to advantage of the Victorian proliferation of Andrew Crosse’s electrical insects, to medical industrialized printing technologies, particularly electricity and the electropathic belt, the those that made the mass-production of relatively connection seemed secure. By the early 1890s, cheap high-quality illustrations possible. advertisements for electric belts and corsets For researchers who spend much of their manufactured by C. B. Harness and his Medical time delving into Victorian journals, magazines, Battery Company were everywhere, though and newspapers the visual transformation of print Harness was to find himself in court and at the culture between the 1830s and the 1860s is beginning of the slippery slope to bankruptcy remarkable. Illustrations in 1830 are crude and within the year. After all, if the connection weren’t few and far between. By the end of the ‘60s they so obvious to The Graphic’s readers, the Bovril are both sophisticated and everywhere. The same advert would make no sense. goes for advertisements. New technologies, new After 1890, though, electricity had markets and new audience expectations acquired a quite different connotation as the transformed them from being a few lines of latest technology for dealing scientifically closely packed text in columns during the 1830s administered death. The link between death and to the sort of visually dense representation you electricity wasn’t entirely novel; professional can see here. electricians, as part of their discipline’s folk So why is this such a great picture? In the tradition, had wild tales of intrepid natural first place, it’s because it’s advertising Bovril, a philosophers experimenting on the Leyden Jar. substance that needs some introduction to a non- From the 1880s, as towns and cities across Europe British audience. It was first manufactured in 1886 and North America electrified, there was a steady and was the sort of thing I was still being given as stream of newspaper reports of incautious workers a child in the 1970s after being ill. The name has killed by touching the electric wires. William an interesting etymology that helps explain why Kemmler’s death, as the first victim of the electric this advert is so fascinating for a historian of chair – and the invention of the word electricity. In his 1871 novel, The Coming Race, electrocution to describe the process – made the the English pulp writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton link between electricity and death just as secure in introduced the “vril-ya,” a race of subterranean late-Victorian minds as the connection between super-beings that did everything through the electricity and life. There were debates in power of vril. Vril, as Bulwer Lytton’s description electrical and medical journals about just how, in made quite clear, was electricity, and animal practice, electricity killed. electricity at that. Manipulating it, the vril-ya “by The advert shows us the multiplicity of ways operations, akin to those ascribed to mesmerism, in which electricity might make sense for the electro-biology, odic force, &c., but applied Victorians. It was life, it was death. It represented 40

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 41

TH E ANIMALS ARE

“B REAKING 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 boundary- breaking 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 Louise Squire

here are several difficulties to consider in emphasis added). If both “freedom” and relation to this investigation of animals as “agency” require capacities beyond the T “free-agents,” not least of which is how we wherewithal of animals, rendering them conceptualise the terms “freedom” and incapable of either, then our various constraints of “agency.” Such terms, of course, participate in them would appear unproblematic. On this view, the ways, within a Western paradigm, that we we might say that the adverts selected, in have historically defined humanity. Both terms, portraying animals thus, take a merely whimsical once we investigate them, are heavily approach to enrolling the viewer – and no doubt, dependent (at least traditionally so) on a to an extent, they do. We might add to this the capacity for “rationality” (for example Kant, 1959), more telling notion that the adverts serve – or at and the established view has been, as Mullin least seek – to counter issues related to animal remarks, that “Humans might be animals, but welfare, especially where the utilisation of animals humans alone possessed rationality, language, lies behind the products marketed. This consciousness, or emotions” (Mullin 1999, 206; countering in itself, arising in part from the work of

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Fig 1. VCCP Muller “Thank You Cows”, two stills from tv advert, 2010
VCCP

the likes of Regan (1983) and Singer (1977), Overview 1: This first advert features Mary begins to implicate the adverts as signifiers of the Cow who “has always dreamed of being a shifting attitudes towards animals, indicative of horse.” We watch as she is “released” to gallop the “reassessments of the capacities and status freely on a beach, thus her dream is made to of animals coming from environmental come true. Cows, collectively, are then “thanked” philosophy” (Jones 2003, 294-295). for the natural goodness of their milk, which they However, we can take this further. The era provide for Muller’s fruit corner yoghurts. within which we currently dwell has profoundly Comment,1: Three points are of challenged and is currently shifting our thinking particular note for our discussion: (a) the act of about our place in the world. The modernist “release,” setting Mary free; (b) the act of thanking project for which “[t]he scientific domination of cows generally; and (c) the statement that Mary nature promised freedom from scarcity, want, has “always wanted to be a horse.” The portrayal and the arbitrariness of natural calamity” (Harvey of Mary as “thanked,” as Jonas notes, at least 1989, 12), as founded upon the assumption of an acknowledges that there is some “cost” to the infinitude of “natural resources,” has of course cow (Jonas, 2010 Survey), signalling a shift in the grossly misfired. The devastating losses of ways we think about farmed animals; on the countless species and their habitats add up to other hand, as Cole has noted, this kind of “disappearances” which now endlessly “discursive reconfiguring” of “the relationships “reappear” on our television screens in between humans and farmed animals” is also programmes such as BBC’s Last Chance to “incidental” to the real welfare of the animal (Cole See (2009). This is no mere aesthetic loss, nor is it 2011, 84). That Mary has “always wanted to be a confined to the ethical; it takes on the scale horse” further separates the real from the far- presently defined by anthropogenic climate fetched, yet also performs an interesting function: change, in turn threatening our own survival – not horses, we might note, possess a more privileged to mention that of endless non-human beings. position in human (Western) society than do This environmental “crisis” appears not only “out cows; they “participate in ... society in the there,” but manifests as a phenomenon of our capacity of subjects;” we converse with them living rooms, where the world of commodity and give them personal names (Sahlins 1976, continues to reach out to entice us with its 174). A horse, therefore, has a degree of products. Seen in this light, in “setting animals “personhood” which the cow, in becoming horse, free” these adverts, regardless of their location in is portrayed as moving closer towards. the realm of commodity, seem to signify a new The portrayal of cows as “free-agents” in our desire to return animals “to landscape;” a desire second advert is quite different: Anchor’s “Made which, I intend to show, has resonance beyond by Cows”. issues of animal welfare, which it nonetheless Overview 2: A herd of cows bring includes. themselves into the dairy to be milked and then The first two adverts for consideration both proceed to carry out the production process from feature animals that are commonly contained start to finish, giving their “approval” to the packs within human systems of production – cows: of butter which appear on the final conveyor. We Muller’s “Thank You Cows” watch as they “man-handle” the pallets of

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Fig. 2 CHI & Partners Made by Cows, two stills from tv advert, 2010
CHI & Partners product, operate the gadget that dispenses 6). We can explore this in terms of two kinds of brown packaging tape, stack up the boxes on limitations: (a) our “physical” constraining of pallets and then load them into a lorry for animals; and (b) our “ethical valuing” of them. distribution. In terms of the first, Foucault provides a Comment 2: That the cows take on the useful means to view the “constraint” of animal roles of human workers purports to render them bodies in human systems. He claimed that it “free-agents” to the extent that we, as citizens of was out of the longstanding struggle to relieve our socio-economic framework, are free-agents. humans from the constraints of the natural world While this advert makes less of an imaginative that a shift in the use of power arose, changing leap from traditional anthropomorphic portrayals emphasis from one of absolute power (controlling of animals, the “message” here is clear: cows the “right to life”), to one of “discipline” – participate actively in the production process and emerging as finely tuned and subtly rendered give their approval to the end product – butter. control over the living body at the level of life This, as Kali notes, gives the appearance that itself, giving “power its access even to the body” they are “complicit in the use of their bodies” for (Foucault 1984, 265). The models of production (Kali, 2010 Survey). governmentality applied to cities were then Growing popular concern for the extended to police the “whole territory” – a wellbeing of animals, of course, poses particular “historical rupture,” which Darier describes as challenges for those companies whose products becoming” a condition for environmental “crisis” are entangled with the rural, which, as Jones (Darier 1999, 23). Farmed landscapes points out, is “the space where much of the thus translate as designated food-resources for subjugation of animals on behalf of modern “livestock”; “shady meadows” function alongside society takes place” (2003, 287). In both adverts, buildings designed to “... ensure the successful we can see that the matter of subjugation, enrolment of domesticated animals into human- mentioned here by Jones, is reworked (thus driven networks” (Jones 2003, 294-296); and concealed) via its own antonyms for the viewer’s through this enrolment, the living body of the own comfort or amusement, presenting the animal, as described by Noske, becomes animals as set free and thanked, or rewarded alienated in a number of ways: once steered by and in control. Whatever concerns we may have the animal, the body is now controlled by others about the wellbeing of farmed animals, these “and is actually working against the animal’s own adverts seek, on some level, to allay them. At the interests.” An animal is thus alienated from the same time, this move to portray animals as “free- natural life of his or her species, from the eco- agents” might lead us to consider more system within which he or she evolved, and often specifically what a growing popular concern for also from his or her own fellow animals (Noske animals might seek to see animals freed from. As 1997, 18-19). Cranston notes, in order to discern what is meant Regarding the second limitation, our by “freedom” in any given application, we should ethical valuing of animals has, of course, long ask the question “Freedom from what?”[i] (1967, 5- been clouded by our assessments of their mental

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Fig. 3 TBWA/Chiat/Day New York Sad Stretch of Road, two stills from tv advert, 2009
TBWA/Chiat/Day New York

“capacities”, due in part to the philosophical from is the very idea itself that they cannot be difficulties with ascribing them rationality or free. powers of conceptual thinking. But possessing a The next two adverts provide a means to “concept of freedom” or no, it is not hard to see consider the “free-agency” of animals that that animals, when constrained, strive to be free lie outside our direct containment or control: (Ingold 2000a; Jones, 2003). As Ingold notes, our Michelin’s “Sad Stretch of the Road” and LG’s relations with animals have produced a whole “Clever Elephant”. range of “tools of coercion, such as the whip or Overview 3: this rather gruesome advert the spur, designed to inflict physical force and features a “sad stretch of road” littered with “road- very often acute pain” (2000a, 307). The kill” casualties. As a pink rabbit begins to cross the presence of this need to coerce clearly reveals road one dark night, the headlights of a blue car the countering by the human of some otherwise rapidly approach. Will the rabbit be killed? No – free movement of the animal. Williams adds the because the Michelin Man throws out a set of point that such coercive practices often do, in tyres for the blue car, enabling it to screech to a fact, recognise the sentience of the animal, a halt and leaving the pink rabbit unharmed. recognition which can boost the success of Comment 3: What is striking about this coercion (Williams, 2004). Successful coercion, of advert is that the agency of the animal manifests course, benefits production, but as Carr states: at the point where the car responds to it by “coercion, it is all but universally agreed, is screeching to a halt. When learning to drive, we antithetical to freedom. To be coerced to do (not are taught, in relation to the UK’s Road Traffic do) something is to have one’s freedom Act,[ii] not to swerve or stop for animals such as abridged” (Carr 1988, 59). What this highlights is badgers, foxes, rabbits etc. for fear of the tenuous nature of the links between endangering “persons.” If in swerving for an our valuing of animals and the matter of their animal we harm a “person,” we have driven capacity to be “free.” “dangerously,” which amounts to a criminal Interestingly, so-called “human” capacities offence. This advert therefore appears to suggest have, in turn, informed the very concept of that animals might be “persons” too. “freedom” itself. Kant, for example, and very Overview 4: Here, an elephant steps influentially, argued that it is only in the rational gracefully through an Amazonian forest actions of a moral agent that true freedom can landscape. We watch as he or she reaches a tall exist (Kant, 1959). Philo and Wilbert point to this tree and proceeds to climb up it, step by step, “long-standing human belief in a basic distinction branch by branch. Reaching the top, he or she between” the rational human and “base passions emerges from the canopy to encounter a vast and instincts,” which, they observe, “allegedly and beautiful vista of the landscape at large – a obliterate a being’s potential for agency” (2007, view from on high. 14-15). This provides a curious situation, in which Comment 4: In climbing a tree, the what we may actually desire animals to be free elephant breaks out from his or her own

45

Fig. 4 Y&R New York Clever Elephant, two stills from tv advert, 2010 Y&R New York
limitations; but who really climbs trees? The of human and non-human agencies” (2000b, elephant, we might note, has borrowed the skills 155). He states: “The most fundamental thing of primates, who in turn we conceive of as about life is that it does not begin here or end dwelling at the borders between human and non- there, but is always going on ... Environments are human animal (Mullin 1999, 213). Jonas (2010 never complete but are always under Survey) very eloquently describes this advert as construction” (Ingold 2000b, 172). This temporal “a Plato’s Cave image,” in which “climbing out of “becoming” of landscape, in which many agents the world of shadow, the elephant reaches the participate, can be considered as a Latourian awesome light of pure reason.” In terms of the Actor Network, wherein which it is “no longer just rational requirements for freedom and agency, the human who transports information through this reveals the elephant as therefore breaking transformation, but the nonhuman as well” (Latour free from our very conceptions of him or her as 1999, 122), underscoring the function animal. of association between a range of These two adverts portray animals not as heterogeneous, agential elements involved in integrated into systems, but as dwellers of the any coming-to-be (Latour 2005, 5). When viewed wider landscape. Within a Western mode of as an ecological construct, this positively being, we have long had a habit of objectifying demands the recognition of non-human “agents” our world, so that “the meaning or identity of a as “acting” dwellers in the wider landscape. thing is given in itself alone, rather than the ‘living’ From within the climate change era of context of which it is a part” (Taussig 1977, 153). If “environmental crisis,” a phenomenon evoking we look at (or think of) an animal and only see responses that range from alarmism or “the animal,” we have objectified it. The animal is zealousness to apathy or even denial, the retreat at once put at risk, for we can reposition it into of the “natural,” together with the decline of its whatever context we choose – literally so in the non-human dwellers, appears as one of the more case of farmed animals, where a pig is an palpable of major concerns. While such a animal that “lives in a sty,” cows “give us milk,” recognition might further the valuing of the and so on. But the emergence of our adverts animal per se, it does so within a broader context coincides with an era wherein which of risk to the wellbeing and survival of not only the “environment” has become an arena of natural world and its parts, but in turn of the contention and intense examination. New human species. My contention, then, that the awareness of ourselves as impacting upon the portrayals of animals as “free agents” in these four natural world raise a parallel shift in our adverts indicate a desire to return animals to understanding of “animal,” from animal “as landscape, is on these grounds. Where Lerner object,” to animal as active participant in the and Kalof, in a survey of television commercials wider landscape. In his work on “Dwelling” during the late 1990’s, noted that animals used or (2000b), Ingold views landscape as “continually consumed by humans tend to be portrayed as coming into being through the combined action “distanced” by avoiding “humanising” them

46

(Lerner and Kalof 1999), the four adverts in this our systems, provided that they are “properly analysis distance us from the animals in varying looked after.” But if the “becoming” of landscape ways and, in doing so, simultaneously tap into an requires the involvement of both human and non- overarching popular concern, that of the security human agencies (Ingold 2000b, 155), then our of the natural world – a concern assumptions start to look flakey. The “free-agency” which includes the wellbeing of animals via their of animals contains a wider good, even under “release” from our physical and ethical the terms of those who are unable to see it as a constraints.[iii] This “camouflaging” (Grauerholz benefit for the animal him or herself. 2007) and repositioning of the real animal The four adverts between them clearly both removes responsibility from the consumer evoke a poignant message, one to which viewers (Grauerholz 2007, 347-348), in terms of seem largely to be attuned. Expanses of rainforest commodity and ongoing consumer status, and (through which a “clever elephant” strides); yet offers the consumer an ersatz opportunity to endless natural habitats across the world; the participate in the reinstatement of animals as animals themselves, once living creatures strewn “free-agents,”[iv] and thus to “contribute” to the across our (“sad stretches of”) roads; whole safeguarding of the natural world. species of “wild” animal – all are vanishing, it If to reposition animals in landscape is to seems, before our eyes (Franklin 1999, 58, Serpell render them “free-agents,” then advertisers are 1996, 233). We seem at a loss as to how to clearly tasked with the reversal of our assessments “remake” disappearing “nature,” for whatever we of them as incapable of free-agency. How does “make” by human hand appears to us as no this work? The main difficulty, as noted, is that of natural thing, but rather artefact. In distilling the ascribing animals rational thought. Yet our animal out of ourselves (e.g. Midgley 1994) we conceptions of freedom and agency can be seem to have lost our way and thus now need challenged, for example, by the work of Thrift who that “animal” to be “free.” Hence these adverts, points out that cognition functions at the level of while they are incontrovertibly tools of the world of the body (and the senses) much of the time (Thrift commodity (together with all that this implies), 2003, 314). He uses this point to extrapolate the and while they assuredly function to obfuscate notion of body at the imparting moment of its the real lives of animals (Cole 2011), on the other existence, “bare life,” which, unfolded, becomes hand do point to a profound shift in popular “axvastxbiopoliticalxdomain” (2003,313). Conceivi thinking. What these adverts, I suggest, portend – ng bodies this way, he argues, highlights “new and in this sense encouragingly – is at least a paths along which we move,” creating relations growing popular “desire” to rematerialise, through with the world about us that become the release of the “animal,” the disappearing “exfoliations of the space of the body that can be natural world. The question of course is ... how to treated separately” (2003,114, quoting Gil: 1998, render “desire” dynamic, so that it enters the 127). On these terms, the “exfoliations” of a cow deeply exigent sphere of change. confined in a dairy turn out to be dairy (or meat) products, while the “exfoliations” of an animal “in Research Statement the wild” emerge via the animal’s participation in the ongoing construction of landscape. In both This paper originates from a larger dissertation, cases, the animal is therefore an agent, but only the research for which included two short in the second case is the animal “free.” qualitative surveys (2010),[v] each straightforwardly Kant’s claim (1959) that it is only requesting a response to three or four of the in the rational actions of a “moral” agent that true adverts. One survey, via H-Animal.net, collected freedom can exist, points to “morality” as a further responses from scholars with interests in animal difficulty for animals and free-agency. Whilst it has studies; the other was distributed to a range of been shown that animals may in fact possess individuals across different professions, a portion altruistic behaviours (e.g. Bekoff 2004; de Waal of whom had environmental interests generally 2010), the idea of “morality” remains grounded, (e.g. members of Transition Town, RSPB, HDRA, philosophically, in our notions of human minds. Greenpeace, and so on). While only some We can, however, take a different approach to aspects of the findings are included in this shorter this and think instead in terms of a “capacity to piece, I nonetheless wish to thank all who achieve the wider good.” As long as we are participated in these surveys for their comments, content to believe that animals possess no such and in particular Eric Jonas capacity, nor a capacity for “rationality,” then it of Northwestern University and Dr. Audrey Kali appears unproblematic to reposition them within of Framingham State University whose comments,

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with their permissions, I have cited. Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell.

Grauerholz, Elizabeth. (2007). Cute Enough to Eat: The Notes Transformation of Animals into Meat for Human Consumption in Commercialized Images. Humanity & Society 31 (4), 334-354. 1 As Cranston points out, if someone were to approach us on the Ingold, T. (2000a). From Trust to Domination. In T. Ingold, The street and claim “I am free,” we would have little idea what they Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and meant (1967, 3). Have they just walked out on their partner? Have Skill (pp. 61-76). London: Routledge. they been let out of jail? Is it a political statement? We are obliged to Ingold, T. (2000b). The Perception of the Environment: Essays in ask the question “freedom from what?” if there is to be any hope of Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. our ascertaining what is meant by “freedom” in a given application Jones, O. (2003). “The Restraint of Beasts:” Rurality, Animality, Actor (Cranston 1967, 5-6). Network Theory and Dwelling. In P. Cloke, Country Visions (pp. 283- 307). Essex: Pearson. 2 The Highway Code: “Dangerous driving” is an offence; “dangerous,” according to the Road Traffic Act 1991, means Kant, I. (1959). Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. (L. W. Beck, “danger either of injury to any person or of serious danger to Trans.) USA: The Liberal Arts Press. property” (RTA Part 1, Section 1, No’s 1-3). Last Chance to See (2009), BBC 3 In the 2010 qualitative surveys undertaken as part of the research website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/lastchancetosee/. for this project, those directly expressing concerns in relation to Latour, Bruno. (1999). Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of animal welfare tended to be alert to the gaps between the real and Science Studies. London: Harvard University Press. the portrayed lives of animals, whereas roughly two thirds of those disclosing no such concerns took a supporting or even celebratory Latour, Bruno. (2005). Reassembling the Social: an Introduction to stance towards the “release” of animals depicted. Both groups Actor-Network Theory. UK: Oxford University Press. therefore support the “release” of animals from human constraints, while a third, but smaller group, actively defended farming Lerner, Jennifer and Linda Kalof. (1999). The Animal Text: Message and Meaning in Television Advertisements. The Sociological practices. Quarterly, 40 (4), 565-86.

4 Even the child participants of the survey noted the “cover-ups;” Midgley, M. (1994). Beasts, Brutes and Monsters. In T. Ingold one, for example, stated: “Having animals in this advert [LG’s “Clever (Ed.), What is an Animal? (pp. 35-46). London: Routledge. elephant”] defeats how un-environmentally friendly TV’s are, because you are seeing all this nature, which makes people forget Mullin, M. H. (1999). Mirrors and Windows: Sociocultural Studies of how bad it is for the environment.” Human-Animal Relationships. Annual Review of Anthropology, 28, 201-224.

5 Conducted in accordance with the ASA Ethical Guidelines for Noske, B. (1997). Beyond Boundaries: Humans and Animals. London: Good Research Practice (1999); website of the Association of Social Black Rose. Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth. Philo, C., & Wibert, C. (2007). Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-Animal Relations. (C. Philo, & C. Wilbert, Bibliography Eds.) Oxon: Routledge.

Regan, T. (1983). The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley: University of Bekoff, Marc. (2004). Wild Justice and Fair Play: Cooperation, California Press. Forgiveness and Morality. Animals, Biology and Philosophy, 19, 489- Sahlins, M. (1976). La Pensee Bourgeoise: Western Society as Culture. 520. 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 Singer, Peter. (1977). Animal Liberation. New York: Avon. “Animal-Centred” Welfare Discourse. Animal, 1, 83-101. The Highway Code. (n.d.). Retrieved November 12th, 2010, from Cranston, M. (1967). Freedom (3rd ed.). New York: Basic Books. DirectGov: http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/TravelAndTransport/Highwaycode/DG_06 Darier, Eric (Ed.). (1999) Discourses of the Environment. Oxford: 9858 Blackwell. Taussig, M. (1977). The Genesis of Capitalism Amongst a South De Waal, F. (2010). The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a American Peasantry: Devil’s Labour and the Baptism of Kinder Society. London: Souvenir Press. Money. Comparative Studies in Society , 19, 130-155.

Ethical Guidelines for Good Research Practice. Retrieved September Thrift, N. (2003). Still Life in Nearly Present Time: the Object of Nature. th 25 , 2010, from Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and In P. Cloke (Ed.), Country Visions (pp. 308-331). Essex: Pearson. Commonwealth: http://www.theasa.org/ethics/guidelines.shtml

Foucault, M. (1984). Right of Death and Power over Life. In P. Louise Squire has an MA with Distinction in Philosophy (Nature Pathway), from the University of Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault Reader. London: Penguin. 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 Franklin, A. (1999). Animals in Modern Cultures: A Sociology of University of Surrey, and her thesis examines the problem of "death" in relation to Human-Animal Relations in Modernity. London: Sage. "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 Gil, J. (1998). Metamorphoses of the Body. Minneapolis: University of mainly in Environmental Philosophy and Anthrozoology. Louise's central concern is in Minnesota Press. 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. 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 Gene Gable

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 I 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 Eastern Corporation Atlantic, 1946 Eastern Corporation quality you could achieve with it.

49

Eastern Corporation Atlantic, 1946
Eastern Corporation

50

EVOLUTION AND

DESIGN

The animal as sign has a long evolutionary history, but with the onset of cultural modernity it began to assume new semiotic forms. Foucault describes a new field of increased visibility that emerged in the eighteenth century which gave rise to a complex semiotic system within which the sign began to take on a life of its own. If images could be regarded as living organisms, how could this affect their representational values in society? And, what are the implications for the lives and representation of animals?

