Communist posters
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One of the common features of communist regimes is the use of art for revolutionary means. Posters in particular have served as beacons of propaganda – vehicles of coercion, instruction, censure and debate – in every communist nation. They have promoted the authority of state and revolution, but have also been used as an effective means of protest. By their nature posters(...)
Communist posters
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One of the common features of communist regimes is the use of art for revolutionary means. Posters in particular have served as beacons of propaganda – vehicles of coercion, instruction, censure and debate – in every communist nation. They have promoted the authority of state and revolution, but have also been used as an effective means of protest. By their nature posters are ephemeral, tied to time and place, but many have had far-reaching, long-lasting impact. They are imbued with both artistic integrity and personal conviction – Bolshevik posters, for example, are among the most vibrant, passionate graphics in art history. This is the first truly global survey of the history and variety of communist poster art. Each chapter is written by an expert in the field, and examines a different region of the world: Russia, China, Mongolia, Eastern Europe, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba. This beautifully illustrated, comprehensive survey examines the broad range of political and visual cultures of communist posters, and will appeal to a wide audience interested in art, history and politics.
Printed Matter
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In August 1968, the Pakistani foreign minister visited Beijing and presented Chairman Mao Zedong with a crate of mangoes as a diplomatic gesture. The next day, Mao sent the mangoes to the “Worker-Peasant Mao Zedong though Propaganda Teams,” who had been stationed at Quinghua University to put down warring factions of Red Guards ten days previously. The message of this(...)
Mao's Golden Mangoes, and the cultural revolution
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In August 1968, the Pakistani foreign minister visited Beijing and presented Chairman Mao Zedong with a crate of mangoes as a diplomatic gesture. The next day, Mao sent the mangoes to the “Worker-Peasant Mao Zedong though Propaganda Teams,” who had been stationed at Quinghua University to put down warring factions of Red Guards ten days previously. The message of this gift was to dismiss the Student Red Guards, who had been leaders of the proletarian movement in China, and in their stead to install workers as the permanent guardians of China’s education system. During the following weeks, the mangoes were distributed to several factories, where they were treated as though they were religious relics. The golden mango was thus a powerful emblem of the power and respect accorded to the proletariat under Mao’s rule. Mao’s Gold Mangoes and the Cultural Revolution is the catalog for an exhibition of the same title at the Museum Rietberg in Zürich, which explores the golden mangoes’ reverberations throughout Chinese culture for years to come.
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After the wall between East and West Germany was destroyed in 1989, the rapid political reunification of the country was greeted with euphoria. However, psychological and cultural reunification has proved to be a much slower and more difficult process. Michael Schmidt, a lifelong Berlin resident, approaches that anxious process in part by reflecting on Germany’s past.(...)
Michael Schmidt: Ein heit (u-ni-ty)
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After the wall between East and West Germany was destroyed in 1989, the rapid political reunification of the country was greeted with euphoria. However, psychological and cultural reunification has proved to be a much slower and more difficult process. Michael Schmidt, a lifelong Berlin resident, approaches that anxious process in part by reflecting on Germany’s past. About half of the works are Schmidt’s own photographs; the remainder are photographs he made from other photographs culled from newspapers, magazines, propaganda pamphlets, and other such sources. The meanings of historical monuments and political symbols, of particular gestures and facial expressions and styles of clothing, are left open to interpretation. Each viewer is challenged to judge whether a given image represents East or West Germany, a villain or a victim, a moment in 1935, 1965, or 1995. This project merges two artistic traditions, treating photography both as a medium for describing personal experience and as a vast, impersonal resource created by the mass media. The book explores the emotional weight of history, the power of ideological symbols, and the relationship of the individual to the body politic.
Photography monographs
Domesticity at War
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In the years immediately following World War II, America embraced modern architecture--not as something imported from Europe, but as an entirely new mode of operation, with original and captivating designs made in the USA. Beatriz Colomina shows how postwar American architecture adapted the techniques and materials that were developed for military applications to domestic(...)
Domesticity at War
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In the years immediately following World War II, America embraced modern architecture--not as something imported from Europe, but as an entirely new mode of operation, with original and captivating designs made in the USA. Beatriz Colomina shows how postwar American architecture adapted the techniques and materials that were developed for military applications to domestic use. Just as manufacturers were turning wartime industry to peacetime productivity--going from missiles to washing machines--American architects and cultural institutions were, in Buckminster Fuller’s words, turning "weaponry into livingry." This new form of domesticity itself turned out to be a powerful weapon. Images of American domestic bliss--suburban homes, manicured lawns, kitchen accessories--went around the world as an effective propaganda campaign. Cold War anxieties were masked by endlessly repeated images of a picture-perfect domestic environment. Even the popular conception of the architect became domesticated, changing from that of an austere modernist to a plaid-shirt wearing homebody. Domesticity at War itself has a distinctive architecture. Housed within the case are two units: one book of text, and one book of illustrations--most of them in color, including advertisements, newspaper and magazine articles, architectural photographs, and more.
