Propaganda Technique

Assertion.

Energetic, enthusiastic statement presented as fact.

E.G "our product is the best!"

Relies on subject assuming its true.

Bandwagon.

"Others are doing this so you should too."

It presents the side its on as the winning

side. So many people have joined it you are

guaranteed to win.

or

Everyone else is doing it, so you'll be left

out if you dont.

Selective Omission.

Regarded as extremely effective by the IPA.

Only showing information that is positive

to the cause.

Glittering Generalities

"in defense of freedom."

"we are against the terrorists."

Words that are linked to high value concepts.

You cant argue except by asking them to

define that word or phrase. Who are the

terrorists? Who are Al Queeda then?

Lesser of Two Evils

"sacrifices must be made"

Like Churchill bombing Canterbury to protect

the enigma code.

Name Calling.

Using negative words to describe a the enemy.

Pinpointing the Enemy.

Simplifies as a complex situation by presenting

a group or person as the enemy. Asks you to

view the situation as right and wrong.

Plain Folk.

"our views reflect those of the common people."

A person may use the accent of a group, put

built in stutters in speeches, they may use

glittering generalities limited vocabulary.

Improves sincerity.

Testemonials

Quotations / endorsements taken out of

context.

Transfer

Linking something to something else to

generate the same feeling associated with it.

Eg. Putting the Swastika on something so

it becomes associated with the Nazi's.

Or as a positive, popular celebrity endorsement.

Cold War Propaganda

It was called the Cold War as "it was rarely contested with 'hot' weapons. It was in many ways a propaganda war in which images were used to produce both fear and loyalty, at home and abroad". David Crowley (2008), Poster of the cold war, V&A publishing

Radicals and government on both sides of the East / West divide seized the medium of posters to broadcast their opposition to the cold war order.

The concept of the Iron Curtain symbolized the ideological fighting and physical boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1989. On either side of the Iron Curtain, states developed their own international economic and military alliances.

The Berlin Wall (German: Berliner Mauer) was a barrier constructed by the German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany) starting on 13 August 1961, that completely cut off West Berlin from surrounding East Germany and from East Berlin.

The Soviet-dominated Eastern Bloc officially claimed that the wall was erected to protect its population from fascist elements conspiring to prevent the "will of the people" in building a socialist state in East Germany.

The Berlin Wall was officially referred to as the "Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart" (German: Antifaschistischer Schutzwall) by GDR authorities, implying that neighbouring West Germany still harboured nazis.

Before the Wall's erection, 3.5 million East Germans circumvented Eastern Bloc emigration restrictions and defected from the GDR, many by crossing over the border from East Berlin into West Berlin, from where they could then travel to West Germany and other Western European countries. Between 1961 and 1989, the wall prevented almost all such emigration. During this period, around 5,000 people attempted to escape over the wall, with estimates of the resulting death toll varying between 100 and 200.

In 1989, a radical series of political changes occurred in the Eastern Bloc , associated with the liberalization of the Eastern Bloc's authoritarian systems and the erosion of political power in the pro-Soviet governments in nearby Poland and Hungary. After several weeks of civil unrest, the East German government announced on 9 November 1989 that all GDR citizens could visit West Germany and West Berlin. Crowds of East Germans crossed and climbed onto the wall, joined by West Germans on the other side in a celebratory atmosphere. Over the next few weeks, a euphoric public and souvenir hunters chipped away parts of the wall; the governments later used industrial equipment to remove most of the rest. The fall of the Berlin Wall paved the way for German reunification, which was formally concluded on 3 October 1990.

What is Viscom? Context and Brief

Context:

I want to practice my illustration and drawing skills, learn how to print and etch, and research propaganda, conspiracy theory and counter culture.

I also want to produce a body of work based around this research aimed at convincing / persuading or informing people of an issue using an appropriate medium to the style of propaganda art. I also want to deepen my understanding of propaganda and times in history when propaganda was epecially prevalent.

Brief:

Produce a sequence of images based on the research I've conducted into propaganda. Conduct research into what makes effective propaganda by gauging audience responses to the work and attempt to create some effective propaganda for an idea or cause.

Rationale:

First conduct research into propaganda through history and into what has been most effective.

Begin to make sketches of ideas for pieces of propaganda and produce as many as possible, getting audience research along the finding out what was effective and what wasnt. Use print making techniques to create these using the idea that they would need to be mass produced cheaply in a live brief. Record this in a similar way to how we did on "Design for Audiences."

