Nineteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

The poster as the genre of graphic arts is a medium where the representation of the human body functions as an important semiotic sign. In addition to informative and illustrative content, representation of the human body in this genre has always had ideological purpose. This paper discusses how the political ideology integrates the images of the human body and how it contradicts the individuals’ personal feelings and bodily experiences. The case study of posters from the Soviet period (1950s – 1980s) indicates the ideological strategies of sports promotion posters and anti-alcoholism propaganda posters. Political propaganda posters reveal the body politics of the communist ideology: to create a uniform, disciplined, desexualised, masculine bodies capable of embodying the image of the “New Soviet Hero”. I suggest that the artistic tendencies of the so-called “Harsh Style” that evolved in Latvian painting at the time can be seen in the sports posters of this period. The success of the Latvian school of posters manifest the influence of Central European countries, especially Poland. Anti-alcoholism posters tend to employ a cartoon aesthetic. This tradition has its roots in the mass propaganda of the Russian Revolution (1917), which encouraged the extreme dichotomies in visual communication. These posters show the human body as a ridiculous and weak object that deserves to be condemned and alcoholism is not presented as a disease but as a “bad choice” of individuals. Complex research methods have been applied, including iconography, semiotics, contextual and comparative analysis.