Fidel Castro’s revolutionary 26th of July Movement and its allies defeated the military dictatorship of Cuban President Fulgencio Batista in January 1959. The new revolutionary government enacted a wide array of new domestic laws and policies, but Castro always saw the revolution in Cuba as just the beginning of the liberation of the oppressed masses in not just Latin America but war-torn Africa and around the world, wherever the poor and downtrodden were oppressed by colonial or neo-colonial masters.
OSPAAAL
And so the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America (in Spanish the Organización de Solidaridad con los Pueblos de Asia, África y América Latina – abbreviated to OSPAAAL) was set up to fight globalisation, imperialism, neoliberalism and defend human rights, in Havana, in January 1966, after the Tricontinental Conference, a meeting of over 500 delegates and 200 observers from over 82 countries.
One of the first things the organisation did was establish a magazine to publicise its causes and titled Tricontinental. From 1966 into the 1990s more than fifty designers working in Havana produced hundreds of posters and editions of the magazine which expressed solidarity with the U.S.A.’s Black Panther Party, condemned apartheid in South Africa and the Vietnam War, and celebrated Latin America’s revolutionary icons, as well as criticising the ongoing existence of U.S. military bases in Guantanamo Bay, calling for the reunification of North and South Korea and many other radical causes.
The exhibition includes some 33 of the total of 50 or so artists and designers who worked for OSPAAAL, including leading lights such as Alfredo Rostgaard, Helena Serrano, Rafael Enríquez and Gladys Acosta Ávila.
Unlike artists in the Soviet bloc the OSPAAAL designers weren’t shackled by the deeply conservative doctrine of Socialist Realism, but were free to pick and choose from all the best streams of current art, including Pop Art and psychedelia. They also co-opted images and ideas from capitalist adverts into what they called ‘anti-ads’.
The plan was for the posters to be stapled into copies of Tricontinental, and so distributed around the world. Because the posters were intended to be internationalist they had to use strong primal languages or find inventive ways of conveying their message. If any writing was used it was generally in the three major languages of Spanish, English, French, and sometimes Arabic.
By the mid-1980s heavy trade embargos and sanctions imposed by American had created such shortages that it ultimately forced the organization out of production. By that time approximately 326 OSPAAAL posters had been produced.
Altogether it’s estimated that some nine million OPSAAAL posters were distributed around the developing world. At its peak the magazine had more than 100,000 subscribers, mostly students. At one time, it was common for posters from issues of Tricontinental to be put up on the walls of student community centres.
This exhibition brings together 170 works (100 posters and 70 magazines) produced by 33 OSPAAAL designers, created between 1965 and 1992, which are not only striking and dramatic art works in their own right but shed unexpected insights onto the long history of the Cold War.
The Mike Stanfield Collection
While originally distributed freely in editions of thousands, OSPAAAL posters and magazines are now rare and highly sought-after. The works in the exhibition are all drawn from a single UK private collection – The Mike Stanfield Collection, the largest collection of OSPAAAL material in the world, gathered by British collector Mike Stanfield over a 25-year period. Every work in the exhibition is drawn from his collection.
Posters
The poster designers used every trick in the toolbox of capitalist advertising plus a lot more they invented. The diversity and inventiveness of approaches is astonishing. Obviously the cause, the fundamental political aim of the posters, was deadly serious – but this didn’t stop them using scathing satire to make their points.
And above all they didn’t limit themselves to one aesthetic but seized an extraordinary freedom to experiment, with the result that you see everything from bold typography and photomontage to psychedelic colours and pop culture-inspired graphics, iconic modern imagery or ancient native objects pressed into service, silhouettes, psychedelic reverberating, cartoons and biting satire.
Cuba
The first edition of Tricontinental included an article by Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara and a folded poster by Alfredo Rostgard, thus inaugurating its two-pronged approach to radical propaganda: text for those who could read, stirring images for those who couldn’t.
It’s almost too obvious to point out but, in the Soviet bloc, the canon of revolutionary heroes from Marx through Lenin, Stalin on down, were all portrayed in real, or heroically socialist realist style. It takes a moment’s reflection to realise how utterly unlike that dull stifling tradition the OPSAAAL images are, freely taking from contemporary pop and op art and psychedelic art.
Africa
The designers were tasked with distilling complex anti-colonial conflicts down into simple but striking images, symbols which would require little or no explanation. This image of African women in traditional costume and carrying their babies in baby-carriers is made vivid and powerful by the addition of the semi-automatic rifles slung over their other shoulders.
The all-consuming nature of the struggle, the need to balance ordinary life with the struggle, the empowered role of women in the struggle, and the lack of facial features indicating that these are just two out of millions and millions anonymous fighters across the continent, are all brilliantly conveyed.
Apartheid was a sore on the conscience of the world throughout the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Many of the OPSAAAL posters were simple images of oppression. This is unusual in being a more narrative image, with its four pictures showing the progressive, and inevitable, collapse of the repressive regime. Note the use of the four cardinal languages, Spanish, English, French and Arabic.
