A few of my favourite things…
Date: August 21 2005
Location: Salzburg, Austria
Fieldnote: Fräuline Maria’s cycling tour group, mainly American, perform hesitant re-enactment of Do-Re-Mi song and dance routine at Schloss Mirabell. Outside the palace gates, a young Czech male in 18th century garb promotes the ‘Best of Mozart’ concert ‘to be performed by musicians in wigs.’
The battle between Rodgers and Hammerstein and Amadeus for the tourist dollar and the dominant image of place resonates throughout the city. Fortuitously, the uber-brand ‘Salzburg: The Stage of the World’ is ambiguous enough to embrace the sub-brands of both ‘Sound of Music City’ and ‘Mozartland’. The place-marketing logo with the fortress and spires of the old town silhouetted against the craggy cliff of the Mönchsberg Mountain, offers the consumption of landscape alongside culture, Austrian tourism’s most persuasive argument. It is an image of instant and effortless identifiability, of the kind according to Kulka’s
(1996) definition of kitsch that triggers an unreflective emotional response. ‘The Stage of the World’ strapline declares Salzburg to be the site for global event culture with its festival providing the centrepiece of the ongoing ‘spectacle’. All events here appear to take on a theatrical quality, a kind of ‘staging’ as they become by-products of the city’s cultural ‘trademark.’
When Kevin Lynch (1972) intriguingly asked What time is this place? the answer for Salzburg would appear to be forever somewhere between the beginning of the Baroque era and Mozart’s death. Here the lovingly and ‘authentically’ refurbished buildings are to quote Giddens(1999) ‘severed from the lifeblood of tradition, which is its connection with the experience of everyday life’ and therefore rendered kitsch. What is interesting is that the city mediated through Mozart is considered more ‘authentic’ by locals than what has been described as ‘ the Alpine cliché of yodelling, goatherds and lederhosen’ offered by The Sound of Music. Captain Von Trapp’s faltering words, crooned to Maria in the gazebo, ‘Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could’ hadn’t anticipated The Sound of Music’s transformation into ‘its own pure simulacrum’ (Baudrillard, 1994). What is offered to tourists are a range of tours of Salzburg and Salzburger Land based on a 1960’s Hollywood interpretation (or as it has been argued, deliberate misrepresentation) of a fictional account of an Austria that never really existed. Of course tourists are not passive recipients of contrived heritage and understand that the ‘staged authenticity’ of Mozartworld is no more real than Julie Andrews marriage to Christopher Plummer. As Urry (1995) argues, ‘Authenticity is merely another game to be played at, another pastiched service feature of postmodern experience.’
As cities compete in the global marketplace to attract inward investment, ‘hard-branding the cultural city’ (Evans, 2003) transforms places into signs of themselves. In the case of Salzburg, the re-imaging of the city has sacrificed its plurality or potential meanings for the sake of a constructed mythology that provides reassurance in the face of change. While Austria continues to grapple with its post WW2 image, the tensions between tradition and modernity appear to be suppressed in favour of kitsch. So should we be content with ‘the crystallisation of the continuous movement of life in the permeable disguise of fantasy’ (Olalquiaga, 1998)? Or is it possible to accommodate diversity in metanarratives? How can those involved in design and marketing engage with the re-imaging of cities in positive ways and represent places as the complex and multi-faceted cultural entities that we know them to be?
Nicky Ryan is a senior lecturer in Visual Culture and Theory at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London UK
“In the case of Salzburg, the re-imaging of the city has sacrificed its plurality or potential meanings for the sake of a constructed mythology that provides reassurance in the face of change.” But Nicky, this is exactly what branding does - it reduces plurality, complexity, diversity and ambiguity to stereotypes and generalities, ‘identity’ and ‘authenticity’ to travesties of themselves. However, even to talk about ‘plurality’ or ‘diversity’ in this kind of way is to suggest that there is something called ‘plurality’ or ‘diversity’ that could become a brand asset. There isn’t. To create a brand that says ‘we are all about diversity’ is to have already flipped diversity into its opposite, uniformity - “we’re so diverse, we all value diversity!”. No, if ‘we’ are really diverse, some of us will value diversity and some won’t and there will be a myriad other points of view as well. We won’t necessarily even share the same understanding of what ‘diversity’ is.
Mozart and the Von Trapp family notwithstanding, Salzburg is no less or more of a place than Salford. And it hasn’t been ‘transformed’ into a sign of itself, because everything is *already* a sign of itself (a better way of putting this, to my mind, is to say that ‘everything is word-like’). Salzburg is a sign of itself. Salford is a sign of itself. New York is a sign of itself. You and I are signs of ourselves… There is no escaping the fundamental human experience of the world as a text - “Being that can be understood is language”, as Gadamer wisely observed (or, indeed, Derrida’s “Il n’y a pas hors de texte”). The important question here is what our texts are showing us, and whether we are heeding it.
The Western conception of design, as it is practised and theorized, has produced this travesty of disconnected signification that we call branding (or, under different circumstances, that we call conceptual art). And it’s not hard to see how this is the child of the abstraction and reduction of modernism on the one side, and of the ‘postmodern’ cultural theories that come out of semiotics on the other. How can designers who are working within this paradigm find a way out of it? I don’t believe it is possible - and that it dooms designers to reworking the ‘back catalogue’ in ever more stale and cynical ways, as we have been doing pretty much since the blaze of postmodern design burned itself out. The theories and practices have nothing more to offer: the chewing gum has lost its savour on the bedpost overnight. And ‘Irony’ has become nothing more than an excuse for kitsch produced by graduates.
Authenticity in its deepest and most original sense implies a deep connectedness, a continuum, between the illimitable possibilities of expression of an (unmanifested) essential being and the concrete forms that are particularisations of it. Design has never had a language to talk about this - indeed, the theories that are taught to designers only recognise ‘creativity’ as external association, as quotation and sampling and reference and self-referentiality. But “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you,” as the (gnostic) Gospel of Thomas has it.
james
/james souttar 03/11/2005