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CLICHÉ: The Workings of Ideology

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Susan Sontag uses the aesthetic term “cliché” to describe the particular effects of photographic circulation. Although in her book, Sontag is focused on photographs of suffering, her diagnoses of these particular aesthetic conditions might be a useful frame to think about ideology. Ideology is most powerful when it is part of the everyday. It is most effective when it is disguised as “common sense” and remains unchallenged. Ideology accrues power through repetition and sedimentation over time, to the point that it might resonate as a cliché through circulation. I draw from Sontag because she describes how images—as containers of meaning and ideology—become cliché through repetition, inundation, and excess.
 
In many ways, my first image project tackled the over-proliferation of the concepts of “freedom” and “liberty” that I see as the core of US ideology. Read alongside Sontag’s piece, I think what I was trying to elaborate on was bringing a critical eye to these powerful words and images that function as the bedrock of our nation. The Statue of Liberty itself might be a prime example of the dialectic between cliché and shock. In reality, the status of liberty is awe-inspiring, grandiose, and spectacular—a monument to American exceptionalism that seems to suggest that freedom and liberty are uniquely American. At the same time, the common-place circulation of this recognizable image—and I would argue to the point becoming a cliché—has hollowed out the meaning of a word or image of “liberty” and rendered its political or ethical promises complex.
 
My Barbara Kruger-inspired image plays with the clichéd status of Lady Liberty. In this project, I tried to deconstruct the iconic image through two layers. One, the close-up scale of Lady Liberty’s face renders the familiar image strange. The unrecognizability (and as many in the class pointed out, the genderlessness of her face) brings us out of the common-sense circulation of the statue’s iconography. I selected the base image because it suggests illustrates the material construction of the Lady Liberty. It is rendered literally a hollow, inhuman mask that might allegorize the empty promises contained within semiotic mask of “freedom” or “liberty.” That is, the ideology of freedom or liberty is not necessarily oriented to social justice, equity, or liberation. The second layer of meaning is the inclusion of the GoT quotation “A Girl Has No Name.” Through the story of Arya Stark, a GoT character who trains to be a faceless assassin, I suggest bring light to the imperial violence done by the US abroad under the name/face of “democracy” and “freedom.” Further, through the layering of visual meaning, they help us ask: What is at stake when we organize politics and ethics under the banner of “freedom” and “liberty”? 
 

This page has paths:

  1. INTRODUCTION Huan He

Contents of this path:

  1. “Cliché” and “Shock” in Sontag’s "Regarding the Pain of Others"
  2. DESIGN LIKE KRUGER: Faceless Liberty