Text by Sonja Britz

epresentations of animals in advertising are between humans and animals. The animal as persuasive constructions of how animals are signifier has assumed many roles and identities Rperceived. They can convey notions as throughout history, often at the expense of the disparate as the domestic, the exotic, or the animal. The apparent evolution of the animal as ‘natural’. Certain animals such as cows and pigs signifying element in design, could rather be conventionally appear as commodities, whereas described as one which has been subjected to others such as pet cats and dogs are presented an inverse process, an involution, that denotes a as individuals with their own specific likes and retrograde action turning in on itself. dislikes. And across the world the corporate arena Foucault assigns three major divisions to tends to favour charismatic animals, particularly his notion of the Western episteme: firstly the Lion. I wish to consider the use of animals in Renaissance, secondly Classical and lastly advertising through the lens off Foucault’s notion Modern. The latter is governed by scientific inquiry of the Western episteme and how cultural spaces as well as urbanization. The resulting changing are governed by it. However Foucault was writing perceptions of natural history, provide, to my in another era and, as Bill Mitchell has observed mind, a framework wherein views on animals ‘….’cyberspace and biospace’ have introduced could be located. His exposition of natural history new frontiers for ‘technical innovation, and sign systems serve to inform cultural appropriation and exploitation‘ (2005, p. 309). representations of animals: importantly, culture Current Posthumanist discourse challenges never admits unmediated access to actual the tenets of five hundred years of normative animals. (Baker 2001:10). The culture of design Humanist thinking which postulated the centrality provides a good example of how urban of human consciousness. Post-humanist thinking experiences of the animal are mediated by foregrounds the question of the animal by means of semiotics and technology and, thus, critically re-assessing established boundaries how either prejudices, or sympathies and other

51

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

stereotypical attitudes towards animals filter quite played a minor part in 16th century seamlessly through these representations. The representations of animals: the normative, which producer, designer and viewer (the latter as fitted into the cultural matrix, rather than the intended consumer) are forced into complicity. observed animal, was represented. In order to establish an acceptable A good example of this would be Dürer’s evolutionary model, it is important to compare rhinoceros (1515) (which became the our episteme to preceding ones with regard to acceptable icon/emblem of the animal - even natural history and representational strategies. though it differed from existing contemporary According to Foucault, the first division of the empirical observations and studies of the actual Western episteme, namely the Renaissance, animal. consisted of a complex system of similitude, in On another level, there was a great which the concern was not so much related to curiosity for the visual relationship of one thing to the animals themselves, but to what they signified another - which favoured the symbolic - and for human beings. Developing from Medieval stood in opposition to the 16th century rhetoric of bestiaries, strange and exotic animals were science, which has been described as assimilated into an existing cultural order which “diminished in visibility” ( Baker 2001: 20) due to its was based on an emblematic, imperialist visual fascination with the hidden, organic structural tradition. The results of empirical observation connections between things.

52

In the second section of the Western episteme, order to fulfil the requirements as set out in the called the Classical, the great tripartition between consumer industry. observation, document and fable (differences W.J.T. Mitchell compares the iconologist to between, firstly, what one sees; secondly, what a natural historian: images and pictures are has been observed and thirdly, what others compared to species and specimens in order to imagine or believe) did not yet exist, and the explain how new images appear in the world, reason for this was that signs were then regarded what these effect , what they mean and how they as part of things themselves. In the 17th century change (Mitchell 2005: 86-87). According to this they became modes of representation (Foucault theory, images could therefore be subjected to 2002:140-141) evolving their own sign systems. extinction, mutation and evolution or, exist, at In the 18th century, Linnaeus (Systema least, as co- evolutionary entities with human Natural, 1759) initiated a new system of beings. Darwinian evolutionary theory propounds connecting things in the world to observation and that common ancestral stock adapts to existing to discourse: the strangeness of animals was no conditions and are susceptible to gradual longer regarded as spectacle (as in the 16th modification over time. Populations are held in century) but became the object of study for check through natural selection and survival of taxonomic purposes. The causal relationship the fittest, the latter fulfilling the demands of the “ between this view and the birth of natural history economy of nature” (White & Cribbin 1995:2000). as we know it today, is quite obvious. It was clearly Transmutation is a resultant process in which the not the result of a new interest in nature and its modified offspring of all dominant and increasing creatures (because the origins of this interest can forms tend to become adapted to many and be traced back to pre-history) but really the highly developed places within the economy of construction of a new field of increased visibility - nature. An interesting view developed by Deleuze which depended on both exclusion and and Guattari explodes the old model of the systematisation (Foucault 2002:144-145). That evolutionary tree of descent. They introduce - as which could not be seen, was utilized as a they themselves call it - a schema of aparallel classificatory tool, giving rise to the development evolution; I quote from A thousand plateaus: of complex sign systems, dislocating the sign “rhizomes operating already in the from the thing itself. Signs began to take on a life heterogeneous and jumping from one already of their own. differentiated line to another” (2004: 11). It follows In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the that evolutionary processes are not judged, but positioning of the human species in nature can simply are: a species is neither good nor bad be described as heavily mediated by (Mitchell 2005:86). technology. As both visual and audio-visual By contrast to evolutionary theory, historical media govern most mass media imagery, analysis is traditionally linear, a process of including that of the animal, there should be no analogue and chronology. An historical survey of problem to present the consuming public with the animal as sign will be helpful in identifying accurate, in situ representations of animals. certain classificatory paradigms in which the Verisimilitude, rather than similitude in some animal had been manifested. Abject representations, serves as ersatz quality for representations of the animal as exotic other can contact with actual animals. be traced from Roman times through to the 19th To a large extent, for human urban century and early 20th century circus productions. populations, biological diversity has definitively More recently, to use Steve Baker’s term, become a pure virtual reality: one that has its “disnification” of animals in representation, has origins in, and also is constructed by and given led to animals being trivialized, signifying content by three communication forces, namely cuteness, humour and disempowerment. computer generated imagery, television “Disnification” immediately conjures up its prime documentaries and branding strategies. It is a referent – signification – a term which is fact that, in their daily living, current human urban employed to bestow meaning and credibility on populations are exposed to a very limited number the subject. By juxtaposing these two concepts, of animal species. The viewer’s experience of the Baker points to the trivializing nature of animal animal therefore happens to be primarily a representation wherever it occurs in the mass mediated one. The consequent media. It is a common phenomenon to notice simulation/representation of the animal, therefore that marginalized, disempowered groups are divorces the animal from its proper life context in often metaphorically classified as one of a

53

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

number of animal species, because in the to as icons of species loss. A recent Reuters report hierarchy of the “anthropological machine” states that: “ As world wealth tends to grow, (Agamben 2004:37) the animal is seen as willingness to pay to protect species is growing humanity’s lowest denominator . even faster” (The Star, 11 May 2006:11). The metapicture suggested by Mitchell, of “However, spending money to save is not as regarding images as living organisms, opens up important or valuable as not spending money to an important arena of debate around the value not destroy” (The Star, 11 May 2006:11). A UN of representations in a social context. Biologists report in March 2006 (The Star, 11 May 2006:11) also question seeming certainties within their field stated that: ”humans were causing the worst of knowledge, and the worth and validity of their spate of extinctions since the dinosaurs vanished classificatory systems. Similar to biologists, one 65 million years ago.” cannot evaluate species/images but needs to In the section to follow, I will be discussing consider the values introduced into the world by three examples of animal representation as they new forms. These might possibly contest existing appear in advertising material. I will pay attention criteria and effect a change of mind. Images are to the following four tropes respectively employed therefore not merely passive entities requiring in each of the chosen examples: metaphor, human hosts to activate them. They “re-function metonymy, anthropomorphism (or our memories and imaginations, bringing new personification) and totem. criteria and new desires into the world” (Mitchel My first example: The computer generated 2005:92). figure for the cellular phone company, The question that needs to be asked here, Vodacom, named “ Mo”, is a case in point. The is whether the images that do survive the cultural topos of the computer animated meerkat (a evolutionary process are necessarily beneficial to species in the mongoose family) finds its roots in the iconotype of its life form, in this case being the world of Disney entertainment and then the animal. Walter Benjamin reminds us of this matures in Vodacom’s marketing campaign with danger when he says: ”For every image of the promises to share profits aimed at benefiting the past that is not recognized by the present as one upgrading of the meerkat enclosure at the of its concerns, threatens to disappear Johannesburg Zoo. The image of the computer irretrievably” (1999:247). It is also important to generated meerkat has enormous eyes and a identify and recognize the semiotic structures corrupted, cute appearance. This image can be underlying these survivor images, not so much for classified as both anthropomorphic and purposes of classification as for clarification. neotenous. Furthermore, the metaphoric and The cultural matrix imposed by economic metonymic dynamics of this representation forces in society on the representation of animals complicate the strategies employed in the can ironically be metaphorically equated to the creation of this image. These will be discussed in “economy of nature” – a concept I borrow from the paragraph to follow. the field of evolutionary theory. Large corporate Anthropomorphic interpretations of companies in S.A., like Vodacom, Investec, animals are common-place in art and the Hollards and Impala Platinum, each employ their media. The roots of the attribution of human choice of animal in order to enforce a specific motives and behaviour to animals can be traced brand image. This brand image ostensibly implies to traditions like Greek mythology, fables, environmental awareness and sustainability; or at children’s stories and, more recently, the banality worst, it suggests a false metaphor which is de of Disneyworld and movies like Ice Age. This facto harmful to the animal. phenomenon most often conflates with that of Large corporations - as mentioned above metaphoric language and sign. John Berger - often willingly write blank cheques to protect argues that: “it is not unreasonable to suppose certain animal species. In fact, policies in regard that the first metaphor was animal” (Berger of sustainability and social responsibility are today 1980:90).The animal as metaphor proposes a essential strategies for economic exchange. This relationship between humans and animals which willingness to pay may be on the increase, may not at first glance seem exploitative, and in thereby posing the following risk: businesses like many, especially literary examples, actually are mining and other industries, might feel less not. burdened by the fact that their particular However, when the animal is used as industries may be affecting less visible habitats or metaphor denoting the Other, binary oppositions less attractive animals that are usually not referred are activated and the animal is usually

55

Unknown Artist The Orang-Outang Carrying Off a Negro Girl, in Nederveen Pieterse56 1992:38

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 2006. Image showing advertisement for Vodacom’s a belief in an absolutist view of nature, which can advertisement for cellular technology. ‘Mo’ Vodaworld: Autumn. 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 represented as negative or inconsequential. In metonymic fashion the company’s image. this case, Mo is neither human nor animal, but But what is this image signifying? Does it created through technology, operating in the represent the organic living substance within realm of the cyborg. He is a metaphor for go- nature in opposition to culture, in the culture- between vis-à-vis consumer and what is being nature debate? Or can it be termed in Foucault’s consumed. The actual animal - its appearance words: “forms of animal visibility” (Mitchell and nature – is, to a large extent, ignored. His 2005:177) - real objects in the world, but which attire, reminiscent of the tourist and the safari, are also images and verbal expressions (Mitchell immediately places him on the opposite side of 2005: 176). Could one therefore refer to it as a the animal world with its connotations of the big, totem, a sign which occupies a strategic position white hunter and trophies. With camera in hand at the nature-culture frontier? Totems can take on and safari hat jauntingly pulled over his one eye, several forms: one of them being the animal he seductively gazes at the viewer. This vaudeville itself. However, the image as such is always more aspect of his manipulated personality is further sacred than what it represents (Mitchell 2005: revealed by his animated actions in the TV 178). In this case, not under imminent threat of adverts, namely to jive along in a downtown extinction as yet, but a successful commercial, setting while being followed by a constantly corporate image, which hardly touches upon the increasing crowd of fans, reminiscent of the Pied existence of the actual animal. Piper and his mesmerised followers. Only in this My last example: The Hollards branding case the rapid growth of the crowd and its strategy takes this notion of the animal as brand increasing noise levels, exposes, as Canetti symbol into the biocybernetic domain. By (1981:20) claims, the inherently destructive combining two diverse species –the horse and potential of the crowd, transforming it into a the cheetah that you can see here, as well as the scene which is more frightening than entertaining. image of the duiker buck joined with the caracal I Neoteny is employed as a popular device showed in my introduction - the notion of the in animal representation in the media. Neoteny original two animals is displaced. A sense is refers to “a condition in which there is retention of created that the modification is an improved youthful characteristics in the adult form” (Baker version - rather than a weakened copy of the

57

Ivestec Here Tomorrow
Investec

58

Morrisjones & Company Unique Partnership, 2006
Morrisjones & Company

original. Digital manipulation ensures natural organisms are not just improvement and flawlessness. entities in themselves but a system The representation of this newly of natural signs , living images, a constructed image, can also be interpreted as natural language of zoographia providing a symptomatic example of “image or ‘animal writing’ that, from anxiety” (Mitchel 2005:12) pointing to an ancient bestiaries to DNA and the uncertainty regarding the future – including the new book of Life, continually possible extinction of species. Here, the potency reintroduces religion – and of the cloned image becomes a central concern animation - into things and their , because it exemplifies the uncertainty of the images.” future while fulfilling the dream of creating living forms which lead to living images - a viable Current Posthumanist discourse does indeed simulacrum of a living organism (Mitchel 2005:12- challenge the tenets of 500 years of Humanist 13). thinking. Instead of adopting a position supportive In conclusion, the representation of the of an idea that can be used to attempt to animal is central to the history of animals – illustrate the evolutionary development of the “because that history is fully shaped by human animal as sign in design, I - by contrast - prefer documents” (Fudge 2004).The repercussions of the notion of a rhizomatous change as this plethora of documentation, which includes expounded by Deleuze and Guattari (2004:12) - design, are central also to ethical debate stemming from a cultural matrix which embraces focusing on the question of the animal. As diversity, collaboration and multivocality in order Mitchell states (2005:178-179): 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. 1968. 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. 1859. The Origin of Species. Signet Classic: New York.

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. 2004. A Thousand Plateaus. Continuum: London.

Foucault, M. 1970. The Order of Things. Routledge: London, 2004

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. 2006. Hollards Duiker, Hollards Horse:Johannesburg.

Cover picture. 1994. National Geographic (186, no. 6), December.

Nederveen Pieterse, J. 1992. White on Black: images of Sonja Britz is a painter and writer born in Durban, South Africa . She Africa and Blacks in Western popular culture. Yale University studied painting at the University of Natal, completing her MFA Press: New Haven. Between 1991 and 2009 she was based in Johannesburg, whilst also undertaking artist’s residencies and exhibiting in Europe. She is The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, v.1. 1973. Sv “evolution” interested in the socio-cultural aspects of animal representation and and “involution”. Oxford University Press: Oxford. 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. Thompson, N. 2005. Becoming Animal: contemporary art in In 2009 she moved to the UK and now lives on the coast the animal kingdom. Mass Moca: North Adams. of Cumbria. She has recently completed on an Arts Council England funded project, Companion Species: Portrait of a Community. White, M. & Cribbin, J. 1995. Darwin: a life in science. Simon Current interests are animal portraiture and contemporary & Schuster: London. wunderkammer.

60

NERVOUS DOGS

N EED 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 [i] all Britishers’ and by 1930 numbered some 300,000 members. 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 Hilda Kean

he same issue of the monthly magazine emphasised by the language: ‘sir’ and ‘son’. included photographs of Winston Churchill However this particular ‘bulldog’ would not have T patting a Great Dane and of a Kerry Blue been eligible for show since he has no testicles- champion. There were adverts including this absence is clearly displayed given the angle those for Hackbridge Kennels to which dogs of the image. Despite his firm four-footed stance could be evacuated for ‘the duration’, Spratts and iconic status this great British bulldog has no dog food ‘still carrying on!’ and canine gas masks balls, rather like the depiction of the former and gas –proof kennels. The editorial written at deputy prime minister John Prescott in Steve the height of the so-called Battle of Britain was Bell’s The Guardian cartoons. In the image of an headed with the much-used epithet ‘We can take emasculated bulldog ‘full of sound and fury and it’, endorsing the myth of a resilient Britain signifying nothing’ with collar but no balls - [iii] standing alone. Prescott’s crucifixion on croquet mallets was a This jocular advert is aimed at dog lovers. particular delight- I always knew I was reading a The cartoon bulldog, recognised as a specific stand-in for a blustering man. [v] But here the breed by the Kennel Club from the 1870s, wears bulldog is not intended to represent a particular its regulation collar and acts symbolically for human. Britain reassuring the nervous puppy. As Steve The querulous complaint of the puppy Baker has argued ‘any understanding of the plays upon a war rumour. In 1940 measures were animal is inseparable from the knowledge of its taken to regulate food for non-human animals. In cultural representation’: Britain and bulldogs go Britain a Waste of Food Order obliged animal [iv] together. The dogs’ male gender is keepers to act reasonably, while stressing that

61

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

pets could still be fed.[vi] At a similar time there that German dogs were being killed because were (inaccurate) reports that Hitler had ordered Germans allegedly liked eating dog meat. [viii] This all dogs to be killed since they were taking food rumour has been exposed as such.But I do not from humans.[vii] However, there was a rumour read this cartoon as a serious comment on

62

alleged Nazi dietary habits. The magazine References contains a serious article critical of the fascists’ utilitarian approaches to dogs and does not [i] mention this rumour at all. The advert de-bunks The Tail-Waggers Club, Tailwaggers, nd 1931 the rumour by treating it jocularly - and we know [ii] An Urgent and Important Notice for all Tail-Waggers and dog that it is jocular since the ‘dogs’ are not dogs but owners generally! Tailwaggers Club June 1930 cartoon characters.

The text also debunks the idea that [iii] Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz, Pimlico,1991 animals were anxious because of bombardment

– although some clearly were - [x] stating ‘Nervous [iv] Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast, Manchester University Press,p.25 dogs are usually the victims of wrong feeding’. Importantly this problem (unlike bombing!) was [v] http://www.guardian.co.uk/slideshow/page/0,,1974790,00.html soluble with Admin vitamins. An irony of the ad is that it is published in 1940 because of the war but [vi] RSPCA, Annual Report, RSPCA,1940 the war itself (aside from the Nazi speech bubble) is not mentioned explicitly. Even potential meat [vii] Animals Defender, NAVS, July 1940. The Home Office believed shortages are only alluded to elliptically. The dogs were being killed to provide glycerine and fertilisers. TNA:HO puppy who is too young to know better ‘speaks’ 186 /1419 about the war but his comments are dismissed with a ‘stand firm’ message. While playing to the [viii] Veterinary Record, October 1940. Also The Times of 18 Nazi-dog-eating story the advert simultaneously November 1940 undermines it. The young puppy has ‘got it wrong’. However it is surely the puppy who [ix] Mieke Roescher The Nazis and their animals (unpublished paper). articulates human anxieties. The anxiety is See too Maren Mohring, Cats and cities. ‘Hygienic helpers’: cats in responded to by another, older, dog. The human the cities of the ‘Third Reich’. /puppy is being calmed by an older dog. library.panteion.gr:8080/dspace/bitstream/.../479/1/MMOHRING.pdf Arguably the reader is expected rationally to identify with the older dog but emotionally with [x] Measures against this, including medication or ear covering, were the puppy. (If Admin powders were given to real promoted by the RSPCA and National Canine Defence League dogs, it would apparently benefit the anxious dog [xi] as well as the human anxious about the dog.) Paul Wells, The Animated Bestiary Animals, Cartoons, and Paul Wells has approached cartoon Culture, Rutgers University Press, 2009, p.11 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 [xi] their cause’. We are not expected to take the Hilda Kean PhD, FRHistS is former Dean and Director of Public History advert seriously on one level since it is juxtaposed at Ruskin College, Oxford and currently Adjunct Professor at the with journalism about ‘real’ dogs: but we are also Centre for Australian Public History at UTS, Sydney. She has published widely on cultural and public history and the position of non-human intended to read the cultural representation of animals. Her numerous works on animals include Animal Rights. the bulldog as a national icon. Social and Political Change in Britain since 1800 (Reaktion Books But my use of the word ‘we’ is inaccurate 2000), chapters in several books (most recently in Lest we Forget ed Maggie Andrews 2011 and in Animals and War ed Ryan Hediger and ahistorical. This was neither aimed at the 2013) and articles in Society and Animals, The London Journal, twenty first century reader nor was the product for International Journal of Heritage Studies, Anthrozoos and History Workshop Journal. She serves as history editor for Society and contemporary dogs. The product, the advert and Animals and on the advisory board for Minding Animals and the the intended reader were all rooted in the lived Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. She is currently researching and experience of war some 70 years ago. The writing about the animal – human relationship on the home front during the Second World War. Her latest books are The Public History animal-human relationship (and its Reader (edited with Paul Martin) Routledge 2013 and Public History representation) was of a very particular time and and Heritage Today. People and their Pasts (edited with Paul Ashton) this advert helps remind us of this. 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 Katherine Bennett

Fig.1. Michael Mercil The Virtual Pasture, postcard, 2009
Michael Mercil 64

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

y marketing spend is a rounding error Stonyfield’s package reproduces the living bodies [compared with competitors]," he of cows through multiple levels of abstraction as: says. "But you can go on Stonyfield's representational figures in a pastoral landscape, “M the iconic brand of a multi-national corporation, web site (YoTube), and watch cows chewing their cud”. a purchaser reward system, a codified market Gary Hirschberg, Stonyfield CEO (Reingold, 2012) commodity, a matrix for bacterial life, a food product requiring artificial temperature control, a My Stonyfield yogurt carton depicts a pastoral regulated and certified object of consumption, landscape identified as Wayside Farm, Vermont numbered grams of nutrients and percentages of (USA). The reproduced image wraps around a “daily values” for an idealized diet, and an white plastic cylinder. Its colors are polarized and ingredient in a heteronormative ‘family meal’. In focal depths multiplied. A golden light bathes the this article I question the representational terms verdant pasture and grazing cows in sharpest and conditions of such abstractions. Their focus at the center. The curved plastic surface idiomatic reformulations appear in pictures, words foregrounds the cows spatially and graphically. and numbers. Their commingled figures produce They are the closest figures in the ‘field’ to me. A reductions and multiplications of the bodies of picturesque New England barn set in the forested cows in relation to the bodies of people, and of edge some distance back echoes the modeled both in relation to their environments. Material browns of their bodies. The words “Organic” and bodies are both subjects and objects of the “Plain” intrude into the landscape’s middle ground abstractions, reduced by them to caricatures, and vertically frame the cows. The font is serifed labels and calorie counts. They are also and traditional but playful. Floating above in a multiplied, virtually, into new identities and hazy sky, the more stylized torso and head of a relations through entangled processes of cow peep winsomely between flat, primary yellow commodification and advertising. I question how and blue banners for ‘’Stonyfield” and “Organic”. these representations proliferate reflexive identities The same head reappears decapitated and – self-advertisements – of their human vertically centered in a margin left of the producers/consumers, which are then inscribed landscape, bearing in its mouth an invitation for back onto the cows, the people and their “SF Rewards” – an incentive program for “our loyal environments. How do these representations yogurt eaters" [i]. Aligned above is the product naturalize new identities and relations, which are bar code, and below are a list of bacterial recursively rendered through a marketing spin- cultures attributed to it, a stipulation to “KEEP cycle? My inquiry traces materialities and REFRIGERATED” and two certifications: “Organic” virtualities of its subjects: the cows in a stony field, and “Gluten-Free”. A standardized chart the field and its stones (where are they?), and the quantifying “Nutrition Facts” bounds the image to presumed but unpictured human viewer. the right. Text dominates the rear panel, At issue are the material and virtual presenting the corporation’s story and embodiments, continually refigured, of animals environmental ethic. A beaming 'mother' is (including cows and people) and their incorporated into the border for a bacon salad environments. How can the frames of recipe under the caption “Meg’s Recipe Box”. The representation be opened so that a mutuality ingredient list is titled “Our Family Recipe”. is seen between these subjects/objects that are

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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 A cow fetish: What is represented? the responsiveness that Donna Haraway (2008) conditions in terms of “respecere”, drawing on the The multiply abstracted cow-commodity is Latin ‘to look again’, but also “the act of respect” imprinted with domesticated standards of health. (19) with its combined meanings of consideration, Its plastic container fetishizes not only the “Smooth perception and looking back [ii]. The Stonyfield and Creamy” bodily substance within, but also its cartoon-cow looks at me, but I am not seen to representations of consumer and environmental look back. The more privileged subject that is ‘I’ protection, localized agricultural practices, and sits swallowing her yogurt outside the carton’s fair trade for small farmers. Guthman (2004, 234) frame. But I am not alone. Who and what else is writes of a politics of consumption that centers on out here, beyond the frame, re-producing ‘my’ eating as 'green', ethical and local. This politics relationship with the cows and ‘our’ environments? implicates a Marxian commodity fetishism – that Can these ‘I’s be brought into the frame to is, a concealment of the hierarchical relations stretch, or bend (without necessarily breaking), the productive of commodities. The masking of reiterative identities of the commodity chain? For capitalist interests behind organic certification a Haraway-inspired response, I begin with Julie ascribes to the commodity an innate mystical Guthman’s chapter on “The ‘organic commodity’ “preciousness” (245). Yet its valuation and and other anomalies in the politics of formation in a market-based system of consumption” in Geographies of Commodity production belies its ethical representations. Chains (Hughes and Reimer, 2004), which takes Guthman shows that the multinational market me briefly back to Marx and Capital on the structure behind the organic label contradicts commodity fetish. From there, I turn to Judith and in practice de-links it from idioms of “small- Butler’s investigation through Foucault into political scale, populist agrarianism” (240). Organic economies of the body in her talk “Bodies and certification does not limit the scale or mechanics Power, Revisited” (2002). Butler leads me to a of production, does not inherently or effectively reconsideration of materiality and virtuality, regionalize food systems, does not minimize food examined in relation to contemporary capitalism processing, and does not promulgate labor or by James G. Carrier, Daniel Miller, Leslie Sklair and localized trade standards. Rather, ‘Organic’ is now Nigel Thrift in Virtualism: A New Political relegated to standards for production practices, Economy (Carrier and Miller, 1998). I then look to and more specifically to ‘organic’ inputs, artist Michael Mercil, whose project The Virtual themselves incorporated into an ‘organic’ market Pasture (2008-2011) re-forms the frame in a for fertilizers, pesticides, soil modifications, etc. manner suggested by Butler in The Psychic Life of (240-1). An internationalized industry, evolved Power (1997).

