Silent Witnesses

The facts are hard to come by but most estimates suggest that France has no more than a fifth of the surveillance cameras deployed on British streets. As if to compensate, French streets have a very high population of carved and modelled figures maintaining observation over their flesh and blood compatriots. The city of Marseille is well endowed in this respect and a small selection follows here. It begins at the railway station where a selection of savage beasts and wrestling figures patrol the concourse. In the city centre they can be seen flanking the entrances to department stores and at busy traffic intersections where their frenzied activities, frozen in stone, form a strange counterpart to the furious commotion that circulates around them. As you pass through a doorway, a blank stare is directed downwards from the tympanum. And at many street corners diminutive Madonnas occupy tiny recesses at second storey level as a reminder of the existence of higher powers. 

Mondrian and Kleenex

In the autumn of 1949 the Museum of Modern Art in New York displayed an exhibition, Modern Art in Your Life and among the exhibits were two Mondrian paintings and a Kleenex box. The show was designed to explore the links between Modernist painting and sculpture and the world of publicity and product design. It was reviewed in the New Yorker (Mondrian, Kleenex and You, Oct 15, 1949) by Robert M Coates who pointed out that many of those who expressed the greatest antipathy to Modernism found nothing to object to when it was appropriated in advertising and industrial design. Nearly 64 years later Mondrian and Kleenex have been reunited on the supermarket shelf in the Kleenex Collection of contemporary cubes. Neo-plastic geometry in the aisles of Tesco and an opportunity to blow your nose the Mondrian way are both to be welcomed although if the packaging net had been designed to place the glued flaps on the base instead of the sides it would have looked even better. Mondrian is the only artist whose work has been so unambiguously appropriated here but there may be others who could bring something distinctive to the Kleenex box. The name Francis Bacon was suggested to me - a judicious selection of bodily fluid stains with crossed syringes might find a niche market among the Brit Pack artists if nowhere else. I like the idea of an Ad Reinhardt box and I can imagine Matisse cut-outs and Léger’s grandes machines would easily adapt to the task but if I could consign just one artist to a lifetime of service on the Kleenex pack it would have to be Wyndham Lewis because nobody else would have been so infuriated by such a fate. Better still – nobody would ever buy it. 

 

Rockwell’s April Fool

I recently made some disparaging comments about Norman Rockwell and his lack of visual imagination and spatial sensibility. In this cover design from 1948 he makes a massive effort to put his imagination to work but the result is less than a triumph. The mechanistic permutations of body parts have produced an image that is mildly puzzling rather than spine-chilling. All the ingredients are present – sinister shopkeeper, hybrid creatures, animated puppets, physical incongruities – but the absence of atmosphere and genuinely diabolic inspiration completely wastes their potential. What should have been oppressively claustrophobic looks like a mildly boring but harmless tableau. It might seem ungenerous to point to Rockwell’s limitations but in the context of all the uncritical adulation that seems to surround him it feels like a duty. 

Hard Times in Dieppe

Away from the bustle of a Cross-Channel port and the casinos and luxury hotels of a fashionable resort, another very different world existed – a literally marginal community whose homes were carved out of the cliff face. Images of destitution and deprivation are uncommon on postcards unless they are simultaneously picturesque and colourful. Not the case here among the cave dwelling fishing community in Dieppe. The fascination here seems to have more to do with the frisson of superiority to be experienced when gazing upon the wretched and dispossessed. They offer intriguing glimpses of a world of hard labour and primitive living conditions. By the time that W R Sickert settled in Dieppe in 1920 he had left behind the sordid and squalid subject matter of Camden Town in favour of café society and casino high-life, otherwise this disadvantaged tribal group might well have attracted his attention. 

Flavor-Town

One of the most prized directives in the corporate witch-doctor’s bag of tricks is the need to identify your mighty enterprise with a small town or rural location. Plant the idea in the public mind that yours is a business just like the reader’s – you struggle along against all the obstacles that government puts in your path making just enough profit to keep going. At the end of the day you are just plain folks, nothing fancy or pretentious to unsettle the customer. The makers of Beech-Nut Gum made the most of their small town origin in the Mohawk Valley town of Canajoharie employing the service of a bucolic Adonis complete with pitchfork to bring the news to the visitor from the city. Just a bunch of local boys who got together to process wholesome smoked country hams and invented the vacuum jar – everything from ketchup to jam, from peanut butter to marmalade went into those jars until chewing gum was added to the product lines. To overcome the problem of pronouncing Canajoharie it was renamed Flavor-Town. 

Now for a Declaration of Bias – I have the undiluted petit-bourgeois aversion to the habit of chewing slabs of synthetically flavoured latex. The mechanical rhythms of the rotating jaw and associated vacuous facial distortions are self-inflicted and everyone has a right to look stupid, but the practice of transferring discarded gum to the clothing and footwear of strangers via the agency of table undersides and public seating is genuinely objectionable. So shed no tears for the demise of Beech-Nut. The company was swallowed up and spat out by a succession of competitors including Life Savers, Squibb, Nabisco, Nestlé, Ralston Purina, Madison Dearborn and the Hero Group. Somewhere in this marathon the gum expired and all that remains today is baby food. In 2011 the very last production facility in Flavor-Town moved elsewhere. 

Global Ambitions

When businesses expand, dreams of worldwide domination with consumers in every land and advertising in every language begin to form. There will be a network of offices across the globe and the name in lights in the centre of every major city. A reputation for excellence will extend into the most remote regions of the planet. To become part of a supra-national global community orbiting the earth at supersonic velocity, detached from the deadweight of national allegiance was the ambition of the visionary CEO. Advertising agencies stood prepared to translate these glittering visions into reality with the assistance of a well-stocked repertoire of clichés. Foremost among these were images of the globe, infinitely adaptable and instantly recognisable. We present a small selection below but a special mention for Colgate whose loyal customers were rewarded with a globe of their own to dominate in the privacy of their own homes. 

Postcard Memory Palace

Introducing a new place to view postcards

After almost 6 years of posting here I hope there are a few readers who share some of my enthusiasm for vintage postcards. With this in mind a new blog has been set up at WordPress to display a much deeper selection of postcard imagery than we have space for here. There will be no commentary but the tags should enable visitors to make their own choices and navigate around. It should eventually develop into an extensive archive with the opportunity to select and browse by theme, genre and location. Postcards will continue to feature here as long as I have something to say about them but from now on there will be a complementary space for those of you who wish to see more.