Merry Christmas. My "A" paper on Saville's postmodern cover of PCL, as it relates to Jean Baudrillard. Thanks again to Ricardo for the interview audio from the 24HPP DVD.
Peter Saville’s Power, Corruption, and Lies Album Cover as Hyperreal Simulation
Designer Peter Saville’s album cover for New Order’s 1983 LP Power, Corruption, and Lies is a prime example of the postmodernist ideas expounded by Jean Baudrillard in his book Simulations, which was published in English translation that same year. Saville’s very postmodern album cover is a “hyperreal” piece that combines several historic art styles (Romanticism and modernism), and relies on multiple layers of signification, in order to become a distinct entity with an invented reality of its own.
To explain: Baudrillard writes that we are in an “age of simulation,” in which signs have become so removed from their referents (i.e., signified things in physical reality) that concrete reality ceases to exist outside of the signs themselves; “the age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials” (204), he says. Our collective sense of reality has hitherto been dependent upon a “representational imaginary”-that is, a mentally- and socially-constructed correlation that connects the signified (or referent) and the sign that represents it. This creation of reality via signification is an ordered system with multiple levels which have emerged over the course of human history: the oldest, first-order signification, requires that a sign directly represent the (real) referent (e.g., trading goods for other goods), while second-order signification involves the mechanical reproduction of those first-order signs, creating a sign-of-a-sign (e.g., currency used for transactions instead of traded goods) that still retains a connection to the original referent (Easthope 255).
Whereas the first- and second-order significations preserve the “representational imaginary” that links the signs to reality, third-order significations-i.e., simulations-do not (Easthope 255). “This representational imaginary…disappears with simulation” (204), Baudrillard notes; these third-order significations mark the contemporary, postmodern era. In this age of simulation, mass-produced simulations, signs-of-signs-of-signs, eliminate the necessity for real referents (e.g., credit cards used for transactions instead of currency), creating a newer constructed sense of “reality” which masks the erosion of the old one. This new reality-what Baudrillard terms “hyperreality”-is produced by “substituting signs of the real for the real itself”; because simulations are “no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance”-that is, no longer reflect reality via the representational imaginary-then they are “no longer real at all,” and can therefore create this illusory hyperreality, regardless of how irrational the simulated “reality” might seem. Simulations “can be produced an indefinite number of times,” thus disseminating the hyperreality throughout the world (204). However, simulations rely on myths and nostalgia associated with the now-eroded reality, therefore preserving the illusion that reality has not been eroded at all; they accomplish this by acting as self-referential signs which only refer to other signs, “engendering a reality more real than any shreds of a memory of the real itself” (Easthope 255).
Peter Saville, designer for New Order’s album covers, created one such simulation in the form of the band’s 1983 LP cover. Strapped for ideas on what the cover should look like, he began buying postcards of paintings from the National Gallery in London. Although he initially had no intention of using it, one that appealed to him was a still life of some roses in a basket, appropriately titled “A Basket of Roses,” painted in 1890 by Ignace-Henri-Théodore Fantin-Latour (“Peter”). The initial referent for the album cover was this bunch of roses, which Fantin-Latour arranged a certain way for aesthetic effect before painting them. The painting itself thus became the first-order signification for the referent roses, directly representing the physical rose arrangement. Saville finally decided to use the painting because the “kind of 19th-Century Romantic chintzy bowl of flowers” made “the perfect camouflage” for an album titled “Power, Corruption, and Lies.” He showed the postcard to the band and its management, and everyone agreed on the idea, especially since there was a reference to flowers (“Oh, our love is like the flowers / the rain, the sea, and the hours”) in a song on the album called “The Village” (“Peter”).
Saville sent photographer Trevor Key to photograph the painting at Norwich Castle, where it was on long loan for five years. However, Saville (and everyone else) then decided that the brownish-gray tint on the postcard image looked better than Key’s photos, but the National Gallery had lost the reproduction transparency, so the tinted image from the postcard could not be duplicated (“Peter”). The postcard image is the second-order signification, a sign representing the first-order sign (the actual painting) which represents the referent roses. Another transparency could not be created since the painting was away on loan, and the design group was refused access to photograph the actual painting again. Tony Wilson, founder of Factory Records (New Order’s record label), met with the director of the National Gallery and asked who the painting belonged to; after being told that the people of Great Britain owned the work, Wilson allegedly replied, “Well, the people want it”-so the director capitulated and allowed the design group to use it (“Peter”).
