Showing posts with label Supression. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Supression. Show all posts

Sunday, 17 May 2009

Reclaiming roots

Angkor Wat - Cambodia

On the subject of weeds, I witnessed some enormous weed-like trees whilst in Cambodia a couple of years ago, at a Buddhist temple complex in the Middle of the jungle called Angkor Wat. Some of the roots seem so fluid in their motion, as if oozing over the stone creating some extraordinary compositions.


Trees around the fence of Kelvingrove Park

Slightly closer to home, I remember walking past the fence of Kelvingrove park and seeing an area where the trees were growing very close to the fence and had grown between the bars and of the years expanded to encapsulate them. I find this to be a very impressive spectacle, one that may take many years but nonetheless is a fantastic display of determination and defiance.


For me, these trees demonstrate how anything that is suppressed will inevitably escape it's boundaries sooner or later:

i.) In nature, weeds and trees will grow around, up or through most obstacles
ii.) In states where a strict i.e. communist regime has been imposed, artists will still continue to create underground work in response/in spite of this
iii.) Even suppressed thoughts which are imposed by the conforms of society's will be unveiled in your dreams (Freud)

Books & Films about oppressive regimes

Aldous Huxley - Brave New World (1932)


"Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't."
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World

"I can sympathise with people's pains, but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness."
Aldous Huxley


George Orwell - Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)


Equilibrium - Kurt Wimmer (2002)



The Pianist - Roman Polanski (2002)



The Lives of Others - Florian Henckel von Donnersmark (2006)

Saturday, 16 May 2009

John Heartfield

John Heartfield was a pioneer of modern photomontage. Working in Germany and Czechoslovakia between the two world wars, he developed a unique method of appropriating and reusing photographs to powerful political effect.

Heartfield devised photo-based symbols for the Communist Party of Germany, allowing the organization to compete with the Nazis' swastika. His images of clenched fists, open palms, and raised arms all implied bold action and determination. In the image above, a disembodied fist becomes a radio antenna for a Communist-affiliated station in Czechoslovakia that broadcast into Fascist Germany.

'The Voice of Freedom'
in the German Night on Radio Wave 29.8, (1937)

Heartfield unleashed his sharpest satire on Hitler's Führerkult (cult of the leader), the basis of German Fascism. These montages parody Hitler's most iconic poses, gestures, and symbols to create the impression that one need only to scratch the thin surface of Fascist propaganda to uncover its absurd reality.

Adolf, the Superman, Swallows Gold and Spouts Tin -
(AIZ (July 17, 1932), vol. 11, no. 29, p. 675)

In this cover for the AIZ, Heartfield used a difference in scale to dramatize Hitler's relationship to Germany's wealthy and financially supportive industrialists. The leader is seen as a puppet whose now-infamous gesture reads as the acceptance of monetary influence.

The Meaning of the Hitler Salute, Little Man Asks for Big Gifts -
(AIZ (October 16, 1932), vol. 11, no. 42, front cover)