Consumer imagination of the communist dictatorship: Czechoslovak advertising in the post-war era

In modern society, advertising works as one of the barometers of social, aesthetic and communication changes. Its form and content are closely related to a political context and ideological shifts. Advertising as a tool of consumer imagination also had an effect on the lives of citizens living in a system based on state ownership. The purpose of the Consumer imagination of the communist dictatorship project, which deals with Czechoslovak advertising in the post-war era, is to clarify the functioning and production of advertising departments in the era of state socialism.
The issue of visuality of the state socialism era has recently attracted significant attention across social-scientific branches. So far, topics related to film, design, ideology and comics have been given preference. The project objective is to analyse strategies of visual presentation of consumption within the ideological limits, economical context, and semiotic meanings of that time. Consumption messages were distributed through diverse media, from posters, brochures, press, neon signs and shop-windows to film and radio. In order to best capture the complexity of advertising, an interdisciplinary perspective has been chosen, combining approaches of historical, audio-visual, graphical, and linguistic research. This approach is possible thanks to a unique museum-academic cooperation. With their research, the team members would like to contribute to uncovering the visual traditions of Czech society and the description of the functioning of consumer imagination as a tool of legitimising the authoritative government.

Project name: Consumer imagination of the communist dictatorship: Czechoslovak commercials in the post-war era
Code: 18-24439S
Duration: 2018–2020
Agency: Czech Science Foundation
Project type: standard
NM’s investigator: Mgr. Ondřej Táborský, Ph.D.

Anticipated results/outputs:
The anticipated result of the project is to find out, through the analysis of the mechanism of creating consumption models, how conditions and rules of imagining were formed in the era of the communist dictatorship, and which forms of visualities an authoritative regime creates. The project results shall be published in the form of expert articles and an expert book.