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

from interstate agribusiness, has appropriated the absolutely no connection with the organic label. Stonyfield’s corporate genealogy physical nature of the commodity [iii] exemplifies this tension between ethical and the material relations arising standards and market standardization. Its out of this. It is nothing but the expansion into international markets [iv], big box definite social relation between retail outlets, café chains [v] and an array of men themselves which assumes processed "food products" asserts a capital here, for them, the fantastic form growth model that dominates its localized picture of a relation between things. (165) of health for cows, people and their 'environment'. Guthman reveals the underlying Marx’s insight might return us to the paradox: Enlightenment's rational-empirical divide, but for his recognition of the fetishized [Organic labeling] fetishizes the commodity’s twofold configuration as process of social change itself, by object and exchange value, yogurt that is $3.49. suggesting that purchasing a He points to the self-contained interdependence commodity is sufficient to effect of its dual value form, and further the such change. If organic food was “antagonism… developed concurrently within truly an antidote to processes of that form itself” (160). Despite – and because of – commodification, the ‘organic this inherent self-contradiction, Stonyfield’s twofold commodity’ surely would be seen formation of ‘organic yogurt’ has led to a 20% as an oxymoron. (245) annual growth rate and $360 million in sales in 2010 for it and multinational owner Groupe What terms and conditions are operative in the Danone (van Rensburg, 6-7). capitalized field behind Stonyfield’s cow fetish? How does the commodity fetish refigure Marx, Guthman notes, writes of a veiling of the bodies of cows and people? The bodies human-nature relations by exchange value and under question here are those of cows, people, fetishism. He argues, "the objective appearance and by extension their environments. The social of the social characteristics of labour” (Marx, processes at issue are those of capitalized food 1990, 176) and its products obscures their social trade and the marketing practices of constitution. Marx distinguishes the contradictory, Stonyfield. In “Bodies and Power, Revisited” “twofold” form of the commodity, as both (2002), Butler turns to another model in revisiting physical object of utility (possessing use-value) Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. The model and virtual depository of exchange-value. directly associates bodies and power as terms Conflation of the physical/natural object (e.g. and conditions of each other. They figure each yogurt) with its value form ($3.49) masks the other. Butler writes of a “constitutive paradox” socially dominant conditions of its production (by embedded in recognition (17). This built-in Stonyfield Farm, Incorporated). Marx examines antagonism binds the body to social processes the role of seeing in the making of commodities: that delimit yet lend it the terms necessary to formulation as a viable subject in the world. the products of labor become Foucault examines “a certain ambiguity between commodities, sensuous things subjects and power” (14). He attaches ‘body’ to which are at the same time supra- both prisoner and prison as material structures. sensible or social. In the same way, The reiteration articulates his formulation of the the impression made by a thing on body as not exclusively human, or singular. It is, the optic nerve is perceived not as also, social, taking form in the prison. The double a subjective excitation of that reference abstracts at the same time that it re- nerve but as the objective form of materializes the term’s signification. It enables a a thing outside the eye. In the act representation that is twofold in its materiality and of seeing, of course, light is really virtuality. Both subjects, the prisoner and the transmitted from one thing, the prison, are quite material things – as are the cow external object, to another thing, and the (stony) field, the consumer (‘I’) and the the eye. It is a physical relation grocery store. But their materiality does not between things. As against this, the represent the full extent of their identities, which commodity-form, and the value- are constituted also through their relation with one relation of the products of labour another. Bodily imprisonment is one configuration within which it appears, have of power relations. Capital is another. The

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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 exchanges. The power technology that is capital of the other, through which the power of identity is fabricates and sells the product that is yogurt produced and continually reproduced in a taut through the institution that is the mutuality. Butler writes, citing Foucault: market. Materiality can then be understood as itself twofold, denoting “the process by which one the very materiality of the prison passes over into the other (or indeed the process has to be understood in terms of its by which both ‘institution’ and ‘body’ come into strategic action upon and with the separate existence in and through this prior and body: it is defined in relation to the conditioning divergence)” (15). So markets, cows, body: '[the] very materiality [of the people, fields and stones are embodied and co- prison environment is] an produced symbiotically. No one of these instrument and vector [vecteur] of subjects, scaled individually or multiply by an power’ (Foucault, 30). incorporated genealogy, appears able to survive without the others. At least, we can’t see how The institutions of power (e.g. the market) and the within the currently represented tableau, body (e.g. the cow, the person, 'the environment', reproduced within an exclusively capitalized the field, the stone) each require the other for frame. recognition. And recognition is essential to persist So what else may be out here, re- in the shared context of multiple subjects that is producing these relationships of bodies and society. The body is the material condition of the power? Where are the stones in this field? Societal social identity and its institution. It serves as the norms are heavily implicated in the terse medium through which a “technology of power” antagonisms of bodies and power. They operate (14) acts and activates, produces and to filter the communicable, hierarchical terms of

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

recognizable identity. They name, for instance, recognition. Into a two-sided border between “Stonyfield”, “Wayside Farm”, "Vermont", and desire and recognition reaches “the limited “Meg”. That which is non-normative is not freedom of not yet being false or true” (19). In recognizable and cannot be named or relation to the stony problem at hand, Butler’s perceived. Yet Butler finds in the unrecognized an refiguration of possibility through the very process opening of possibility through “critical distance” of desire that fixes – institutionalizes, markets – it, (19) from its constraints. This distance lies tellingly, offers the becoming of other identities, other even promisingly, within the constraints and is not relations, other interdependencies. Haraway, too, independent of them. Power can only have invokes the futurity of becoming, and adds a effect, and therefore can only exist, through significant ‘with’: “Touch, regard, looking back, imposing “norms of recognizability” (17) on a becoming with – all these make us responsible in subject. Still, the subject has to desire recognition unpredictable ways for which worlds take shape” in those institutionalized terms. S/he must attach (36). to them, be named. Desire figures the precarity, but also the possibility, of the unrecognized Materialities and virtualities: How to subject(s), the cow(s), the person(s), the field(s) become with? and/or the stone(s). The subject wishing to move beyond the surveyed frames of identity opens So how can those outside the frame re-enter it to his/her/its self to questions of what he/she/it might embody additional figures of mutuality and become. Desire animates possibility by produce new bodies of exchange? Can we exceeding the norm while demanding 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 regenerate new forms of capitalism (19). Still, an identification. Foucault writes in Discipline and integral logic of Carrier’s and Miller’s argument Punish that “systems of punishment are holds: Continual virtualization of abstractions to be situated in a certain ‘political economy’ of reinforces rather than resists their representational the body” (cited in Butler, 13). Carrier (1998) ties terms and conditions. Miller writes: the political economy of consumer values to a concept of virtualism, “the attempt to make the my critique of postmodernists is not world conform to an abstract model” (25) and that they raise the spectre of idealized images of reality (5). Desire, abstraction, abstraction – a project that this imagination and conformity are at the core of essay clearly shares. Rather, it is virtualism’s practice. While it shapes abstracted that postmodernism is based in systems of thought such as neo-classical large measure upon a misreading economics, virtualism also permeates “daily life of the experience of consumption, and practice”, as “practical abstraction” (25). I that theorists abstract in a way that find Carrier’s ultimate “tale” problematic in its reinforces abstraction as virtualism. abnegation of “general social relationships like They replace consumption as kinship, gender and craft identity” (42). Such human experience with the virtual “nuances” give way to a static “distinctive logic figure of the postmodernist that springs from the calculations of commercial consumer. As such, they contribute institutions in a competitive environment” (42). The to a consequence of economics universal claim deriving from – or driving – his and auditing, a general reductive argument, seconded by Miller, is I think experience of alienation from what precisely the problem. Dismissing agencies of is viewed as an abstract and political economy explored productively by distant world. (212) Foucault, Butler and many others can only

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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 decade earlier (1988), would be illuminating. Their practice of virtualism cloaks the practical stance outside the frame barely dents it. identities of a fin de siècle bourgeoisie. Sklair links How do I refigure cows through consuming “the transnational capitalist class (TCC)” to a their milk? My routine consumption of yogurt may global realm of regulatory bureaucrats be said to further virtualize the bodies of “dominated by big business” (144). Thrift finds that Stonyfield’s cows. I say “further” because these the practice-oriented abstractions of cows are already abstracted. Stonyfield ceased contemporary business lurk in a “reflexive to own cows early in its business life, contracting capitalism” (170) seeking generic operational milk from dairy farmers since 1984 tactics. Both Sklair and Thrift, as Carrier notes, (http://www.stonyfield.com/about-us/our-story- suggest “a kind of embeddness for the powerful, nutshell/full-story, 10-23-12). A reference to abstraction for the weak” (17). All four examine a Baudrillard’s fourth phase of simulation and third- cooption of Marxian formulations by mutual, order simulacrum (1995) is easy here. But transnational business and state interests. They following Carrier’s and Miller’s insistence on presage Guthman’s deconstruction of organic “actual practice” as model, I brush reiterative trade and certification oriented to capital growth. simulation aside to look more into the virtualized But are these members of the elite academic daily lives of the abstracted cows in Stonyfield’s class (which they critique) looking in the right landscape. Stonyfield.com/yotube, links to videos places for resistance to capitalism? For that of family farmers belonging to the Organic Valley matter, are they even looking for resistance? Family of Farmers/CROPP collaborative. They Because if so, the glitterati world of the capitalist portray commitment to the ethics of “populist elite seems hardly the best place to start. I agree agrarianism” that Guthman reframes, in particular with Guthman that “preciousness is a dubious the health of cows, people and their solution” (251). An acknowledged situation of their 'environment' (as if there were only one). The theoretical positions within the capitalized Organic Valley “family” extends to 1,687 academy, as Haraway recommended a 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 year-round access to the outdoors, to uncrowded (20) (http://www.farmers.coop/producer- space and to daily grazing in season. Quality pools/cropp-producer-map/, 10-23-12). Of these, Assurance International (QAI), Inc., a private 1,411 are dairies, representing about 270 organic organic certification company authorized by the milk contracts for Stonyfield (Carper, 2010, 36). U. S. Department of Agriculture, certifies the Notably, Organic Valley’s product line, limited in compliance of Stonyfield yogurt with these its yogurt options to a “lowfat smoothie” regulations. QAI itself holds certifications outside drink (http://www.organicvalley.coop/products/yo the US in Europe, Canada and Japan, and from gurt/, 10-23-12), competes minimally with the International Organic Accreditation Service. Stonyfield’s yogurt products [1]. CROPP, renamed QAI’s founding in 1989 likely anticipated the 1990 from Coulee Region Organic Produce Pool federal Organic Foods Production Act. Guthman to Cooperative Regions of Organic Producer points out the trade-based origins of the national Pools, opened stock options to non-members in legislation, an evolution of the California Organic 2004. Preferred shares valued at more than $75 Foods Act. What is now the Organic Trade million dwarf the voting member shares totaling Association was founded in 1984 by certification $42,175[2]. The Organic Valley label exports to at agencies and larger-scale producers to define least twelve Asian countries, and plans to grow in the organic label as primarily “a production China (Carper 2010, 34, 36). No wonder CROPP standard for farmers (and later processors) rather advertises itself as “the nation's largest and most than as a food safety standard for consumers” successful organic farmer (239). She goes on: cooperative” (http://www.farmers.coop/, 10-23- 12). Certainly it did not represent an The National Organic Program’s alternative system of food regulations for Livestock Living Conditions provision. The organic movement generally require accommodation of "the health thereafter evolved into a drive for and natural behavior of animals,” and stipulate

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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

institutional legitimacy and poles on a 500 square foot plot outside the regulation of the term ‘organically university’s Wexner Center for the Arts. It entailed grown’ in the interests of trade… So collaboration with the OSU College of Food, although codification arose from Agriculture and Environmental Sciences as well as multiple intentions, its greatest the Wexner. In his notes for a 2011 talk, Mercil success was to open up markets. describes it as his cultivation of art as practice and as ‘work’, in its verb form: QAI, the third-party certifying agency of Stonyfield, belongs to this capitalized institutional lineage. Its Thoreau’s work at Walden identity lies within the virtualized frame of was Walden, or the becoming transnational capital propounded by Carrier, of Walden through the Miller, Sklair and Thrift. living/writing/working through of it. Thoreau went to Walden to A virtual field naturalize himself (to configure his relation to nature) where he then “What, however, if human labor power turns out planted a field of beans to to be only part of the story of lively capital?” socialize himself (to configure his (Haraway, 46). I know Michael Mercil as an artist relation to society). His work in the and professor of art at the Ohio State University in bean field was a working out of Columbus, Ohio where we both work. Mercil conversation with neighbors and situates his practice within the structure and history passers-by (advice given/advice of the land grant university. A series of projects ignored). Likewise, I planted The under his “locally focused forum”[3], The Living Beanfield near the Wexner Center Culture Initiative, materializes within the academic and along College Road to institution the instantiation of possibility that Butler engage in conversation with the proposes. Mercil’s installation The Beanfield (2006- society of the university (advice 08) refigured Thoreau’s 2.5 acre beanfield at given/advice ignored). 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

I asked Mercil at that talk about his use of The soft veil of nostalgia [for the nostalgia in The Beanfield (2006-08), and in his pastoral] that hangs over our next Living Culture installation/plantation on the urbanized landscape is largely a same plot, The Virtual Pasture (2009-11). The vestige of the once dominant latter, three-year ‘work’ involved breeding what image of [America as] an became a flock of 16 sheep (from an initial three) undefiled green republic, a quiet at the Stratford Ecological Center, an educational land of forests, villages, and farms organic farm and nature preserve 25 miles north dedicated to the pursuit of of campus. Mercil trucked several of his sheep to happiness. (6, Mercil’s annotations) the fenced campus plot for monthly visits during the school year, a recurring event advertised [By design] most literary works through a series of postcards. Artist and flock called pastorals… qualify, or call occupied their small 'field' outside the Wexner into question, or bring irony to bear from 10 am to 3 pm on the "first Mondays". Mercil against the illusion of peace and planted his field with livestock forage grasses, harmony in a green pasture. And it apple trees, and a large LED monitor. The is this fact that will enable us, monitor's pixelated screen virtualized the sheep’s finally, to get at the difference country home via continuous live video feed from between the complex and Stratford. sentimental kinds of pastoralism. This discussion of the project draws mostly (25, Mercil’s annotations) from Mercil’s written response to my question about nostalgia, a Haraway-style response, but It is industrialization, represented by also my on-going conversations and co-worker images of machine technology, relation with the artist. Mercil begins with a set of that provides the counterforce in quotes from Leo Marx’s The Machine in the the American archetype of the Garden (cited in Mercil notes, 2011, n.p.): pastoral. (26)

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Mercil goes on to write about his own work: farm animals we, in fact, do not know what we are talking about. The LED monitor in The Virtual Pasture acts as a counterforce to Yet of all animals it is with farm the rural nostalgia re/presented by animals that we have an the landscape of the central evolutionary covenant. We have campus Oval (once an actual co-evolved together. Farm animals pasture, then re-engineered in the are dependent upon us. We are image of a pasture — without dependent upon them—not only animals) for food, but for our thinking.

From the Stratford Center (where The Virtual Pasture overlooked Ohio State’s the sheep are kept) to the Wexner traditional campus green, named The Oval. The Center (where the artwork is Boston-based Olmsted Brothers landscape located), the image of the farm, its architecture firm integrated the former farm field pasture and grazing animals, is into a master plan for the university in 1909. The captured by remote camera, Oval's picturesque scenography inherits a transferred by satellite, streamed pastoral ideology from the brothers' pater and through a computer network and Central Park's landscape architect, Frederick Law viewed through the screen of Olmsted. Mercil, representing The Machine in the contemporary technology. Garden, references (Leo) Marx’s account of the pastoral’s elite history in 18th century landscape In his notes, Mercil muses on the origins of painting. Cheerios in an unseen and disconnected oat field owned by General Mills Corporation. He Returning to Mercil's notes on the project: considers a recent evolutionary theory on the role of cooking in the development of the relatively ... this image of farm animals large brain and small stomachs of humans: outside the Wexner Center is spectral. The Virtual Pasture haunts Cooked food is more easily and the Oval with images of animals quickly digested than raw food. that at one time actually grazed it. Less energy needed by the When, on the first Monday of each stomach to digest = more time for month, I bring my sheep to the brain to daydream. From this campus to graze this 500 square might we suggest that food = foot patch of grass, it becomes a culture? At the table (or round the pasture in fact—and it is the Oval fire) lies the context for that remains a virtual image. conversation = the context for chewing over ideas (e.g. “Try this. To encounter (see) an animal’s You might like it.”). image is not, however, to experience or to know the animal. I am not speaking here (though I To know a farm animal one must could) of nutritional impacts, but handle it. This is what farmers do. rather I am speaking about the At The Virtual Pasture I do not offer cultural impacts of removing farm lessons in animal handling—even animals from our daily living. With if, at times, it seems the entire no contact with farm animals, how university is my classroom there. Yet can we come to know them, or from encounter we build what can we know about them? experience. By making farm Without contact with farm animals, animals once again visible within what kind of conversations can we our daily comings and goings, The have either with or about them? So Virtual Pasture seeks to inform our now, if we speak about farm thinking about them and our animals that we no longer see talking about them… and, consequently, we no longer know, then when speaking about With the rise of industrial scaled

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farming, the animals have form to our existence, we are in this disappeared from our sight. Is this respect – and irreversibly – a good or a bad thing for the vulnerable to exploitation. (Butler, animals? Is this a good or bad 2002, 9) thing for us? Is that a stupid question? Might a better question Guthman applies a concept of "aesthetic illusion" be, whether or not raising animals (Fine and Leopold, cited in Guthman, 236) to in sheds is a necessary thing to do? brand name. The concept addresses the And, if so, what condition(s) make it interpretive gap between a commodity's necessary? While we may choose "(physical) use value" and its exchangeable to raise farm animals in this way, "imputed use value" (236). The gap permits the must we choose to do so? introduction of rent, a disparity between attainable prices and actual production costs. A Is to pasture raise a cow a consumer culture that fetishizes the organic (nostalgic) picture of farming, or is imaginary enables the production of signs, it a farming practice? The Ohio “voluntary labels”, as a tactic for creating rents. Dairy Association describes the Such signs, though, are “highly ambiguous”, pasturing of cows as an subject to reinterpretation and redeployment. “alternative farm management Their openness to unintended, socially re- technique.” Alternative to what? inscribed, values and desires suggests Foucault’s Might we think about that? How concept of proliferative power. Guthman points might we talk about it? What, if to the classed, raced and regionalized anything, might we do about it? economic disparities that produce rent and that rents re-produce. Butler, in her chapter “Stubborn Where do we find ourselves? And Attachment, Bodily Subjection: Rereading Hegel what is the nature of the culture we on the Unhappy Consciousness” (1997, 31 -62), produce here now? I am an artist, interrogates the reiterative and proliferative not a farmer. The substance of my exchanges of power that produce disparity. Butler practice is to work from the re-narrates Hegel’s “Lordship and Bondage” tangible facts of my world toward figures, the lord and the bondsman. Here, I insert a shaping of my experience of/in into a retelling of Butler's rewriting a parenthetical it. inscription relating to a stony field. I assume in this uncertified act of re-inscribing an artifice to which Mercil dismantled The Virtual Pasture and Butler might object. But I do this to posit another "dispersed" his flock in December 2011. The artist's frame, wrapping around two figures, a person upcoming film Covenant extends the installation's (named Lady Stonyfield) and a cow (named central question into the human encounter with Cow), in a stony relational field (named farm animals. The release description reads: Commodity). The lord (Lady Stonyfield) and the Covenant (42:35 minutes) is a film bondsman (Cow) are figures in a stony field about farm animals and us that (Commodity). These two appear at first to be narrates the fact and the way opposed and completely different. But the Two these animals become food. In it, each co-figure the Other in a singular yet not farmers reflect upon the nature static mutual interdependence. The lord (Lady and economy of keeping livestock, Stonyfield) depends on the bondsman's (Cow’s) while calling our attention to the body and products of labor (milk) for the material rewards, anxieties and challenges conditions (yogurt) of his (her) daily life (breakfast). of the human/farm animal bond. Through this dependence, the lord (lady) produces the bondsman's (Cow’s) body, which he Antagonism and desire, retold (she) subsumes into his (her) own body. The lord (lady) thus consumes the bondsman's (Cow’s) If we had no appetite, we would labor and products of labor (milk and more be free from coercion, but cows). For this show of power ($360 million in sales because we are from the start in 2010) to work, the lord (Lady Stonyfield) must given over to what is outside us, selectively ‘forget’ his (her) involvement in submitting to the terms which give effecting the bondsman's (Cow’s) body and

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(food) products. He (she) must ‘disavow’ his (her) bondage is seen, and named. Butler (Hegel) finds dependence on the bondsman’s (Cow’s) work. A desire – the suppressed desire that drives the paradoxical result is the lord’s (lady’s) bondsman’s work – to be operative in the disembodiment in assuming the body of the possession of agency (40). But the cow, Other, embodying him (her) as bondsman (Cow)! regardless of her desire, possesses no terms The bondsman (Cow), too, must take part in the through which to enter the relational field. The substitution (commodification) of his (her) body (incorporated) person(s) condition the and products for the lord’s (lady’s) body and representational terms of relation. For the cow to possessions (cartons of yogurt to sell for $3.49). even appear to her (them) in that field, the The bondsman (Cow) must conspire, is allowed person(s) must look back and see her. Butler finds no choice but to conspire, in the concealment that the socially proliferative process of (Commodity) of that exchange consumption destabilizes agency and identity in (commodification). The bondsman’s (Cow’s) human terms. The proliferation opens possibilities recognition or nonrecognition, consciousness or to resist erasure. It binds subject and object unconsciousness, of the conspiracy (Commodity) together in a recognized interdependence. If does not at first change that relational field. The Lady (people) and Cow (cows) are each seen as bondsman (Cow) is embodied (incorporated), the internalized subject(s) of the Other(s) (lady- without regard for his (her) response (looking cow), each can become the desired object of back), into the duplicitous simulation of a the other. Both can become with. substitution (Commodity). The bondsman (Cow) is I see in Mercil’s acts of work a desire to conscripted into the relational field on which he know and to respond, respectfully, to the other (she) depends for sustenance (grass) and value animals that enable him to think and work, that (exchangeability) by the lord (lady). Butler take part in that thinking and working. His acts are formulates the substitution (incorporation) epistemological and ontological, concerned with rhetorically as: “you be my body for me, but do possible logics of knowing and being. In this work I not let me know that the body you are is my find an openness to becoming with that body” (35). Still, the bondsman (Cow), bonded to Guthman alludes to, but doesn’t get to, in the the lord (Lady Stonyfield), cannot ultimately conclusion of her chapter – despite its critical escape an unhappy consciousness (fear) of self- openings. The chapters by Carrier, Miller, Sklair loss (death). This conscripted reflexivity occurs first and Thrift on a reductive virtualism seem to when the bondsman (Cow) sees himself (herself), foreclose more possibilities than they open. and his (her) own erasure in the course of Butler’s work, in contrast and resistance to that production. These signs of self he (Cow) must closure, represents new possibilities. I credit it in submit, has no power but to submit, to the lord doing so with making possible. Mercil’s (Lady Stonyfield) and his (her) embodiment installations and his words, like Butler’s reprinted (incorporation) of possession here, co-figure bodies and power. Mercil, unlike (commodification). The submission of identity and Stonyfield, physically and daily works with animals, agency refigures self as an expropriation and including sheep, chickens, cows and people, erasure. The bonded (cow) and bonder and their grassy and stony fields. An exchange of (Stonyfield) logically converge in a field of subjectivity and objectivity takes place in the disembodiment and “fearful transience” (39). work’s refiguration of bodies and environments Each is materialized and virtualized through a self- and their co-scripted relations of power. I suggest perpetuating process of consumption. that the possibilities Mercil’s work instantiates My reinscription stops where the emerge through its materiality in co- bondsman’s and cow’s stories diverge. Butler operation with its virtuality. I reiterate here Butler’s (Hegel) traces a sequential, reflexive exchange of and Marx’s materiality as twofold, and Haraway’s objectivity and subjectivity between the “becoming with” as “coflourishing” (41). These bondsman (human) and lord (same species). shared materialities and flourishings can, should, Each subject pursues a desire for permanence be manifold. But only two must be seen to start (life) represented by his (her) object (product) of the co-productive reflexivity that Butler and labor. The dominated human after many self- Haraway name. As both demonstrate, and as we representing (self-advertising) acts of exchange is already knew, death and fear recur. Some stones enabled to re-inscribe upon his/her self some, remain hidden. But hiding can be constructive or though not full, agency of identity. Through this destructive interdependent with situation. And work, the person concealed within the frame of death need not be an erasure, like the

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incorporated subsumption of Stonyfield’s cow Miller, Daniel. “Conclusion: A Theory of Virtualism”. Ed. Carrier, James G. and Miller, Daniel. Virtualism: A New Political Economy. Berg. fetish. 1998.

