“Let’s build a squadron of dirigibles in Lenin’s name!”
My parents have been visiting this past week, and (as you perhaps might expect from a visit to Berkeley), it’s been all Mao all the time. First, we stopped in at the Red-Color News Soldier exhibit at the Journalism School while I was showing my parents round campus. The photos really are all stunning, particularly when displayed at full poster size.
A few days later, we went to Stanford and stopped in at Revolutionary Tides: The art of the political poster 1914-1989 (unfortunately, the website requires Flash). It’s a very interesting exhibition, focussing on the ways in which masses and crowds have been represented in graphic art. There was a great range of posters; the usual suspects of Russia, China (although fewer than I would have liked), as well as Nazi Germany and wartime posters from the West; but also the Spanish and Iranian revolutions, for instance, which I’ve seen very little of.
The juxtaposition of these very different historical moments could, of course, carry the standard liberal pronouncement that all mass movements are bad (as with the SF Chronicle’s outstandingly superficial review, all the more annoying as the critic seems to think he’s saying something incredibly clever, rather than parroting the party line of contemporary capitalism). But while there was an element of that, the general thrust of the exhibit rather seemed to be interested in analyzing the masses as a central figure of modern politics, which had to be reckoned with by any form of political organization, although the figure could be mobilized in many different ways. Particularly interesting was the discussion of various anatomical metonyms (the fist or the mouth of the masses). I thought of Hardt and Negri’s discussion of the flesh of the multitude, and I wondered how we might represent that ‘crowd without organs’ in our own political agitation.
I’ve also discovered a site of Russian posters, many of which are marvellous. My favorites so far are probably this futurist one, and these images of technology (one including Lenin).
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Bones and Horns would be my suggestion for symbolic images to use to fight the domination.
A ton of ideas exist at gcn.com - Alex Jones
rbnlive.com
Democracy now also has a daily television broadcast.
Im just heard about Emma and found your site. Please don’t get to discouraged about the movement. I think the whole gender paradigm serves many interests. Interesting as well, i just recently heard that Gloria Stymen (sp) was an operative. Nevertheless, these sure are interesting times. Take good care :)
Comment by LOoLoO @ 11/14/2005 1:17 am
Dude, that’s not Futurism, that’s Suprematism and/or Constructivism. Futurists were these movements’ fascist bizarro-selves.
Comment by Stefan @ 11/14/2005 4:03 am