The French Revolution and Jacques Louis David

Jacques Louis David was a french painter who lived from 1748 until 1825.

David was an active supporter of the French Revolution and friend of Maximilien Robespierre (one of the best known and most influential of the Revolution, highly active during the "Reign of Terror." Known as the Incorruptible or Bloodthirsty dictator, he was executed by Guillotine in 1794.)

David was the dictator of the arts under the French Republic but was imprisoned after the fall of Robespierre. He aligned him self with the regime of Napoleon the first after that.

Brutus - JL David 1789

David carried his moral and pictorial quest to its farthest limit in this painting. Painted the year the revolution began, 1789, it was valued for its political content. David contrasted the strict morality of the Roman Republics first defender, sacrificing his sons for his country, to the moral flabbiness of Louis XVI who was a notoriously bad decision maker.

Although it was due to Louis XIV's excessive spending that the government was in financial crisis, Louis XVI rejected any financial advice to raise taxes and decided to take out international loans instead. This eventually lead to bankruptcy.

The Marquise D'Orvilliers - JL David 1790

This is a painting commission from David by one of the Great Lords of the Ancien Regime. The woman in the painting is quite plain looking as is the painting.

"She seems lost in a daydream, passively allowing her portrait to be painted. The features of her round face are not unusual and life itself seems lost in somenelance - a life free of curiousity and complexes." - Luc De Nanteuil - David, Thames and Hudson Publishing

I think this quote above is an insight into David's opinions of the ruling class at that time. We know he was a supporter of the revolution. While this painting is peaceful and serene and the woman is smiling, it shows her in plain environment with little interest. I might be allowing my own opinions to come through here, but I assume David would have percieved as boring and a waste of the countrys money. Royals werent required to pay taxes.

The Tennis Court Oath - JL David 1791

"It was on June 20, 1789, at Versailles, that the members of the third estate by members of the clergy, met in the hall of the Jeu de Paume. It was there that, with only one exception, they all took an oath pledging "never to be seperated and to meet wherever circumstances so require, until the constitution of the Kingdom is established firmly on solid foundations."

"On June 27, He (the king) ordered the nobility and the clergy to join the Third Estate. The States-General ceased to exist and on July 9, the body of deputies became the Constituent Assembly. The Revolution had begun." - Luc De Nanteuil - David, Thames and Hudson Publishing

The Club des Jacobins, in October 1790, invited "the creator of Brutus and Horatii to, this heroic Frenchman who's genius foreshadowed the revolution" to create this painting. David did this drawing but didn't finish the painting (he gave up in 1801 as Napoleon 1 was then ruling.)

Robespierre is presant in this drawing slightly right of centre, pressing his hands to his chest with emotion. To David, Robespierre symbolised revolutionary purity and passion. The clergy who have just joined the third estate (what we would now consider lower middle class) are in the front hugging. On the left are reprasentatives of the people and the National Guard, they express popular support and enthusiasm. The theatrical people on the balconies are there to show the massive diversity of attitudes, but the majority convey the spontanaity and unanimity of the oath. The curtains are blown by a huge gust of wind and if you look closer a lightning bolt is striking Versailles.

The Accomplice of Terror

David was president of the Club des Jacobins in June 1973. He was appointed to the committee of General Security. During this period he would counter-sign with his colleagues those arrest warrants which, in the majority of cases, would lead the arrested individuals to the scaffold. David signed nearly three hundred warrents for the apprehension of suspects. Many of which were his former patrons. One of which was the Duke d'Orleans who had also voted for the execution of the king.

Also, not a single artist was sentenced to death and David also sometimes intervened to assist the flight of suspects such as General Seriziat, a relative of his brother in law.

David argued in his defense after this period that his functions prohibited him from taking any personal measures.

Marie Antoinette Brought to Execution - JL David 1793

"This drawing is startlingly true to life but there is not the slightest trace of emotion in its execution." Luc De Nanteuill - David, Thames and Hudson

Davids generally nasty conduct during the "reign of terror" lead his wife to divorce him. He is recorded saying in an emotional outburst to Robespierre in 1794 "My freind, if you drink the hemlock I will drink with you. " He did not however attend the convention for Robespierres overflow excusing himself saying he was ill.

On August second, the convention ordered Davids arrest for his fantacism and ties to Robespierre during the Reign of terror.

He said "If the false virtues of Robespierre misled my patriotism, the error that seduced me was less the effect of the personal feelings that bound me to him, than the result of the universal esteem in which I always saw him held." Implieing that David didnt fully understand why he had been arrested.