Day of Solidarity with the Struggle of the People of South Africa (1974) Olivio Martinez Viera, OSPAAAL. The Mike Stanfield Collection
Asia
The Vietnam War came to symbolise neo-imperialist Western super-violence against nationalist independence struggles and crystallised America’s reputation as the great enemy of freedom for many Third World countries.
This clever poster shows the word Saigon slowly morphing from being dominated by the Stars and Stripes to bearing the flag of the communist North, suggesting that the rebels would win in the end. As they did.
From the moment Castro’s revolution succeeded, the Americans tried to overthrow it. In 1961 they launched the embarrassing Bay of Pigs invasion which ended in humiliation, but continued making intermittent attempts to assassinate Castro, as well as imposing crippling sanctions on its tiny neighbour.
In response Cuba helped to focus the world’s attention on America as the heartland of neo-colonial oppression. Some of the most powerful images in the exhibition distort and subvert imagery and symbols central to American culture, such as the Great Seal, the Bald Eagle, the Statue of Liberty or, as here, Uncle Sam himself, zapped by the power of the World Revolution.
As a way into contemporary liberation struggles in Latin America, Asia or the Far East, some OPSAAAL designers had the idea of taking traditional indigenous artefacts and giving them a modern spin, mostly putting a machine gun in their hands. Some of these aboriginal peoples also represented the very first resisters to the colonial oppression which their distant descendants were now fighting against.
This approach tapped into nationalist feelings in the respective countries, and also made contemporary protesters feel, or realise, that they were in fact part of a long, long lineage of resistance and protest. The ten or so images which used old imagery like this were among my favourites.
To some extent the designers’ style was dictated by a shortage of materials, including good quality paper and printing ink, embargoed by the United States. This encouraged the designers to eschew subtlety in shade and contour and favour high-contrast photography and large areas of clearly defined colour. Tricontinental’s often starkly simple covers were printed in four colours by offset lithography.
Anti-America
Although little Cuba suffered badly from American sanctions, during the 60s and 70s there were many radical American supporters of the revolution. The San Francisco-based People’s Press published a North American edition if Tricontinental, and images created by Emory Douglas for the Black Panther Party newspaper were adapted for use by OPSAAAL.
There are posters here supporting the imprisoned black activist Angela Carter, as well as memorials for various black radicals shot or imprisoned in America. But in a way, it was the imaginative symbols of American oppression which make the most impact.
Tricontinental magazine 33
Anti-apartheid
Apartheid was in force in South Africa from 1948 to 1994. It was only the most extreme version of institutionalised white racism, which also included the segregation laws in America, so vehemently protested by the Civil Rights Movement.
For me the OPSAAAL posters and Tricontinental cover art are at their best when they embody a really strong design idea, as in this simple but scathing image, a piece of Pop Art collage used to withering effect.
Tricontinental 76
Thoughts
1. Taken together they make up a fascinating review of visual styles and approaches available to political poster makers in the late 60s and 70s. In many ways the magazine covers are even more inventive and biting than the posters. Lots and lots of them have a really strong visual and intellectual impact, like the image – blown up, here, into a wall-sized hanging – of an American astronaut reaching out to the moon while standing on the backs of two prone African Americans.
2. It’s a reminder of just how much conflict there was around in the world in the 1970s when I grew up, with military dictatorships running most of South America, with colonialist regimes and apartheid South Africa still repressing millions of Africans, while millions of others were caught up in brutal civil wars, and then topping everything the nightmare of Vietnam which was promptly followed by the living hell of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia.
When you factor in that half of Europe was under Communist tyranny and there was an endless diet of scares about whether this or that incident might trigger World War Three, the world I grew up in seemed a much more violent and dangerous place than it does today.
3. This is embodied in the way there are so many guns in the posters. Almost all the native artefacts-updated ones simply put guns in the hands of tribal gods. In the last room in particular, almost every poster seemed to feature a man or woman or sometimes an inanimate object, holding a sub-machinegun. Stepping back from the rights and wrongs of the causes, the final room in particular gave me a claustrophobic sense of violence and fighting going on in every part of the world.
That’s maybe the main feeling the exhibition gave to me, but other visitors will find their own threads and meanings. Above all I defy you not to be thrilled by the sheer inventiveness and exuberance of so many of the works on display.
Installation view of Designed in Cuba at the House of Illustration. Photo by Paul Grover
And it’s worth pointing out that the curators of the exhibition flew to Cuba specially to interview the surviving OPSAAAL designers and that the exhibition includes the resulting video, in which leading designers such as Alfredo Rostgaard, Rafael Enríquez and Gladys Acosta Ávila explain at length their motivation and approach, the design ideas and technical constraints, which lay behind the Tricontinental phenomenon.
This is another brilliantly conceived and beautifully laid out exhibition from the House of Illustration.
