Some Negative Comments about Corporate Minimalism

Many British television audiences will no doubt be familiar with Benefits Street. First airing back in 2014, it claimed to be documenting the residents of James Turner Street in Birmingham, with clear emphasis on the fact that most of its residents claimed state welfare. Rather than providing that British-televisual trademark of “impartiality” — a notion the show likely believed it held — Benefits Street ended up becoming one of the flagship brands of the post-crisis anti-welfare commentariat, in keeping with Love Productions’ reactionary populist Anglophilia epitomised later with Make Bradford British and The Great British Bake Off. As a phenomenon, it was a sad reflection of the latent classist rhetoric of the Coalition-government’s “compassionate conservative” agenda, wrapped up in the narrative of austerity. Along with it came the Daily Mail-bolstered accusations levelled at working people, who were criticised en masse for buying a flat screen TV or — God forbid — enjoying consumer-brand biscuits. How dare you “indulge”?

This sentiment has never really dissipated from British political commentary, perhaps only somewhat subdued by Brexit talk and the coronavirus pandemic. During Theresa May’s leadership, the epithet of “live within our means” felt like the logical semantic continuation of post-crisis austerity. After all, this is what austerity is actually all about: political semantics. Cuts to basic public services were always more than just about saving money — it was about trying to each us all a lesson in material humility, to be content with less and to do more with what we already have. Less, don’t you know, is more. Never mind the parliamentary expenses scandal, where the likes of Tory MP David Davis — the future Brexit Secretary — claimed around £10,000 of public money to renovate his portico (how colonial) and mow his private paddocks.

Such is the magic of coincidence, Burger King announced their new “rebrand” while I wrote this.

With this has come the aesthetics of austerity, minimalism championed on the grounds of supposed simplicity — a style grounded in an economical “down-to-earth” communication between product and consumer. One need only look at the way that corporate imagery has evolved over the past ten years to notice that visual “simplicity” has overtaken as the dominant corporate aesthetic. Just look at the way Microsoft’s Xbox series has changed in their own start-up designs — from the 2001 original’s grungy sci-fi darkness, to the 2020 Series X/S consoles with their comparatively brief black-and-white faux-Eno moderation. It’s all a tad contradictory — the technology and labour behind these products are as convoluted and messy as they have ever been, if not messier. Even McDonalds — America’s number-one symbol of commercial gluttony — has recently traded its traditional plastic interiors with sleek minimalist geometry, more reminiscent of a gentrified gourmet sandwich bar than a fast-food joint. Global post-Fordist production is never going to be conceptually reflected in corporate aesthetics, hence why they submit to this new form of commodity fetishism: minimalism, celebrated not for any real aesthetic legacy, but for its implicit exclusionary tendencies. Minimalism as defined by absence — this idea is not an inherently problematic thing, but is part of what makes minimalism’s creative identity so potent. As an aesthetic, it possesses the ability to critique a particular concept by stripping it of an essence otherwise regarded as immaterial to its construction. It asks us what is missing, and if it was always necessary to begin with. In this sense, it operates around a core binary expression — a dialectic which, according to its application, can either be radically self-critical or dangerously repressive. After all, it is just a rhetorical device. Its ability to remove something from the equation becomes problematic when employed as a way of placating to oppressive sentiments.

It is best to understand austerity-era corporate minimalism as a vision defined by the very thing it antagonises — the image of excess. Although capitalist realism dominates, it still cannot quell its associations with excess — the exact same material conditions that it was attacked for in the Cold War period. The global financial crisis, as “unpredictable” in real-time economic terms as it may have been, was still an entirely inevitable result of neoliberalism and its emphasis on trickle-down elitism as the ultimate solution to all problems (as Francis Fukuyama famously coined, the “end of history”). Even the CIA have had an image rebrand, opting for a black-and-white logo evocative of artwork from an Unknown Pleasures remix EP. So much then for the image it once emblazoned itself with — a deep blue circle rimmed with gold, with an eagle atop a glowing red compass-star, and below it an ivory scroll reading “United States of America”. While not extravagantly maximalist, its imagery is one with excessive cultural attachments — aggressive American traditionalism associated with the violent indulgences that have defined the CIAs presence on the global stage. Now the Afghanistan public can sleep soundly knowing that their cities are being blasted to dust by a trendier version of drone warfare. When conservatives and right-wingers respond by declaring mass symbolic feminisation or castration, their instincts (if not their emotional conclusions) do have a real-world basis in this aesthetic repression of excess. The reactionary ideas they hold dear — of state-sponsored violence, hyper-masculinity, ethnonationalism, etc’ — are themselves forms of excess to which they as a community subscribe to. This isn’t to say that institutions like the CIA or the United States government are no longer foundationally violent ethnonationalist profit-keepers — simply that, in the world of mass image saturation, controlling one’s associations really does matter. “Keeping it real” as simply another form of masking to keep you in the good graces of the liberal mainstream.

