What's Behind the Billboard: Dead Men and Private Parts. Object? Sign? Thing?

It is a truism that objects and visual sign systems convey meaning. But the meanings shift radically according to the viewer and how the signs are read. Several years ago I asked an American student to photograph scenes which either shocked her or perplexed her upon her arrival in France. One photo is of a publicity panel at the entry to Le Pere Lachaise cemetery. The panel consisted of nine magazine covers, including covers for magazines on children, cooking, hunting, and computers, as well as two pornographic magazines. The young student focused on just the last two covers, thus masking out the others to create her shocked meaning. Other viewers, such as a housewife, would have been expected to mask out the pornographic magazines and be enticed by the magazines centered on the home. A more global reading of the billboard reveals rhetorical links, narratives, and ironical juxtapositions between the magazines, thus creating dispersed and contradictory meanings drawn from this miniature map of contemporary France. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol20/iss2/6 What's Behind the Billboard: Dead Men and Private Parts. Object? Sign? Thing? Peter Schofer University of Wisconsin-Madison One cannot think of objects in isolation. They are defined by their context, and they also define the space and time that surround them. Twenty-five years ago a Coca-Cola bottle placed on the table on the terrace of a vacation home in Southern France suggested either the presence of an American among the French, or a French snobbishness and desire to be different. In all likelihood, it would clash with the surroundings and our image of the "French." Ten years ago the same bottle might have indicated that some Frenchman was drinking a mixture of Scotch and Coke, a chic mix at the time. Today the bottle, now in plastic, would be but one more sign of the integration of American commercialism into French society. In yet another context, Andy Warhol graphically transformed the same bottle into an art object which became a sought-after artifact for someone's living-room wall, whether in France or the United States. At the same time, an object has the value we assign to it. Utilitarian objects, such as a bottle opener, have a very clear use and a first meaning: "to open bottles"; but, as Barthes demonstrated many years ago in Mythologies, nearly all objects have a second and third meaning. For an American, a certain kind of bottle opener can signify "France" and "Frenchness," or another can suggest wealth. Other objects can be said to have no first level meaning or utility, for example a rock (which is not there to be thrown at someone) placed on a coffee table: it signifies at once "beauty," "art," and "nature." This paper is devoted to objects that have a practical, direct utility and which are located in an economic system with a need to sell products by stimulating desire, thus favoring the second meaning. In order to create the desire for a specific product, the advertise1 Schofer: What's Behind the Billboard: Dead Men and Private Parts. Object? Published by New Prairie Press 382 STCL, Volume 20, No. 2 (Summer, 1996) ment-objects resist conceptualization and demand that the viewer isolate the image of the advertisment from its surroundings. An explanation: This exercise is part of a larger project which for the moment I have entitled reading and misreading in everyday life and literature. As part of the project, I have asked students going to France for the first time to take a throwaway camera with them and to photograph objects, events, or people which they could not immediately understand, which might disconcert them, or even shock them. The aim is double: to rediscover what we, as seasoned travelers to France, really no longer see as different and foreign and to note what the inexperienced viewer or seer finds truly foreign. It is assumed that these phenomena are not part of their own upbringing or part of the youth that nurtured them. Many of the photos are to be expected: very small cars, narrow streets, musicians playing in the metro. Others are more interesting, such as a series of photos centered on a French phone booth. A phone booth that takes a card and contains a mysterious "volet" at first disconcerts the American mind and its impression of France. A simple object, the telephone, is suddenly a confrontation of cultures and technologies and poses questions which go beyond the object itself ("Where does one buy the card?"). Here it is not the telephone, but the American who is out of context and out of touch with modern French society, which manipulates the objects without having to think. Among the photos taken, the most disconcerting was not of the telephone, but rather of a billboard, an object shared by both Americans and French. The billboard is located just outside the Cimetiere Pere Lachaise, and the photo was taken by a 21-year-old woman student from the Midwest. The billboard is comprised of nine panels in color advertising nine different types of magazines. On a white margin there is an advertisement for a tour book of the cemetery as well as a panel advertising the works of the spiritist Allan Kardec. Because the print is small and at times blurred, I will spell out the