This really is a beautifully produced book, giving the reader access to loads of preparatory sketches and cartoons made by Mexican muralist Diego Rivera before he painted the vast murals depicting the Ford motor factory at Detroit onto the walls of the Detroit Institute of Arts, along with photos of the great man in action (and catching sneaky kisses from his wife, Frida Kahlo) and a detailed analysis of each of the 27 murals’ design and meaning.
The Nightmare of War and Dream of Peace
In the epilogue, the book’s author, Linda Bank Downs, describes the fascinating incident of the political controversy which suddenly engulfed the murals almost 20 years after they were painted.
Rivera had been expelled from the Mexican Communist Party in 1929, following a visit to Moscow during which he criticised Stalin’s leadership. For the next twenty years he remained, rather pathetically, desperate to be readmitted to the party.
In 1952 Rivera was commissioned to paint a portable mural for a Mexican art exhibition in Paris. He chose as subject The Nightmare of War and Dream of Peace. Now, the Korean War had broken out in 1950 and was still ongoing. The communist North Koreans were backed by Stalin, were soon lent troops from China, which had only just come under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao Tse-Tung. The portable mural Rivera created caused an international scandal.
Rivera’s mural is not only packed with detail but is, in fact, a painting within a painting. It is a mural of a mural. On a wall in some Mexican city is painted the political mural. This mural ends three quarters of the way to the right, ending along with the wall it’s painted on, beyond the end of the building we can see a panoramic view of the modern Mexican city, with its bustling traffic, high rise buildings and billboards.
In front of the mural a load of inhabitants of the city are being moved along the pavement from right to left. They are being handed copies of ‘the Stockholm Appeal’ by a man in a black suit at far right, by Rivera’s wife, Frida Kahlo in her wheelchair, by the central figure of the worker who acts as the dynamic fulcrum of the action, and on to the two chaps standing behind a makeshift table, who are persuading citizens – be they peasants or smart suited urban types – to add their names to the petition.
The Stockholm Appeal was a short, simple text, launched in 1950, which called for an absolute ban on nuclear weapons. The appeal was launched by the French Communist physicist Frédéric Joliot-Curie, and the petition gathered a supposed 273,470,566 signatures. Joliot-Curie is depicted to the left of the central worker, facing us, wearing a black beret.
Behind this bustling scene of street-level politics is the mural itself. This depicts, at left, Uncle Joe Stalin and Chairman Mao offering a peace treaty to the Western powers – France personified as a woman with a liberty cap, pugnacious John Bull standing behind her, resting a hand with knuckle dusters on the globe which stands between them, and a white-top-hatted Uncle Sam behind her.
The two-thirds of the mural to the right depict the horrors of war. Behind a vast atomic mushroom cloud, steel-helmeted soldiers whip, hang, crucify and shoot the victims of war, peasants with Asian faces.
The Nightmare of War and Dream of Peace by Diego Rivera (1952)
The Korean War
The point is that Rivera painted this mural at the height of the Cold War and two years into the bitter Korean War (1950-53). The Korean War began when communist North Korean forces invaded South Korea, with no warning or pretext. They pushed the unprepared South Koreans and their handful of peacetime American allies right back to the south-east of the peninsula and very nearly conquered it all.
Until the hero of the war in the Pacific, American General MacArthur, launched a daring amphibious landing half way up the peninsula, not far from the southern capital of Seoul, threatening to cut the North’s supply lines and take them in the rear. The victorious allies forced the North right back up to the original border between the countries, and then pushed them back up towards Korea’s border with China.
It was at this point that Mao Tse-Tung’s Communist China – which had only’fallen’ to the communists as recently as 1950 – sent huge numbers of Chinese Red Army cadres to reinforce the North Koreans, while the Americans, leading a supposedly United Nations force, reinforced its armies – and so the war settled down to a brutal war of attrition.
Rivera wasn’t wrong in depicting a world brought to the brink of nuclear war. When the Chinese joined the war and pushed the allied forces right back to the middle of the peninsula, MacArthur seriously suggested to President Harry Truman that they launch a nuclear attack on Chinese cities. He was promptly sacked, but that’s how close to a nuclear war the world came.
Controversy in Detroit
How does this affect the Detroit murals? For the simple reason that Rivera’s depiction as heroes of peace the two brutal communist dictators, Stalin and Mao, which the USA was at war with, against whose armies American boys were fighting and dying, inflamed public, political and artistic opinion against him. He was vilified in the right-wing and liberal press, artists, and politicians. The McCarthyite hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee were just about to start, with their hounding of anyone suspected of even the slightest left-wing leanings.
In this mood of war fever and patriotic paranoia, it’s no surprise that voices were raised criticising the Detroit murals, the largest example of Rivera’s work outside Mexico: Why was Detroit promoting the work of a war-mongering commie?