Reingold, Jennifer. “How to sell sustainable foods to the Wal-Mart Notes shopper”. CNN Money. http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/04/17/boundaries-sustainability/ (24 Oct, 2012). 1 Stonyfield does have a line of organic yogurt smoothies. Sklair, Leslie. “The Transnational Capitalist Class”. Ed. Carrier, James 2 In 2011, the first series was valued at $25,137,147, and the latest, G. and Miller, Daniel. Virtualism: A New Political Economy. Berg. closing in 2010, $45,612,958. (CROPP Audited Financial Statement 1998. 2011, http://www.organicvalley.coop/about-us/invest/stock- prospectus/ 10-23-12). “Stonyfield CEO founder opening NYC organic, natural food cafe 3 http://www.michaelmercil.com/livingculture.html concept” Sustainable Food News (2012) http://sustainablefoodnews.com/story.php?news_id=15988 (26 Oct, References 2012)

"Stonyfield Comes to Europe, Buys Glenisk". Dairy Industries i myStonyfieldRewards.com (15 Oct 2012) International 71 (2006). ii I refer to Haraway’s usage of “to respond” in her critique of Derrida’s Thrift, Nigel. “Virtual Capitalism: The Globalisation of Reflexive Business lecture “And Say the Animal Responded” (cited in Haraway, 2007). Knowledge”. Ed. Carrier, James G. and Miller, Daniel. Virtualism: A New Political Economy. Berg. 1998. 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. 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.

Butler, Judith. "Bodies and power, revisited". Radical Philosophy 114 (2002). 13-19.

Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford University Press. 1997.

Carper, Jim. "Organic Valley Grows Naturally". Dairy Foods 111:12 (2010). 32-37.

Carrier, James G. “Introduction” and “Abstraction in Western Economic Practice”. Ed. Carrier, James G. and Miller, Daniel. Virtualism: A New Political Economy. Berg. 1998.

Guthman, Julie. “The ‘organic commodity’ and other anomalies in the politics of consumption”. Ed. Alex Hughes and Suzanne Reimer. Routledge. 2004.

Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet (Posthumanities). University of Minnesota Press. 2007. Katherine Bennett is an assistant professor in the Landscape Architecture Section, Knowlton School of Architecture at The Ohio Haraway, Donna. "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in State University (OSU), where she teaches design studios, Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective". Feminist Studies representation workshops and research seminars that investigate 14:3, Fall (1988). interspecies habitat. She is a registered landscape architect and has practiced in Boston, New York, Cape Cod, Savannah, San Marx, Karl. Capital Volume I: A Critique of Political Economy. Penguin Francisco, Seoul and Hanoi – the latter while a Visiting Professor of Classics. 1992. Landscape Architecture at the University of Seoul. Her degrees in Landscape Architecture and Painting are from the Graduate School Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral of Design at Harvard University (MLA) and The University of Georgia Ideal in America. Oxford University Press. 1967. (BFA). Katherine has begun research toward a PhD in the Department of Geography at OSU, integrating her collaborative Mercil, Michael. "The Living Culture Initiative". research with agroecologists, anthropologists, artists and architects in http://www.michaelmercil.com/livingculture.html (30 Oct, 2012). the US and Asia.

79

BR OOKE’S MONKEY

BR AND 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 [i] and the hint of a smile while two neat Victorian children watch calmly on.

Text by John Miller

onkey Brand Soap, Brooke’s boasted, a political animal. The ‘new imperialism’ of the ‘cleans, scours, scrubs, polishes [and] 1890s saw an intensification of British expansionist M brightens everything’, with one notable energy that gave consistent emphasis to the exception. The catchphrase ‘won’t wash clothes’ importance of commerce. Empire provided both features in the majority of the series (here printed an abundant source of industrial raw materials on the stair carpet), offering a guarantee of the and potential new markets for manufactured otherwise illimitable scope of Brooke’s hygienic commodities. Reflecting and supporting this pledge. One striking image demonstrates the national endeavour were various forms of popular soap’s extensive powers by posing the monkey imperialism. Images of empire were voraciously gazing with an air of self-satisfaction at his own consumed in music halls and theatres, in copious likeness in a frying pan’s sparkling base, his face works of travel writing and adventure fiction, altered miraculously from black to white, ensuring that the idea of Britain’s civilizing mission accompanied by the explanatory note, ‘For became part of the fabric of cultural life. British Happy BRIGHT reflection, MONKEY BRAND is just interests in Africa were particularly prominent in perfection’. Significantly, the frying pan generally the media at the fin-de-siècle. H. M. Stanley’s features somewhere in Brooke’s simian mise-en- 1890 In Darkest Africa, Lord Kitchener’s successful scène, although it sometimes takes a second campaign in the Sudan in 1898 and the start of look to find it; as if, fascinated by his own protean the Second Boer War in 1899 were among the form, the monkey wishes to always keep to hand notably newsworthy events that were grist to the the possibility of sneaking a glimpse at his new mill of writers, artists and illustrators. Hardly body, reminding himself of his transfigured skin in surprisingly, therefore, Africa is a recurring theme the gleaming world Brooke’s promises. in Victorian ad pages. Bovril, Eno’s Salts and Brooke’s monkey is, of course, very much Guinea Gold Cigarettes were among numerous 80

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

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companies that forged a marketing strategy in campaign, except occasionally when the relation to the myth of the Dark Continent with its monkey himself is displayed as a labouring familiar ideological pattern of savagery and subject in images that add social class to race as bestiality inviting in the ‘enlightening’ influence of another category of the animal in human form. British rule. Brooke’s monkey is part of this history. As such, Brooke’s offers both an inducement to As our most proximate and troubling animal and an erasure of toil. So, despite the advert’s relatives, monkeys have long evoked questions of insistence on Monkey Brand’s cleaning, scouring, human origins and identity; concerns which, in scrubbing utility, what matters most is not the the context of imperialism, frequently return to substance or effect of the soap, but the glittering ideas of race. Victorian soap advertising drew ideal it encapsulates: a domestic utopia that consistently on an association between otherness derives its political force from its relationship with and filth: in the logic of imperialism, the the Earth’s remote, dark places. Behind the animalized African, or the Africanized animal, was monkey a pot plant’s spreading foliage gestures a lamentably unsanitary creature. Anne towards a distant jungle habitat. As he zips down McLintock’s important study Imperial Leather, and away from this hint of his past, flying by the which explores, among other things, the central seat of his tailored pants, precarious but connection of ‘commodity racism and imperial ultimately secure in his new environment, the advertising’, provides a compelling analysis of the monkey represents the triumph of way that ‘soap-making became the emblem of empire, realised in the urbanity of the middle industrial progress’, as ‘soap was invested with class home that safely contains him. In the magical, fetish powers’.[ii] Britain, the argument deeply conservative Victorian attitudes he ran, was bringing the world cleanliness, washing announces, Brooke’s anthropomorphic monkey away degeneracy and backwardness. Dirt was reminds us of the discomforting ideological uses an evolutionary issue. Consequently, Brooke’s non-human primates have long been put to in monkey is a truly global animal, illustrating the the semiotic repertoire of capitalist modernity. terrestrial scope of imperial ambition, even in one incarnation skipping around a tiny Earth, with his References trademark frying pan in paw, a citoyen du monde, heralding a worldwide regimen of [i] London Illustrated News, October 3, 1891, p. 453 spotless civilization. He is, the byline runs, ‘the world’s polisher’; himself a reformed subject of [ii] Anne McLintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in imperial capitalism, lifted from his beastly state to the Colonial Contest. New York and London, Routledge, 1995, p. the appearance of a man. 217; p. 207 Above all, the moral of Brooke’s Monkey Brand is a message of order. ‘The poetics of [iii] McLintock, Imperial Leather, p. 226. cleanliness’, McLintock writes, ‘is a poetics of social discipline’,[iii] recruiting us all into rituals of work, consumption and aspiration, redolent with a Dr John Miller arrived in Sheffield in September 2012 to take up a larger philosophical proposition. This is what it lectureship in Nineteenth-Century Literature. He completed his PhD means to be human. At first glance, there is a at the University of Glasgow in 2009 and then held postdoctoral certain perilousness about the monkey on the research fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in the stairs. The blond girl’s arm holds back her Humanities, University of Edinburgh, and at the University of Northern younger, dark-haired companion, but their faces British Columbia. He also held a teaching fellowship at the University betray no fear. Rather, they are making space for of East Anglia. He is general secretary of the Association for the Study the spectacle of the monkey’s chaotic nature of Literature and Environment (UK & Ireland):http://asle.org.uk/ reconfigured as fun, at worst a case of His research focuses on writing about animals, ecology and schoolboyish high spirits. If there is a touch of empire from the nineteenth century to the present, with particular weepiness about the big-eyed brunette, there is emphasis on the late Victorian period. His first monograph Empire and the Animal Body (Anthem, 2012) explores the representation of an assurance in the older girl’s poise that keeps exotic animals in Victorian and Edwardian adventure fiction. He is the tears at bay. Very little literal connection to the currently working on the co-authored volume Walrus for the product’s functionality is apparent in the Reaktion Animal series and on his second monograph, Fur: A Literary exhilaration of the monkey’s descent, unless History. Other work currently in progress includes co-edited perhaps in the polished smoothness of the collections on Henry Rider Haggard and on globalization and surface that allows him to glide so effortlessly to heterotopias, and a special edition of the Journal for Victorian the floor. Indeed, the concealment of work is a Culture, ‘New Perspectives on Victorian Animals’ (with Claire characteristic trope of the Monkey Brand McKechnie).

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JUMBO : A CAPITALIST

CREAT ION 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

t is tempting to take for granted that mature Everybody Needs a Story: Gilded Age consumer societies are thusly marked by “ark- Jumbo Iloads of animal figures—realistic and fantastic—which parade a veritable carnival of In the beginning, there was a modest but significations” through our commercial culture, as enthusiastic consumer culture in North America, Reuel Denny noted already a half century ago inhabited by citizens known to expect timely and (1989, lv-lxix). Yet they could not function as such fashionable things at the lowest possible price if it were not for the crucial training ground an (Breen 2004, 131-32). Prominent among the elephant called Jumbo provided advertisers and products and services they patronized were consumers over a century ago. He was the itinerant displays of anonymous exotic or wild primordial case, a Gilded Age signpost showing animals shown in barns and empty lots for a fee. marketers and manufacturers how to use animal For consumers, paying to see unusual animals figures to tell emotive stories endorsing a modern spoke of a desire for worldly novelty and security consumer subjectivity, stories that could be through trade (Somkin 1967, 11-54; Weeks 1994, essentialized and associated with any product. 485-95). The handbills and newspaper ads Although an individual with a particular history, employed by showmen provided the first graphic over time Jumbo’s tale was boiled down until he commercial representations of the animals that became “an adjective” in both colloquial and most North Americans would see, including the commercial use (Harding 2000, 11). And, he asks young female pachyderm known famously as us to think about how animal figures have guided “The Elephant,” an educational and exotic visitor. consumers through one hundred and thirty years That first elephant’s popularity with audiences of economic change by persuading them to inspired showmen to spend the next century internalize a central premise of modern working out how to use animals and their capitalism; namely that one can best achieve representations to sell. personal liberty through ever-expanding Phineas T. Barnum would become a consumption and the ethic of “more.” crucial pioneer in this art of communicating to

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consumers with animals that promised graphics or grandiose claims, and repeating compelling consumer experience. Barnum was a them until no person could possibly ignore them media genius who instructed his agents to (quoted in Rowell 1870, 83). Circuses were the embellish fences and newspaper columns with most prolific employers on the continent of line drawings, steel plate images and textual grand, surreal and colorfully graphic lithographed depictions of real and invented animals, advertising, which advance men liberally pasted contextualized with intriguing stories that enticed over fences and buildings in cities and the tiniest viewers to visit in order to judge those beings for towns. They easily flattered audiences as a themselves. At the same time, he invited privileged citizenry by exclaiming how much risk a Americans to determine how, as residents of a given impresario had taken on to bring the largely unregulated capitalist economy, one most extraordinary animals to all ticket-payers, might wisely evaluate advertising to find the regardless of their station in life, illustrating those frauds and truths they contained. Americans were claims with bizarrely surreal and glamorous willing partners with Barnum in valorizing this idea, images of people and animals in every hoping that each person would be free to form imaginable pose. an opinion and exercise it through spending as a Barnum was additionally notorious that patriotic mode of self-improvement (Adams century as a master of “Humbug” (today we 1997, 147-63; Cook 2001, 73-126; Harris 1981, might say hype). He was an early expert at issuing 74-75). press releases, interviews to friendly journalists, When he got into the circus trade in the letters to the editor, and various day-by-day bits 1850’s, Barnum knew that audience fascination of information that contextualized his advertising with the notion of abundance, as well as with a broader controversy or shared public story. competition between companies, had driven Thus, when Barnum considered Jumbo at the show producers to develop a “MAMMOTH SHOW” London Zoo in 1881, he saw an elephant who (as the ads often read) marketing practice might carry a dramatic individual story while whereby companies strove to create “grandness” serving as the perfect agent for the penultimate and “giantism” in their productions, presaging the execution of mammoth marketing in history. The broader marketing of excess in the late twentieth elephant was then a much-loved resident of the century. Bull elephants especially articulated the Zoo and a favorite of Queen Victoria herself. Born industry’s overall promotional aesthetic. Circuses in 1861, in the French Sudan (Mali), he had were the only ventures that held living elephants resided for a short time after his capture at at that point, since there would be no network of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris before arriving in zoos in North America until the end of the century. London around age four, where he spent plenty With their vast bulk and unique shape, elephants of time accepting food from visitors and being on circus bills and in circus day parades driven by his trainer William Scott about the functioned “as an advertisement” for the whole grounds, carrying a howdah filled with the performance genre. “Any alert advertiser [knew] children who paid for a ride. By the late 1870’s, that the elephants were the thing to ‘bear down Jumbo was maturing into an adult, and so was on hard’” in order to stay in the public eye, as experiencing dangerous periods of irritability circus press agent Charles Day recalled of the known as musth (central to elephantine industry wisdom at the time (1995, 66, 69). reproduction and social organization in the wild). Later that century, when ad men said “Bill He had also begun to resist the dominance it like a circus,” they referred specifically to the training used to subdue him by becoming dramatic and colorful promotional techniques unpredictable when Scott was not immediately developed by early showmen to entertain and present. amaze just so (Laird 1998, 44). More broadly, the Jumbo had a strange dual personality as dominant advertising theory of the period far as the British public could see. As portrayed by advocated for liberal spending on messaging citizens and the press, he was at once a friend to that presented consumers with the same children and a dangerous wild animal surely information—usually plain-spoken details on what bound to kill someone. Looking to relieve himself could be bought, where, and for what price— of the responsibility of the elephant, London Zoo over a period of weeks or months. Barnum and Superintendent Abraham Bartlett agreed to sell other aggressive marketers in various trades would Jumbo to Barnum, who would acquire the largest develop this practice by piquing audience elephant in the world, as the advertising would interest with novel ads offering puzzles, insist, as the centerpiece for a show branded observations on current events, compelling “Greatest Show on Earth Combined with the

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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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Great London Circus,” produced by his merger actual size, and a horse and carriage passing with the ventures of legendary circus impresarios comfortably under his belly.[i] James Hutchinson and James A. Bailey (Saxon Jumbo’s advertising told viewers that he 1995, 284). was an extraordinary and powerful individual When news of the sale became public, reluctantly forced to the United States, a feat only the British press ignited a public controversy that Barnum could produce. That narrative drew its would lay the groundwork for the elephant’s cultural sense from the century’s hunting transformation from mildly famous zoo captive to narratives, a genre that was popular in book provocative advertising symbol. In London, the publishing, magazines and newspapers. Hunting newspapers and plenty of angry citizens, narratives provided dramatic tales of western including children, called Barnum and all men who, with the aid of local servants, tracked, Americans “Philistines” and “slave-owners” who captured or killed wild animals in Asia and Africa. would make the noble Jumbo mere “chattel” Their prey, including elephants, were routinely held captive to entertain a “Yankee mob.” (The US portrayed as fierce and noble adversaries of the had abolished slavery sixteen years earlier, but hunter, beasts who fought valiantly against their that cliché along with older suspicions of the pursuers, then died in dramatic fashion—all the America as a degenerate and rebellious nation better to display the honor and strength of the had stuck) (Harding 2000, 43-45; Harris 1981, 257; hunter (here Barnum as financial risk taker) brave Jolly 1976, 57-58; Rubin and Rubin 2005, 3-20). enough to initiate the chase (Donald 2006, 50- At first, the controversy had little resonance 68; Wylie 2008, 83-84). An editorialist in the since North Americans could not closely follow influential Harper’s Weekly agreed that citizens, the scandal in the London papers. So Barnum too, had “reasons for satisfaction” in Jumbo’s encouraged the local press to give over many acquisition because he seemed the largest and column inches over to Jumbo’s arrival in New York perhaps the most robust captive African elephant on April 9, 1882. Thereafter his marketing team left in a world in which the ivory trade was used broadsides and show programs to decimating wild elephant populations.[ii] Soon, he reconstruct media representations of the difficult speculated, the American public might evacuation of Jumbo from Britain found in possess the last African bull elephant on earth! newspapers and illustrated magazines like The Barnum’s victory was a victory for the whole Illustrated London News and Frank Leslie’s nation, the colloquial and promotional wisdom Illustrated, much of which consisted of pseudo- insisted. One Greatest Show on Earth broadside events devised to lengthen and make more got this point across with an image of Jumbo theatrical the shipping of the elephant. towering over the preserved skeleton of a North Barnum’s lithograph broadsides, show American mastodon, a late eighteenth-century programs and newspaper spots certainly billed totem of national prestige that people Jumbo’s journey “like a circus,” with a colorful and remembered well.[iii] dramatic giantism (Figure 1). One iconic poster On both sides of the Atlantic, pundits globalized “THE GIANT AFRICAN ELEPHANT JUMBO” noted frequent public fatigue in the face of such as “The Biggest Elephant in the World” in tapered tactics, yet also noted that many Britons and typeset that evoked the curvature of the earth, North Americans seemed sincerely interested in reminding viewers that Jumbo’s “Removal” had Jumbo’s life. So did the naysayers hasten to been “remonstrated against by the whole British participate in the Jumbo scandal by lampooning nation and was accomplished in the face of the deftness with which Barnum and his staff were seeming insurmountable objections” by Barnum making an international incident out of the sale of and company. It showed a resistant Jumbo a captive animal (a transaction zoos and circuses “FORCED INTO HIS BOX” and bracing himself performed regularly with no public notice). The against the outside of the crate. It also portrayed lampooners probably only heightened Jumbo’s “JUMBO CHAINED,” wearing an angry expression versatility as a “rhetorical animal” since they and straining against his halter. Other promotional made cultural space for reticent observers to materials depicted Jumbo’s height and size with make their own interpretive use of Jumbo by great exaggeration, as was Barnum’s frequent complaining or taking ironic enjoyment from practice with animal attractions (Presbrey 1968, Jumbo as symbol of consumer credulity (Ritvo 215). One show program offered “All-Famous and 1989, 5-6). Funny Folks, an illustrated humor Gigantic ‘JUMBO’ The Mighty Lord of all Beasts… tabloid supplement added to the British The Largest Living Quadruped on Earth…[and] paper, Weekly Budget,[iv] stayed relevant with a Towering Monster” with Jumbo drawn twice his cover (in its own way an advertisement for the

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Fig. 2. Funny Folks, 1882. McCaddon Collection, Special Collections and Rare Books, Princeton Library, Princeton, NJ. 87

magazine’s contents and character) depicting products aimed at women (Laird 1998, 93). Spots Jumbo as a figurative and literal vehicle for for foods and medicines depicted anonymous Barnum’s marketing efforts (Figure 2). Drawn with animals as spirits of transformation representing circus handbills and broadsides glued to his skin, the power of the product at hand. Some even he was a caricature of Barnum’s entrepreneurial linked human and non-human life in whimsical persona as an American media monarch. In a and ancient ways by offering amusing animals satirical Roman or British style, he rides Jumbo with portrayed in human clothing or, particularly in the paste-brush scepter in hand while wearing a stars case of patent medicines like liniments, assuring and stripes suit and jaunty crown. Below him, a viewers they could use the product on a horse’s grumpy looking Jumbo passes a handbill body or their own (Lears 1994, 145). These celebrating his own captivity to a small girl. promotional animal representations revealed an Plenty of people understood that Jumbo early industry understanding that advertising had become a living communication medium. should engage the viewer with an open-ended He was a figurative billboard onto which, not only interrogation of some common truth (for instance Barnum and the British and North American press, the complexity of citizens’ constructions of the but also citizens—the customers of zoos, circuses non-human), the memory of which the customer and the media—were projecting their own needs could link to purchasing the product. Traditionally and identities. Jumbo was then the most famous the circuses had advertised their elephants even animal in the world and a turning point in the more simply as naturalist’s curiosity or happy commercialization of the human habit of using performer. animals “to think”—in this case about nature and Jumbo, however, was depicted as a national rivalries. And as Jumbo toured the US complex individual experiencing a broad range and Canada with Barnum’s company over the of human-style emotions and personality traits: next three years, the public noise around the frustration, love, fear, stubbornness, sadness, elephant came to be known as “Jumbo Mania.” anger and melancholy resignation. As much as it Certainly, Jumbo’s arrival in New York in asked the viewer to pay to see him at the circus, April of 1881 was a moment many saw as a sign Jumbo’s advertising also invited consumers to of the American public’s right to have privileged empathize with his feelings over his fate, while access to whatever the world contained. If imagining themselves as his captors. It was that Barnum wrestled that “whatever” away from the mediated representation of Jumbo as traveler British for his own profit, he did so equally on that gave the elephant his real value. “Men and Americans’ behalf, many believed. In a widely women are selfish,” Barnum had advised fellow republished telegram to the editor of the London entrepreneurs of why this was so. “We all prefer Telegraph, Barnum insisted the elephant was a purchasing where we can get the most for our right owed to “Fifty-one millions American citizens money,” he explained, knowing that in the case [for whom] my 40 years’ invariable practice of of his animal exhibitions he sold not just the exhibiting [the] best that money could procure chance to view an animal but an opportunity to makes Jumbo’s presence here participate in a story about the animal that imperative.”[v] Here—and this was crucial— reflected one’s own identity (quoted in Rowell Barnum’s bombastic claims of sparing no 1870, 82). Barnum had pioneered the “exchange expense or effort to bring the most gigantic land of story for value” in his earlier promotions of animal on earth to the American public were not human performers as celebrities and freaks, but signs of fraud, but elements of an authentically tread new territory when he extended it to the American cultural event. Each citizen-consumer non-human Jumbo (Twitchell 2000, 25; see also could speak his or her mind about Jumbo’s story Presbrey 1968, 219-22). And, in fact, it appears and vicariously capture the mighty elephant. In that the Greatest Show on Earth circus sold far effect, Barnum’s advertising told consumers: more tickets than usual because of the fame Expect more. You deserve it. Jumbo achieved in the US. Barnum boasted, in Jumbo Mania was possible, in part, one of his biographies, that he earned several because the elephant’s ads constituted a radical times over the reported $30,000 he invested in departure from previous circus advertising for importing and maintaining the elephant (Barnum elephants, or any animal for that matter. Since 1888, 333). the 1870’s, when it became possible to Jumbo Mania continued unabated for inexpensively produce detailed illustrations, three years. North Americans immediately began advertisers had begun experimenting with ads making colloquial use of the elephant’s title, for featuring animal and child figures, especially for instance as a name for horses and household

