By Harry Archer and Emma Collins
In Still Life with Rhetoric, Gries traces the circulation of Shepard Fairey’s now iconic Obama Hope image and explores how the image spread throughout the world in a variety of different mediums. Using her method of iconographic tracking, Gries’ work is extremely helpful in understanding the national and global influence of the image. Yet although the book features some longer explanation of local uptakes of the Obama Hope image, the book generally focuses on the broad strokes of its circulation and transformation. Our chapter seeks to zoom in and take a close look at localized uses of the Obama Hope image through a method we call virtual geosemiotics. While iconographic tracking privileges movement and transformation in regard to a single image, this method slows the motion of circulation to see how a particular sign serves a particular function in a particular place as it interacts with other signs around it. We are particularly interested in what kinds of signification and function the Obama Hope image takes on in murals found in Larose, Louisiana and in Orgosolo, Italy. Whereas Obama Hope communicates a sense of positive forward momentum in certain contexts, in Larose and Orgosolo, the image takes an ominous turn.
Drawing on the methodology of geosemiotics, this chapter will introduce a method for accessing context dependent meaning of an object as it circulates into different visual ecologies. We generate case level arguments regarding how Obama Hope is used and intoned by differing motive forces in both Louisiana and Sardinia. Whereas other geosemiotic studies have used traditional ethnographic observation to make their claims (Bick and Chiper; Denis and Pontille), we have improvised a virtual geosemiotic method using online mapping technology. For students and scholars of the image and its circulation, tools such as Google Street View can offer potential avenues for gathering information regarding an image’s placement. With more information about the visual scene of which an image is a part, digital visual studies scholars can produce richer claims regarding the nature of rhetorical circulation itself.
As we discuss in more detail below, virtual geosemiotics takes advantage of visual semiotics and place semiotics as well as digital technologies such as Google Street View to access the dialogicity that Obama Hope is implicated within, both in Larose, Lousiana and Orgosolo, on the island of Sardinia to the west of Italy. In doing such research, we aim to demonstrate how virtual geosemiotics as a method can enhance our understanding of how place contributes to the meaning of communicative artifacts. As evident in the spatial humanities, digital tools such as Google Earth and Google Maps are becoming more and more popular for doing research across disciplines. For instance, in human geography, De Vries et al. have used Google Maps to measure the social attractiveness of landmarks in the Netherlands based upon tagging behaviors of locals and visitors. We argue that digital tools such as Google Maps, Google Street View, and the practice of geotagging across platforms can also be useful to digital visual studies, especially for projects such as this one that are concerned with how murals and other visual artifacts are shaped by their emplacement.
The Obama Hope image surfaces in a variety of media in its variety of locations throughout the world. We have settled upon the two murals in Louisiana and Orgosolo, in part, because mural as a medium lends itself to semiotics of place, due to their inscription upon physical walls of the city, and to visual semiotics due to their composition as visual forms. But we are also interested in these particular murals due to their function as sites of resistance. Prior studies in rhetoric regarding murals have focused on the ability of the medium to destabilize hegemonic spaces. Darrel Enck-Wanzer, for instance, describes murals in El Barrio/East Harlem as “tactical interventions in the neoliberal metropolis” (p. 346). The Nuyorican murals are part of an ensemble of material culture that espouse identity and resist complicity with dominant Anglo-American society by “generating identity possibilities” in the metropolis (p. 361). Enck-Wanzer also observes the use of murals by corporate agents to appeal to the Nuyorican regional aesthetic in order to garner their business. Needless to say that the mural as a medium can be hijacked for the needs of dominant interests but as Ferrell et al. argue, the battle for meaning between social movements and late capitalism is ongoing with victory never total. The battleground itself, the city walls, remain as a site of ongoing contestation.
Mural and graffiti are so context dependent that to define them and render them as static objects would belie their nature as temporal phenomena inscribed, only for a time, on the urban landscape. Street art may be a better term to capture the fleeting essence of these forms. In this vein, Gillian Jein investigates the Parisian banlieues, experiencing the concurrent processes of gentrification, displacement, and segregation along the lines of class and race. In the Parisian context, the street art Jein analyses claims its own place in a space that is being restructured by government policy, which has inspired a rise in property values, and a bourgeois redistribution of the sensible. Following the work of Jacques Ranciere, Jein suggests that street art forms an interruption in the:
police order, through its material performance of the ephemeral and aesthetic interruption of the smoothness of public architectures. It calls on the viewer to stop and look, creating pause in the flow of orderly departures and destinations that cause us very often to miss the cumulative presences that make urban space a public place. (p. 103)
In other words, murals and graffiti tend towards resisting dominant discourses or police orders to provide spaces of everyday life that may offer a pause from the grinding gears of the hegemonic order. The two murals investigated here are similar in that, as you will see, they challenge a commonplace reading of the Obama Hope image by foregrounding imagery that resists the discourse of the global and regional metropole. As such, these murals make for important foci for learning more about the Obama Hope image’s complex rhetorical life.
In this chapter, we argue that using virtual geosemiotics to study these two murals can help reveal the changing valences of the Obama Hope image as it travels across the world. As a methodology, geosemiotics provides researchers with analytic categories for observing local dynamics in visual communication, but when twinned with a critical sensibility borne from the rhetorical tradition, the methodology can facilitate a judgment [krisis] on the relations it discovers. After all, as potential mediators of images in everyday life, people ought to be able to make a judgment regarding whether they should share or promote certain images in certain locales. To achieve this perspective on Obama Hope, we consider some general geosemiotic principles before introducing our own research method and geosemiotic analysis. In our analysis, the stable character of the artifact is challenged, and the mobile and mutable characteristics of the object’s rhetorical life are celebrated. But in addition, by reimagining geosemiotic methods, we seek room for critical judgment on the deployments of the Obama Hope image in the indexable world.
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