The city’s council took up the cry, and one councilor, Eugene Van Antwerp, called for the murals to be whitewashed over. However, the director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, Edgar Richardson, admirably stood his ground. He argued that the murals were great works of art and an obvious tribute to the capitalist inventiveness and industriousness of America, which were in no way affected by the changing political beliefs of their creator.
Richardson had a massive sign painted and hung up outside the institute, which read:
Rivera’s politics and his publicity seeking are detestable.
But let’s get the record straight on what he did here.
He came from Mexico to Detroit, thought our mass production industries and our technology wonderful and very exciting, painted them as one of the great achievements of the twentieth century.
This came just after the debunking twenties when our own artists and writers had found nothing worthwhile in America and worst of all in America was the Middle West.
Rivera saw and painted the significance of Detroit as a world city.
If we are proud of this city’s achievements, we should be proud of these paintings, and not lose our heads over what Rivera is doing in Mexico today.
The politicians insisted that there be a public consultation about the work’s future but, in the event, Richardson only received a handful of letters and the protest, such as it was, fizzled out.
Rivera and the Communist Party
The Mexican organisers of the show in Paris pleaded with Rivera to change his depiction of the dictators. When he refused, they decided not to exhibit the painting. This prompted the Mexican Communist Party to express righteous indignation, propagandise about ‘freedom of expression’ and to hold a public viewing of it, attended by numerous communist officials, writers and fellow travellers.
It didn’t help Rivera in his almost obsessive attempts to rejoin the Party. His fourth application to join was rejected. In 1953 Rivera sent the mural – which was always designed to travel – to China. It subsequently disappeared and has never been seen again. It would be fitting if it was destroyed by radical students in the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. In 1954 Kahlo, now very ill, committed suicide. Rivera made her funeral into a Communist Party demonstration, and his fifth application for readmission to the Mexican Communist Party of Mexico was finally accepted. Three years later Rivera died.
Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in front of the unfinished mural, The Nightmare of War and the Dream of Peace (1952) Photo by Juan Guzmán
Haven’t been to the Design Museum since it moved from its old location at Shad Thames and opened in its fancy new building at Holland Park at the end of 2016.
The Design Museum is the world’s leading museum devoted to architecture and design. Its work encompasses all elements of design, including fashion, product and graphic design. Since it opened its doors in 1989 the museum has displayed everything from an AK-47 to high heels designed by Christian Louboutin. It has staged over 100 exhibitions, welcomed over five million visitors and showcased the work of some of the world’s most celebrated designers and architects.
On 24 November 2016, The Design Museum relocated to Kensington, West London. Leading architectural designer John Pawson has converted the interior of a 1960s modernist building to create a new home for the Design Museum giving it three times more space in which to show a wider range of exhibitions and significantly extend its learning programme.
Both the exterior and interior of the new building are spectacular.
The museum is currently hosting two exhibitions, one about sculptor-turned-couturier Azzedine Alaïa, and the one I came to see, Hope to Nope.
Hope to Nope
The rise of graphic design
The idea is that the ten years since the global financial crash of 2008 have been especially politically volatile. At the same time, the rise of social media has changed the way graphic political messages are made and disseminated. Traditional media have been joined by social media, with its hashtags and memes – all of which means that the influence and impact of graphic design have never been greater.
This exhibition explores the numerous ways graphic messages have challenged, altered and influenced key political moments.
Have they, though? ‘Challenged, altered and influenced key political moments’?
Or are they just creative images, slogans and memes – millions of them, easy to make for anyone with a smart phone and a bit of flair – which are as enjoyable as TV ads or pop songs, but change nothing? I went along to find out.
Big and varied
This big exhibition cherry picks from many of the political protest movements of the past ten years all sorts of ephemera – placards, banners, posters, t-shirts, installations and art works – alongside film footage of political rallies, and a section devoted to the rise of social media.
Politically neutral
The curators are careful to say that the exhibition takes no particular political line and doesn’t necessarily support any of these causes, but I didn’t really accept that. One of the two ‘media partners’ is the Guardian newspaper and the exhibition is really a sort of three-dimensional Guardian. Among many others issues and events, it features:
a display case about the anti-capitalist Occupy movement
a wall-sized photo of the women’s marches in Washington, London and elsewhere
a big quilt, a protest video and other artefacts from the Black Lives Matter movement
opposition to Vladimir Putin, especially to his anti-gay policies
opposition to Tory Austerity and Brexit in Britain
opposition to Jacob Zuma’s corrupt regime in South Africa
opposition to the North Korean dictatorship of Kim Jong-un
opposition to the authoritarian Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
You get the picture. Lots of opposition movements.
Oh, and Donald Trump. Did I mention Donald Trump? It very very powerfully comes across that a lot of American artists, feminists, academics, writers and activists don’t like Donald Trump one little bit.
Banner from International Women’s Day. Photo by Steve Rapport
In other words, no surprises – all the usual movements are here and all the usual hate figures from the front pages of the Guardian and other bien-pensant publications.
