The clearing Bank's Share

Shop logo is a classic

visual/verbal pun. Shares

are either Bulls (going up)

or Bears (going down).

They are inextricably linked

and in the graphic they are

foreground and background to

each other in an Escheresque

manner.

A classic of image fusion: Abram

Games's WW2 poster, 'Grow Your

Own Food'. It is rare to find a

shape that can so convicingly

represent such disparate

objects as a spade and a ship.

And that they should not be

arbitrarily combined but actually

be the obvious visual

metaphor to carry a strong

message, is almost

unprecedented.

A contemporary rough for an

ad in the Gamesian visual/verbal

punning mode. Amazon, the online

bookseller allows any book to

found on the Net within seconds.

Lurking behind it is the cliched

metaphor of 'a forest of print' and

the fact that books are produced

from woodpulp: 'another slain

forest', as authors sometimes

insincerely sigh when their book

comes out.

Getting it Across

Many animals exhbit luring behaviour, often using mimicry. It is not surprising that advertising (what is it but luring?) uses techniqiues of visual punning related to mimicry. Advertising is particularly fascinating because it intends to achieve a concrete result, ie more sales, but the route is a classic of displacement. Neverthless the messages must be read: representation must occur. Given the economic end, successful techniques of advertising will have been subjected to a kind of evolutionary pressure, and they should be able to tell us something about the capacity of human beings to respond to visual puns.

Much advertising makes use of Ruskin's pathetic fallacy. That is, human emotions are projected onto the external environment. Adverts are usually too short to demonstrate happiness, sexual success etc dramatically, so projection is the most economical technique. Recently, computer animation has made such scenarios much easier to realise. Objects can come alive in the middle of naturalistic scenarios. In a Sattchi advert for Inter City in the early '90s the Penguin logo on a reader's book breaks rank and lounges voluptuously in its hammock. The emotion of the human participant has been transferred to some inanimate object in the physical environment. It is interesting that no one seems to have to be taught how to interpret these adverts.

Advertising demonstrates effective representation in action. Not surprisingly, it shares many characteristics with cartooning. The Clearing Banks' Share Shop logo is an effective verbal/visual pun with an Escheresque twist. The phrase bulls and bears used for shares that go up (bulls) or down (bears) is illustrated by a composite black-and-white figure-ground picture in which the profiles of the bull and bear share the same line. The images of the bull and bear interlock rather than fuse. Perrier's advertisements continually play on the sound of the word 'eau' as it appears to English ears. One advert had the Perrier bottle in the shape of a cherub under the caption 'Seau Pure'. Such bending of the packages of consumer products to fuse them with other images is currently a favoured technique. An ad for KitKat illustrates its slogan 'Take a break, take a KitKat' by painting the KitKat wrapper onto the sides of lorries and trains, illustrating 'work' paired with the blissful relief that a KitKat is supposed to bring. Gombrich highlights another variant on the technique in a Philishave advert from the 1950s. The rotary movement of the shaver is transferred to the face of the user. The image reinforces the slogan: 'How to get a better shave...all round' .

The heyday of fusion advertisment was the 1940s and 50s and its master was Abram Games. Games believed that an advertising poster was more than a picture plus words. What he sought was a fusion, often between letters and images, sometimes between two images. All the elements in his work have a purpose: they are never merely decorative. Take the wartime poster, Grow Your Own Food (1942). He discovered that the image of a spade could also be a ship's hull face on; so the picture divides down the middle wi th a ploughed field on the left, the sea on the right, a securing nail in the shaft on the left, a striped funnel on the right. The stark choice between growing your own food and relying on the convoys with their huge loss of life and materials was rammed home by forcing the two images together.

For an artist like Games, images, concepts from disparate times and places, conventional signs like letters all democratically inhabit Posterland and they interact on the basis of both their visual resemblances and their meaning for us. And the signs within this realm are more than ciphers: they have creaturely qualities. So, in a holiday poster, J of Jersey becomes a parasol or a deckchair with awning. In a series of ads for the Financial Times the paper itself assumes the body of a man, most memorably in the golfer: somehow the twist of the body and feet is enough to specify golfing swing even though above the feet there is nothing but newspaper, no limbs, no head. It is such illustrations that are perfect fodder for Gombrich's studies of representation: Golfing swing' can be convincingly represented quite independently of the presence of a 'golfer' in the conventional sense. In an age when genetic engineering threatens to produce less benign 'new objects' a few more Gamesian hybrids would be welcome.

The Implosive Animation of the Still Cartoon

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