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Book Review
| Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape. By Catherine Gudis. New York: Routledge, 2004. viii+333 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Paper $22.00.
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| Everyone with even a passing familiarity with the American roadway has seen billboards. Travelers may hardly notice them, and they have not attracted much examination outside polemics and the trade literature. But they are indeed everywhere, and serious students of the American landscape would benefit from a serious examination of their origins, their aesthetics, their economics, and the arguments used to justify or condemn them. Catherine Gudis has provided exactly this service in her excellent book. |
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Gudis's study explores the proliferation of billboards as a phenomenon that is intimately associated with the rise of "automobility" in the early twentieth century, seeing these roadside advertisements as part of a more profound change in the American landscape. Not surprisingly, perhaps, billboards predate the rise of the automobile in urban areas. With the advent of the automobile and its wide accessibility to the public, leaders of the billboard industry understood that motorists were a mobile audience for their advertisements. Their response was to organize and systematize their work, to adopt much of the modern art "look" from print advertisements, and to develop increasingly complex arguments about the contributions their industry made to overall American economic health. As billboards proliferated across the American landscape, opponents, sometimes characterized as "scenic sisters" due to the fact that women and women's organizations led the charge, began to mount ever-more sophisticated and effective campaigns against the "billboard barons." Gudis's examinations ends in the 1960s, with the efforts led by Lady Bird Johnson to beautify America. The continued presence of billboards in all states of the United States but four tells who "won" the "billboard wars." |
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Billboards are phenomena best examined through multidisciplinary analyses and with clearly articulated theoretical frameworks, lest the scholar fall into the same polemics that govern public debate. This study draws equally well from art history, landscape studies, economic history, and analyses of popular culture. Gudis does an excellent job recognizing and dealing with the complexity of both her subject and the theoretical framework required to examine it clearly. She is keenly attuned to the cultural biases and implications of the historical arguments, noting the nostalgia for the picturesque rural landscape and the mythology of the American open road that motivated both billboard developers and their opponents. She points out the sexism of the roles of both men and women in these disputes, and, overall, makes a convincing case that not only is the American landscape a very deliberately constructed cultural form, but that the economics, politics, and rhetorics that have given us this landscape are deeply engrained in the culture. |
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The illustrations sprinkled liberally throughout the book add considerably to its value to generalist readers with broad interests in advertising, the landscape, and the cultural phenomena associated with the automobile. Specialists in the voluminous scholarly literature on the road and the car in American life will find much familiar ground, but Gudis treats it thoroughly and well. Really, the only problematic part of the book is its conclusion, where she, perhaps somewhat awkwardly, attempts to bring the concepts of the work up to date past the mid-1960s. In her conclusion, Gudis appears to suggest that the rise of the Internet, geographic information systems, and other digital technologies have made the physical roadway, and landscape, irrelevant to advertisers and the myriad others who are committed to reaching the public with their message. Yet billboards remain; the physical landscape has not yet been transcended by cyberspace. Be that as it may, it can be hoped that this work—the conclusions it draws and lines of argument it explores—will stimulate similar first-rate inquiries into the most ordinary aspects of the "common" American landscape. |
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Patrick Nunnally is adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches courses on the American vernacular landscape. His regional area of specialty is the Mississippi River valley. |
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