Structure of the show
The exhibition is rather loosely divided into three parts: Power, Protest and Personality.
1. Personality
This is the clearest (and smallest) section – highlighting the way politics around the world has come to be dominated by strong personalities who provoke strong and divisive reactions v Trump, Putin, Erdogan and so on.
In this section we find Theresa May being pilloried in a set of very funny cartoons by Chris Riddell (of the Guardian). Jeremy Corbyn has a section to himself, which features a suite of satirical front covers from Private Eye, the glossy cover shoot he did for GQ magazine, samples from the Corbyn comic books which (apparently) proliferated when he was elected leader, and a striking Corbyn t-shirt – plain white with the Nike swoosh on it and the word Corbyn where ‘Nike’ should be. (Apparently, the designer and manufacturer had an injunction taken out against them and had to scrap the design, making this a valuable rarity.)
Corbyn t-shirt with Nike swoosh. Photo by Benjamin Westoby
But the award for the Political Personality Who Dominates Our Age and Who You Love To Hate goes to… Go on, guess. Well, he owns a tower and is called Donald.
There’s a wall-sized display of more than 50 news magazines (including The Economist, TIME and Der Spiegel) chosen because they all feature cartoons, lampoons, caricatures, spoof and doctored portraits of The Donald, from the moment he was selected as the Republican candidate to when he became President.
What does this prove, exactly? Mainly that there has been no let-up in the scathing satire and criticism Trump has been subjected to by the left-liberal press since he first entered the presidential race. And with what result? Did satirical cartoons and scathing articles prevent him becoming Republican candidate, or prevent him being elected president? Have they gotten him impeached and kicked out?
Nope. Fail. As about a million other commentators have pointed out, all this ridicule by the East Coast – or foreign, intellectual – élite only confirms the belief of his grass-roots supporters that Donald is their man, an outsider, someone who will stand up for their values, values they see being ridiculed on a daily basis across almost all the mainstream media. ‘We’ may hate him but ‘they’ just carry on loving him to bits.
Wall of magazine covers lampooning Donald Trump. Photo by Benjamin Westoby
2. Protest
The section on Protest is dominated by a wall-sized screen onto which are projected a few minutes of news footage from each of five countries showing protesters in action – marching, chanting, fighting with the police.
Hope to Nope film installation by Paul Plowman. Photo by Benjamin Westoby
This turns out to be an installation by Paul Plowman. In front of the big screen is a set of smaller screens on stands showing alternative images of protests, interspersed with the hashtags which were used in each of the different protests featured. The countries and events being:
Catalonia – street protests for independence
South Africa – street protests, speeches etc against President Jacob Zuma
Grenfell Tower in London – an angry crowd shouting ‘justice justice’
Turkey – street protests against Erdogan
The Women’s March in Washington
Nearby are posters mocking Vladimir Putin, a suite of posters from North Korea exemplifying the state-sponsored poster art of that country, some photographs showing a protester in China, a panel about the ‘Umbrella protests’ in Hong Kong in 2014, some examples of wall art and graffiti made by Iranian artists to protest what they see as the corrupt nature of the Iranian government.
One of the most striking things in the show is a two-metre-high replica of the inflatable duck from the 2016 protests held against Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff.
And there’s material from the 2015 Je Suis Charlie movement and the ‘Peace for Paris’ marches.
But I kept being drawn back to the enormous Plowman video installation, not least because it is very loud, with sounds of people chanting and yelling, the roar of police sirens etc.
I also liked the way the hashtags zoomed past on the smaller screens of the installation, hundreds of them. Maybe their sheer number is meant to shock and awe the viewer into realising how Mighty the opposition is, how many of ‘us’ there are, how global ‘the movement’ is.
But to me it powerfully conveyed the opposite, the sheer ephemerality of many of these movements, each with their fleeting moments on TV, and a few days trending on twitter, before being forgotten.
And when you see a load of hashtags all together, following in quick succession, you can’t help noticing how facile they are.
And so on, round and round like a hamster in a wheel.
Anti-capitalism
Also in the Protest section we learn that capitalism is a bad thing. We know this because of all the people who’ve used their Macs and Ipads (designed in America, built in China, delivered to your door by Amazon) to design graphics, cartoons and memes slagging off evil international corporations.
And also because of all the anti-capitalist protesters who use multinational corporations like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube to protest, organise and lobby against the way the world is run by multinational corporations.
The most notable example was the 2011 Occupy movement, active here in London, in New York and elsewhere. Display cases show their numerous anti-capitalist leaflets, booklets, posters and slogans, t-shirts and badges. And did they overthrow capitalism? Even a teeny tiny bit?
Display case of Occupy items. Photo by Benjamin Westoby
We also learn that some of these massive corporations tell fibs v videlicet a vast poster reminding us of the way Volkswagen comprehensively lied about the diesel output of its cars.
