Posters as forms of remembrance

POSTERS

as forms of remembrance

When walking around in various cities, among the urban tourist monuments we often come across the phenomenon of reproductions of posters from the second half of the 19th century. These posters typically advertise the favourite chocolate, cigarette paper and liqueurs of the time, i.e., products that were considered the luxury goods of the period, mostly in Art Nouveau style. One might wonder what it is that connects the identity of a city's experience with memories of a bygone era? Is it merely aestheticism or is it the last years of the belle epoque that preceded the severe traumas of the 20th century? And what does it all mean today, a hundred years on, if not the continuity of a linear progression in time between the past that once was there and the that existing in the here and now? For this is how these cheap souvenirs are linked to the reality of Art Nouveau buildings today, bringing to life the frames that represent the scenes of everyday life then and now. Their faint reflections, the information that shines through the present, project an image of the city people of a hundred years ago. It is no different now, in our days. The memories of the past, both near and distant, not only define the spaces in which cities live, but also influence the shape of individual memory: a poster, packaging or advertisement, one of the many tools of visual communication, is imprinted on different stages of our lives. Recalled, or seen, like Proust's madeleine dipped in tea, it evokes a series of memories, while we can only directly attribute one specific message to it. In our individual recollections, these, if they exist, are in every case linked to a wealth of information that has little or nothing to do with what we see, yet in the tunnel of memory they reveal memories that are lined up behind the concrete visual image as individual or collective knowledge. Our visual memory assigns memory events to images in its own right and along a psychological process. From the posters of my youth, one stands out as a milestone, after which nothing was the same as it used to be: the poster of Istvan Orosz entitled "Tavárisi konyec" not only was carved into my memory, but also became a symbol of a historical turning point, since it now unquestionably proclaimed the end of the presence, i.e., the withdrawal of the Russian troops, who had been hardly mentioned before, but were very much present. At the dawn of a new era, it boldly conveyed, spoke out and combined in a very sensual representation the intoxicatingly beautiful moment of the country's independence. However, it was only in the space of the social public sphere defined by Habermas1 that this very sensuous image acquired its full representational role and its complex of meanings. Freedom is when such a poster appears in the street, because it can finally appear. For the poster artist is not only a creator of images, but also a creator influenced by a given cultural sphere, who expresses his or her own point of view in a given culturalsocial context; for the poster, like any other work of art, is on the one hand what we think about it, and on the other, what we see2. Thus, for the message of the poster to unfold, it needed those recipients to whom the message was conveyed in the given context and with whom it displayed a kind of shared thinking and shared will. In other words, this poster makes history not only by what it depicts, but also by the relationship of certain groups to it at that moment.

1 Jürgen Habermas: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Hungarian edition,

SzázadvégGondolat, 1993 2 Diego Zakaria: L’afficheParolesPubliques Edition Textuel – Paris, 2011

Jacques Villeglé, a representative of the nouveaux réalisme, is famous for his torn poster images (affiche lacrenée3), which, as a kind of rhizome4, refers to the way posters exist: not horizontally, in relation to the perspective of the city at a given moment, but vertically. He sees the superimposition of posters as the historical/ sociological/cultural imprint of the city, the face that defines it. The poster fragments that remain in layers on the poster wall, like the wrinkles on one’s face, are imprints of past times and events.

The poster is therefore not only a form of communication, but also a form of memory. It is a way of capturing time. It is a testimony not only to events, but also to styles, to current forms of visual expression, as well as to the problems that most threaten contemporary societies. The poster, like a sociological study, is a spectacular record of our passing lives.

A Festival of Shared Memory

If we look at the posters that line up at the festival in the sense outlined above, what is most striking is the existence of a common knowledge, a common message, a common experience of life on an international scale, which binds together the exhibitors from all those countries, just as mass communication has created a global village5 that constitutes the common knowledge of humanity on Earth.

166 foreign and 54 Hungarian exhibitors, 277 posters from 30 countries – these are the statistics of the 3rd Posterfest, which already show that, in addition to the rather unusual context of the last two years, the Budapest Poster Festival has grown to a huge scale.

This poster festival features work from almost every corner of the world, from the North and South American continents to Asia. A very diverse range of cultural, economic, and social determining factors are thus placed in a context that conveys the issues that concern humanity today.