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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 self- interested 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 Then Jumbo died, hit by a train in the small town and Lindner Lithograph, 1883, Historical Collections, Baker of St. Thomas, Ontario. It was 1885. Barnum, Library, Harvard Business School, Harvard University, Bailey and Hutchinson pressed on, exhibiting Cambridge, MA. Jumbo’s skeleton and taxidermied skin for some years, then donating the former to the American pets. Consumers identified with Jumbo further Museum of Natural History in New York and the because the elephant complimented latter to Tufts College in Medford, Massachusetts. contemporary technologies for the inexpensive Yet, the idea of Jumbo had been such a reproduction of images, which were proving a great step forward in using animal figures to link boon to the work of persuasion by way of spending to the consumer’s symbolic storytelling with characters (Laird 1998, 69, 93, appropriation of the animal’s energy that it did 149-51). In the spirit of Barnum’s “Jumbo chained” not die. Jumbo first reappeared as “jumbo,” a vignette, a Boston thread manufacturer issued a promotional notion in the 1910’s and 1920’s in the color trade card advocating for the strength of world of music production, seen as a “craze of their product, showing a fierce, red-eyed Jumbo composers and concert-givers for long being dragged through the streets of London to compositions and monster performances,” and the ship that would send him to America other works featuring “long-drawn-out arias” and “Because Drawn by Willamantic Thread!”[vi] Clark’s other gimmicks.[ix] Later the word became a term Spool Cotton company produced a series of ten for the marketing of newspapers with sensational trade cards showing: Jumbo arriving in America; stories and “Jumbo editions,” and the drive to with suitcase in trunk playing tourist; in a tuxedo at produce ever-taller skyscrapers.[x] Early twentieth- the Opera; in a bathing suit at the beach at century jumboism—“the tendency to esteem art Coney Island; in a bow tie, guzzling beer at the in proportion to its bulk” (as circuses similarly had bar (here as a male overindulging at the saloon in their mammoth marketing programs)—was a in reference to the reality of manly alcoholism sign of gauche excess and imprudent faith in

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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 Meanwhile, advertisers turned to “scientific satire and celebration of American pretensions to advertising” campaigns that assumed the greatness was so often repeated that it had emotional pliability of consumers and so become a cliché, now devoid of its original associated products with experiences of tongue-in-cheek roasting of the public’s satisfaction or the creation and display of fascination for “firsts” and “mosts.” personality (Marchand 1985, 68-69). In moving Whether nervous or dismissive of the trend, from the carnivalesque to realism in their art, ad critics noted that jumboism seemed a peculiarly men emphasized aspirational consumption of American aesthetic, a code for lowbrow home appliances, automobiles, jewelry, clothing, abundance.[xii] Fueled by the booming consumer and cosmetics. Anonymous elephants continued culture many urban Americans were experiencing to appear in various kinds of advertising in those in those decades, it was also promoted by years, for instance as icons for India (pictured as consumers’ groups and ad men determined to a decorated Asian elephant carrying riders), or in establish mass consumption as a basic element cartoons, as symbols for the American of national identity and social participation. In Republican Party, and (if pink) for a state of doing so, they were reinvigorating the old “politics intoxication. of ‘more,’” introduced by trade unions in the When the Great Depression hit, the 1890’s, as an alternative to radical economic contemporary ethos evoked “Fear and reforms, to offer workers a bigger cut of the Hoarding,” as one recent interpretation put it, as wealth they helped to produce (Currarino 2006, consumers focused especially on food 17-36; McGovern 2006). staples.[xiii] It was also the era of safari-style “tooth

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and claw” movies and other cultural products lifestyles (enacted through specific products) such that celebrated a forceful and independent that jumboism proliferated to a broad array of manhood in order to reassure Canadians and products promising modernity, joy and liberty in Americans who saw the men in their lives buckling unrestrained consumption, especially for the emotionally under the humiliation of chronic valuable adult female market segment (Leiss, unemployment. Inviting vicarious participation by Kline, Jhally and Botterill 2005, 190-98). The 1955 viewers, in safari films, wild animal wranglers like mail-order catalogue Housewares for Frank Buck and Clyde Beatty dominated their Homemakers proposed that the Pearl-Wick animal subjects—tigers, lions, elephants and Jumbo Shelf Hamper could make post-War others—who were noble adversaries because laundry storage elegantly functional: “Super they were equally powerful as their captors. giantized hamper with handy built in shelf for (Stokes 2004, 138-54) Indeed, had it not been so cosmetics… Largest hamper ever made.” In the for Barnum and his audience with Jumbo as well? Miss America Pageant Official Yearbook for 1963, Consequently, for parity products like an ad for Toni Home Beauty Collection offered, food, the old aesthetic of abundance became “for the girl who wants just curves, not curls. Big, newly important and jumboism as marketing big jumbo size body curlers.”[xvi] theory for musicians and newspaper men jostled Jumbo had come to mean “enjoy more – in those days with an archetypical African bull, a you deserve it”—more volume, more options, generic Jumbo of sorts. He appeared on cans more convenience—as a sort of and boxes to give “regenerative” meaning to consumerist carpe diem. Jumbo as modern oversized produce like “Jumbo Olives” (Lears abstraction offered acquisitiveness without the 1994, 157-58). Strength Valencias oranges of taint of gluttony. It reified a corporate, California created a series of animal themed government and popular consensus that North labels for their wooden crates featuring rhinos, Americans would be defined by what Lizabeth lions, and others. The Strength-brand African Cohen has called “an economy of inexhaustible elephant sniffed down his trunk at the viewer with abundance,” that many consumers appear to his ears outstretched displaying his size and might have embraced wholeheartedly as a right they (Figure 4). For consumers weary of restraint and had earned (Cohen 2003, 10). Indeed, every uncertainty, this jumbo elephant was a sign of agricultural fair and carnival offered “Jumbo gigantism to be sure, yet not as hype or satire, but Malts” and milkshakes for carefree summer eating as relief. He was a comforting promise for the in places of commercial leisure, and so future and metaphor for citizens’ inner fortitude, employed jumbo as a food design element mental and physical. (Indeed, the University of evoking relaxed celebration. Alabama still uses an “angry” African bull It made sense for Jumbo to become so elephant as promotional mascot for their sports abstract. New streams of conceptual advertising teams.) were emerging just then to explain products, Older forms would overlap with these new services, whole companies, and even political trends. The formal “Jumbo” still served as a candidates with impressionistic and highly nostalgic stock character of the circus arts, symbolic or metaphorical messaging. The advertising the genre in films and Broadway Volkswagen Beetle “Think Small” ad miniaturized a shows set in circuses. And after the Cole Brothers Beetle in the upper left hand corner of a blank, Clyde Beatty Circus had the gumption to offer an white space in order to advertise the car by elephant as “JUMBO 2nd – The Only African engaging its critics (resulting in “The most admired Elephant with Any Circus” in the 1930’s, there print ad of all time,” by one telling) (Tungate 2007, would be more than thirty zoo and circus opposite 118). Such advertising asked consumers elephants around the world given that to do the mental work of interpreting and name.[xiv] One 1948 Levi’s ad for working-class incorporating promotional communication into a men combined jumbo as circus trope and persona evincing membership in subcultures metaphor by portraying two elephants giggling defined by particular modes of consumption. about a third, who vainly struggles to pull his leg Accordingly, in the context of growing public free from a stake to which he is tethered with a awareness of the abilities and complex mental pair of jeans: “Since they tied him up with those lives of elephants publicized by media-savvy Levi’s – he never gets away,” one explains to the ethologists and behaviorists in those years, North other.[xv] Americans soon found advertising bearing trained Still, post-War advertising practice elephants pictured attempting to crush luggage expanded to include promotion by the selling of in order to demonstrate its durability or pictured

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

with home computers as a metaphor for memory Jumbo: “Help Yourself to Happiness” [xvii] (Mitman 2006, 175-94). Perhaps the peak of innocent faith in Today, Jumbo seems, in many respects, a jumbo as product design concept came in 1970 throwback to simpler times. In our contemporary with the advent of commercial travel by the “fifth frame” of promotional communication, Boeing 747 (Figure 5). The “Jumbo Jet” much advertising refrains from telling consumers incorporated the essence of a long-dead animal that products and services are tied to a particular to express an ethos of “more” by its very form. It lifestyle, social group or persona; instead offering evoked a sense of wonder for the can-do-ism in that it can be a medium for the creation of one’s American industrial production, linking consumer own meanings (Leiss, Kline, Jhally and Botterill emotions and ideology in every flight (Kramer 2005, 563-72). Yet, Jumbo remains more 2006, 156-59). Like the promotional stamp the ideologically rigid. It is a tenacious classic that United States Postal Service would issue in 1999 to paradoxically speaks of an admiration for “more,” celebrate the first commercial flight of the Boeing while promoting products and services directed 747, the aircraft would advertise American power at people for whom more is often less. To be sure, and affluence as it traveled the globe. 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 [xviii] Fig. 6. bulk. Recent uses of the jumbo idea bear Asian elephant as stand in for jumbo as suddenly precarious troubling testament to that self-destructive streak product design concept, 2010. Image courtesy of Diamond Funding Corporation. in North American consumers. With the economic bubbles North Americans created at the end of the twentieth-century, there came robust modes some is good, more must be better; North of consumption and display to celebrate them. Americans should have the most, and it will be The conceptual jumbo became a marker easy. Since Jumbo’s day, images and stories (satirical for some, invigorating for others) of extracted from events around his life seem to brands encouraging proud rejection of modesty have had a mysterious power to communicate and self-restraint, with food as a particular fixation: manifestly fraudulent claims with a sense of Jumbo 2 for 1 Pizza, jumbo hot dog, Super Size authenticity that have made them seem meal, Super Big Gulp, Meat’Normous Omelet normative and comforting. The puzzle and power Sandwich. Jumboism materialized as an entire of jumbo as advertising trope is that this effect did genre of “all-you-can-eat” restaurants unique to not fade as the generations passed. Today he still the continent (the most unintentionally depressing naturalizes the most unsustainable consumer slogan being attached to the Golden Corral desires and habits. 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 Notes promise the consumer economies of scale but actually burden them with the costs of [i] “The Great African Elephant Jumbo,” Strobridge Lithograph Co., 1882, Tibbals Digital Collection, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, retrieved May 2, transporting, storing and financing inventory that 2011; http://emuseum.ringling.org/emuseum/view/objects/asitem/search$0040/4/title supermarkets and department stores once -asc?t:state:flow=9dc5b092-f73d-4076-ada6-c44123d3e916; “Barnum & bankrolled. Those patterns were in turn facilitated London: 8 United Monster Shows,” 1883, C-131a, Circus Poster Collection, Princeton University Library, Princeton, NJ. by the public’s desire for increasingly large vehicles (remember the Hummer?) to carry [ii] “Jumbo,” Harper’s Weekly, April 1, 1882. warehouse shopping finds to spacious “monster [iii] “Barnum & London: Jumbo,” Strobridge Lithograph Co., 1882, Tibbals Digital houses,” all of it financed by “jumbo loans.” Collection, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, retrieved May 2, 2011, http://emuseum.ringling.org/emuseum/view/objects/asitem/search$0040/1/title (Figure 6) -asc?t:state:flow=04cd6684-1e6b-4674-8c76-74dfb893acc5.

Eagles, beavers, elk, bison, coyotes and [iv] “History of the Collection – Funny Folks,” British Comics Collection, British other symbolic species aside, the African bull Library, retrieved April 17, 2011, http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/findhelprestype/news/britcomics/. elephant—the Jumbo elephant—has been the iconic animal of North American capitalism. [v] “Barnum and His Elephant Jumba (sic.),” New York Times, February 24, 1882.

Unlike the fictionalized and essentialized animal [vi] The Willamantic trade card is reproduced in Deborah Walk, Jennifer Lemmer figures that represent human feeling in advertising and Marcy Murray, “Colorful Circus Paper Traces the Spread of ‘Jumbomania’,” Ephemera Society Articles, retrieved March 21, 2011, for cellular companies, zoos, foods, animated http://www.ephemerasociety.org/articles.html. films and countless other products, services and [vii] Clark’s O.N.T. Spool Cotton Jumbo trade card series by Buek and Lindner experiences, jumbo advertises the overarching Lithograph, 1883, Historical Collections, Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, retrieved March 27, 2011, ideal by which consumption has constantly http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/19th_century_tcard/. The full series can be expanded. Although embraced sporadically viewed at http://www.tradecards.com/articles/jumboBL/index.html. across the population, the ethos of jumbo has [viii] “Jumbo Billiard and Pool Balls,” Puck, June 27, 1883. been grounded in a simple but very old idea: if

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[ix] “A Few Lines,” Review of Reviews 4 (1891): 289; Henry Theophilus Laird, Pamela Walker. 1998. Advertising Progress: American Business and the Finck, Songs and Songwriters (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1900), 28. Rise of Consumer Marketing. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lears, Jackson. 1994. Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in [x] “Journalism,” The Spectator 114 (June 12, 1915): 805. America. New York: Basic Books.

[xi] Finck, Songs and Songwriters, 19. Marchand, Roland. 1985. Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for

[xii] “Jumbomania,” Littell’s Living Age 287 (1915): 187 Modernity, 1920-1940. Berkeley: University of California Press.

[xiii] “An American Dream Timeline,” Vanity Fair, March 13, 2009, retrieved May McGovern, Charles F. 2006. Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 2, 2011, http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2009/03/an-american-dream- 1890-1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. timeline.html. Mitman, Gregg. 2006. “Pachyderm Personalities: The Media of Science, [xiv] http://www.elephant.se/database.php. Politics and Conservation” in Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman, eds. Thinking

[xv] “Levi’s,” Hoofs & Horns 43, no. 3 (September 1948): 21. with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism. New York: Columbia University Press, 175-94. [xvi] John Wanamaker Department Stores, Housewares for Homemakers (Philadelphia: Whipple & Kelley, 1955), 13; Official Yearbook of Presbrey, Frank. 1968. The History and Development of Advertising. 1929; repr. the Miss America Pageant, 1963, 31, Miss America Programs Collection. Both New York: Greenwood Press. these sources reside in the Digital Archives of the Hagley Library and Museum, Greenville, DE, http://digital.hagley.org/. Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate: The English and other Creatures in the

[xvii] For a sampling of such advertising see Victorian Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. http://www.advertisingarchives.co.uk/. Rowell, George P. 1870. The Men Who Advertise: An Account of Successful [xviii] At least five books by different authors bear the title Affluenza. Juliet Advertisers, Together with Hints on the Method of Advertising. New York: Nelson Schor, The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need (New York: Chesman. Harper Perennial, 1999).

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

Adams, Bluford. 1997. E Pluribus Barnum: The Great Showman and the Making Saxon, Arthur H. 1995. P. T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man. 1989; repr. New of U.S. Popular Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. York: Columbia University Press.

Barnum, Phineas T. 1888. The Life of P.T. Barnum, Written by Himself. Buffalo, Shukin, Nicole. 2009. Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. NY: Courier Company. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Breen, T. H. 2004. The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Somkin, Fred. 1967. Unquiet Eagle: Memory and Desire in the Idea of Shaped American Independence. New York: Oxford University Press. American Freedom, 1815-1860. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Cohen, Lizabeth. 2003. A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Stokes, John. 2004. “‘Lion’s Griefs’: The Wild Animal Act as Theatre” in New Consumption in Postwar America. New York: Vintage. Theatre Quarterly Vol. 20, No. 2, 138-54

Cook, James W. 2001. The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Twitchell, James B. 2000. Twenty Ads That Shook the World: The Century’s Most Barnum. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 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 Tungate, Mark. 2007. Adland: A Global History of Advertising. London: Kogan Vol. 93, No. 1, 17-36 Page.

Day, Charles H. 1995. “The Elephant as an Advertisement,” Billboard, March Weeks, William Earl. 1994. “American Nationalism, American Imperialism: An 23, 1901 reprinted in Charles H. Day. Ink from a Circus Press Agent. San Interpretation of United States Political Economy, 1789-1861” in Journal of the Bernadino, CA: Borgo Press. Early Republic Vol. 14, No. 4, 485-95.

Denney, Reuel. 1989. The Astonishing Muse. 1957; repr. New Brunswick, NJ: Wylie, Dan. 2008. Elephant. London: Reaktion. Transaction Publishers.

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 Harris, Neil. 1981. Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum. Chicago: University of entertainment. She is Associate Professor at the University of Guelph Chicago Press. in Guelph, Ontario and affiliated faculty of the Campbell Centre for the Study of Animal Welfare. She received her Ph.D. from UC Jolly, W. P. 1976. Jumbo. London: Constable. 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 Kramer, Cheryce. “Digital Beasts as Visual Esperanto: Getty Images and the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream, 1790-1935 (University Colonization of Sight” in Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman, eds. Thinking with of North Carolina Press, 2009), documenting uses of Eastern Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism. New York: Columbia personae in amateur and professional entertainment. Susan's most University Press, 137-72. recent work, Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and Business in the American Circus (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013) Leiss, William, Stephen Kline, Sut Jhally and Jacqueline Botterill. 2005. Social documents the lives and labors of 19th-century circus elephants. Communication in Advertising: Consumption in the Mediated Marketplace, 3 She is currently working on the nature of animal celebrity as well as a ed. New York: Routledge. book-length history of rodeo animals in North America.

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N ONE 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 Kelly Enright

his ad for Armstrong tires depicts a burly, mimic (as today’s biomimicry might) its brash rhinoceros slouching somewhat construction. The comparison is presumptuous. T tauntingly, hat askew, and cigar in hand. He Yet Armstrong’s illustrator makes the point. Look at looks like a Hollywood gangster. “Really,” the the tires lined in a neat row of increasingly deep, rhinoceros seems to say, “you’re going to rugged traction. Then move your eye to the right question my toughness?” hip of the rhinoceros. His skin is pocked and The slogan “None Tougher” appears as the wrinkled and has warts that visually resembles the headline of the ad, intended to sell durable tires most rugged of the tires (the one at far right). Here to American consumers. Armstrong’s advertising is the image of rhino toughness the consumer is strategy meshes a presumed toughness of meant to buy—figuratively and literally. rhinoceros skin with an imagined toughness of While this gangster rhino appears as a rhinoceros personality. Yet the imagined character in several ads, Armstrong’s logo for “personality” of this rhinoceros has more to do with Rhino-Flex tires is the smaller rhinoceros seen on a stereotype of a car salesman or auto the top of the tire rack. Represented here is a mechanic than of actual rhinoceroses. He is comparatively younger, more jubilant member of made human through bipedalism, clothes- the species. It is engaged in a carefree jaunt, its wearing, and cigar-smoking. This is, in fact, a very tail bouncing in the breeze, its mouth turned human version of toughness; it says nothing about slightly upwards in a smile. This rhino, known as the natural traits of rhinoceroses that might make “Tuffy,” appeared printed on several marketing them good examples of robustness. products such as ashtrays, paperweights, and Armstrong’s advertisement is selling both patches, and despite its name hardly conveys nature and artifice. First, the product itself, Rhino- toughness. The fiction of the ad creates a world in Flex tires, are constructed from rubber. Rubber is which a rhino salesman uses another rhino image a natural product, though it is likely that Armstrong to sell tires. Tuffy is a rhinoceros representation also used artificial ingredients available at the within a world of personified rhinoceroses. Is the time, perhaps even artificial rubber. While they larger one the real rhino? Or is the logo? make no claims to the tires’ composition, they And which is really selling the tires? While use a second natural product as a sales pitch: the tough rhino glares at the viewer, Tuffy, smiles. rhinoceros skin. The tires are not made from rhino From toughy to Tuffy, the admen cover all their skin nor, as far as we can tell, do they directly bases. They convey the durability of Rhino-

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Keith Ward Armstrong Rhino-Flex Tires, 1953

Flex tires and employ a charismatic image of an decreased rhino numbers throughout the animal to ensure likeability. twentieth century.[i] Thus, Armstrong had to So where is the animal in this animal ad? separate product from its place of origin. The Why not just depict a real rhino looking as if he rhino image, perhaps unwittingly, is both tribute were about to charge the viewer? Would that not and façade. By not showing anything resembling convey toughness? Perhaps Armstrong could not a real rhino, consumers disassociate product and commit to a realistic rhinoceros representation place. Yet the product itself is a tribute to the because it would be too real. The destruction of genius of nature, wanting to replicate the skin of a rhinoceros habitat, in part for rubber plantations, rhino as industrial product.

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Referring to real rhinos might have also 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 traits-- longevity, durability--that rhinos, in fact, do not possess. The irony is further evident in the ad’s subtitle: “unconditionally guaranteed!” What can a vulnerable animal guarantee? The ad is ripe with denial about the destructive relationship between nature and technology.

Notes

[i] Dinerstein, Eric 2003. The Return of the Unicorns: The Natural History and Conservation of the Greater One-Horned Rhinoceros. New York: Columbia University Press and Martin, Esmond and Chryssee Bradley 1981. Run Rhino Run. London: Chatto & Windus.

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 AN IMAL RIGHTS AND

SHOCK A DVOCACY TO

KINSHIP W ITH 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 Joe Zammit-Lucia and Linda Kalof

B ad Marriage, Quick Divorce. survival. The animal rights focus on sentience as the main criterion for awarding rights to animals leads to the following position: “What the rights The above subtitle from a paper by Marc Sagoff view denies, at least in its current articulation, is (1984) summarizes the state, then and now, of that plants and insects are ‘subjects-of-a-life;’ and the relationship between the animal rights it denies as well that these forms of life have been community and those concerned with the shown to have any rights, including a right to recovery and protection of endangered species. survival” (Regan 2004, xl) – a position that is Accusations of flawed views and unreasonable anathema to the conservation biologist and the behaviour flow both ways, reflecting seemingly environmental philosopher. irreconcilable values and ways of seeing. For the animal rights advocate, on the other hand, conservationists are more concerned Different Worlds with science and with abstract technical concepts such as “species” and “ecosystems” For the biologist interested in wildlife and habitat than they are with the actual animals. The conservation, animal rights advocates are keeping of animals in captivity, the chasing, irresponsible, single issue activists who have failed sedating, tagging, biopsy-ing and constant to take on the issue of species extinction and who studying, monitoring and otherwise harassing embark on emotionally driven activities without animals in the wild causes pain and suffering, due consideration of their consequences. For subordinating the very real everyday lives of instance, the “liberation” of thousands of farmed individual animals to intangible and uncertain animals (such as mink) contributes to the already species and ecosystem benefit – not to mention precipitous decline to near extinction of native that a significant proportion of studies are of species. Almost total opposition to captive doubtful benefit to the animals themselves, but breeding and scientific research on animals rather serve either to feed the publication harms, in the long run, the chances of species requirements of the involved researchers or the

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perpetuation of the self image of the language adopted by animal rights groups conservation biologist as intrepid field explorer. highlights the sorry plight of the animal at the The sanctioned culling of animals in the interests hands of the human. Images are largely of preserving “ecosystem integrity” is difficult to designed to be distressing to the viewer and to reconcile with the rights view. The animal rightist engender support through a combination of would also argue that beyond abstract and far- outrage and guilt. This is a visual culture that from-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 Human vs. The Animal Fig. 1. The Humane Society International Seal slaughter. Image courtesy of The Humane Society The narratives and visual cultures of animal rights International groups and wildlife conservation groups reveal similar attitudes about the relationship between humans and other animals. Much of the visual

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

creates a divisive dichotomy – and a distance – Is this visual culture the optimal way to encourage between the Human and the Animal: the Human the sort of human-animal relationships that might as the callous aggressor; the Animal as the lead to altered human behaviours that bring helpless victim. unnecessary pain and suffering to other animals? A similar set of principles governs the conservationist’s visual culture. Here the Animal Using Animal Portraiture occupies an idyllically untamed space – the animal “running free in our imaginary and To address this question, we examined a different mythical wild” (Baker 1993, 294). This is part of a approach to animal representation and the romanticized vision of a “Nature” that is separate impact that approach has on viewers. “Animal from Culture, with the Portraiture” is a broad term that can cover a Human as the intruder, aggressor and destroyer multitude of artistic approaches, each having of spaces and species that need to be potentially different effects on viewers. We protected. evaluated the specific approach taken to animal While coming at the issues from almost portraiture by photographic artist Joe Zammit- opposite poles, the animal rights and the wildlife Lucia. Zammit-Lucia explores the use of animal conservation movements end up in essentially portraits to examine the human ability to see the same place. The animal is portrayed as animals as individuals with character and something separate and distant from the human personality, rather than as generic specimens of – in one case separate as a captive or species (see also Zammit-Lucia 2008a). Rather persecuted victim, in the other, separate as part than traditional animal imagery, the artist uses, as of a romanticised nature – and, in both cases, a his starting point, the techniques of classical casualty of an undesirable human disposition and human studio portraiture and applies them to reprehensible human activity. animals.