It’s next to art work criticising BP, which will be forever associated – by the kind of protesters this exhibition celebrates – with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
the art work is a sort of neck frill, not unlike the ones Elizabethan courtiers used to wear, made of green crepe paper designed to look like the BP logo. From the accompanying photo the idea is that you paint your face BP green, slip on the crepe BP logo, and go join a crowd protesting against wicked oil companies. Maybe you drive there, or organise a coach…
Protest web statistics
I work in website analytics. Until recently I worked as a Digital Insights Manager for a British government agency. This experience has taught me that you really can prove anything with statistics. Another way of putting that is how remarkably easy it is to bamboozle people who don’t use figures very often or aren’t at home with figures.
As a result I don’t really believe any statistics about anything I hear from anyone, not just governments, anyone.
This is relevant because the exhibition features a timeline dating the advent and rise of various social media platforms over the past ten years (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, all the usual suspects). They are the big red, blue and green circles you can see in the photo below.
Beneath these – under each of the black, red and blue smart phone icons – is an array of Fascinating Facts and Stunning Stats designed – I think – to show you just how Important and Relevant and Urgent contemporary protest is. Certainly how social media helps spread its messages at lightning speed to huge numbers of people.
Timeline of social media and protest statistics. Photo by Benjamin Westoby
Thus we are told that:
in 2011 450,000 accounts sent 1.8 million tweets containing #OccupyWallStreet
in 2012, in the week before he quit, tweets calling for the resignation of Egyptian president rose from 2,300 a day to 230,000 a day
in 2013 #OccupyGezi relating to the Taksim Square protest in Turkey was mentioned 160,000 times on Twitter
in 2013 #BlackLivesMatter jumped from 10,000 to 93,000 tweets after the Ferguson verdict not to charge a white police officer who shot dead a black teenager in the U.S.
in 2016 1 billion tweets were sent relating to the U.S. presidential election
in 2017 11.5 million tweets were sent containing #WomensMarch during global reaction to President Trump’s inauguration
For a start none of these figures are put in any kind of context. Yes 11.5 million is a big number, but a basic fact of the internet and social media is that it is awash with big numbers. What other topics were trending that day or week or year, to help us put these numbers in context? How did it compare with that day’s stats about Ed Sheeran or Beyoncé?
Numbers alone don’t mean anything. Numbers only mean something in a context and it’s humans who create that context.
32.
Is that how old I am or the temperature outside, the number of teams that started the Word Cup in Russia or the number of refugees who drowned in a boat off Libya?
At work, I create the context which makes the figures I present about my web service look really impressive, even though I know that putting them in a different context, with a different narrative, would show them up to be very poor.
Not forgetting that there are quite a few ways to give my numbers a context which would just be confusing, or would make them disappear by making them look like lots of other numbers, and so make any pattern at all difficult or impossible to discern. I could make them do whatever my boss wanted them to do.
Statistics are always created, and for a purpose.
Same here, in this exhibition. The curators have selected a handful of statistics to show how quick and massive social media responses were to key moments of ‘protest’. No doubt they were.
But what that means v how you should interpret the numbers, how they stack up next to other events on the same day, or to similar events happening at the same period or to the tweets and Facebook likes from the opposing point of view…. that context, those other points of view, a fuller picture… are not here.
The Hope icon for Barack Obama’s election campaign. Photo by Benjamin Westoby
Results
Oh and as one of my bosses said when I showed him a particularly dramatic graph I had concocted v ‘Fancy figures don’t pay our wages. What about results?’ Practical results which people outside your social media bubble might notice.
Did those 1.8 million tweets bring about the downfall of capitalism? Did #OccupyGezi topple Erdogan? Did those 1 billion tweets sent during the U.S. presidential election stop Trump becoming President?
10 out of 10 for impressive stats. 0 out of 10 for impact.
Global interconnectedness gives a misleading impression of the scale of political protest
I’m dwelling on the issue of numbers because democracy is a numbers game. To win power you have to build coalitions, often with people you don’t really like or share values with.
My view on the current situation is that the internet and social media have certainly made everything more global (and this exhibition is a good example), but that this is not necessarily the blessing it appears.
It now means that women protesting against rape in India can hook up with Reclaim the Night campaigners in America, or that anti-capitalist protesters all across Europe and the States can link up and co-ordinate their protests and publications. Fine.
All this activity (not to mention the relentless support of papers like the Guardian and the New York Times and their liberal avatars around the world, and artworks and installations and exhibitions like this one) gives the impression that it’s all coming together, that we have the numbers, that truth and justice are on our side so we must win, that we’re soooooo close to the tipping point, one more march, one more protest, and we will get our way and…
Capitalism will be toppled. The patriarchy will be overthrown. Trump will be impeached. Catalonia will win its independence. Turkey will become a liberal democracy. Putin will resign and name a gay video artist as his successor.