After this four-month delay was over, Saville had the reproduction of the painting with the desired tinting-a second-order signification for the referent roses-which he then cropped and added a small vertical bar of multicolored squares in the upper-right corner, creating the final design (see Fig. 1, the front cover). The finished album cover is a third-order signification, or simulation, no longer tied by the representational imaginary to the referent roses; the album cover is based upon a photograph of a painting, but not Fantin-Latour’s long-dead roses themselves. The inclusion of the color bar is important, as the colored squares are actually a modernist code designed by Saville to replace letters and numbers. The key to this color code appeared on the back of the record sleeve as segmented, multicolored rings around the center of a white floppy disc design (as floppy discs were used by the band to store sequencer information) (see Fig. 2, the back cover). There are 26 segments of color-either solid color, or one color upon either yellow or green-composing the two outer rings, each corresponding to letters and numbers; by counting clockwise around the outer rings, starting from the vertical green segment at the 12 o’clock position, one can decode the color bar on the front of the album (e.g., the first green block corresponds with both the letter “A” and the number “1”). The color bar on the front of the album is decoded as “FACT 75,” indicating the Factory Records catalogue number given to the release (LeBlanc). The “juxtaposition of the historic Romanticism and the kind of contemporary coding” gives the cover a postmodern design that refers only to itself, not to the original referents (i.e., the long-dead roses); the real bunch of roses from 1890 has been appropriated into a design that mixes historical art styles, creating “a slightly uneasy balance between modernism and Romanticism” which both divests the image from its origins in reality and refuses to acknowledge either of the first- and second-order significations (i.e., the painting and the postcard). Saville says the postcard image of the roses, tinted to give the illusion of age, is “the perfect foil” for the title of the album, which reveals the sort of the nostalgic (hyperreal) assumption that a Romantic painting of roses would have nothing to do with either power, corruption, or lies; the reality of historical periods (the 19th-Century in fact featuring more than its share of power, corruption, and lies) thus becomes destroyed and replaced by a hyperreal façade which fosters the irrational, mythic belief that certain time periods exemplified particular moral and aesthetic values essentially different from those operating in our current age of simulation (“Peter”).
“I didn’t actually want to write ‘Power, Corruption, and Lies’ on this cover,” Saville says. “I was interested in the idea that it was rumored to be called ‘Power, Corruption, and Lies.’” The color-coded Factory number was used in lieu of an actual title on the album cover, with the title and band name instead hidden inside the sleeve in code; one of the reasons Saville chose to do this was because he thought the National Gallery would be upset if he put the album title “Power, Corruption, and Lies” over the image of their Romantic painting (though that title was certainly more acceptable than “Piss Off You Shitheads,” one of the more tongue-in-cheek working titles)-the abstract color bar thus making the nostalgically hyperreal image more palatable to those who might object to such an ironic title/image juxtaposition (“Peter”). The color code also resembles “a printer’s 4-color registration code” (Costelloe), a self-referential touch alluding to the mass production of the sleeve-dissemination of hyperreality being an important quality of third-order signification-which contrasts with the singular nature of the painting (first-order signification) upon which the image is indirectly based (via the second-order signification, the postcard). As the designer responsible for practically all of the band’s record sleeves, Saville was interested in the idea of “a mass-produced secret, something that between 100,000 and half a million pop fans knew about that wasn’t part of the sort of public marketing machinery”; because the hyperreal sleeve creates its own dominion as a separate entity from the vanished real, fans could “go in and find a New Order album even though it didn’t say New Order on the front.” Helped by the fact that the band members never appeared on their album covers (with the notable exception of 1985’s Low-Life, which ironically featured a musician’s face on each panel of the sleeve), the eventual result is that “the perception of New Order was the received perception of the packaging,” the album cover thus becoming so divorced from the referent roses that “the inscrutable Saville design” develops as a hyperreal simulation inseparable from something entirely different from roses: the supposedly “faceless” band itself (“Interview”). In this way, simulation, the “new order” of signification, epitomizes our modern age-a historical period in which our perceived “reality” is actually the illusion of hyperreality and nothing is as it seems.
Sources Cited
Baudrillard, Jean. A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader. Ed. Anthony Easthope and Kate McGowan. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1992.
Costelloe, David. “Biography.” Peter Saville Graphic Design. 13 March 2004.
LeBlanc, Nicolas. “FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions).” New Order Online. 2004. 13 March 2004.
Saville, Peter. Interview. New Order Story. Dir. Kevin Hewitt. Videocassette. Polygram Video, 1993.
Saville, Peter, and Wilson, Tony. “Peter Saville Gallery” Commentary. 24 Hour Party People DVD. Pathé Distibution, Ltd., 2002.
Read it sober mate!:p