Architectural Theory
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TASS posters were created by a large collective of Soviet writers, printers, and artists, including such notables as Mikhail Cheremnykh, Nikolai Denisovskii, the Kukryniksy, and Pavel Sokolov-Skalia. Often six feet tall and always striking and bold, these stenciled posters were printed and placed daily in windows for the public to see. They were also sent abroad to serve(...)
Windows on the war: soviet TASS posters at home and abroad 1941-1945
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TASS posters were created by a large collective of Soviet writers, printers, and artists, including such notables as Mikhail Cheremnykh, Nikolai Denisovskii, the Kukryniksy, and Pavel Sokolov-Skalia. Often six feet tall and always striking and bold, these stenciled posters were printed and placed daily in windows for the public to see. They were also sent abroad to serve as international cultural "ambassadors," rallying Allied and neutral nations to the Soviet cause. Drawn from the Art Institute of Chicago''s collection, as well as other private and public holdings, these TASS posters have not been seen since World War II. An international team of scholars presents the TASS posters both as unique historical objects and as artworks that reveal how preeminent artists of the day used unconventional technical and visual means to contribute to the war effort, marking a major chapter in the history of design and propaganda. Generously illustrated, the book presents photographs, documentary materials, and memorabilia in meaningful juxtapositions with images of the TASS posters. Also included are documents illuminating the expression of Russian cultural life in the United States during the war, opening a fascinating window onto the war along the Eastern Front.
Printed Matter
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A rising star in the Russian literary firmament Pelevin, winner of the 1993 Russian Booker Prize for short stories, has written a parody of life under Communism refracted through the prism of the Soviet space program. This clever parable about a young cosmonaut ordered to make the ultimate sacrifice? Killing himself after secretly piloting a supposedly unmanned lunar(...)
Omon Ra
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A rising star in the Russian literary firmament Pelevin, winner of the 1993 Russian Booker Prize for short stories, has written a parody of life under Communism refracted through the prism of the Soviet space program. This clever parable about a young cosmonaut ordered to make the ultimate sacrifice? Killing himself after secretly piloting a supposedly unmanned lunar expedition? is sprinkled with throwaway gags, absurdist humor and wickedly ironic touches, as well as with the eerie beauty of space exploration. Obsessed with space travel since early childhood, Omon Krivomazov identifies with Ra, the ancient Egyptian falcon-headed sun god, a fixation that reflects his desire to escape the gray conformity of Soviet life and his yearning for a soul. Omon learns that more than 100 of his fellow cosmonauts have already been sacrificed as guinea pigs after taking part in supposedly automated, manless launches. Pelevin portrays the Russian space program as a vast propaganda enterprise, a distraction to paper over the tawdriness and fear of everyday life. Many allusions will be lost on American readers. And, in light of the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction state of contemporary Russian society, some of the Soviet-era satire seems oddly tame.
Architecture and the imaginary
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Our culture is dominated by the visual. Yet most writing on design reflects a narrow preoccupation with products, biographies, and design influences. Maud Lavin approaches design from the broader field of visual culture criticism, asking challenging questions about about who really has a voice in the culture and what unseen influences affect the look of things designers(...)
Graphic Design and Typography
October 2002, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Clean new world : culture, politics, and graphic design
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Our culture is dominated by the visual. Yet most writing on design reflects a narrow preoccupation with products, biographies, and design influences. Maud Lavin approaches design from the broader field of visual culture criticism, asking challenging questions about about who really has a voice in the culture and what unseen influences affect the look of things designers produce. Lavin shows how design fits into larger questions of power, democracy, and communication. Many corporate clients instruct designers to convey order and clarity in order to give their companies the look of a clean new world. But since designers cannot clean up messy reality, Lavin shows, they often end up simply veiling it. Lacking the power to influence the content of their commercial work, many designers work simultaneously on other, more fulfilling projects. Lavin is especially interested in the graphic designer’s role in shaping cultural norms. She examines the anti-Nazi propaganda of John Heartfield, the modernist utopian design of Kurt Schwitters and the neue ring werbegestalter, the alternative images of women by studio ringl + pit, the activist work of such contemporary designers as Marlene McCarty and Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, and the Internet innovations of David Steuer and others. Throughout the book, Lavin asks how designers can expand the pleasure, democracy, and vitality of communication.