After the convention approved a general amnesty for crimes related to the Revolution in 1795, David regained his full freedom and returned to Paris. After this he took to teaching students, promoting their individuality and independance as artists.

The Death of Marat - JL David, 1793

The Reign of Terror or Terrible Year. Marat was the editor in chief of L'Ami du Peuple. He was a fiery orate and violent man. Only July 13, 1793, a young Royalist called Charlotte Corday managed by a clever subterfuge, to gain access to his apartment. When Marat agreed to recieve her she stabbed him in his bathtub where he had to sit hour after hour treating the disfiguring skin disease from which he suffered.

This is an idealised image which is vaguely reminiscent of the "descent from the cross." David saw Marat as a model of antique virtue and the decomposed state of the body didnt allow David to paint a lifelike picture of Marat so the finished piece makes him look alot younger and less affected than he would have been.

Source of Research

David, Luc De Nanteuil, Thames and Hudson Publishing 1990

French Revolution and James Gillray

The French Revolution began in 1789 with the meeting of the States General in May.

On July 14 of that same year, the Bastille was stormed: in October, Louis XVI and the Royal Family were removed from Versailles to Paris.

A Legislative Assembly sat from October 1791 until September 1792, when, in the face of the advance of the allied armies of Austria, Holland, Prussia, and Sardinia, it was replaced by the National Convention, which proclaimed the Republic.

In January of 1793 the revolutionary government declared war on Britain, a war for world dominion which would continue for another twenty-two years.

The Reign of Terror, during which the ruling faction ruthlessly exterminated all potential enemies, of whatever sex, age, or condition, began in September of 1793 and lasted until the fall of Robespierre on July 27, 1794

Napoleon Bonaparte became Emperor in May of 1804.

The French Revolution was welcomed not only by English radicals like Thomas Paine and William Godwin and William Blake, but by many liberals as well, and by some who saw it, with its declared emphasis on "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," as being analgous to the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

As it descended into the madness of the Reign of Terror, however, many who had initially greeted it with enthusiasm — Wordsworth and Coleridge, for example, who came to regard their early support as, in Coleridge's words, a "sqeaking baby trumpet of sedition" — had second thoughts.

Edmund Burke denounced the Revolution in 1790 in his great Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke maintained that the radicals who had begun the Revolution were interested first in the conquest of their own country and then in the conquest of Europe and of the the rest of the world, which would be "liberated" whether it wished to be or not.

Tom Paine's great response to Burke's work,The Rights of Man, appeared in 1791, and the debate between conservatives and radicals raged on for many years.

The Great French war lasted between 1793 and 1815.

Propadanda is a form of communication that aims to influence a community towards some cause or idea.

Garth Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell - "Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist."

A propaganda organization employs propagandists who engage in propagandism—the applied creation and distribution of such forms of persuasion."

James Gillray was one of these propagandists in Britain working during the French Revolution.
He produced prints for the Anti-Jacobin (anti french revolutionary) Journal in around 1797.
Gillray would work for different publishers, under different names attacking both Whigs (drew support from wealthy merchants, aristocratic familys, country estates) and Tories (drew support from church of england, the royals.)

"Initially many Britons were sympathetic to the aims of the revolution, ... However as Terror raged and the guillotene began to rise and fall, so did much public opinion begin to turn. ... The blood of King Louis XVI, shown as a martyr by Gillray, flows in torrents ..." - The Art of Caricature, Richard Godfrey, Tate Publishing 2001

The execution of Louis XVI was shocking to most of Britain and Gillrays "The Blood of the Murdered Crying for Vengeance." was sympathetic to the french Aristocracy.


"The revolution was at its ugliest in Paris during 2-6 September, with bloody massacres of prisoners, including many preiests and political prisoners, as well as prostitutes and common criminals. At least 1400 people died in dreadful butchery. "

"The composition (talking 'A Family of Sans-Culottes...' pictured below) looks dashed off, improvised in a frenzy, but it is in fact a very skillful adaption of an egnraving after Pieter Brueghel, The Poor Kitchen."


