Reification and Representation

Architecture in the Politico-Media-Complex

Graham Cairns

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317403722
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

The relationship between politics and the public relations industry is controversial and, at times, polemic. However, one component of this relationship that has yet to be investigated is the role of architecture. Arguing for a fundamental reconfiguration of our understanding of 'political architecture', this book suggests it is not only a question of constructed buildings, but equally a case of mediated imagery.

Considered through examples of architecture as a backdrop for photo shoots by politicians in the democracies of the United States and the United Kingdom, this book suggests these images give us both a better understanding of recent developments in the Western political economy and the architectural and urban developments of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.

Using case studies of Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, David Cameron, Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, this book represents a ground-breaking triangular analysis that will be essential reading for scholars in architecture, politics, media and communication studies.

Section I

The United States

1 From Lincoln to Obama

The recent history of architecture as political imagery in the United States

The American civil war – technology, media and imagery

On January 1^st, 1863, Abraham Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation in Washington DC. Two months later he puts pen to paper on the first conscription act in the North. In July the same year, the Battle of Gettysburg commences. It is a year seen by most Civil War scholars as the decisive turning point in the most bellicose conflict in America’s history. Despite destroying large parts of the South, life in the North during the Civil War (1861–1865) has been historically ascribed an aura of normality, evidence thereof being the opening in August 1863 of the new Ford's Theatre, Washington DC. An architecturally nondescript home of thespian activity, the theatre would, less than two years later, enter United States folklore as the site at which, on the night of April 14th, 1865, John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln at point blank range. The President would be pronounced dead at 7.22am the following day. It was less than one week after Appomattox and less than five years since Lincoln’s own election victory.

Figure 1.1AA Lamb. Emancipation Proclamation, 1863-4

The election Lincoln won was held on November 6^th, 1860. He obtained 39.7 per cent of the popular vote and became the sixteenth President of the United States. His counterpart, the Southern Democrat John C Breckinridge took 18 per cent of the popular vote and continued to serve in the Senate until joining the Confederate Army in 1861.¹ In the popular victor-composed narrative, the election, and the war that followed, were battles characterised and vindicated by the emancipatory discourse. Despite the gloss offered by such assimilations however, Lincoln’s early pronouncements on the issue of slavery reveal the well documented real-politick of the times. In his inaugural speech Lincoln pronounced he has “….no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.” Indeed, he went on to state, “I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”² In August 1862, in a letter published in the New York Tribune, in response to Horace Greeley’s “The Prayer of Twenty Millions,” an editorial critical of the Lincoln administration, the President writes, “if I could save it [the Union] by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.”³

Despite the emancipatory heuristics of the Lincoln Presidency then, the Emancipation Proclamation has also been critiqued in the contextual framework of a pragmatic set of formulas devised in response to a precise geo-political moment. The ultimate goal, laid out in these terms, was at several removes from the emancipatory orotundity and veneer later applied to it and which, despite the endeavours of notable campaigners to highlight the dehumanising nature of the Peculiar Institution, was also framed as a political and economic expediency by much of the industrial elite and white working class of the North at the time.⁴ Enveloped in the context reiterated here, the ideological battle between the forces of union and secession in the North and South of the United States is not reduced to an emancipatory battle for humanist values of liberty or equality. When considered in dialectical materialist terms, the North’s underlying motivation for walking the path to War is inevitably read as a different form of struggle, a struggle about the modus operandi of the American economic system itself. In this regard, it can even be betokened as the definitive imposition of a Hamiltonian ideology of free market economics in the modern age of industrial production in the final throes of a Jeffersonian ideal of a complex agrarian ‘liberty’.⁵ Whilst such a reductionist summary inevitably oversimplifies, the ideological distinction it focuses attention on allows the elucidation of the contradictions we find in the first image referenced in this book, AA Lamb’s Emancipation Proclamation, 1863–4.