Graphic Design and Typography
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The fictitious hero of this 1984 installation is a lonely dreamer who develops an impossible project: to fly alone in cosmic space. But this dream is also an individual appropriation of a collective Soviet project and the official Soviet propaganda connected to it. Having built a makeshift slingshot, the hero apparently flies through the ceiling of his shabby room and(...)
Ilka Kabakov: the man who flew into space from his apartment
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The fictitious hero of this 1984 installation is a lonely dreamer who develops an impossible project: to fly alone in cosmic space. But this dream is also an individual appropriation of a collective Soviet project and the official Soviet propaganda connected to it. Having built a makeshift slingshot, the hero apparently flies through the ceiling of his shabby room and vanishes into space. The miserable room and the primitive slingshot suggest the reality behind the Soviet utopia, in which where cosmic vision and the political project of the Communist revolution are seen as indissoluble. The Man who Flew into Space from His Apartment also raises questions of authorship in modernity. All of Kabakov's work is made in the name of other, fictitious artists. This reveals a hidden rule of the modern art system: only an artist who doesn't want to be an artist or who doesn't even know that he is an artist is a real artist—just as only an artwork that does not look like an artwork is a real artwork. The installation is a narrative, the documentation of a fictitious event. Boris Groys is Professor of Philosophy and Art Theory at the Academy for Design in Karlsruhe, Germany, and Global Professor at New York University.
Art Theory
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Our culture is dominated by the visual. Yet most writing on design reflects a narrow preoccupation with products, biographies, and design influences. Maud Lavin approaches design from the broader field of visual culture criticism, asking challenging questions(...)
Clean new world: culture, politics, and graphic design
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Our culture is dominated by the visual. Yet most writing on design reflects a narrow preoccupation with products, biographies, and design influences. Maud Lavin approaches design from the broader field of visual culture criticism, asking challenging questions about about who really has a voice in the culture and what unseen influences affect the look of things designers produce. Lavin shows how design fits into larger questions of power, democracy, and communication. Many corporate clients instruct designers to convey order and clarity in order to give their companies the look of a clean new world. But since designers cannot clean up messy reality, Lavin shows, they often end up simply veiling it. Lacking the power to influence the content of their commercial work, many designers work simultaneously on other, more fulfilling projects. Lavin is especially interested in the graphic designer’s role in shaping cultural norms. She examines the anti-Nazi propaganda of John Heartfield, the modernist utopian design of Kurt Schwitters and the neue ring werbegestalter, the alternative images of women by studio ringl + pit, the activist work of such contemporary designers as Marlene McCarty and Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, and the Internet innovations of David Steuer and others. Throughout the book, Lavin asks how designers can expand the pleasure, democracy, and vitality of communication.
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March 2001, Cambridge, Mass.
Graphic Design and Typography
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In Soviet Salvage, Catherine Walworth explores how artists on the margins of the Constructivist movement of the 1920s rejected “elitist” media and imagined a new world, knitting together avant-garde art, imperial castoffs, and everyday life. Applying anthropological models borrowed from Claude Lévi-Strauss, Walworth shows that his mythmaker typologies—the “engineer”(...)
Soviet salvage: Imperial debris, revolutionary reuse, and Russian Constructivism
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In Soviet Salvage, Catherine Walworth explores how artists on the margins of the Constructivist movement of the 1920s rejected “elitist” media and imagined a new world, knitting together avant-garde art, imperial castoffs, and everyday life. Applying anthropological models borrowed from Claude Lévi-Strauss, Walworth shows that his mythmaker typologies—the “engineer” and “bricoleur”—illustrate, respectively, the canonical Constructivists and artists on the movement’s margins who deployed a wide range of clever make-do tactics. Walworth explores the relationships of Nadezhda Lamanova, Esfir Shub, and others with Constructivists such as Aleksei Gan, Varvara Stepanova, and Aleksandr Rodchenko. Together, the work of these artists reflected the chaotic and often contradictory zeitgeist of the decade from 1918 to 1929 and redefined the concept of mass production. Reappropriated fragments of a former enemy era provided a wide range of play and possibility for these artists, and the resulting propaganda porcelain, film, fashion, and architecture tell a broader story of the unique political and economic pressures felt by their makers. An engaging multidisciplinary study of objects and their makers during the Soviet Union’s early years, this volume highlights a group of artists who hover like free radicals at the border of existing art-historical discussions of Constructivism and deepens our knowledge of Soviet art and material culture.
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September 2018