This year's Posterfest works are an excellent reflection of what have been, and perhaps still are, the most preoccupying issues in the world today. The main themes of the exhibited works are the pandemics, freedom of expression, pollution and ecology, women's rights and domestic violence, and last but not least the constructive and destructive effects of social media. Not to mention a context that the preselection jury could not even have imagined: how sad and uplifting it is to see the work of artists from Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus here, today, together, in one place. It is a moral value that overrides the interests of politics that are relative in every respect, at any given moment.

The posters on display focus on basic human values and their relationship to reality, regardless of country, nationality, or skin colour, and in doing so give us an admittedly rather pessimistic picture of our world. They offer a visual imprint of the first two decades of the 21st century, from Taiwan to Ecuador. Yet it is precisely this shared knowledge, this shared analysis, these serious messages expressed through artistic means, that gives the 300 posters their common and powerful force.

This globally shared thinking is of course represented by countless styles, visual languages, traditions, culturally coded sign systems and stylistic aspects.

Poster and Intermediality - The Birth of a New Genre

It is safe to say that the genre of the poster is changing, as the medium of communication in which it appears has been transformed, and we are witnessing this genre change.

The change in poster art today lies in the change in mass communication. The poster as a message often appears more as an autonomous work, at festivals, biennials and, of course, on the universal web of the aforementioned global village. The poster used to appear on the street, and now it is much more on social media and the web. It is through these that you can reach your preconfigured target groups.

And, accordingly, the world wide web, the social media you use, has an impact. Its imagery, its symbols, its memes are all elements of a shared visual memory and knowledge that create a visual system called the 'universal alphabet'6, whose elements influence the poster back and forth.

The proliferation of the web is now not simply visual anymore, but is also a moving image, and posters are influenced in the direction of the moving image. Applications have emerged that transform static posters into virtual moving images, allowing the poster to display

more than one image, movement, or change. Instead of a static image, the range of its resources has now expanded.

The structure of the visual piece of art defined as a poster has changed. Traditionally, the poster is both open and closed, concrete and undefined, since the inscriptions, the dates, the concrete events are very much linked to a social context, to cultural art or political life, while the visual part is open to interpretation by the viewer. The inscription is information, while the image is a much broader form of communication that achieves its own perspective of meaning by meeting the horizon of expectation of each individual recipient.

Hans Gadamer, in his work Truth and Method, classifies the poster as a referential image, a symbol8 that contains a condensed but welldefined message, which is always linked to an element of the world. As opposed to the image, which, according to Gadamer, creates an internal coherence, an autonomous context. At the same time, it is precisely because of the transformation of the communicative surface that autonomous imagery is gaining ground on social media and on various web platforms. The aim is to capture new, unique images and contexts instead of the repetition that is so familiar in the commercial sphere. Concentrations of condensed meanings, which bring posters closer to the visual language of logos (Alberto Aquilar Cortes: No more violence; David Crajkowski: Women's protest) and memes (Lex Drewinski: Disinformation; Elmer Losa: Migration) or abstract formal signs (Ania Wieluńska: The 27 Warsaw poster biennials; Wojciech Janicki: 50th birthday of Katowice Spodek), which are linked to autonomous imagery, are being used to develop a new formal language. In addition to the examples above, PosterFest03 includes several works of this kind. Although many have sounded the alarm bell over poster art, I think we should instead look with interest at the change that is taking place in it. In every age, the change of medium has extended to the change of genre, maturing new forms of human creativity and spirit. This is where we are now, and although it is sometimes difficult, in this respect, I think we can look to the future with confidence.

Valéria Fekete

aesthete, visual arts director Pécs Galleries

3 Jaques Villeglé: Le lacéré anonyme, Edition Presses Du Reel, Paris 2008 4 Deleuze, Gilles et Félix Guattari: Rhizome, Paris, France, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1976 5 Marshall McLuhan: A Gutenberggalaxis. A tipográfiai ember létrejötte; Trezor Kiadó,

Budapest, 2001 p.45. 6 Clement Greenber: Avantgarde et kitch; IN: Art et Cultur, Macula, 1988, p.1516.

IN: D.Zakaria im. p.10 7 D: Zakaria: im. 8 HansGeorge Gadamer. Az igazság és módszer, Ford.: Fehér M.István Gondolat Kiadó,

Budapest 1984