Marketing Animals - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

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64 A STONY FIELD Brand representations proliferate reflexive identities of their producers and consumers. These self-advertisements reinscribe commodified identities reproductively back onto the subjects and objects – the represented figures – of consumption. In this paper I argue that the cooption of identity politics by multinational corporations like Stonyfield Farm, Inc. operates within material and virtual domains that conceal fetishized processes of consumption. I redeploy Stonyfield’s representational vocabulary in looking to uncover these processes as hidden ‘stones’ in a relational ‘field’ of embodied power. I begin by reviewing selected theoretical literature on material and virtual forms of identity, consumption and power. I then apply these perspectives to a recontextualized ‘stony field’, as figured through the work of artist Michael Mercil. I suggest that his project The Virtual Pasture (2009-11), considered in relation to Judith Butler’s re-readings of Foucault and Hegel, reconditions the proprietary terms of Stonyfield’s cow fetish. Text by Katherine Bennett Fig.1. Michael Mercil The Virtual Pasture, postcard, 2009 Michael Mercil
Fig.2. Stonyfield yogurt carton front center, photograph by author. “M y marketing spend is a rounding error [compared with competitors]," he says. "But you can go on Stonyfield's web site (YoTube), and watch cows chewing their cud”. Gary Hirschberg, Stonyfield CEO (Reingold, 2012) My Stonyfield yogurt carton depicts a pastoral landscape identified as Wayside Farm, Vermont (USA). The reproduced image wraps around a white plastic cylinder. Its colors are polarized and focal depths multiplied. A golden light bathes the verdant pasture and grazing cows in sharpest focus at the center. The curved plastic surface foregrounds the cows spatially and graphically. They are the closest figures in the ‘field’ to me. A picturesque New England barn set in the forested edge some distance back echoes the modeled browns of their bodies. The words “Organic” and “Plain” intrude into the landscape’s middle ground and vertically frame the cows. The font is serifed and traditional but playful. Floating above in a hazy sky, the more stylized torso and head of a cow peep winsomely between flat, primary yellow and blue banners for ‘’Stonyfield” and “Organic”. The same head reappears decapitated and vertically centered in a margin left of the landscape, bearing in its mouth an invitation for “SF Rewards” – an incentive program for “our loyal yogurt eaters" [i]. Aligned above is the product bar code, and below are a list of bacterial cultures attributed to it, a stipulation to “KEEP REFRIGERATED” and two certifications: “Organic” and “Gluten-Free”. A standardized chart quantifying “Nutrition Facts” bounds the image to the right. Text dominates the rear panel, presenting the corporation’s story and environmental ethic. A beaming 'mother' is incorporated into the border for a bacon salad recipe under the caption “Meg’s Recipe Box”. The ingredient list is titled “Our Family Recipe”. 65 Stonyfield’s package reproduces the living bodies of cows through multiple levels of abstraction as: representational figures in a pastoral landscape, the iconic brand of a multi-national corporation, a purchaser reward system, a codified market commodity, a matrix for bacterial life, a food product requiring artificial temperature control, a regulated and certified object of consumption, numbered grams of nutrients and percentages of “daily values” for an idealized diet, and an ingredient in a heteronormative ‘family meal’. In this article I question the representational terms and conditions of such abstractions. Their idiomatic reformulations appear in pictures, words and numbers. Their commingled figures produce reductions and multiplications of the bodies of cows in relation to the bodies of people, and of both in relation to their environments. Material bodies are both subjects and objects of the abstractions, reduced by them to caricatures, labels and calorie counts. They are also multiplied, virtually, into new identities and relations through entangled processes of commodification and advertising. I question how these representations proliferate reflexive identities – self-advertisements – of their human producers/consumers, which are then inscribed back onto the cows, the people and their environments. How do these representations naturalize new identities and relations, which are recursively rendered through a marketing spincycle? My inquiry traces materialities and virtualities of its subjects: the cows in a stony field, the field and its stones (where are they?), and the presumed but unpictured human viewer. At issue are the material and virtual embodiments, continually refigured, of animals (including cows and people) and their environments. How can the frames of representation be opened so that a mutuality is seen between these subjects/objects that are
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Antennae Issue 23 - Winter 2012 ISS
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EDITORIAL ANTENNAE ISSUE 23 T his i
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83 Jumbo: A Capitalist Creation Sto
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actually ethical, juridical and pol
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A merican popular culture has quiet
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animals represent to the audience?
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Page 19 and 20: References Anderson, John R. (1990)
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