While this image is, at its most evident symbolic and narrative level, a construction around the express question of the Emancipation Proclamation, it can, when examined in social art history or cultural studies frames of reference, facilitate interpretations that define it as an indirect reflection of the deep-set series of social forces hinted at here, the economic substructure of American capitalism itself.⁶ An anomaly in most rapidly advancing capitalist industrial economies by 1863, slavery was not only an institution that emerged as a form of oppressive ‘labour relationship’, it was one that emerged as part of a largely pre-industrialised process of mass production predicated on the practical elimination of labour costs. Under pressure in the mid-18^th century to keep pace with productive speeds yielded by technologies such as the cotton gin, it was, ironically, being led along a path to expansion, at least in part, as a response to the impetuses of industrialisation that, in the North, were politically lining up against it.⁷ Framed in such materialist terms, the drive for emancipation from the white Northern elites, as presented by Lamb, is interpreted as the ‘pure’ logic of economics – as an inevitable response to unfair trading practices. Through this rubric, the industrial elites of the North, and the white working classes of the already established industrial centres thereof, are construed as reactive supporters of emancipation countering a perverse form of production subsidy to the Southern economy that devalued the labour exchange value. If divorced from its humanitarian context in this way, the pro-industrial nature of the emancipatory North buttresses the ideological duality that for decades characterised the early social-economic debates of the newly independent nation: the Jeffersonian agrarian idyll set against an industrialised capitalist economy epitomised by a Hamiltonian vision of a fully modern and mercantile American future.⁸

By the time of AA Lamb’s Emancipation Proclamation, the United States was firmly Hamiltonian and nothing epitomised that more than the industrial nature of the Civil War itself – a conflict that saw trench warfare some fifty years before Europe would reach that point in the ‘evolution’ of its bellicose practices. It was also a war carried out over a geographical expanse only possible in the modern age of railroads, steamships, telegraphic communication and the mass dissemination of news through an interconnected media and printing industry. Furthermore of course, it was a war of mass-produced weaponry and associated mass slaughter.⁹ In this context Lamb’s image is revealing for what it lacks; any indication of the industrial reality of the age or the questionable commitment of the Northern elites to emancipation on anything other than pragmatic grounds. Thus perceived, Lamb’s portrait is an imaginary celebration of the emancipation proclamation that, when analysed via its iconography, presents a narrative incongruously laced with moralism and righteousness.¹⁰ It proffers an Abraham Lincoln equestrian figure heading the Union Army. To the right, a full-bearded, sword-wielding General resembling Ulysses S Grant; to the left, bands of liberated slaves. At the head of the composition is the Goddess of Liberty riding a chariot, drawn by two white horses; emblems of the purest values of democracy and freedom. The American Eagle hovers over the entire ensemble whilst, partially concealed in the middle ground, is a statue modeled on that by Henry K Brown of the untouchable and unblemished figure of George Washington.¹¹ The whole is played out against a backdrop of the symbolically resonant Capitol building.

Focusing more expressly on the role of architecture in the celebratory imaginary thus created, it is noteworthy that at the time of painting, the building itself – of the canon which this book will define as Neoclasscial – remained unfinished.¹² The would be symbolic edifice was actually under scaffold at the time of the fictional events portrayed. Lamb renders it in its future idealised state so the architecture of the United States political elite could assume its anointed symbolic role linking Lincoln, the Proclamation, the War, the Abolitionist movement and the soldiers fighting for the Union, with the cultural meanings ascribed to Neoclassicism in mid-19^th Century America – the intellectual and moral legacy of the Enlightenment and the classical age more diffusely. Perhaps, of elevated pertinence in the focused contextualisation of Civil War America, it also recalls the specific democratic bequest and emancipatory struggle of the American people themselves through the legacy of the Founding Fathers most obviously channeled architecturally through the figure of Jefferson.

Clearly, the pictorial narrative techniques employed here are intended to align with the tradition of pictorial meaning construction through symbolic intertextuality that Panofsky’s iconographic methodology deciphers.¹³ Interestingly, and perhaps reflecting the intended ‘reader’ of the image, the vast majority of symbols employed by Lamb – with the exception of the chariot-riding Goddess of Liberty – are all actual to United States political life: Grant, the Washington statue, Lincoln and the fully functioning and symbolically redolent Capitol Building. The Capitol Building, as the seat of the legislative branch, and thus the most openly ‘democratic’ of all the United States political edifices, is key to the ensemble and not only operates on a generic symbolic level but transposes attention architecturally from the Executive, individual figure of Lincoln – which the inclusion of the White House as the selected architectural referent could have done – to the democratic and shared Union itself, theoretically inculcating all States, including those of the South. In the real-politick of its day, the image can be seen as both selective and specifically focused in its communicative intent.

