“… the price we pay for peace”: Luba Lukova’s Poster Art

Abstract

Placed at the crossroads of fine and applied arts, of advertising and reproduction, the poster is a hybrid visual medium which synthetises words and images to communicate its message through both semantic content and aesthetic features. Significantly, the poster’s visual cues are arranged into patterns that are powerfully direct and focused, meant to act on and trigger responses from the potential audience, while, through its manipulation of cultural codes, generalised meanings and beliefs, they can construct or deconstruct contemporary ‘myths,’ the same as other multimodal texts, like film, may do. Hence, the aim of the paper is to offer a semiotic analysis of Luba Lukova’s conceptual poster entitled War and Peace in order to demonstrate how, by means of a simple visual language, her work revisits and revises the myths of ‘war heroics’ and ‘blissful peace,’ imparting a strong social and political vision as poignantly and effectively as complex multimodal texts like Michael Cimino’s ‘The Deer Hunter’, Hal Ashby’s ‘Coming Home’, or Oliver Stone’s ‘Born on the Fourth of July’ did on the screen.

Keywords

• conceptual illustration
• political poster
• anti-war film
• myth
• semiotics
• multimodality