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The Human 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 Fig. 5. Shepard Fairey to evoke the American flag and, in Fairey’s own Hope, 2008
Fairey/Garcia words, “convey the idea of blue and red states, Democrats and Republicans, converging” (Fairey people’s support for protection and conservation. and Gross, 2009, p7). More support is expressed for large animals and Context, on the other hand, conveys the those who resemble humans (Gunnthorsdottir message in Jacques-Louis David’s famous 2009). However, traditionally, “animal art” has “Bonaparte Crossing the Great St Bernard been about humans not about animals. In large Pass.” Here Napoleon’s “greatness” is implied as part, animals have been shown as symbolic he follows in the footsteps of Hannibal and icons, as decorative items, or as human Charlemagne - the unstoppable hero on a companions. “Portraits” of companion animals or symbolic white horse (Welch, 2005). working animals provide a commentary on The individuality, or what Pope-Hennessy human achievement or human possession. In (1979) describes as “The Cult of Personality” that contemporary art, many artists are concerned we read in a portrait, is not a result of physical with social commentary. Again, much of this likeness, but is transmitted through symbolism – engages with human behaviours in relation to be that symbolism contained in physiognomic animals, and with human social and cultural codes and ciphers; in the carriage, bearing or frameworks as they affect animals rather than with gestures of the individual portrayed; or in the the essence of the animal. ancillary elements of dress, jewellery, context, or The animal becomes more central in allegorical or other symbols. genres such as wildlife photography, wildlife illustration, and in art which is concerned with the Animal Imagery natural world. Here the animal is predominant, but in a way that is detached from the human. Animal images can also create strong, positive Scientific illustration objectifies the animal as a values. For example, experimental work has subject of study, whereas wildlife photography, established that animal “attractiveness” increases while glorifying the animal, treats him as a

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

specimen of species and, as we shall see later, setting), and (ii) frames the animal representation places him or her in a “nature” that is separate to mimic a human studio portrait (i.e., in a way from the human. that is culturally more often associated with Few artists depict animals as “specific human representation). The idea of animal individuals.” Instead they “use animals as individuality in these images, therefore, does not metaphors or symbols for the human condition, depend exclusively (nor even primarily) on the or as generic signifiers for the natural world” (Watt representational form of the animal – the 2010, 77). In fact, “most forms of contemporary recognition of the specific features of the animal representation, whether or not in lens- individual animal – but rather on the based media, fail effectively to communicate an appropriation of the general style of the human animal’s individuality, singularity or particularity” studio portrait and the impact of that style on the (Baker 2000, 179)[1]. viewer’s spontaneous reactions to the imagery. Zammit-Lucia’s animal art focuses This approach builds on the fundamentals of unashamedly on animals as unique individuals in human portraiture where, as we have discussed the same way as the human studio portrait above, individuality, personality and status are not focuses on the individual portrayed. The artist’s communicated through uniqueness of features, hypothesis is that our embedded, reflexive but through the overall form, composition, reaction to human portraiture can be turned to context, and other features of the complete an advantage when used in animal portrait. representation. Focusing largely on threatened or Zammit-Lucia uses other devices to endangered species, the artist adopts a influence the subject-viewer interaction. Direct representational approach that (i) alters the eye contact is common and can create a context in which the animal is presented (i.e., a tension between the observed and the observer studio-like setting vs. in the wild or in a captive in the viewer-portrait interaction. The subject’s

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

stance is also chosen to allow viewers to project Using this approach, Zammit-Lucia character and personality on the individual hypothesizes that such images emphasize the animal portrayed, while the overall composition – very animality of the subjects portrayed. The central composition or, alternatively, the use of imagery uses our own embedded cultural large negative spaces – are used to enhance responses to human portraiture to enhance the visual impact, substituting for the ancillary viewer’s sense of kinship with animals, while elements contained in human portraiture. maintaining respect for the animal for what he or A further important element distinguishes she is (Zammit-Lucia 2008b). In his artist’s animal portraiture from human portraiture: human statement, Zammit-Lucia (2010) states: portraiture suffers from a strong undercurrent of inauthenticity, driven by the fact that the subject In creating images of animals, I have tends to engage in a performance. As Roland little interest in what the animal looks Barthes (1981) puts it: “I do not stop imitating like; in the animal merely as observed myself, and because of this, each time I am (or object. Rather my interest is in the let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer deeper reality of what the animal from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of might possibly be. Through these imposture.” (p13-14). What has been variously images, I am interested in exploring described as “Fictions of the Pose” (Berger, 1994) questions: How do I feel in relation to or the “The Theatre of the Face” (Kozloff, 2007) is this animal? Can I relate to this animal absent from the portrait of the animal. The animal as an individual rather than as a mere is not complicit in the creation of his or her own specimen of species? And, more image, thereby lending the portrait an interestingly, what could be the unavoidable feeling of authenticity absent from experience of being this animal? the human portrait.

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

Does it Work? approach to the study have been described elsewhere (Kalof, Zammit-Lucia and Kelly, 2011). We were interested in testing whether the artist’s Here we focus on the main findings and their hypotheses were borne out when viewers potential implications for animal rights and other interacted with these animal portraits. While forms of animal imagery. animal visual imagery has been the focus of a Our findings showed that the widespread substantial body of research, to our knowledge traditional imagery and methods of there are no studies that have collected communication about endangered species in empirical data on whether animal visual imagery Western Culture do seem to convey the has the potential to change cultural perceptions expected messages. Prior to viewing the animal of animals. Indeed, given the widespread use of portraiture exhibit, visitors defined animals visual material to persuade audiences to change primarily as wild, free and sometimes violent and attitudes and behaviours, it is surprising that there dangerous creatures that are part of “Nature.” is a paucity of research on the impact of visual Pre-exhibit, the thematic cluster of “Nature,” material on the public’s view of any single issue “Wild/Free” and “Violence” accounted for 60% of (Joffe 2008). Our study was designed to fill some respondents’ overall perceptions of the Animal. of the gap in our knowledge of the impact of After viewing the exhibit, visitors gave a animal imagery on viewers’ perceptions of different meaning to the word “Animal” animals. We evaluated visitor experiences of the compared to the meanings they expressed artist’s work mounted as an exhibit entitled Monde before entering the exhibit. The biggest single Sauvage: Regards et Emotions, which was change was seen in the significant increase in the displayed during Fall 2008 and Winter 2009 at the attribution of “Personality” to animals. However, National Museum of Natural History in Paris, the impact of this artwork was seemingly much France. The detailed methodology and broader than the increased attribution of

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Implications for Animal Rights and Conversation Imagery

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, economy- stifling 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 heart- Fig. 9. rending images that form the staple diet of Animal Portraiture Exhibit Flyer
Image courtesy Muséum animal rights groups represent effective fund national d’Histoire naturelle, Paris raising fodder. Indeed, research has found that . animal rights protestors are directly recruited to the animal rights agenda by moral shocks from personality to the concept of “Animal.” We saw a visual imagery (Jasper and Poulsen 1995), and wholesale shift from the Animal being perceived empirical work confirms that animal advocacy as something wild, natural and hostile – and messages intensify pre-existing dispositions toward therefore separate from the Human – to a animals and animal abusers (Scudder and Mills perception of closeness and kinship between 2009). Animal rights advocacy images are based animal and human. Post-exhibit, the relevance to on good versus evil, with clubbed baby seals and visitors of the thematic cluster of “Nature,” neurotic monkeys presented as the innocent “Wild/Free” and “Violence” fell to 25% from the victims of evil. Victimized animals who are furry, pre-exhibit level of 60%. Conversely, the whimpering, crying, and spilling red blood elicited combination of “Personality,” “Kinship” and more sympathy because viewers could more “Vulnerable” now accounted for a full 75% of the easily anthropomorphize them (Jasper 1997). aggregate intensity scores (a measure of the Yet, animal rights organizations that use depth and emotion in the visitors’ perception of images of animal abuse in their own campaigns “Animal” based on the degree of elaboration and have also been critical of picturing animal detail given in their response). These changes suffering when they consider it gratuitous or when suggest that the effect of the exhibit went beyond they do not feel that the context justifies it. In isolated changes in perceptions around individual 2008, the artist Adel Abdessemed exhibited a themes, to changes in the overall cultural video that included footage of six animals being perception of the Animal with possible bludgeoned to death with a sledgehammer on a implications for the nature of the relationship farm in Mexico. His exhibition was closed down between the Human and the Animal. after protests from animal rights groups (Watt

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2010). The web site for People for the Ethical dominate the natural world (Kellert, 1997) and Treatment of Animals (PETA) encourages people substantiates “the dualism at the very origin of the to take action against portrayals of animal cruelty relation between man and animal” (Berger 1980, on the internet, but makes a clear distinction 28). Is this effect also possible when we are between animal cruelty imagery that is bombarded with constant imagery showing “educational, depicting the cruel behind-the- human domination of animals in other contexts – scenes reality of industries that thrive on animal such as images of factory farming, seal culls, or exploitation and abuse” and “(o)ther sources dog fighting? Could these images serve to (that) are merely depicting cruelty for shock undermine further the standing of animals in value” (PETA, 2011). When is shock advocacy human culture by confirming them as the objects legitimately “educational?” When does art that of human subjugation, entertainment and depicts animal cruelty as part of its social cruelty? commentary become simply gratuitous? Surely it It could be argued that generating is not simply a question of who is doing the shocking visual imagery is the easy option. It takes dissemination that determines the acceptability little thought and gets attention – and sometimes of shock imagery. headlines – simply by its sheer awfulness. Yet it There is no doubt that picturing the does so because of its unashamed, cheaply suffering animal has legitimacy as part of what voyeuristic nature. To paraphrase Randy we might call investigative journalism. Exposing – Malamud’s commentary about the zoo-going and documenting – animal abuse must be an experience (1998), these images of animal essential component of the work of animal rights abuse can be considered minimally imaginative, organizations. But it is a big step from that to cheaply vicarious and inhibitive, rather than creating a visual monoculture of grisly imagery generative of a positive experience of the animal and justifying its widespread dissemination as and its valued place in human culture. Further, educational. What are the long-term effects of according to Sontag (2003, 109) “our capacity to these shock advocacy images on the cultural respond to our experiences with emotional relationship between the human and the animal freshness and ethical pertinence is being sapped – particularly now that exposure to acts of animal by the relentless diffusion of vulgar and appalling cruelty has moved beyond the still image to the images.” almost ubiquitously available graphic video? In It may be undeniable that outrage is an the context of exhibiting captive animals in a zoo important element in the fight against continued setting, it has been argued that such a setting cruelty to animals. But how does it work and for only serves to convince visitors that humans how long? Myers (2006) points out that imagery,

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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)

Fig. 12. A baby monkey before being removed from the University of 107 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)

.

Fig. 14. Elephant killed by poachers, Voi area, Kenya (Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/53/Elephant0567.JPG)

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

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particularly highly disturbing imagery, is not subjugated, exploitable others, we believe that immune to having unintended consequences. visual and narrative approaches that culturally Such imagery may generate a form of mild post- position animals as our kin, while having their own traumatic stress disorder in viewers and evoke self- “personality” and their own visible worth based on protective responses. These responses are both their unique animality, are more likely to immediate (turning away, shutting the eyes, etc.) encourage the development of the sort of and long-term adaptation mechanisms that may human-animal relationships that could resolve involve pre-emptive avoidance of such imagery some of our most devastating animal as well as habituation to it. “(T)he “reality” of the exploitations. image will count for nothing if that reality seems This approach finds support in the too horrific to be countenanced” (Baker 2001, philosophy literature. It has been suggested that 220). Further, at the emotional level, the effects of humans have “nested communities” of relations such imagery become attenuated over time to others, some of which are closer to us and and/or, at the cultural level, the idea of violence some further away (Callicott 1992). An ethics of may become normalized. care approach to this issue would suggest that it Myers points out that such imagery does could be productive to explore ways that not work on its own, but as part of a complex encourage humans to extend their more intimate interaction with people’s moral and cultural circles of care outwards, developing greater values. He suggests that “(e)ven ‘hard hitting’ kinship with animals – be they farm animals or images need to be analyzed for their nuanced those who are threatened or endangered. meaning in the context of the moral narrative that “Appropriate” animal representation may be a is constructed” (Myers 2007, 30). Absent such valuable tool to achieve kinship with animals with understanding, one may end up only appealing whom we cannot so easily develop a day to day to those who are essentially already convinced. relationship based on direct contact. A similar concept arises in Warwick Fox’s Theory of General Conclusions Ethics where, as part of a much broader theory of ethics, he proposes that we have “an obligation Although animal rights groups and conservation to offer saving help only to supersignificant and groups are seemingly at odds on many of their significant others” (Fox 2006, 3838). He includes fundamental values, they display remarkable companion animals in these categories. While it is similarities in their visual cultures and narratives. unlikely that we can elevate animals, other than Both display the animal as separate from, and a companion animals, to the status of significant victim of, the human. In an attempt to gain others, cultural constructs that emphasize attention through shock, outrage and guilt, visual concepts of personality, kinship and vulnerability imagery constantly reinforces the negative are more likely to move us in that direction than aspects of human behaviour, and creates an the more distancing concepts of the animal as a ever-increasing cultural distance between the dominated, violated other, or as a wild, free and human and the animal. violent creature who belongs in a distant, non- We believe that such approaches are, in human Nature. the long run, counterproductive as people adapt, Some animal advocacy groups are tune out, or even accept, the portrayed moving away from, or trying alternative negativity both emotionally and approaches to, shock imagery as the bread-and- culturally. Worrisome trends in the direction of butter approach to highlighting and cultural adaptation can already be seen. For communicating the very real issues in animal instance, mobile platforms using the Android exploitation that need to be tackled. We could operating system have recently seen the release not find any shock imagery on the web site for the of KG Dogfighting - a video game application American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to that allows players to “feed, water, train and fight” Animals (www.aspca.org). The web site for The their virtual dog against other players (Android Humane Society of The United Market, 2011)[2] . States (www.humanesociety.org) contains a We suggest that continued progress both number of sections clearly targeted at building in conservation efforts and in animal rights positive relations with animals – though many of advocacy does not depend on continued these sections still contain embedded videos of castigation of the human, but rather on animal abuse. PETA has for some time added a embedding in our cultures the type of human- “glamour” approach to broadcast their animal animal relationship on which positive change can advocacy messages – especially when these be built. Rather than positioning animals as messages are targeted at younger audiences. 109

2The 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: Fig. 15. Designing Manifest Hope and the Campaign for Change. New York: PETA anti-fur campaign (Image courtesy of People for the Abrams Image. Ethical Treatment of Animals) Fox, Warwick. 2006. A Theory of General Ethics: Human Relationships, . Nature and the Built Environment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Kindle Edition.

We have shown that one particular Gunnthorsdottir, Anna. 2001. Physical Attractiveness of an Animal approach to animal imagery has the potential to Species as a Decision Factor for its Preservation. Anthrozoos 14(4), 204-215. promote a shift in how the animal is perceived. Our aim is not to promote any one approach Jasper, James. M. 1997. The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, over others, but rather to use our findings to raise and Creativity in Social Movements. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. questions about how different visual cultures may affect the human-animal relationship over the Jasper, James M. and Jane D. Poulsen. 1995. Recruiting Strangers long term. We suggest that animal advocacy and Friends: Moral Shocks and Social Networks in Animal Rights and Anti-Nuclear Protests. Social Problems 42(4), 493-512. groups, like wildlife conservation groups, could usefully examine different approaches to their Kalof, Linda; Joe Zammit-Lucia and Jennifer Rebecca Kelly. 2011. The Meaning of Animal Portraiture in a Museum Setting: Implications visual cultures and narratives. There may be for Conservation. Organization and Environment 24(2), 150-174. opportunities to create more productive Kellert, Stephen R. 1997. Kinship to Mastery: Biophilia in Human approaches before the easy option of shocking, Evolution and Development. Washington DC: A Shearwater Book published by Island Press. voyeuristic imagery beats our audience into numbness and runs out of steam, even as it Kozloff, Max. 2007. The Theatre of the Face. New York: Phaidon Press continues to embed the Animal’s position as a Inc.

subjugated, exploitable object in our society. Malamud, Randy. 1998. Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity. New York: New York University Press.

Notes Myers, Eugene Olin. 2006. The Psychology of Photographic Imagery 1 Baker also argues that the self-consciously serious post-modern in Communicating Conservation. Unpublished contribution to the artist may fear that attempts at individualizing the animal will be International League of Conservation Photographers. read as a sentimental over-investment in the animal’s appearance, thereby undermining the perceived “seriousness” of a piece of art PETA 2011. http://www.peta.org/action/get-active-online/cruelty-on- based on rationality with a rather distasteful indulgence in emotional the-internet.aspx. content. 110

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, 77- 81. 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

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.

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.

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F AD 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 Natalie Gilbert

Thinkbox Harvey, 2010
Thinkbox

o be clear, a dog rescue centre did not through the bars of their kennels, clearly looking make the advert, it was made by an make a choice about which of them they will T advertising agency called Thinkbox who use adopt as their pet and take home. They reach Harvey as an example to demonstrate how Harvey’s kennel and the dog turns on a TV behind powerful TV advertising can be. him to show them his own advert: in the advert he In the advert a young couple visit a dog cooks, cleans, mows the lawn, washes the rescue centre. They look at each dog in turn windows, collects the children from school,

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Thinkbox Thinkbox Harvey, 2010
Thinkbox Harvey, 2010
Thinkbox

entertains them and tucks them in at night; he is their resources gives them a also seen using the human loo. In essence, greater chance of detecting an Harvey is the ‘perfect dog’ in the eyes of most approaching lion than any one domesticated households. His advert impresses would have on its own,” (ibid.). the couple and he packs his bag ready to leave the kennels. Harvey is forming a contract with his new owners The advert is of course meant to be light in a domesticated setting where there is washing hearted and humorous, but its very existence tells to be done, clothes to be ironed and children to a much deeper story about our relationship with be fed. He knows that new owners will feed him dogs and the outcome of their domestication – and offer him shelter so, in return and to convince the advert could not be a success if there were them to take him, he advertises his ability to help not a strong foundation to this story that engaged around the house. a TV viewing audience. Thinkbox has naturally However, in reality, humans are not chosen an animal and a situation to maximise keeping their part of the bargain. It is a sad fact impact and Harvey did just this: “Thinkbox’s TV ad that in the UK in 2009 the RSPCA found new has seen Thinkbox.tv traffic increase by over homes for 90,493 abandoned or rescued 400%, Harvey’s Facebook page attract over animals (rspca.org.uk, 2011) and “investigated 7,000 fans... It has also attracted over a million 141,280 cruelty complaints” (ibid.). Battersea online views following 260 million broadcast TV Dogs & Cats Home looks after 10,600 cats and views” (thinkbox.tv: 2010) and won the ‘Ad of the dogs every year (battersea.org.uk, 2011), whilst Year’ competition. It’s doubtful that a cockroach The Dogs Trust is looking after a further 16,000 called Harvey could generate such an enormous dogs (dogstrust.org.uk, 2011). The advert may be surge of interest and likeability, or the tagline for imaginative and effective, but it only forms a the ad: ‘Every Home Needs a Harvey’. contract between Thinkbox and its clients. Harvey Harvey is the very idea of domesticated is a mere tool for entertainment and to generate bliss between Man and Dog where the essence sales. His situation, however, is very real. 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:

“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 Natalie Gilbert has worked professionally in online, marketing and editorial in diverse capacities for sixteen years across many different documentaries, the members of industries, but has always found her feet firmly in language, creation the group gain an added and progress. She takes every opportunity to explore the realms of advantage because the artistic, literary and visual possibility. With volunteer experience at animal care centres around the world, a degree in Wildlife especially acute senses of one Photography and a postgraduate in Anthrozoology, she has followed species can make up for the a keen interest in the human-animal bond and artistic portrayals of animal beings in modern society, on and offline @Animal Theory deficiencies of another... Pooling

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T HE SADDEST

S HOW 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 travelling show for years.

Text and interview questions to Jeremy Smallwood and Pam Mufson by Chris Hunter

ensitive to the rising influence of the animal In late 2010 PETA contacted Y&R Chicago, the rights movement and challenged by an Midwestern hub of the global Y&R advertising S increase in local governments who have network with an assignment to pull back the enacted bans on animal acts, Ringling Bros. has curtain on Ringling Bros’ animal cruelty in a way adopted what it considers to be a transparent more likely to break through to parents. The approach to its training methods. On its website response was a series of circus posters that the circus portrays itself as a responsible, ethical showed a ticket to the Greatest Show on Earth purveyor of animal entertainment, claiming its comes at a great price indeed. training is “…based on reinforcement in the form Recently Antennae spoke with Y&R of food rewards and words of praise. Verbal or Creative Directors Jeremy Smallwood and physical abuse…are strictly prohibited.” There is Pamela Mufson, who created the campaign, even the inference that its elephants enjoy their about the challenges of bringing PETA’s message place before the cheering crowds due to “the to moms and dads — and the Cannes award- mental stimulation of performing.” winning campaign that resulted. But according to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), a group dedicated Chris Hunter: What are your memories of to exposing and ending animal cruelty, Ringling the circus as children? Did you ever go to Bros. Circus actively engages in wrongful animal a circus? handling. A video obtained and posted to Youtube in 2009 exposes what PETA describes as Jeremy Smallwood: I actually have very fond “relentless abuse”. However, the limitation of such memories of going to the circus as a child. I shock videos is that they fail to reach the mean other than the general fear of clowns, I audience most likely to influence ticket sales: think most kids think it’s a great time. And that's middle income parents who have little inclination sort of what drove us to make this work. It's difficult to search out gruesome footage exposing such for a child to understand exactly what's going on inconvenient truths. behind the scenes, but if parents know, maybe

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Y&R Chicago Welcome to the Saddest Show on Earth, 2011
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they'll skip that activity. Sadly, it's almost always the fear of pain being inflicting for an unwanted action. Elephants are Pam Mufson: I actually never went to the circus very communal animals. Remove them from as a child. But I always wanted to. That's why it's so each other, isolate them, and you completely imperative to inform parents of the truth. After all, shatter their nature. That, even more than the they're the ones who decide what entertainment physical pain, might be the cruelest part of it all. their kids take in. CH: What was the key insight on the CH: Did it occur to you then – or as a creative brief that struck you as the most parent now – that circus animals may in surprising? fact not want to be part of these performances? JS: That such a historicized business hasn't evolved, hasn't even tried. They assume that JS: I think most parents know that something isn't parents don't care - that the public doesn't care. right. But the idea of depriving their kids of that experience overrules their instincts. With a little CH: In many such campaigns, it’s push though, and armed with the right common practice to put up a real knowledge, its an easier decision. photograph of an animal being abused along with a very straightforward CH: What happens to elephants when plea. Your campaign has the look of they’re trained by Ringling Bros.? cheerful circus posters that, on closer viewing, reveal a very dark twist. Why did JS: A pretty traumatic experience to start. I mean, you choose this approach? 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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already established idea of what the circus is - that catches you off guard. the idyllic vision. We see what we want to see, it makes us feel better, makes buying that ticket a PM: It all comes down to how you use little easier to stomach. The use of the cheerful, advertising. We chose to make the poster interact celebrated illustration style played into that with its surroundings. Just seeing around the construct and then turned it on its head. corner changes how you see something, in this case the circus. That can be just as powerful as CH: In a world where Youtube shock- any video. videos and stories of animal abuse spread like wildfire through social media CH: Now did PETA and the general public why is traditional advertising — old react to your concept? fashioned posters in this case — still a powerful way to raise awareness of this JS: Like most causes worth fighting for, it's not subject? going to be one magical solution that solves the problem, but many. PETA is a great organization JS: Youtube and most videos online are that knows you can't just say the same thing, be in consumed at such a staggering rate, that it all the same places all the time and expect the blends together. We've become desensitized to result to change. They are nimble in how they act all those videos, nothing rings authentic and true and flexible with their tactics. They liked, I think, – just entertainment. I think effectiveness in raising that this was one unique approach to both the awareness is all about context; that problem and target. Hopefully, the folks that saw becomes paramount. Where did I see it and how it decided against buying tickets that year. And was it served up to me? If I'm expecting the shock maybe instead just had a fun day at the park. 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 is 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 is the lambs who are not portrayed in the advertisement.