But I wonder whether it’s the very internationalism of the movement which condemns it to failure v because, although sizeable communities of protesters, objectors and activists can now hook up across regions, countries and continents, reassuring and encouraging each other – within their own individual countries they remain definitely in the minority. Within their own individual countries there simply aren’t enough of them to make the changes they want to see.
After all, despite the deluge of opposition across social media, mainstream media, despite all the street protests, t-shirts and badges, and all the TV comedians relentlessly mocking the other side v Trump won the US election, Brexit won the referendum, Putin was re-elected, Erdogan has just won re-election, Viktor Orbán has just won re-election, The Five Star Movement are in power in Italy, and so on…
Fancy t-shirts, stylish badges, clever hashtags aren’t enough, nowhere nearly enough, to begin to effect real social and political change.
Forlorn poster, t-shirt and other items promoting the Remain campaign. Photo by Benjamin Westoby
I had thought this was the message of the so-called Arab Spring. Bien-pensant liberals in the West thought ‘Hooray, Libya is going to turn into Switzerland, Syria is going to turn into Sweden, the whole Middle East is going to be transformed into socially progressive democracies’.
All the revolutionaries in Egypt, Syria, Libya and so on were excited by the online networks they were able to create among themselves, and the support they could give via the internet to fellow revolutionaries in the other countries, and the support they got from all well-meaning folk in the West.
All of which DELUDED them into thinking they were in a majority in their own country. But it was social media smoke and mirrors. The majority of the populations of Syria, Egypt, Libya and so on are NOT video artists and LGBTQ+ activists; they are illiterate peasants and vast numbers of under-employed urban youths who don’t have Facebook accounts, don’t particularly want political change or, if there is change, want to see strong nationalist leaders emerge who will give them jobs, keep their country together, and defend their cultural values.
It’s odd that the one of the biggest artefacts here more or less acknowledges this obvious fact. It reads:
SLOGANS IN NICE TYPEFACES WON’T SAVE THE HUMAN RACES
Slogans in nice typefaces won’t save the human races. Photo by Benjamin Westoby
To paraphrase: no amount of fancy design, diligent video journalism, snappy hashtags, witty placards and spirited street fighting will overthrow a regime. Only securing the support of (admittedly not necessarily the majority) but still a sizeable minority of the population, will lead to real and cultural political change.
Riots which escalate into the seizure of the presidential palace and the TV stations are often little more than coup d’etats which, as we have seen hundreds of times in the developing world over the past fifty years, generally end up with military dictatorships worse than the one you were trying to overthrow (as in Egypt), or with anarchy (as in Libya) or with prolonged civil war (as in Syria).
The net result of all these attempts to overthrow the wicked dictator is not a wonderful rainbow nation where everyone respects each other’s gender choices, but hundreds of thousands of people fleeing for their lives and drowning in the Mediterranean.
The role of graphics in political protest
Which brings us to the role of graphics in all this political protest. The curators assert at various points that the political activism of the past ten years has seen a particular upsurge in the use of graphics in political protest.
The exhibition aims to capture, depict, examine and display the political graphic design of a turbulent decade.
Alongside traditional posters and banners, the exhibition charts the rise of digital media and social networking, which have given graphic iconography an extraordinary new reach.
Graphic design in the form of internet memes, posters and protest placards is being used by the marginalised and powerful alike to shape political messages like never before.
This is a fascinating, entertaining and often unintentionally funny exhibition but I couldn’t decide whether its central claim was true or not.
On the anti side, the huge photos of the various Women’s Marches and the footage of protest rallies in Barcelona, South Africa, Turkey and so on seemed to feature people holding exactly the kind of home-made banners and placards which I can remember protesters holding from any time in the last 40 years.
I couldn’t see any evidence of a ‘graphics revolution’ in a hand-made placard reading ‘This Pussy Grabs Back’.
Wall-sized installation celebrating the Women’s March in Washington DC
On the other hand, it stands to reason that hundreds of millions of people (generally, we can guess, university-educated, middle-class people) now have access to personal computers which contain an unprecedented array of programs for writing, designing, colouring, typefacing, laying out, and printing all sorts of images, placards, posters, magazines, handouts and so on.
So without a doubt there is more protest material being created, and without a doubt more of it can be distributed over social media than ever before for the self-evident reason that social media didn’t really exist ten years ago. So I suppose it must be true that the internet/social media have given ‘graphic iconography an extraordinary new reach’.
But has it changed the look and impact of graphic elements in political protest?
This might be an impossible question to really answer. The world is a big place, so much is going on, and so many people are creating, publishing, printing and manufacturing so much stuff all the time that it would be pretty challenging to decide if much of it is new.
We made t-shirts and fanzines in the punk era of my youth, back in the 1970s. The Greenham Common women and any number of protesters against Ronald Reagan and Mrs Thatcher managed to make badges, t-shirts, posters and placards and banners and to print off magazines and broadsheets back in the 1980s, without any help from computers or the internet.
