Architecture as Political Image: The Perspective of Advertising

Graham Cairns

doi:10.14324/111.444.amps.2012v1i1.001

Abstract

In the realm of contemporary politics, the need to “communicate” is paramount. Some call political communication a process of manipulation, others a dark art of depict. Here, it will be examined as a form of promotion; as a form of advertising. However, it is an advertising typology that clearly appropriates architecture to its own persuasive ends. The world of advertising has been subject to numerous developments throughout the course of its history. In the last three decades this has seen what had become the standard mode of visual communication, semiotics, replaced by divergent and ever more sophisticated systems. These systems, we suggest, require the application of phenomenology as an analytical framework if we are to fully understand how they work. However, the importance of semiotic systems of communication has not evaporated. They remain core to advertising and, although obvious to a now fully visually literate public, a reasonably effective technique. They also remain evident in the realm of architecture, political communication and, as we describe here, the combination of the two. Examining two images of Barack Obama form the 2008 Presidential election in the United States, this paper underlines how core aspects of the standard semiotic system of analysis clearly reveal the promotional and persuasive techniques employed in “political imagery”. However, it also describes how they are incorporated into a broader framework of the politico-media-complex and how this has helped transform their communicative strategies into techniques which require the application of a phenomenological analysis. Employing the terminology of Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, Judith Williamson, Noam Chomsky and Maurice Merleau Ponty it will describe these images in fully advertising terms; an approach that turns the politics in play into a form of commercial exercise and the candidate promoted into a “product”. The communicative techniques revealed are of course applied by all parties and individuals operating within the competitive political arena but these images of Barack Obama are perhaps the ones that reveal the similarities between the advertising and politics, and their use of architecture, most succinctly.

Highlights

In the US the electoral machinery of the two main political parties is in overdrive in the run-in to the 2012 Presidential election
The importance of semiotic systems of communication has not evaporated. They remain core to advertising and, obvious to a fully visually literate public, a reasonably effective technique. They remain evident in the realm of architecture, political communication and, as we describe here, the combination of the two
Clearly political communication, in the high octane context of election campaigning, is a field of activity in which every scrap of knowledge from the advertising world is put to work in the creation of “political images”; both literal and metaphoric

Summary

Introduction

In the US the electoral machinery of the two main political parties is in overdrive in the run-in to the 2012 Presidential election. The use of adverts in political campaigns: Any understanding of the incursion of advertising techniques into contemporary political communication will identify the end of World War II as a key turning point. This period represents the apogee of the socio-cultural influence of the United States. It ended with an appeal to vote for Johnson because “the stakes are too high” It was seen as using contemporary “emotionally persuasive” techniques characteristic of the commercial advertising industry of the time, and was controversially withdrawn after one screening.[1]. By the turn of the century the difference between advertising and political campaign messages had clearly blurred and the very latest advertising and PR techniques had become fully integrated into politic campaigning

Objectives

Conclusion