The Trump phenomenon makes sense here. Donald Trump rides upon a maximalist platform — one suffused with strong imagery, a self-acknowledging (if not critically self-analytical) pride with the institutions he represents. Most neoliberal bodies — from the upcoming Biden administration to Elon Musk — refuse to engage with this level of extreme branding of excess, even if their political realities (and the leaks in their constructed social image) speak to differ. Surely then this speaks to the prevalence of the alt-right as a cultural force — a neoconservative ideology built upon the internet’s hyperactive distribution of symbols. The sentiments that fuel the alt-right’s appropriation of Pepe the Frog is, in its conceptualisation, not that different to the analogue-world Trumpian anxieties that drove the Confederate flag’s resurgence in right-wing protest culture. Such is the state of contemporary politics that even the most remote Trump supporter is not immune to the internet’s impact on post-crisis conservative philosophy.

Maximalism is, however, not the exclusive realm of the reactionary right and never has been. The potency of visual symbols can be read as a reaction to the apolitical politics of liberal moderation. Austere neoliberal minimalism wants us to look down upon the gaudy and the excessive with smug pride — its symmetrical gloss is designed to be an exercise in humility, but its philosophy is ultimately false one. There is no humility to neoliberal minimalism for its particular “absence” speaks of cultural abandonment — of communities left shuttered, food banks, precarious employment, plastic seats left to tarnish like old movie posters melting off walls after years of rainfall. It is the aesthetic essence of contemporary gentrification — cereal cafes, charging a tenner for a bowl of Froot Loops, displaying itself in slick design schemes while advertising cereals with inherently maximalist designs. Maximalism has been infantilised — worse than that, it has been reduced to the realm of whimsy. Of little beyond spectacle to distantly admire but not to adopt, to enjoy with ironic distaste. It should be no surprise that Christopher Nolan would find his style becoming such a recycled visual doctrine — while not strictly a minimalist filmmaker, his style has certainly championed a visual mode of anti-excess. The shameless camp of superheroes past that made Tim Burton’s (and even Joel Schumacher’s) contributions so gleefully memorable are reduced to maligned profligacy by the witless anti-fantasies of The Dark Knight trilogy. Something for us to “look back on”, to disregard as some kind of historical failure — and so on with Nolan’s reduction of generic spectacle to a vehicle of soulless exegetic realism. Even its name — The Dark Knight — rings in your ears like a semantic rejection.

There is genuine creative power in embracing maximalism and re-contextualising it so that its presence does not become entangled in the impulses of neo-fascism. At heart, it is a scream — it is the need to yell when the etiquette of yelling is considered a faux-pas. Top-down austerity symbolism is replete with self-contradictory symbols: affectations of moral and sensual restraint while — down the line — those at the top of society’s pyramid are able to keep enjoying their own excesses. Neoliberal minimalism, as with austerity politics, guilt trips us into believing that we are at fault for cultural failures. It tells us that there is something to aspire to in the curbing of indulgences — in the excess, if you will, of moderation. It makes us look at our neighbours — a working-class household with a new home cinema setup, or a migrant worker who just wants to grant their family safe passage by sending them money — and antagonises them. So why not embrace these excesses and more, disrupt the creative economies of minimalist dogma through the loud and the chaotic and the transgressive.

What is defined as “excess” is, of course, contextually dependent. Indeed, many modernist utterances of the word load it with severely negative connotations — hence its tendency to become problematic within the binary flirtations of minimalist aesthetics. Vera Chytilova’s Daisies — in spite of Chytilova’s own insistence of what the film actually “means” — appears to re-appropriate excess in style and narrative content through its maximalism, away explicitly associations with a patriarchal capitalist bourgeois class. While undoubtedly true that the excesses of this class are questionable, it isn’t necessarily the idea of excess itself that should be attacked — rather the exploitative and hypocritical hierarchical conditions that uphold it: a concept that was very apparently missing from the rule of the CSSR. Today, these excesses — as villainised by corporate minimalism —can be defined as the very things that corporate neoliberalism wants us to despise. Technological non-linearity; the right of non-hegemonic identities to be identified within their own terms; the deconstruction of its imposed boundaries; celebrations of gluttony and laziness; the collective over the individual; violence as an act of transgression; education and labour in service of something beyond the demands of the industry. Maximalism asks us to bring this commentary to the aesthetic forefront — it desires us to embrace the nonsense and irrationalism that neoliberalism vilifies and indulge in the offensiveness of gratuity. A “bad taste” celebration of maximalism’s saturated anti-geometry.

Hanagatami — from one of the masters of Japanese cinematic maximalism, Nobuhiko Obayashi