Is there anything more omnipresent in everyday life these days than consumerist goods, images and enticements? We live in a hyper-consumerist age, manifest in this hyperbolic commodification of our spaces, times and experiences of life, this mushrooming of the world of goods, brands and logos.
While calls for us to protect the environment, to show restraint, if not actually to reverse consumerism, are snowballing, our obsession with consumerism continues inexorably on its course. We consume more and more energy and electricity, more and more domestic and electronic appliances, we change smartphones every two years, we buy twice as many clothes as we did twenty years ago and keep them for half as long as we did.
The proliferation of logos and advertising demonstrates another facet of hyper-consumerism: so all-pervading have brands become that they dominate every platform, obtrude into every area of daily life, every living moment and space, every urban setting, every kind of media, and even natural spaces. Brand names appear on the main streets of every city, in stations, in stadiums, in the halls and shops of every airport in the world. The outskirts of towns are jungles of signs, bristling with billboards.
But now with the rise of the web and digital technology, new ways of advertising are springing up. Advertising on smartphones, digital posters, 3D electronic billboards, and vast multicoloured and animated videos are the order of the day. It is clear, therefore, that the digital revolution is transforming ‘classic’ ways of advertising. Digital advertising is gaining more and more force as a substitute for the ‘paper’ advertisements which used to appear in newspapers and magazines. The world of advertising is changing: here as elsewhere, Schumpeter’s beloved theory of ‘creative destruction’ is at work, that is to say the process which sees established approaches rendered obsolete and disappear in the face of new ones brought about through the innovations of new technologies and implemented by innovative entrepreneurs. Just as the painted advertisements and sandwich men of old have disappeared from our world, so too now traditional paper poster advertising is at increasing risk of becoming obsolete.
It is precisely this decline of large-scale printed posters, if not the disappearance it portends, that Eduardo Nave captures in his new series of photographs, revealing himself to be not just a landscape photographer but an anthropologist charting the transformations of our contemporary ultra-modern world.
In no way does this decline signal the beginning of the end of consumerism. Consumerism continues to feed people’s passions on a massive scale. Let us not be naive, the ecological and climate crisis is not going to put an end to the consumerist frenzy which increasingly looks to the internet and online shopping for satisfaction and demonstrates an insatiable taste for travel, tourism, restaurants, shows, films and series. As for advertising displays, they are not remotely on the way out and are even becoming increasingly giant in format, and notably using digital screens. And you cannot even say that traditional paper posters and printed advertising are dead: indeed, they are still very visible, particularly in the outskirts of towns and cities, but also in the shape of the countless flyers, brochures, catalogues, and promotional leaflets which drop through our letterboxes and are read by six out of ten people in France every week. Print advertising is still a key component in any brand marketing campaign.
But at the same time, it is impossible not to recognise that its hour of glory is now past. Inevitably ‘physical’ advertising in the form of paper posters has begun to seem vaguely archaic, old-fashioned, ‘outdated’, overtaken by the advance of new technology: it no longer seems cutting-edge or modern. What Eduardo Nave shows us is the obsolescence of traditional static paper poster displays, in favour of communication screens, smartphones, giant LED and digital screens, digital and dynamic displays. Underlying Eduardo Nave’s Espacio disponible are the aesthetics and poetics of disappearance.
Espacio disponible is the opposite of Times Square: instead of an urban centre saturated with glittering neon and LED signs, it shows a no man’s land of barren, depopulated, virtually deserted spaces, overlooked by nothing but skeletal structures awaiting unlikely purchasers. Brilliance is replaced by bleakness, excess by emptiness, the euphoria engendered by animated advertising by tedium. This is a time and place where a once powerful channel of communication which sprang up at the start of the modern industrial age has fallen out of favour.
This whole series of photographs depicts the ruins of the modern world in the shape of old- style billboards endowed with a physical structure and a large rectangular metal frame. Like all ruins, they offer us a sight which is not entirely bereft of nostalgia and wistfulness. But wistfulness for what? For these physical platforms themselves, which, incidentally, have long been criticised for their ugliness and their visual pollution of the landscape? Perhaps, but it is primarily another form of nostalgia which they elicit, it seems to me: nostalgia for that utopian, joyful, euphoric, careless, ‘innocent’ age of consumerism of which those big ‘aggressive’ billboards were so iconic.
It is not the apparatus of traditional poster advertising we are nostalgic about, but the decades when consumerism gave the masses something to dream about, a vision of a bright, better life, when people bought without really thinking about the ecological or health implications of consumerism. That era is over. As consumers we have gone from entranced to disillusioned: everything is now problematic, everything sets alarm bells ringing, everything is apt to trigger guilt. Eating meat, taking a plane, wearing fast fashion, not sorting out the rubbish: everything makes us worry, about our health and about saving the planet. Where once consumerism was fun, now it is deemed dangerous, ‘criminal’, irresponsible as far as the future of the planet is concerned. Consumerism is no longer what it was: the happy, carefree, liberating feeling it brought with it has evaporated. The demise of the classic old billboards is a metaphor for the end of that bright moment in the history of consumerism, characterised by a hedonistic focus on the now, without any ethical notion of a future, or awareness of the catastrophic long-term effects of massive advertising campaigns repeatedly inciting people to seize the day and buy, luring them with the immediate and unbridled pleasures to be had from their material purchases.
It is in the context of the current crisis, both in consumers’ changing attitudes to the now and to the future of the planet, that the photos of these dilapidated billboards stripped of their former swagger are freighted with nostalgia: they have the charm of what we imagine to have been a happy past when consumerism was equated with an endless, perpetual, ever more extensive ‘happy holiday’. Perhaps they are destined to become treasured objects in our memories which we savour in the way we do old songs, LPs and old television series. Who knows, one day perhaps we will see them on show in an ‘ethnographical’ museum devoted to iconic objects relating to modern consumerism in the twentieth century.
Gilles Lipovetsky
