Entering Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie, one is immediately faced with a decision. It’s a decision of considerable importance. Standing in the rotunda, one may either go forward, into the temporary exhibition, or right, into the curated beginning of the permanent collection, or left, into the midst of things. To take the left course, knowingly or not, is to elect chaos. To be thrown into Hall XVIII, a trove of Botticelli and much other Florentine perfection. Neither the beginning nor the end of the Gemäldegalerie, but a bewildering middle. One is immediately faced with Andrea del Castagno’s The Assumption of the Virgin, a vivid collision of red, blue, and gold. Here is an image suffused with import and drama. In this picture, Mary ascends in an orange-cloud mandorla toward heaven, arising from a flower-strewn tomb. She is flanked by saints and angels; what little of the background that can be discerned is either a general ground, or a gold-leaf sky. Approaching this work, one might catch several complimentary works in their periphery. Directly to the left, Domenico Ghirlandaio’s The Resurrection of Christ, in which an insouciant-looking Christ seems to raise effortlessly from his own intricately-carven tomb. In the opposite corner, a slew of Botticellis: two very human Marys, one of which is flanked by the sex symbols St. Sebastian and Venus. In this room we have already experienced ecstatic awe; obligatory spectacle; human empathy; and a dichotomy of sex.
Each of these modes is represented in its idealized form: one is thrown from dusky Berlin into a treasury of Italianate dreaming. But one picture seems unlike the rest. It is a dull palette: greys and browns. It contains no depiction of religious beauty, of heroism, of sex — of any humanity whatsoever. It appears almost a depiction of absence, as though the painter (whose right name has never been agreed upon) prepared the stage, but not the drama. The subject is an urban landscape: a geometrical, blocky, precise rendition of a coastal city with Florentine features. Perspective is demanded by red lines demarking tiles; in some respects, this seems like a picture designed to invite the illusion of depth. In the far distance, ships are spotted, but no sailors. This is an abandoned city, or a city built without people. What it might represent remains somewhat obscure. Some have titled it The Ideal City — a picture that epitomizes the city by providing it architectural perfection, and by removing the human element. That is, after all, the most distracting, and often the most flawed, element of any given city. Despite the ardent colors of the del Castagno, or the soft beauty of the Botticellis, it is in this emptiness that the room seems to culminate. Art historians have supposed it may have been part of a bed frame, or mounted on the back of a chair: a form approaching ephemera. It is not, therefore, a grand centrepiece (as so many other pictures in that room), but a constant reminder. The city that might be; the beauty in vacuity; a notion of utopia that feels, when peered at for too long, to represent an apocalypse.
It is this picture that Radu Jude and philosopher-collaborator Christian Ferencz-Flatz have selected for their poster to Eight Postcards from Utopia (whose Romanian title translates literally to: Eight Illustrations from an Ideal World). The film itself is a 70-minute compilation of Romanian television ads postdating the socialist collapse. This synopsis and this painting (which is, it must be said, never referenced in the film itself) do not seem to have any obvious kinship, save the similarity in their titles. But it is the essence of the project. Radu and Ferencz-Flatz find in this scape of advertisement not merely a representation of a society thrown into a new and bewildering economic sensibility, nor simply the texture of that sensibility, but a reflection of ideals and therefore a reflection of perfection. Just as The Ideal City provokes the following feelings: shock, curiosity, an intense desire to invest in geometrically perfect property, comic indifference, and then an underlying unease; so too do these advertisements generally function on a similar scale, replacing the property-urge with whatever product the advertiser intends to hawk. They are amusing, and engaging — often vivid — but almost necessarily empty of real passion, or inner spirit. This portion of the work is replaced by commerce, though equally by an inherent idealism. To make a general (though not absolute) rule: in these ads all people are beautiful; all characters are defined by their perfect archetypes; all things are as they ought to be, or as we (the universal we) would wish them to be. The land of the advertisement is one of wealth, of justice, and of peerless invention. Our characters are constantly in states of amazement and fascination; the world constantly grants them supreme happiness, or else a very amusing demise. However grotesque many of these visions appear, they are not based on an abstract ideal, but rather the ideal embodied in the everyday.
Here we might distinguish The Ideal City from the many other pictures in Hall XVIII: while others are formed of religious or mythological dreams — or at the least a heightened sense of human beauty — The Ideal City is a wholly credible architecture, very clearly derived from the artist’s Florentine surroundings. It is the most ordinary capture of all: a cityscape made clean and orderly, never reaching beyond the material and the present. So too in these Romanian advertisements: they exaggerate the actual (that is, the observed) in society, and therefore formalize that state into its perfect edition. The images of women are not deified as Mary or Venus, but made sensual and sexual as according to the lower whims of the average male viewer; these same men are made funny, ridiculous, and vulgar according to their own standards of good cheer and banter. Standard generalities are also enshrined: young boys always come home from play with muddied shirts; old men spend their days preparing to die. There are no appeals to any exterior or metaphysical perfection: all these ideal states are built from the world as it currently is, and according to those values that predominate. It is both a magnifying glass, and a mirror. These generic notions, these universalisms, must therefore become the book of life.
Given the ad-man is not inherently ideological — his capitalist drive is not generally encouraged by capitalist proselytism but a simple profit-motive — the principles of his work do not come upon the austere perfections of The Ideal City, nor those of the Socialist state apparatus that preceded him. Instead, base principles are appealed to: pleasure, wealth, infinite beauty. Many may contest the presence of that final attribute in this collation of Romanian television ads. Many would be wrong, though there is a truth in their hesitation. That is the nature of the mirror. To watch 70 minutes of these advertisements, screened consecutively, feels perverse. And yet this amount would be consumed over just a few days of general television. If we were to calculate the total hours spent watching TV ads by the peak TV generation, we would come upon some horrifyingly long figure, long enough to wrap around the Moon, Pluto, and other minor cosmic events. In all these hours, the mass-audience have absorbed a perfected iteration of their own society; all its welts and dissatisfactions are made, instead, elements of the sublime. We should not shun greed, or want, or envy; every human defect can be cured by participation in the perfect world we currently live in. We are, according to the advertisements, very nearly in the Ideal City; we are given an entirely achievable pathway to resolve the single discrepancy between current misery and future happiness (a can of Pepsi).
Radu and Ferencz-Flatz take this general premise and therefore mold their film into various thematic strands (the Eight Postcards). Some of these seem inspired by the general humor or unlikely aesthetic combinations posed by capitalist artistry (the “found poetry” segment), while others arrange the materially with greater heft: one reduces the ads into the specific (and repetitive) depictions of particular bodily actions; another traces the history of Romania through advertisements, both in their content and context; another — and most effective — distills the Life of Man into each age group’s targeted advertising, from birth until death. But the phrase “capitalist artistry” seems somewhat important; this film is not a dry, or exclusively academic collection of ideological bad-speak. It is often vivid, and interesting, and funny; there is some representation of the human experience, however ludicrous, that is still able to communicate through the frame of a commercial for a defunct Romanian product. Radu and Ferencz-Flatz have created a picture-book of ephemera; if they imply the function and feedback-loop inherent in the advert-form, they also document a period of visual culture, and the dream of a Romanian utopia, as dreamt by the least utopic of people. This is a visceral history; and one imagines for Romanians, an embodiment of long-forgotten daydreams, stored somewhere in the darker caverns of the brain. There, with the Botticelli and the Assumption, a dream of the world. A dream built of the world as it was made: a dream in which we see both the place that made it, and what that place imagined it could be. Empty — and transfixing.
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