The Cyclical Differences between the Utopia of Catalogue Covers and the Real World
MAGCD / 20036676
After Foucault studied how power and social change played out in the French revolution, he believed that we tend to simplify transition by viewing it as an ongoing inevitable attainment of ‘freedom’. In this Methods of Cataloguing project, I started by analyzing the transitions through the decades on IKEA catalogue cover designs. I am questioning the design: layouts, visual objects selections, style of typography, used materials, and colour tones. because there must be something influences those decisions and more interestingly it might be represented the conditions of the certain decades. My works focused on the five first decade of IKEA catalogue editions to re-assemble narratives where people looking for changes to create a better future as the company vision is ‘To create a better everyday life for the many people’ and their key message is ‘Small changes, a refreshing new life’.
Gioni Massimiliano stated that as the early twentieth century discovered the power of images and photography, artists felt the urge to reconfigure this amorphous mass of anomic images by creating connections, possible narratives, sudden clashes, and interpretations. He also said that it was an attempt to make sense of the world, to structure it, while still preserving its absurdly cacophonic, at times sublime, multiplicity. (Gioni, Massimiliano, The UnMonumental Picture, p. 12) Using montage as the medium, I tried to represent the contradictive situations: where people changing their interior to be comfortable, but, in another side of the world people making ‘change’ to get a ‘comfortable’ future. My process so much influenced by Martha Rosler’s work, Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful in her essay, she said, “the spatial comfort of these constructed works is belied by the discomfort of the details, in which two (or more) discourses are visibly made to collide,…” We might see in the 70s collage, how I tried to portray a glimpse of difference of how women represented in the media and how actually they are on the real life in the early 1970s where women fight for Equal Rights Amandement. I used the women on IKEA covers who sit comfortably on the fancy furniture having a good time at home. While on the outside, some women fighting for their rights. I also put a woman, who hold a big handwritten poster, blocking a place where medias always connect them to the female role in a house: a kitchen. As a further experiment, I made kaleidoscopic patterns out of the montages, it represents that this world made of two aspects: cycle, and constant changes.
What I see as the connection between my works and Foucault’s ‘The Order of Things’ is the similarity between my working process and the way he analyzed documents. Foucault organizes documents, divides, distributes, and organizes them in levels, sorts, distinguishes between relevant and not, finds elements, defines unity, describes relationships, as I did when I started to analyze the IKEA cover designs and tried to find different interpretation rather than look at them as a furniture catalogue covers.
Reference: