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September 14, 2004
Trade: Commodities, Communication and Consciousness
| Title | Trade: Commodities, Communication and Consciousness | |
| Author | Thomas Seelig, Urs Stahel and Martin Jaeggi (eds) | |
| Publisher | Scalo, Zurich | |
| Date | 2001 | |
| ISBN | 3-908247-47-0 | |
| Reviewed by | Jane Szita | |
How do we interpret a world in which everything is fluid, flexible, and flowing faster than ever before? In what ways can we accurately reflect the reality of ‘global’ trade, the quasi-religious power of consumerism, and the spectral flows of information which determine today’s economic and political landscapes? That was the starting point for this book, and for the exhibition (staged at the Fotomuseum Winterthur and the Nederlands Foto Instituut, 2002), behind it. Photographs by over 60 artists, photographers, advertising agencies, magazines, and corporate reports, are complemented by texts ranging from philosophy and economic theory, to quips from politicians and pundits. The effect is of a kind of devil’s scrapbook, a visual journey through a diverse collection of images from the blandly banal and seductively glossy, to the unnervingly revealing and deeply moving. The first pages illustrate urban landscapes (Los Angeles, Tokyo), followed by the weirdly sanitised images of American malls and corporate HQs by Marc Räder. They are followed by idealised images of consumer ‘lifestyles’: bodies in a club, bodies on a beach, and bodies bedecked in jewellery at Cannes. These lead into a dense assortment of images depicting all of life — from food to sex - as commodities, accompanied by David Bosshart’s assertion that, “shopping has become the most fundametal act in all areas of life” (David Bosshart). Then the focus changes to production, from high-tech cleanrooms to child labour on the fraying edges of the global economy. Distribution follows, then the dissenting voices of Greenpeace, its tiny boats taking on Goliath-like whaling ships, and protests during the WTO conference in Seattle (1999). Finally, refuse and recycling are pictured, with images of ‘garbage kids’ in Manila juxtaposed with textual references to the psychic waste of a world in perpetual motion, in which “failure is the great modern taboo,” (Richard Sennett), and life is rendered meaningless by a system in which, “the object, which lasts, matters more the subject” (George Bataille). So the book itself embodies a kind of sinister flow from appearance to reality, from a Western urban vision bathed in consumerist delusion, to the impoverished, polluted reality of rotting, useless excess in the dumps of the Philippines. | ||
Posted by Books Editor at September 14, 2004 09:33 PM