Photography and the tropes of the pictorial tradition in political imagery

Lamb’s artifice is reflective of the broader tradition of narrative painting and portraiture the image manoeuvered through. However, it was antithetic with the War’s representation through the industrialised image of the day par excellence, photography. The prosaic delineation of the American Civil War as the antecedent of 20^th Century ‘industrialised conflict’ is paired with its distinction of being the prototypical mass media war – most notably, but by means exclusively, through its photographic documentation. Epitomised by the work of Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardener, the photographic reproduction of the War¹⁴ was paralleled by almost daily reportage through the media outlets of the day which, by the 1860s, were wholly industrialised in almost every one of their primary processes: communication via the US Postal service, telegram, an interconnected transport service, and the commercial use of revolving cylinder print technology being typical examples.¹⁵

Whilst the photographic ‘war ouvere’ ascribed to the American conflict has been brought into serious question in the terms of photojournalistic authenticity in the years since the Civil War, their representation of both the horrors and the mundanity of the conflict has been elucidated by historians of war photography as setting a new template for image representation. However, there was another less discussed side to the Wartime photography of Brady, Gardener and the photographers of the period which, by complete contrast, sought no new ground beyond the mere employment of the new photographic technology itself, their portrait photographs. Here, no attempt was made to capture either the drama, horror or mundanity of the times. In these images both photographers resorted to type, with any aspirations of capturing societal reality in any form being replaced by the idealisation of subjects threaded through Lamb’s Emancipation Proclamation.

Both men photographed Lincoln himself, and did so deploying all the compositional traits and symbolic references that had epitomised political portraiture painting for centuries, and which were evident in the political imagery of the United States at its inception as an independent nation – John Turnbull, Gilbert Charles Stuart, John Singleton Copley et al., all classically trained and classically influenced artists carrying on the European portraiture tradition.¹⁶ It was of course far from unwitting and, as David Bjelajac identifies, continued long into the 19^th Century.¹⁷ In this tradition, Dozema and Milroy have defined the ‘political image makers of the day’ as engaged in what they call ‘the fashioning of the sitter into personae’ through, in large part, the selective exposition of symbolic features of reference, including architecture.¹⁸ In examples such as Gilbert Charles Stuart’s George Washington (1796) or John Singleton Copley’s Samuel Adams (1772), the sitters in question are presented as erudite gentlemen of learning through an enveloping context of symbols of education and class: their clothing, posture, the books they read, their ornaments, and their taste in architecture. In later semiotic image critiques, which can be seen as a development of the iconographic analytical method, these features would be described as transferring the values of the ‘establishment’ to the sitter.

A perfect example of this is Copley’s painting of Nathaniel Sparhawk, 1764. A Boston merchant and son-in-law of an English Peer who Dozema and Milroy define as ‘a preposterous man dressed in silk velvet whose girth has been exaggerated to convert the ‘skinny man’ into the preferred image of a ‘fat squire’ who has the taste, as well as the means, to eat like a King….. everything they argue, ‘in mimicry of the English’. The use of Neoclassical architectural symbolism evident in this image reflects the political climate and pretensions of the times – the Enlightenment environment of post-revolutionary America in which the ideals of the new democratic nation needed to take on visible form; a form that, more often than not, involved a heavy reliance on built form. It is precisely this artificial construction of personae we see in the photographic portraiture of Brady, Gardner and others of the ilk such as Thomas Le Mere, almost a century later. In Le Mere’s 1863 photographic representation of Abraham Lincoln replicating such traits directly, placing Lincoln centrally in a full-length portrait looking pensively to the left. Right hand resting on the trope of a Neoclassical column base concealed by flowing drapery. Compared to the political portraiture that foreshadowed it, this photograph and others like it, are remarkably similar; the photographic representation in many ways simply continuing the tradition of employing a select range of symbolism to ‘construct personae’.

Figure 1.2John Singleton Copley. Portrait of Nathaniel Sparhawk. 1764

Figure 1.3Thomas Le Mere. Portrait of Abraham Lincoln. April 17, 1863

Analysed thus, both the photographic portraiture of Brady and Gardner, and the idealised allegorical painting of Lamb come from the self-same tradition in which the production of political imagery is inseparable from the construction of political image. Set in their contemporary media context however, both images were also taking up their positions in the traditions of image circulation being set up in the industrialised age. With reference to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Other books by the author
• Introduction
• Section 1: The United States
• Section 2: The United Kingdom
• Conclusion: The agency of the image
• Bibliography
• Index