Text by Sabrina Tonutti

hat we see in their place is the red blood a thing from the start; it is to define the animal as which streamed from their slit throats. a thing beforehand” (George Bataille). However, W Thus, in the same way, the lambs who despite this process of serial slaughtering being crowd abattoirs before Easter (and not only then) embedded in our socio-cultural system, there are are absent - as living, sentient beings – from the many highly controversial elements in it, which discourses and the consciousness of those who have to do with the act of taking the life of a living eat them. In other terms, we could say that lambs being, an act that always needs to be culturally are either “lamb meat”, “Easter roast”, or do not legitimized, and “properly” codified within the exist. cultural context. The legitimization process relies In antiquity, Marcus Aurelius emphasized on several integrated actions: the importance of “representations” in guiding our approach to the world: “how marvellous useful it is - the classification of animals in specific for a man to represent into himself meats, and all categories regarding the animals’ use (“meat such things that are for the mouth, under a right animals”, “farm animals”, etc.); apprehension and imagination! As for example: this is the carcass of a fish; this is of a bird; and - the projection onto these categories of this of a hog (…)” (Marcus Aurelius). The way we utilitarian-mechanistic connotations (these represent things, think about and speak of them animals are portrayed as, and transformed in, (our metanarratives) is a form of our thoughts in “animal machines”, quoting Ruth Harrison); action. Mainly for this reason, farm-animals destined to the abattoir must be thought of in - the exclusion of any form of familiarization with terms of “slaughterable” objects or food matter. farm animals (which might enable the As George Bataille wrote: “(…) to kill an animal emergence of the individual, biographical and alter it as one pleases is not merely to dimension of animals, and, in the same way, change into a thing that which doubtless was not stimulate in humans possible forms of empathy); 120

Campagne Per Gli Animali Buona Pasqua, 2011 CA

- and, last but not least, the dissociation of what is shown is only the “products” in which their different levels and dimensions of reality. bodies have been transformed), or are portrayed Dissociation only works if we compartmentalise in a fake bucolic context, evoking a natural, elements which belong to the same healthy life and freedom. phenomenon, and concur to the same process. A linguistic dissociation concurs with this The killing of animals in slaughterhouses enacts same process: people eat pork, not pig, at a several forms of dissociation. supermarket they buy sausages, mince, ham, and so forth, and many are often at a loss when A spatial dissociation, to begin with: the processes they try to guess which animal some products of raising and slaughtering of animals take place have belonged to. far from the public eye, and remain almost This process is rooted more deeply in completely unknown to those who don’t belong ideology: a teleological representational process to the farming sector. operates, in that it implies that animals are “born Parallel to this, there is an iconic to” be eaten, no matter what we feel about it, dissociation regarding the presentation of animal that are “destined” to be used by humans, “ends” food: while in many countries in the past etiquette of the “creation” (as Aristotle dixit and Kant requested whole animals to be presented on the underlined). table, with no need to disguise the origin of the Just because lambs are absent from the food, nowadays the opposite tendency guides image above, they allow us to argue, in a culinary habits and also the planning of food metonymic way, about the entire farm-animal commercials and marketing. In advertisements category, since we are dealing with animals who for meat, animals either do not appear (and so share the same status (objects, instead of

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subjects-of-a-life, in Tom Regan’s words), as a Dr Sabrina Tonutti, PhD, is a Lecturer and a Researcher in Cultural consequence of human attitudes and practices Anthropology at the University of Udine, Italy. Her studies focus on towards them. Being “animal” is a condition, not human-animal relationships, new social movements, anthropology of food, and epistemological reflections on the human-animal an essence. However, even if we can think of divide in anthropology. Sabrina carried out ethnographic research lambs in terms of a species representative of a on the animal rights movement in Italy, Switzerland, and Great wider category (farm-animals), their tender age Britain, which resulted in the publication of the book Diritti Animali. Storia e antropologia di un movimento (Forum Ed. 2007). and some relevant morphological and Among her other publications on these subjects: Manuale behavioural traits which characterize them add di zooantropologia (Meltemi 2007, with R. Marchesini), ‘Umano, complexity to the legitimization of their troppo umano’. Riflessioni sull’opposizione natura/cultura in antropologia, ed. by Tonutti, S., Lutri, A. and Acerbi, A. (SEID 2009), slaughtering (and tells us something significant on the book chapters: “Cruelty, Children, and Animals: Historically One, humans as well): these traits - white vellum not Two, Causes”, in Linzey, A. (ed by), The Link between Animal Abuse and Human Violence (Sussex Academic Press 2009); (symbolically recalling the idea of purity, and “Anthropocentrism and the definition of ‘culture’ as a marker of the innocence), their cries resembling those of human/animal divide”, in Boddice, R. (ed. by), Anthropocentrism. human babies, and also their neotenic Humans, Animals, Environments (Brill 2011); and the entry “Reform” for the Cultural Encyclopedia of Vegetarianism, ed. by M. Puskar- morphologies (like rounded heads and features, Pasewicz (Greenwood Publishing Group 2010). typical of babies and young animals) - all these Sabrina Tonutti is a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. 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.

Bibliography

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Filiquarian Publishing 2006.

George Bataille, Theory of Religion, Zone Books 1989.

Ruth Harrison, Animal Machines: The New Factory Farming Industry, Vincent Stuart, London 1964.

Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, University of California Press,

1983.

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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 Bettina Richter

lready very early on in the history of the The dog as faithful friend of man is seen on many poster, animals were depicted, mostly in poster images. As the devoted guardian of an A purely illustrative form without educational Olivetti, he stands in the center of the picture, but goals. Still, it is worth examining examples from in passing he mostly appears at the people’s feet. this medium in order to see in what ways the The cat is presented completely differently, based animal came to be represented, how the view on on its assumed characteristic as an independent, the animal has changed, and for which products individualistic animal. With enormous eyes for the the animal will be seen as suitable for advertising. “Black Cat” liquor advertisement, the cat almost Be it for alcohol, floor wipes or an evening at the appears sinister. The trunk of the mighty, good- ballet, animals are extremely eye-catching natured elephant is finally not only a picture motif figures in advertisement and often earn the found in children’s books, but also in a particularly important “ahhh”-effect in a marketing strategy. original image used by the Pirelli-Reifen tire However, the humanization of the animal world company. on posters has also been extensively explored. What the cultural scholar Thomas Macho The tooth brushing squirrel and the clothed has asserted about the use of animals in penguin belong to a former fantasy and fairytale contemporary art applies as well to their portrayal world of illustrated posters. In addition to posters in posters: “The animals are not used exclusively where the animals become the main for reasons alien to themselves as animals. In protagonists, there are also many depictions of many cases, they also demonstrate how much the animal-human relationship. The extravagant the animal is not merely a fantasy of our minds, woman, who advertised for the fur fashion line of but also a possibility of creaturliness, existence, Paul Rückmar in 1924, completely tamed her and happiness that we ourselves may have lost.” wildcat. She symbolized the dominion of people Dr. Bettina Richter is Curator, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, over animals, which had not been deeply Plakatsammlung. Original Exhibit Co-Curators: Dr. Bettina Richter and questioned for centuries. In 1913 the PKZ-Mann, Alessia Contin (Registrar), Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, with the company of dogs, was her male Plakatsammlung. The above text was translated by Abigail Gottinger, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. With special thanks to Dr Nigel counterpart, and the trendy punch advertisement Rothfels for initiating and co-ordinating this adaptation of the original from 1960 was her successor. exhibition project for Antennae. 123

Paul Rückmar Pelzwaren Fourrures, 1924
Paul Rückmar

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Schwarzer Kater Gordon’s Garantie für gute Laune, 1966
Schwarzer Kater It Must be Gordon’s, Gordon’s Dry Gin, 1967
Gordon’s

Tierschutz! PKZ Tierschutz!, 1925
Tierschutz! 125 Die Nuance vom Mann zum Gentleman, 1971
PKZ

Co-op Bodenwichse, 1946
Co-op 126

Laboratories Ed. Mottier Colle M Elephant, 1952
Laboratories Ed. Mottier 127

Zimmerli Tricots

Zimmerli Tricots, 1943
Zimmerli Tricots 128

PKZ Pirelli

Burgher, Kehl & Co, 1913
PKZ Atlante, 1954
Pirelli

Lupolen Basf Setter Set Hausgerät aus Lupolen, 1955
Lupolen Basf 129 Nylons, 1959
Setter Set

Punch Boutique Pumch, 1960
Punch 130

Télévision Ducastel 131 Satisfaction réelle, 1955
Télévision Ducastel

‘WORKS P ROGRESS

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 Susan Nance

ike most New Deal projects, the jobs and set in artist’s canvas-style backdrops that eschew government spending of the agency were detail in favor of stylish efficiency. These L too modest to end the Great Depression. advertisements seem aimed at questioning the Nonetheless, the WPA employed a small army of perceived dividing line between nature and photographers, writers, painters, poets and culture, which we often associate with modernity, illustrators that left behind a cache of creative because they portray nature as culture. Here work that is an invaluable window into the culture animals captured from wild or foreign places are and politics of the decade. Among that work is extracted from those histories and geographies the famed WPA art posters and its “Zoo” and presented as living works of art. Being state- promotional series, which endeavored to boost funded, with no advertising agency accounting the local economy of a given city by promoting department to answer to, the WPA artists created the urban tourism of zoo attendance. Housed at advertising posters that were indeed experimental the Library of Congress, today these beautiful and sleek, although they may have seemed too advertising tools mark out for us the moment in high-minded for many zoo patrons. American public culture when zoos and wild What is more, the WPA “Zoo” animals animals became modern in a twentieth-century come across as works of modern art with species- sense. specific personalities. Indeed, the ads depict the The WPA series ordered American citizens conventional characters that each of these to collect the kids and “Visit the Zoo.” The species carries even today: panda bear as cute silkscreened posters offered such institutions as stuffed toy, hippo as rotund comic, herons as both portal into the natural world and modern silently elegant posers, panther as lithe stalker, entertainment option featuring wild animals as polar bear as ice berg, stampeding bull elephant embellishments to urban American life. Indeed, in as powerful provocateur who addresses the the “Zoo” series we sense no bars or cement or viewer directly and dares him or her to stare in feces, no stereotypic pacing, no jostling zoo awe as long as possible before jumping out of patrons, no man-made noise or overflowing the way. Each of these artistic animal essences garbage bins, no bread lines or homeless represents a particular emotion, be it camps, that is, none of the troubling realities of (anthropocentric) paternalism, delight, mirth, or animal captivity, city living or the Depression. awe. And, here is advertising in its most powerfully What we do see are idealized creatures efficient and democratic mode. The WPA zoo

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WPA Brookfield Zoo WPA
ads edit out the complexities of product and To be sure, the WPA zoo was a museum of consumer context in order to get across a simple, animals seen as natural art for a deserving public; user-friendly message about each animal that it was a “New Deal for Animals” zoo. Why portray flatters the viewer as a person amused and zoos that way? In those days, many in the zoo enriched by his or her consumption of animal business were reimagining captive animal images. 133

WPA 134 Brookfield Zoo,
WPA

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 WPA lobby itself, the WPA posters attempted to Visit the Zoo
WPA 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.

Back Cover Image: Olivetti, Valentine, 1972

135

KILL ‘EM DEAD!: THE

ORDINAR Y PRACTICES OF

PEST CO NTROL IN THE

HOME

In recent years critical animal geographies have pointed to dearth of stories about the small, the microscopic, the slimy and the abject. The exoscheleton, though painfully present to anyone bitten by a bedbug or disgusted by a cockroach, has been all but absent in dominant animal geographies. Death and the killing of animals is a further notable absence. However, this scholarly absence is not parallel within the popular imagination, where cockroaches, files and dust mites loom large at the centre of a homemaking war focused on the eradication of house pests.

Text by Emma Power

he last decade has witnessed a reinvigoration animals – the outcome of these homemaking in studies of human – animal relations. In the practices – is a further notable absence in animal T field of animal geographies this development geographies as well as within geographies of has been particularly significant, with animals home, a curious absence given that many of the increasingly recognised as significant players in animals that people come into contact with in social worlds across diverse places and scales, the context of home are dead in the form of food including across urban and rural locations, and and clothing, or will die as a direct result of even within intimate spaces that are traditionally human activities ranging from the euphemistically the site of close human relations, such as within termed ‘pest removal’ to the euthanasia of loved home and family. Yet despite these pets (see Animal Studies Group 2006 for an developments some animals continue to occupy exception that does examine killing practices, a fringe position in the scholarly imagination. In though does not examine domestic pests or particular, microscopic creatures and those that homemaking practices). In this paper I bring are slimy, scaly, or with an exoskeleton have attention to relations between people and animal received little attention in scholarly studies (see pests in the context of homemaking, looking at Bear 2011 for discussion and an important the normalised practice of pest removal within exception), and are a particular absence in the home and the ways that it is represented and studies of home, which have predominately promoted through advertisements in Australian focused on domestic pets (see for example homemaker magazines. Franklin 2006; and Power 2008; Power 2012a). Pest removal processes typically entail the The absence of these organisms contrasts with exclusion and killing of animals categorised as the significant place that many such animals pests. They are an essential component of have in everyday human activity. For example, in everyday homemaking practice and are a key the context of home these animals are typically way that a house is maintained as home. categorised as pests and are a key target of However, at the same time that these practices homemaking activity. Killing and the death of consolidate home, in bringing practices of killing

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into the home pest removal also connects home Reflecting the modernist ideal of separating and homemakers to practices (killing and death) spheres and functions, home – nature that are practically and conceptually separate separations are written into the city through from the ideas of warmth, cosiness and security planning processes such as land zoning, that underpin representations of the domestic as restrictions around the presence of livestock a ‘homey’ space. The necessary violence is (Gaynor 1999; Philo 1998) and webs of ignored through the necessity of the act. The infrastructure that regulate the flow and supply of apparent tension between ideas of home and natural resources such as energy and water practices of killing through pest removal are the (Hinchliffe 1997; Kaika 2004). These symbolic and focus of this paper. These practices are institutional relations with nature are consolidated examined through advertisements from popular in the material structures of home, including walls Australian homemaker magazines from the and rooves, which at the most basic level 1950s, 70s and 2000s to highlight the popular manage the interface between home and its discourses that surround pest killing and the ways immediate outside through the exclusion of the that they seek to normalise and make pest killing elements. Infrastructure that supplies water and an essential part of everyday domestic practice. electricity consolidates this separation, lending a The ways that ‘pest’ animals are made available sense of home as a site that is autonomous from for killing and that killing is managed within broader environmental rhythms (Kaika 2004), homemaking are examined. including seasonal weather changes and the diurnal rhythms of daylight and darkness (Power Nature-culture separations in 2009b), and facilitating the cleaning of home. homemaking Such structures are further supported by everyday practices such as cleaning that strengthen and In the western imagination home is a human secure home – nature separations through the place: a place of culture in opposition to nature localised exclusion of undesirables such as dirt, and wildness, elements that are imagined to lie pests and germs (Berner 1998; Ger and outside of home. This view of home has its origin Yenicioglu 2004; Martens and Scott 2005). In in the Neolithic when home was first constituted in effecting this exclusion the modern home is opposition to nature, a construction captured in made to appear as a secure space that is the oppositional concepts of domus and agrios. separate from nature and the outside world. Domus is literally the house-as-home, but also Through the apparent exclusion of nature the references the symbolic and material processes material dwelling place is transformed into a through which wildness was brought within the home, a site that is shaped by feelings of sphere of human influence through practices belonging and security. around pottery, plants and animals. Agrios, by Practices of cleaning are an important, contrast, lay outside of home and was localised practice through which nature-culture associated with masculinity and practices around separations are produced and (re)secured within hunting, weapons and death (Hodder 1990; and home, and are instrumental to the maintenance see Power 2012b). Since the Neolithic these of home as a safe and clean space. Crucially, separations have underpinned understandings of this everyday practice not only secures home, but home as a safe, secure, and comfortable space, can also compensate for leaks in home’s borders and provided practical and conceptual through the identification and removal of guidelines for what does, and does not, belong in undesirable and disorderly elements such as dust, home. These separations do not simply exist, but pet excrement and hair, and insects and other rather are made through conceptual, symbolic pests that are discovered within home. and practical relations around nature and the Cleaning practices are historically and nonhuman world, and inform homemaking at culturally situated. Understandings of what is multiple scales. At the scale of the house, ‘clean’ and hygienic, and conversely what elements perceived as not belonging within constitutes ‘dirt’, in the domestic sphere, are home are excluded to create and maintain culturally contingent and have changed over home as a safe, secure space. time (Douglas 1966). The discovery of the germ in Separations between home and nature the late nineteenth century was a watershed in are most strongly articulated within the modern these practices and has significantly impacted home, which is separated from nature and the domestic practice, including categorisations and outside through an array of practices from the perceptions of ‘pest’ species. In particular, the city scale and the institutional to the everyday. discovery of the germ affirmed the centrality of

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Fig.1 Advertisement for Cyclone Screenwire (AWW, October 13, 1954, p.68)

cleaning to the production and maintenance of increased in significance, but constituted a home and saw scientific concepts of germ theory significant challenge to cleaners by drawing increasingly inform everyday domestic practice attention to the presence of dirt within even the (Martens and Scott 2005), from cleaning to most visually clean spaces. Marketers managed broader practices such as interior design and this tension by conflating visual order with an furnishing (Berner 1998). Historically these absence of germs. As Martens (2007: 39) has practices have had broad social and cultural shown, ‘In a context where practitioners could not implications. In addition to maintaining the safety know that germs had been effectively and security of home, effective and ‘correct’ eradicated, this priority emerged and fused in cleaning and home maintenance also speaks to complex ways with a specific aesthetic of shiny, the identity and character of the inhabiting white, sparkling and pleasantly smelling interiors.” household. In the Victorian era a clean home In their research on cleaning products within spoke to the moral fortitude of the household and homemaker magazines Martens and Scott (2006: was a sign of “competence and social 53) show that pest animals became part of this respectability” (Berner 1998: 318). Such values narrative through products which targeted have also been significant in the construction of ‘airborne’ germs, a concept they argue contemporary middle-class identities, with the “suggests the equation of germs with insects and/ appearance of order through a clean and tidy or dust, as germs are themselves not airborne home becoming central to this construction (see and they do not leave an odour.” In this for example Berner 1998 on the Victorian era; framework pests, as visual evidence of disorder Lauster 2010 for a discussion of American within home, become an appropriate target of homemaking from the 1940s; and Dowling and homemaking activity: they were no longer simply Power in press; and Power 2012a for a nuisance or dirt in and of themselves, but also contemporary Australian practices). represented the presence of invisible disorder in Germ theory prompted a profound shift in the form of germs. Pest removal processes offer a the focus of cleaning activities. While cleaning means of combating this threat through the re- had historically been oriented toward dirt that was ordering of home. visible, the invisibility of the germ made cleaning However, the relationship between pest a complex task and saw a shift in the nature and control and the production of home as a clean orientation of cleaning practices. Products that and safe space is not straightforward: pest control disinfect and destroy invisible organisms entails the use of chemicals that can themselves

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Fig.2 Advertisement for Mortein Plus (AWW, February 10th, 1954, p.44)

be dangerous to human residents and even to immoral activities such as prostitution and the material structures of home. Martens and gambling. The removal of slaughterhouses was Scott’s (2006) work has been important in an important component of the modernisation of underlining the significant threats that cleaning the city and the concomitant production of products import into the home and points to the home. Such separations continue to be culturally related threats of pest oriented products, such as significant in the contemporary era. Today, DDT, which was contained in most insecticides in individuals and households that are associated the 1950s. In addition to chemical dangers, and with the killing of animals in the domestic space, as explored in this paper, pest removal also including for cultural/ religious purposes, are connects home with a more conceptual danger: frequently viewed as backward, uncultured, practices of killing and death, which have been dangerous and uncivilised (see for example separated from home since the Neolithic, appear Wolch, et al. 2000). Dominant constructions of as central homemaking practices that are home and the perversity of animal killing belie the effected within home and are at the heart of the very significant place that pest removal practices maintenance of home as a secure space. This is assume within everyday homemaking. Despite a paradox which sees a distinctly unhomey involving the destruction of large numbers of activity situated at the heart of the home and animals these practices are an invisible yet challenges long-standing cultural central component of the production and conceptualisations of home as a site that is maintenance of home. The ways that these separate from killing practices. Historically tensions are managed within pest control practices of killing have been materially and marketing is the topic of the remainder of the conceptually removed from home: in the early paper. twentieth Century this separation was consolidated in western cities through the Methods removal of slaughterhouses, which had formerly been located in the centre of town in many The paper draws on a critical in-depth review of major cities. At the time, as Philo (1998) shows, four popular Australian homemaker and women’s these spaces were associated with the magazines, conducted as part of a broader degeneration of the city through imagined project about animals and homemaking connections with undesirable and purportedly practices. Reviewed were the Australian Women’s

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Weekly (AWW), Australian House & Garden (AH&G) reading of these magazines by foregrounding the and Australian Home Beautiful (AHB) in the periods place of nonhuman actors in the relations of 1951-55, 1971-75 and 2001-05, as well as Better homemaking, with a particular focus on domestic Homes & Gardens (BH&G) 2001-05. The pests including insects and rodents. magazines were chosen for their historical and Written and pictorial depictions of pest contemporary significance and popularity in animals were the focus of the analysis. Australia. Each magazine is a top selling Advertisements and articles, including editorials magazine its category, the ‘women’s’ market for and reader advice columns that mentioned pest AWW and the ‘homemaker’ markets for AH&G, animals were transcribed and analysed, with a AHB and BH&G. The magazines are published particular focus on advertising which is where the monthly and all editions of magazines were majority of references occurred. For the purposes analysed within the study period. The exception is of this paper, strategies that constructed insects the Australian Women’s Weekly, which was and other animals such as rodents as ‘pests’ published weekly in the first two time periods: in within home and that emphasised the these years only the summer editions (January – importance of their removal and/ or killing were March and October – December) were reviewed foregrounded, with particular attention given to as this was when the majority of animals as pests the communicative practices and appeared. representations that sought to make the The reviewed magazines are diverse in destruction of pest animals a normal, essential content. The AWW is oriented toward the and urgent task. Advertisements typically ‘women’s’ market. Traditionally it has had a strong appeared multiple times throughout the study focus on women’s roles as mother and period, appearing on a monthly basis and also homemaker; although this focus has broadened regularly reappearing across a number of years. in the contemporary period themes around Discussions of these advertisements are motherhood and homemaking continue to be referenced to one appearance in a particular strong. It is in this context that the majority of magazine. Images and quotes from references to animals, whether as pet or pest, are advertisements have been selected as typical made. The AH&G and AHB are both home examples. Across each period a small number of focused in the contemporary period with an brands predominated. Mortein, a company emphasis on high end design and products, selling pest control chemicals, was the major whereas in the 1950s their depictions of ‘ideal’ advertiser across each period often advertising homes were complemented with a stronger multiple times within each reviewed edition. focus on Do It Yourself and ‘ordinary’ homemaking tasks. BH&G is the contemporary Representing pests and the urgency of version of these magazines, providing more price pest removal - Practical asymmetry accessible products and a strong emphasis on Do It Yourself tasks from home decorating to A key way that advertising constructs the killing of basic maintenance and building. pests as not just morally neutral but essential is by Magazines provide an interesting and establishing a practical asymmetry between insightful window into popular constructions of human residents of home and pests as invaders. ‘ideal’ homes as well as providing practical Ideas about disease and the dirtiness of animals advice, advertisements and images that depict are key to these depictions, with pests homemaking practices. As such, magazines constructed as a threat to the safety and security have frequently been used in research about of home and of particular danger to children who homemaking, including research investigating are represented as innocent and vulnerable. cultures of consumption and house design (Greig Depictions of insect pests such as the 1995; Leslie and Reimer 2003; Lloyd and Johnson cockroach and fly most strongly reflect this 2004), constructions of housework and the theme. In the 1950s flies were the key organism ‘housewife’ (Johnson and Lloyd 2004), and depicted as responsible for importing dirt, disease cultures and practices around kitchens and and death into the domestic sphere. Images and cleaning (Berner 1998; Martens and Scott 2004; text captured a sense of flies as wily and mobile 2005; 2006). Studies that use home magazines creatures, bringing germs into the house and typically offer a discursive reading of magazines connecting food, toys and rubbish bins as they and document changes in the ways that they flew through the home. These fly-borne represent home over time (Blunt and Dowling connections were shown to challenge home’s 2006: 54). This paper offers a related but distinct safety and security by contaminating food and

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Fig.3 Advertisement for Mortein Plus (AWW, January 6th, 1954, p.36)

making family members sick, with children Advertisements were never subtle. Headlines like particularly vulnerable to illness (see similarly that accompanying Cyclone’s popular Martens and Scott 2006 on germs and cleaning screenwire product: “You may be revolted but more broadly). Concerns about flies’ disease that’s better than being dead!” (see Figure 1) carrying capacity proliferated across were common, and sought to consolidate and advertisements and ranged from the generalised build upon homemakers’ senses of insecurity concern that flies would bring ‘sickness’ into the within home. home, to more specific concerns about Allusions to the capacity of flies to carry gastroenteritis and polio that referenced broader death into the home declined over the reviewed public health campaigns and the perspectives of periods in line with their decreased public health health experts, including doctors. Public health threat, and paralleling the declining prevalence authorities were concerned about the spread of of diseases such as polio. More recent polio at this time, but it was the product marketers advertisements shifted attention to cockroaches, that most readily mobilised and carried this fear with flies appearing predominately amongst lists into the public domain, depicting flies as carriers of other insect pests. However, despite the shift in of death rather than simply illness. These the type of pest depicted, these adverts played representations were enacted across a range of on similarly exaggerated themes that placed products from fly screen like barriers (59 per cent emphasis on the violence caused by pests and of advertisements) to poisons and baits (41 per their inevitable connection with disease (rather cent of advertisements). An advert for AGCO than death). All advertisements emphasised the Supascreens, for instance, pointed to the importance of killing cockroaches found inside imminence of death and its place at the dinner the home and setting up poisonous barriers so table – the conceptual heart of the 1950s family, that those outside could not enter. The multi- observing: national company Mortein was responsible for the vast majority of these advertisements, appearing ‘The filthy annoying fly can carry multiple times in key positions throughout death to your dinner table. Shut him magazines in each year and edition. As in the out – for if he enters, typhoid and earlier periods the offending pest was polio may be riding with him.’ represented as disturbing the cleanliness of (AWW, Dec 23, 1953: 32). home, an outcome affected by connecting home’s cleanest spaces with its dirtiest. A series of 141

BEST OF ALL, NEW PRODUCTS MEAN YOU CAN KEEP PESTS OUTDOORS, WHERE THEY BELONG! Is there anyone who doesn’t find cockroaches disgusting? Not only do they seem indestructible, but they spread disease and germs, and can even trigger asthma attacks. There are two types of roaches American and German and your house doesn’t need either. Luckily, Mortein can help you eliminate cockroaches. (Mortein, AH&G, March 2002, p131).

