viz.

Paul Lukas, who runs a weblog called Uni Watch (the obsessive study of athletics aesthetics), has an entry up on the swastika and uniforms from the early 1900s. This picture shows the Edmonton Swastikas from 1916. Lukas details the popularity of the swastika graphic prior to its ignominious use by the Nazi party. Lukas’ piece is interesting for a variety of reasons (including some nice images and a link to a “Canadian artist/mystic” devoted to rescuing the swastika from its association with the Nazis), but it got me thinking about the ease with which images become iconic (at times unintentionally or at cross purposes with an image’s original meaning) and the kinds of control this easy iconicity demands in visual practice.

Lukas’ blog shows the swastika emblazoned on everything from hockey jerseys to golf clubs to the Finnish airplanes. Of course, we don’t see many of these images because the swastika’s meaning has been so fully determined by the Nazis that we have, in many ways, wiped out the graphic’s history prior to 1920. What was once an extremely portable and popular mark has become a placeholder for all of the disturbing events that occurred under its most prominent and nefarious use. What Lukas calls “the power of design,” the ability for graphic marks to stand in for larger discourses and contain emotional values, has the potential to become a liability for visual practice. The swastika wasn’t offensive in its design, but by way of its easy ability to turn into an icon for those who would use it as a banner for hate. The image condenses all of the complexities of the Nazi regime and becomes a simple synecdochic substitution for a larger discourse.

And so, proprietary control seems hugely important when practicing visual communication. Corporations have long been careful to defend the use and circulation of their marks (with Paul Rand and IBM creating one of the first comprehensive brand image guidebooks), and it seems a reasonable strategy. But it is also at odds with some of the normative demands we typically place on public communication. The idea that a political figure would copyright his or her speech in order to prevent it from circulating in ways unfavorable to figure would strike us as decidedly anti-democratic. Because visual images have a particular materiality to them, and because the meaning of images can be created by way of circulation and display, the proprietary issue is exceedingly important for scholars working in the area of visual culture. If images are made and allowed to circulate unchecked, what once was a marker for good luck on a hockey uniform can become a marker for oppression and death on a soldier’s uniform. Perhaps it could be asked this way: how do we manage the desire for images to be particularly meaningful against the need for open circulation of images that secures the status of public communication?

If you’re attending the National Communication Association’s convention in Chicago in a few weeks, I’ve organized a discussion panel on the intersection between visual communication and intellectual property issues. Participants include Cara Finnegan (University of Illinois), John Logie (University of Minnesota), Kevin DeLuca (University of Georgia), Ted Striphas (Indiana University), and Eric Zinner (editor, NYU Press).

The above image comes by way of ManWoman, the aforementioned Canadian artist/mystic. As ManWoman explained to me via email: “I have little info except that it was in the Edmonton area in 1916 and one of my friend's grandmother was on the team. I have the original in my collection and it was first published (recently) in Modern Primitives from RE/Search in 1989 in an interview with myself.” You might want to peruse ManWoman’s website for more images and information.