The Poor Kitchen - After Brueghel


A family of Sans-Culottes enjoying a feast after the fatigues of the day - Gillray 1792

"As events were nearing their bloody apogee - the Revolution was at its ugliest from 2 to 6 September - reports from Paris containing (often inflated) accounts of the massacres were translated by Gillray into prints such as this." The National Portrait Gallery, Website


French Liberty, British Slavery - Gillray

In the above print, published by H. Humphrey (I assume for the the anti-jacobite rag) we can see a free frenchman happily sitting by a small fire in ragged clothes eating raw onions and snails. In contrast is the fat englishman, red with booze, complaining about taxes and eating huge amounts of beef. I wonder what Gillrays opinion on this actually was. I think the image is showing how much better off we were while having a dig at people who complain at the amount of taxes we were paying, I think on the surface it says "Look at the french, they think they are free but they live like shit. We should appreciate the country and government we live under." Also though he may be digging at the fat and wealthy upper classes for complaining about taxes, he was the son of a soldier and as a caricaturists regarded as a low artists. His print and etching abilities raised him in society slightly.

On the 21st september 1792 the French National Convention abolished the Monarchy.

On the 16/17th January 1793 a vote was taken by roll-call for the death of the King, the voting being 387 to 334 in favour. On the morning of 18th January 1793 Louis XVI was guillotined before a vast crowd, in the place de revolution (now place de la concorde). This lead to the Conventions declaration of war against Great Britain and Holland on 1st February.

Fear of a french invasion was a constant fear in Britain and Ireland until 1805.


Britain goes to war in the shape of George III transformed into a crude map, his feet Kent and Cornwall, his tassled nightcap Northumberland. He craps vigorously on the top coast of France, dispersing a number of tiny gun boats.


Charles James Fox was a British Whig Statesmen.
Fox had little interest in the actual exercise of power and spent almost the entirety of his political career in opposition, he became noted as an anti-slavoury campaigner, a supporter of the French Revolution, and a leading parliamentary advocate of religious tolerance and individual liberty.

William Pit The Younger was the British Primeminister at the time (although they didnt use the term then). Although often referred to as a Tory, or "new Tory", he called himself an "independent Whig" and was generally opposed to the development of a strict partisan political system.

End of the Irish Invasion - Gillray

Fox portrayed here as the dismayed figurehead of the french warship Le Revolutionaire, had repeatedley scorned fears of a French descent upon Ireland. However, on 23rd December 1797 in an expedition organised by the fanatical and Anglophobe General Lazare Hoche (A lower class born french soldier who rose to be a general in the Revolutionary army.) A french squadron with numerous millitary transports anchored in Batry Bay in Southern Ireland but was dispersed by foul weather.

The opposition identified with the revolution, are destroyed by violent storms, fortified by the gales of the wind emitting from Pitt and other politicians.

The Apotheosis of Hoche - Gillray

One of Gillrays most obviously propagandist pieces. Hoche had alot of hatred for Britain. He died in 1797 but it was rumoured he was poisoned. This etching mocks Hoches funeral which was a grand affair. It shows France burning beneath him while he rises amidst a choir of sans culottes to two demonic looking creatures holding 2 tablets with the opposite of the ten comandments written on them. He also plays a guillotine instead of a harp.

On the 1st of August 1798 the British fleet, commanded by Horatio Nelson, destroyed the French in Aboukir Bay in one of the most devastating of all naval victories. The Battle of the Nile instantly turned Nelson into a national hero of almost unprecedented status.


The Vexation of Little Boney - Gillray

The first appearance of Napoleon Bonaparte as a caricature. Small, but horribly energetic, vain, paranoid, easily distressed, a guttersnipe aping his betters, ridiculous, but fearsome nonetheless, Gillray's conception was immediately imitated by other caricaturists

Sources of Research:

http://www.victorianweb.org/history/hist7.html

James Gillray - The Art of Caricature, Richard Godgfrey, Tate Publishing 2001

Initial Ideas

1.
My starting ideas for this project are expression of undescribeable feelings through painting and drawing. Entropic illustrations that are designed to be personal expressions that hopefully tap into other peoples sense of empathy. In other words its designed to make people feel something.
Examples of good and bad of this, do you need to take responsibility for the effect it has on other people? Is it this selfish and masturbatory? Is it good art if it doesnt do anything for the world apart from serve as an outlet for your frustration?

2.
Is the horror genre valuable today and in our society? Does it only serve people who havnt experienced real-life horror or is it the other way round, does it help to make real-life horrors easier to deal with by trivialising them in fantasy. As something that is designed to inspire fear, unease, discomfort etc is it possible to be a good thing?

3.
Art during revolution. Freedom of expression during Lenins Russia (1920 - 1925), then social realism during Stalins russia. (late 1920's.) Research the french revolution.
Illustrative characaturing of aristocrats.
Prevalent artists during french revolution:

James Gillroy

Jaques Louis David

Possibly try to create something inspiring rebellion against the tory government?