As in these three examples, cockroaches were linked with germs and disease that originate from sites that are either practically or conceptually outside of home. The former appears through broad statements such as in the third advertisement that pests are coming in from outside; the latter appears through connections that are charted between pest animals and unhomey spaces and products within home, Fig.4 such as garbage and sewerage. Advertisement for Mortein Plus (AWW, January 9th, 1953, p.68) Across each period connections with disease are substantiated through highly evocative descriptions of the very unhomey places that pest animals visit. Advertisements play advertisements for ‘Mortein home pest control on the imagined geographies of insect lives to products’, for example, observed that: chart connections between sites of refuse and waste – particularly garbage bins, tips and The worst thing about cockroaches is manure – and homey, family spaces such as that they can be everywhere. Even in kitchen benches, food and even children (see the cleanest of kitchens. Nocturnal Figure 2). creatures, they scuttle about after dark feeding on anything from garbage to Stop that fly - he’s sewerage and even dead skin cell dangerous … debris. (Mortein, AHB, January 2001, Every fly is a dirt-and-disease-laden p131). menace. His favourite crawling places … outside your home … are DIY Pest control: Advice from pest loathsome. His hairy legs are efficient Control, Reg Mercer, on how to target instruments for collecting and carrying outdoor problem areas and stop pests filth and germs. (Cyclone screenwire, from coming into your home. […] AWW, Feb 24, 1951: 56). Cockroaches: Feeding on garbage and debris, cockroaches spread I’m safe behind SCREEN WIRE bacteria that can cause food Flies breed in refuse and filth and bring poisoning and dysentery, and their into your home the germs of gastro- droppings can trigger asthma attacks. enteritis and other dangerous (Mortein, BH&G, March 2002, p111). diseases. You’re right to be frightened every time a fly touches Baby or the PEST CONTROL MADE EASY: family foods. Just ask your doctor! PREVENT OUTDOOR CRAWLING INSECTS (Cyclone Screenwire AWW 1954) COMING INSIDE NO MATTER WHAT YOUR CRAWLING INSECT PROBLEM As in these and previous examples, notions of ANTS, SPIDERS OR COCKROACHES home as a secure space in opposition to a MORTEIN HAS AN EFFECTIVE SOLUTION dangerous outside world are evoked. Flies were 142

Fig.5 Advertisement for Mortein Plus (AWW, March 16th, 1953, p.49)

connecting home to spaces “outside your waste products and places them in sites of home”, and bringing germs “into your home”; disposal the pest disrupts this activity, bringing cockroaches similarly are “outdoor crawling waste back into circulation within the home as it insects” that come from “outdoor problem areas” travels the domestic space. Through this activity (see examples in previous paragraph). Screening pests highlight the presence of waste products products and chemical boundary sprays were within home, including those shed from an promoted as the first line of defence against this unstable human body. In touching this waste and threat, securing home’s leaky borders against travelling through the home pests are shown to insect pests and extending the homemakers’ connect waste with the productive and central reach through time and space so that they could sites of domesticity such as the kitchen, food relax within the security of the domestic. Topical preparation areas, and even family members. At fly sprays (and more recently cockroach sprays) the same time advertisements, and the activities consolidate these borders; they are promoted as of pests themselves, highlight the capacity of enabling the homemaker to quickly and home to not just accommodate, but also nourish efficiently kill any pest that manages to cross the the Other. Capable of housing and providing border into home. Associated images depict nutrition to pests the domestic is an always less homemakers arming themselves and deploying than secure and more than human space, an cans of spray against flies in the 1950s and idea drawn upon to build and consolidate the cockroaches in the 2000s (examples of these are homemaker’s sense of insecurity and anxiety. in Figures 2, 4 and 6). Finally, the natural and animalistic dimensions of Magazine representations suggest that the the human body are foregrounded. Even the power of domestic pests is in their capacity to most cultured human body is at risk and rupture and contaminate home through vulnerable to invisible germs that penetrate from connections to sites of disorder, which include outside; the body also creates dirt and disorder rubbish tins and bathrooms, through drains and as it sheds skin cells and other forms of waste sewerage: even as the homemaker identifies which are themselves shown to have a

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Fig.6 Advertisement for Mortein Plus (AWW, January 19th, 1955, p.35)

productive capacity in supporting the life associating individual nonhumans with a opportunities of pest species who consume them. population threat, connecting visible pests with Highlighting these flows, insect pests foreground hidden hordes, and providing large scale images the always limited reach of human culture over of microscopic creatures. the boundaries of the body. In travelling and The first type of representations are connecting the conceptual and material spaces exaggerated, anthropomorphised and cartoonish of home, the human body and waste sites, pests depictions that foreground the canniness of the link inside with outside, culture with nature, insect pest and its love of human spaces. Flies in challenging the homemakers control over home, particular are shown to enjoy the home and the and disrupting perceptions of home’s autonomy easy opportunities that it affords. As the human and safety. These actions afford insect pests a homemaker secures, tidies and cleans home, the power over the human homemaker so that they fly delights in its destruction. Figure 3 is an constitute a constant and invisible threat to example of these types of depictions. Here the fly human homemaking activity and the security of is shown magnified and as a chariot for germs. home, an asymmetrical threat that these The reader is reminded that “Germ warfare isn’t a creatures hold over all but the most vigilant myth!”, a reference to broader geopolitical homemaker. The killing of pest animals appears concerns and a reminder that pest removal within as the natural and responsible endpoint, a way of home is a vital task. The germs themselves are restoring the security of home and protecting its depicted with unpleasant and evil grins. These inhabitants. anthropomorphised features, coupled with their gesticulations in the direction that the fly is Scalar threat heading, afford a sense that their journey into the home is planned and intentional. Another A second and related way that pests such as significant example is Louie the Fly, a human-like insects are substantiated as a significant threat creature introduced by Mortein in 1957. Although within home involves the use of exaggerated and rarely appearing in the reviewed print depictions out of scale depictions that highlight the revolting, Louie is important to consider due to his unfamiliar and abject qualities of these pests. significant position in the public imagination in These depictions play with numbers and scale, Australia, which most recently placed him at the

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centre of a large social media campaign in early hairs which, although invisible to the human eye, 2012 (and see Mortein’s website for historic and are charged with the power to eradicate an contemporary depictions entire human family. The second element of this http://www.mortein.com.au/louie_the_fly.php). description plays with the Otherness of the fly: its Louie is the epitome of the canny pest. He is lack of teeth, siphon like mouth and practice of afforded intentionality and a wilful regurgitating its food. These descriptions seek to destructiveness; he has chosen to be in the home generate senses of disgust and horror in the and delights in the havoc and sickness that he human reader and lend the fly an otherworldly can wreak in this space. Louie’s sneakiness is edge, a creature not just physically distinct from effected through his very personable yet dirty humans, but also culturally. The idea that food character and appearance. His large eyes look should be liquefied, regurgitated and then re- out at the reader, and he is depicted with a ingested stands clearly outside of western cultural sneaky grin and often carrying a piece of rubbish constructions of appropriate eating practices. It picked out of the garbage: a vagrant within the also plays with human horror about non-solid, domestic. In endowing pest animals with a leaky and wet bodily forms and processes (see for thoughtfulness and intentionality advertisements example Longhurst 2001). These descriptions are afford pests a wilfulness, which establishes them particularly effective in establishing flies and as a worthy and significant foe within home, one cockroaches as out-of-place by activating the whom it would be foolhardy to ignore. These are senses of disgust and fear that research has smart pests who threaten to outwit the human shown characterise human encounters with these homemaker. Despite their personal charm, they types of invertebrates (for example Arrindell 2000; seem intent on living within home and express Bjerke and Ostdahl 2004; Kellert 1993). delight in their capacity to connect home to dirt A second and related technique employs and disease. ‘iceberg’ representations, where one visible or Related depictions magnify the insect even partially visible ‘enemy’ is sure sign of a form, foregrounding their bodily Otherness takeover. An example of this is an advertisement through text and images. Pests are either shown in that appeared throughout editions published in large form, or in multiple. Figure 4, an the 2000s promoting Mortein’s rat kill products. advertisement for Mortein Plus which appeared in These ‘rat packs’ are designed to be thrown into 1953, is characteristic of these advertisements. In the ceiling and floor cavities of homes, where the this image the fly is magnified to capture the rat would encounter and eat them and then die bristly hair that protrudes from its body, as well as after receiving a fatal dose of poison. The its large, multiple eyes. Such depictions highlight advertisements for this product are striking. They the essential nonhuman nature of the insect. use a bright, fire engine red background which Similar adverts build upon visual representations covers a full glossy magazine page. with detailed and evocative textual descriptions Superimposed on this background is the foot and that capture ‘disgusting’ bodily behaviours. The tail of a rat, protruding from the edge of the page descriptions seen in Figure 1, and reproduced as though the creature has been caught as it below, are characteristic of this practice. scurries back into its secret, hidden living spaces. The image of the rat captures the scaly otherness Each fly is covered with myriads of of its tail, distinguishing this animal from a tiny, sticky hairs and each hair can domestic pet or any associated imaginary of a carry enough infection to wipe out cute and furry creature. The accompanying text your whole family. states simply “Makes you want to hurl”, alluding to The eating habits of flies are even the way that the poison pack is hurled, or thrown, more disgusting. The moment the into the ceiling space, and using the vernacular toothless fly lands on your food, it term for vomit to capture the sense of horror and vomits an infection-charged fluid to disgust that a homemaker would feel upon liquefy it before eating, then sucks sighting one of these animals in the home. The through its hairy, syphon-like mouth. advertisement also operates within the context of the broader magazine: the alarming red of the Cyclone Screenwire (AWW, October background image stands out against the 13, 1954, p68). otherwise neutral surrounding images which, through advertisements and editorial pieces, The first element of this description establishes the capture and promote the ‘ideal’ home. This magnitude of the threat posed by the flies’ ‘tiny’ advertisement and the sudden appearance of

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the scaly rat seek to disturb the reader, reminding a useful frame for understanding these killing of the many liminal spaces and creatures that practices, counterposing what he terms ‘cold’ are part of home and in doing so generating a and ‘hot’ killings. The former are practices sense of insecurity and disgust. This is a visual and associated with industrial agriculture and medical very catching reminder of the unhomey spaces laboratories where animals are removed from and creatures that are part of home. Similar their living space to the highly ordered killing advertisements focused on cockroaches, spaces of the industrial slaughterhouse or alluding to their: seemingly endless number of laboratory. These places “are governed by rules, ‘friends’ lurking in cracks and crevices, behind the routines, repetition and predictability related to fridge, underneath the cupboards etc. (Mortein minimizing suffering but more importantly related and Australian Home Beautiful promotion, AHB, to efficiency and hygiene.” (Marvin 2006: 16). Jan 2001, p131), and offering products that “get ‘Hot’ killings by contrast are associated with the rid of insects you can see and those you can’t.” killing of pests and are argued to be driven by (Mortein DIY control bomb, Feb 2005, p106). In “emotional reactions ranging from annoyance or these types of advertisements, visual evidence of anger to repulsion and disgust.” (Marvin 2006: 17). pests is connected to home’s liminal places, the Marvin couches these ‘hot’ killings in a language ceiling and wall cavities and sub-floor spaces that of violence, noting that the killing is “usually house electrical, water and waste infrastructure expressed in terms of destruction, removal, and threaten to remind the homemaker of eradication, extermination, annihilation, or home’s connection and dependence upon sites cleansing” and uses “a variety of weapons, traps, of nature and waste outside home. The hidden poisons, and other chemicals, and they may parts of home are foregrounded to play on the even use other animals for this purpose” (Marvin uncanny sense that these spaces and unhomey 2006: 17). These ‘hot’ killings are characterised by pests evoke (see Kaika 2004 and ; Power 2009a passion, aggression and pursuit and stand in for a broader discussion of these spaces as the clear distinction to the “unemotional, clinical domestic uncanny). killing” that characterise the former set of practices. A scientised death: Speed, time and Representations of pest killing in clinical precision homemaker magazines are of a third, or intermediate type that combine Marvin’s A third set of representations focus on the categories. The motivation for the killing is practice of killing. Interestingly although terms like represented as being underpinned and killing and death are widely utilised within necessitated by a sense of fear, insecurity and advertisements, and illustrations of dead insect disgust, a hot killing that pits homemaker against pests are provided, the practice and process of a destructive and polluting pest. However, the the death itself is absent. Further, the techniques practice and moment of death is framed as one suggest a killing that is largely hands off: they do of clinical, scientific coldness: a very modern not require that people come into contact (and process in which animal and human are held hence conversation) with the insect pests. These apart by safe, scientific and modern products. are purified accounts of the killing process that Advertisements across each period employ this make the moment of contact invisible. This is in idea though it is framed differently. Adverts in the contrast to the often very embodied and sensory 1950s emphasised products as new, scientific experience of an actual killing: the bloody residue and modern. These terms were used widely of a mosquito’s last victim, or the cockroach: it’s throughout advertisements and the specific popping crunch when squashed, or its body chemicals employed in products were identified slowed after walking over a barrier poison, or in an to the reader. By contrast, more recent animated frenzy after being misted with a advertisements focused on the clinical and tidy contact spray. nature of the process of killing, while connections Advertisements create a sense of urgency with science such as through the chemical around pest removal practices through the make-up of products is a notable absence. This evocative descriptions of pest’s otherness, their perhaps reflects the growing public distrust of sneakiness and threat to home, as outlined in the chemical use within home. Instead, the previous sections of this paper. The sense of fear intelligence of products is foregrounded, with and insecurity ideally generated in the emphasis on the capacity of poisons and baits to homemaker are designed to precipitate into the attract pests. purchase of pest removal products and their Building on contrasts between motivation deployment within home. Marvin (2006) provides and practice advertisements across each period 146

construct subject positions that counterpose ‘hot’ and the good health of human residents rather and ‘cold’ killings. In the 1950s these position the than through the sighting of dead animals. female homemaker as fearful mother. An example of this is seen in Figure 5 with its headline Conclusions “every wise mother is afraid of flies”. These types of advertisements encouraged a ‘hot’ killing As previous research has shown in relation to motivated by feelings of fear, hate and even practices of cleaning and germ management, dread. The second subject position was that of popular marketing activities have kept the pest the mother as armed warrior. As seen for example threat at the forefront of domestic concern. The in Figure 6 these advertisements created the ‘iceberg’ threat is perhaps the most insidious and mother as armed warrior taking a stand against effective of these representations, equating pests as her baby sleeps. Again motivated by a individual pest incursions with vast numbers of hatred, the killing itself here is shown as cold, hidden pests and the disintegration of home. In necessary, calculated and pre-meditated, a these depictions the presence of one insect pest killing that makes use of the most modern signifies these hordes and highlights the limitations products. More recent advertisements create this of human control over home and the easy interplay in a different way, counterposing the permeability of home’s borders. In this context panic that would be experienced if the house pests are creatures that unstitch home, was not correctly and thoroughly protected highlighting the constructed and always insecure against incursions with the recommended nature of boundaries between home and its clinical, calculated and multi-pronged, multi- dangerous and disordered outside. More than layered approach where homemakers are this, they point to home’s enormous underbelly – prompted to instil a range of barrier sprays the liminal spaces that accommodate pest alongside traps, surface sprays and quick knock species within home and allow these animals to ‘em down sprays as a last line of defence in the feed off the home itself. Pests represent the homemaking war. One Mortein promotion, for inadequacies of homemaking and cleaning example, describes the American Cockroach as activity, signifying the presence of dirt within the a creature “that can send a normally placid domestic, including the dirtiness of the human homeowner into a roach-whacking frenzy”, a itself. Killing practices thus become an essential panic that contrasts with the calm possible if a component of homemaking, a tension that is recommended combination of barrier sprays, managed through reference to the scientific and surface sprays, traps, bombs and baits are modern nature of pest removal processes and employed within the home (Mortein, AHB, January through practices that separate human from pest 2001, p131). These layers of poisonous barriers by facilitating disembodied and detached co-create home, mirroring and solidifying its killings. material form through their chemical boundaries The gender politics of pest removal and offering to seal even the most microscopic advertising are striking. Advertisements are of places against the pest incursion. Again, targeted at women and construct two key subject although inspired by a fear or dread the process positions: the woman as fearful and the woman itself is disembodied and mediated by chemical as warrior. Women’s role as homemaker is products that are shown to safely and silently activated through each of these positions which destroy the household pest. place responsibility for pest management and The scientised and modern nature of the home protection in the hands of the mother. The killing process is a key tactic through which killing masculine subject position has not been practices are established as appropriate within discussed in this paper, but is significant in home. They purport to separate the homemaker positioning the male figure in three key roles. First, from the practice and moment of killing through the masculine subject position is tied to DIY home chemicals that are deployed remotely. These construction: men are depicted as fathers and separate the homemaker from the killing through husbands who have the responsibility to choose time and space: killing occurs in the hidden construction products that are pest resistant to spaces that pest animals inhabit and is affected ensure a solid and stable home environment. around the clock in the absence of the human Second, men are positioned as expert through a homemaker. The disembodied nature of this range of advertisements: they are the scientist, process is critical, affording a detached professional pest controller and public health experience of the killing. In this process success is authority rolled into one who warn women about gauged circuitously through an absence of pests the risks that pests afford within home. Third, and

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perhaps most interestingly, pests themselves are Kaika, M. (2004) "Interrogating the Geographies of the Familiar: Domesticating Nature and Constructing the Autonomy of the gendered as male. Advertisements refer to pests Modern Home", International Journal of Urban and Regional using male pronouns such as ‘him’ and ‘he’ (see Research, 28, 2, pp 265-286. for example Figure 2) and, as shown in Figure 4 Kellert, S. R. (1993) "Values and Perceptions of even as a ‘guy’. The threat to home is a Invertebrates", Conservation Biology, 7, 4, pp 845-855. masculine one. This connects with broader Lauster, N. T. (2010) "Housing and the proper performance of discourses of home as a domestic and feminine American motherhood, 1940-2005", Housing Studies, 25, 4, pp 543- space that is separate from the outside and 557. ‘public’ spaces, which are associated with men Longhurst, R. (2001) Bodies: Exploring fluid boundaries, Routledge, and masculinity. The pest as male offers an London. enhanced threat to the domestic, a threat that husbands and fathers must combat through the Martens, L. (2007) "Balancing on the Dirt Threshold: Domestic (De)regulation and visible/ invisible dimensions of contemporary provision of a solid and stable home and that cleaning practices" in Cox, R. and Campkin, B. (eds), Dirt: new women as mothers and wives must combat geographies of cleanliness and contamination, I.B. Taurus, London, through ongoing and vigilant homemaking. In this pp 34-48. way pest advertising connects with broader Martens, L. and Scott, S. (2004) Domestic Kitchen Practices: discourses of home and homemaking, perhaps Routines, Risks and Reflexivity - Full Report of Research Activities and Results', ESRC, Swindon. underpinning the efficacy of these advertisements and the importance of pest Martens, L. and Scott, S. (2005) ""The Unbearable Lightness of control within everyday understandings of home. Cleaning": Representations of Domestic Practice and Products in Good Housekeeping Magazine (UK): 1951-2001", Consumption, Markets and Culture, 8, 4, pp 379-401.

References Martens, L. and Scott, S. (2006) "Under the Kitchen Surface: domestic products and conflicting constructions of home", Home Cultures, 3, 1, pp 39-62. Animal Studies Group. (2006) Killing animals, University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Marvin, G. (2006) "Wild Killing: contesting the animal in hunting" in Animal Studies Group (ed) Killing Animals, University of Illionois Press, Arrindell, W. A. (2000) "Phobic dimensions: IV. The structure of animal Urbana, pp 10-29. fears", Behaviour Research and Therapy, 38, pp 509-530. Philo, C. (1998) "Animals, Geography and the City: Notes on Bear, C. (2011) "Being Angelica? Exploring individual animal Inclusions and Exclusions" in Emel, J. and Wolch, J. (eds), Animal geographies", Area, 43, 3, pp 297-304. Geographies: Place, Politics and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands, Verso, London & New York, pp 51-71. Berner, B. (1998) "The meaning of cleaning: The creation of harmony and hygiene in the home", History and Technology, 14, pp 313-352. Power, E. R. (2008) "Furry families: making a human-dog family through home", Social and Cultural Geography, 9, 5, pp 535-555. Bjerke, T. and Ostdahl, T. (2004) "Animal-related attitudes and Power, E. R. (2009a) "Border-processes and homemaking: activities in an urban population", Anthrozoos, 17, 2, pp 109-129. encounters with possums in suburban Australian homes ", Cultural Geographies, 16, 1, pp 29-54. Blunt, A. and Dowling, R. (2006) Home, Routledge, London. Power, E. R. (2009b) "Domestic temporalities: nature times in the Douglas, M. (1966) Purity and danger: an analysis of concepts of house-as-home", Geoforum, 40, 6, pp 1024-1032. pollution and taboo, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London. Power, E. R. (2012a) "Domestication and the dog: embodying home", Area, 44, 3, pp 371-378. Dowling, R. and Power, E. (in press) "Sizing Home, Doing Family in Sydney, Australia", Housing Studies, Power, E. R. (2012b) "Nature in the home" in Smith, S. J. Franklin, A. (2006) ""Be[a]ware of the Dog": A Post-Humanist (ed) International Encyclopedia of Housing and Home, Elsevier Approach to Housing", Housing, Theory and Society, 23, 3, pp 137- Wolch, J., Brownlow, A. and Lassiter, U. (2000) "Constructing the 156. animal worlds of inner-city Los Angeles" in Philo, C. and Wilbert, C. (eds), Animal spaces, beastly places: new geographies of human- Gaynor, A. (1999) "Regulation, Resistance and the Residential Area: animal relations, Routledge, London and New York, pp 71-97. the keeping of productive animals in twentieth-century Perth, Western Australia", Urban Policy and Research, 17, 1, pp 7-16. Emma Power is a Lecturer in Geography and Urban Studies at the

Ger, G. and Yenicioglu, B. (2004) "Clean and Dirty: Playing with University of Western Sydney. Boundaries of Consumer's Safe Havens", Advances in Consumer Emma is a cultural geographer. Her research examines urban Research, 31, pp 462-467. natures, everyday practices of sustainability and homemaking, and

human – animal relations. She teaches cultural and social Hinchliffe, S. (1997) "Locating risk: energy use, the 'ideal' home and the non-ideal world", Transactions of the Institute of British geographies, human-nature relations and urban sustainability and Geographers, 22, pp 197-209. planning as part of the Bachelor of Social Science and Master of Urban Management and Planning. Hodder, I. (1990) The Domestication of Europe: Structure and Her PhD titled ‘A more-than-human geography of homemaking’ contingency in Neolithic societies, Blackwell, Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA. examined the ways that people interact with nature and nonhuman animals in the home and garden. It used qualitative methodologies Johnson, L. and Lloyd, J. (2004) Sentenced to Everyday Life: to examine the experiences of people living with dogs in the home, Feminism and the Housewife, Berg, Oxford and New York. and people cohabiting with uninvited common brushtail possums.

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