Billboard Studies The billboard is a highly outdated medium. In Europe, the artificial use of the American industrial term "billboard" instead of the equally valid European phrases aims to include European trade and industry in the megatrend whereby the industrial production of commodities loses out in favor of the distribution of brand names. The commodity has become a sign; labor has become design. The concept of the billboard places outdoor advertising beyond Canetti's end point of history, at which the stage of commodity cancer turned into the timeless dimension of the posthistorical. In this epilogue, all that remains is a festering growth of signs within medial networks. King-size advertisement photos appeal to the youthful élan of our postwar American way of life, which has, in the U.S. itself, long since deteriorated into empty routine and facelift terror. Whereas, in said U.S. of A., the billboards are already being cleared away, Europe is busily erecting its own as proof that it has entered modernity and that the continent's final reconstruction can begin, from the Atlantic to the Urals. The billboard as a frozen image is a Renaissance atavism. It simulates vitality by feeding on the principles of perspectivist illusion, whose center is the eye. By detaching advertisements from their commodity setting, the ironicist Warhol of the early 1960's turned ads, whose function was to transmit consumptive messages, into two-dimensional objects that required no fixed viewpoint. Now that was modern art. Urban advertising follows a similar trajectory, but in the opposite direction. Thirty years after Warhol, the European billboard appears as a senseless, detached message, but does so in order to make renewed appeals to the passerby as consumer. Warhol's principle of repetition (which he copied from advertising) is perverted by posting the same signs all over town, where they soon start to stage a system of their own. The intelligibility of such signposting does not result from its information value, but from its design's capacity to function as a lifestyle mirror for the city and its users. Billboards owe their existence to the third dimension that appears when they catch eyes and become part of a meaningful identity décor. Because stylized advertising stays in the place where future consumers will be born, it will never become modern art. The billboard has always been part of the public picture, deriving its effect from the slowness of the passing masses. Its natural environment is the city, where it boasts a long record as proclamation, mobilization or liquidation order, placard, political poster, announcement or advertisement. The street and square where it resides constitute political space ("Conquer the streets, and you will have conquered the state"). From the Place de la Bastille to Tiananmen Square, it is here that the people reaffirm their existence and instigate events. This coming-out is accompanied by the defacement of all signs of power; plastered over, torn up, burnt, pulled down, or commented upon. Nocturnal bill-stickers hang their own unauthorized posters in forbidden spots, scrawlers chalk their texts on pristine walls, rampant subversion defiles political purity: "The street has always been the bloodstream of popular life" (Eberhard Freiherr von Künszberg). The police traditionally have the job of controlling sign traffic and protecting the public visual order. In the 1970s, as the social management of the welfare state and the repression of hooligans failed to guarantee the intended sign peace, the street scene was privatized. Where, before, there had been police, now there were billboards. The daily clean-and-run operations by parapolice commandos on glassed-in billboards on the pretext of "preventive maintenance" represent a tactical shift from criminalization to the elimination of popular vital signs. In this civilizational offensive, "bloodsucker propaganda" is now being used as "urban décor" to defend the spotless home of the nation against evil stains. Urban furniture becomes a purification plant that declares death on all city waste. Resistance against this clearing of the streets is broken by billboard overkill, each of them instantly replacable by the logistical management in case of destruction. This "stage of acceptance" of the billboard ends with an aesthetic discourse on its "appreciation." At first, the billboards were couch and end table in an urban home. Now we are suddenly expected to admire the art directors' posters as little paintings radiating the familiar intimacy of a Bambi. This is where iconoclasm fails. The only threat to these billboards is the indifference of passersby. At the current stage, the public image resides on the TV screen; all other images are but folkloric relics. Even the city is a thing of the past. The "natural need for traffic" has shifted from the classical transport of passengers and goods to the transmission of data within global electronic networks. As a result, social wealth no longer accumulates in the city, but in the peripheral Byzantine high-rise buildings where the computers reside. Its loss of economic reality forced the city to redefine itself as theme park, as a result of which the tourist industry has become the largest in the world at the end of the 1900s. The inner city is rapidly being transformed into a museological environment to preserve the luster of local history. At the same time, modern facilities are being introduced. People visit the city in order to convert income into personal experience. This release of purchasing power explains the use of billboards in the urban décor. But they must be carefully applied. The critical limit beyond which outdoor advertising begins to interfere with the nostalgia-productive quality of place is not to be exceeded. The billboards "have become fashionable"; they are "seen and implemented as instruments to transmit the desired municipal identity." Dutch research showed that the citizens of Maastricht were fed up with "well-maintained outdoor advertising," whereas those in Rotterdam "simply do not pay much attention to it." Until billboards can be placed along the planetary data routes, the advertising designers ("We don't want the Belgian situation, where they have one billboard after the other") will be stuck with this subtle disordering of the polls by the Dutch population. Since the billboard, to its own regret, has no part in new technologies, it humbly refrains from any revolutionary or avant-garde role. Its posted notification is no more than a spin-off effect of advertising campaigns launched in the real media behind its back. Its self-esteem has to be boosted by telling it that it "offers more potential than the mere enlargement of advertisements." It finds itself stuck with a free-floating quotation, a grotesque sign blown out of proportions like some HIV virus waiting to break the sign immunity induced by others, in order to infect and renovate lifestyle. It falls victim to a plot of market artists and city governors scheming to promote themselves. Its will to banality is constantly repressed by its forced subjection to artistic standards. Revalued as fast-art, receivable in four minutes, yet it remains more of a fortress than the short-range weapon the ad strategists would make of it. The billboard is preserved and trained to "raise its creative and artistic level" and thus expand its fire power, even though it more closely resembles a dodo than a hawk. Its clumsiness feels most at home with "Canned beans $1.09." This is why it is looking for co-conspirators who will take its ignorance to the extreme. In a technological culture where all objects are subjected to an artistic special treatment, the only people it deems fit to finish the job are dropout artistes. With the acceleration of social transactions, the billboard is forced to adapt to the transient nature of passersby. On exit roads it gains speed by placing itself directly beside and above the flow of traffic, reversing speed as it goes: It becomes careering oncoming traffic itself. Since it must expand to remain visible, it may as well inflate as a pure sign and release its information value. Its goal is to distract attention, and to merge with the rippling waves of subconscious sexual intercourse. There is no future for the further acceleration of billboards. There is good reason for the freeway ban on bills. The billboard is considered a ghost-driver from another circuit, leading to devastating chain reactions within security thinking. In fascist billboard critique, it becomes a form of pollution that interferes with the natural relationship to the surrounding environment. The implication is that this connection to cultural civilization may yet be reestablished through an automobile viewing experience. But fast traffic turns every landscape it traverses into a large-screen television showing the in-flight movie. Thus, to erect billboards along the highway would be an act of antifascism. Still, despite its history of resistance, the Netherlands will never witness freeway advertising. At best, the privatization of the airways will lead to the inclusion of acoustic advertising signs during traffic information broadcasts. The national billboard lives on the city's deceleration, where commuter traffic has crystallized into a permanent traffic jam, with ample time left to gaze at the public images behind glass. ??