Occupy Wall Street t-shirt. Photo by Jason Lester
The speed and spread of visual content online is new, because the whole online infrastructure is relatively new and has expanded at a phenomenal rate. But the nature of that content, and in particular its graphic elements – snappy slogans, faces of hate figures humorously defaced, stirring images of suffering women or children, badges with a little slogan on them — is the graphic content of much of this protest material really new?
A morality tale
Two relatively small display cases placed at opposite ends of the exhibition were, I think, intimately linked and also, I think, tell a neat morality tale.
On the first wall by the entrance door there’s an interesting little display telling us that Hillary Clinton’s team brought in design consultant Michael Bierut from design agency Pentagram to develop a core campaign logo. His proposal was for a logo based round the first letter of her name – H – which would be infinitely ‘refreshable’, and easy for campaign team designers and supporters alike to reversion and use.
Fascinatingly, we get to see the notebook in which he jotted down his early ideas. You can’t help wondering how much he was paid for this great stroke of ‘genius’.
Notebook of Michael Bierut showing his notes on the idea of ‘H’. Photo by the author
Fittingly enough, right at the other end of the exhibition space we come across another display case showing this work of art.
Donald Trump campaign Make America Great Again baseball cap. Photo by the author
Recognise it? Yes, because it is very recognisable. It is in fact, possibly, of all the 300 or so objects on display here, the most successful and recognisable design icon in the exhibition – the red workers’ baseball cap which Donald Trump wore throughout most of his campaign.
And you know the most interesting thing about it? The curators don’t know who designed it. Almost all the other 300 objects, artefacts, t-shirts, badges, cartoons, pamphlets, videos, infographics and so on are carefully attributed to named designers or organisations.
Not the Trump cap. Nobody knows who came up with it. It’s a standard factory-produced cap, and (as the curators point out) even the Times Roman font used for the slogan text is as bog-standard, traditional and reassuring as it gets.
The everyday look of the cap struck a chord with Trump supporters from early in his campaign, helping to position him as an everyday guy, an ordinary Joe, a working class guy made good.
Unlike the social media stats which I read and forgot straightaway, possibly the most fascinating fact in the whole exhibition is that between June 2015 and October 2016 the Trump campaign spent more on producing and distributing these caps than on polling.
The moral of this little story would appear to be that expensive, fancy, East Coast design fails, whereas anonymous, everyday, easy-to-make, easy-to-recognise, easy-to-understand artefact and logo, succeeds.
Underlining my belief that, to win power in a democracy, you have to reach out to the greatest number of the electorate, with the widest possible appeal – not just to people who went to college like you, think like you, and have a refined taste in sophisticated graphics like you.
Curators
Hope to Nope is co-curated by the Design Museum and GraphicDesign&’s Lucienne Roberts and David Shaw, with Rebecca Wright. It is really imaginatively laid out, very interesting throughout, with very informative wall labels, some genuinely hilarious pictures, objects and installations, as well as some fascinating new infographics commissioned specially for the show.
It is an excellent, informative and thought-provoking exhibition. But it won’t change anything.
A video
Watch co-curator Lucienne Roberts being interviewed about the exhibition.
This is a major retrospective of the art of the (female) Korean artist Lee Bul, born in 1964 and still going strong, so something of a mid-career snapshot. It brings together over 100 works in the five enormous exhibition rooms of Hayward Gallery, plus some work located outside.
Oh for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!
As you walk into room one, you immediately realise that much of Lee’s art is big, involving costumes, installations, mannequins and dummies.
You also realise that it is done to a high degree of finish. Everything looks very professional and seamless. It comes as no surprise to learn that much of her recent work is conceived by her but created by a studio of craftspeople and technicians.
I’m always a little envious of my teenage kids. When they come to art exhibitions like this, they roam at will, attracted by whatever is big and brash, rarely bothering with the boring wall labels or grown-up ‘issues’, enjoying things purely for what they look like and how much fun they are. They would certainly find lots to admire here, from the point of view of the spectacular and dramatic.
Monster Pink, pictured above, is accompanied by Monster White both of which look like assemblages of wriggling worms, like some mutant aliens from Dr Who. The same sci-fi vibe attaches to what look like fragments of space suits dangling from the ceiling. On closer examination you can see that these are life-size depictions of the human body in the style of Japanese manga comics, in which both men and women have sleek, perfect bodies, often encased in futuristic body armour.
Lee has produced dismembered versions of these, half a sleek, armoured torso, or combinations of limbs and extremities, moulded into striking but disconcerting fragments of mannequins. Soft pink sacks hang next to sleek machine-tooled silhouettes.
Installation view of Lee Bul at Hayward Gallery showing Cyborg WI on the left (photo by the author)
Up the concrete ramp, in room three, there’s what seems to be a model of a futuristic city, held up by thin scaffolding, some kind of hyper-freeway emerging from a tall plastic mountain, complete with a massive neon sign clicking on and off.
Installation view of Lee Bul at Hayward Gallery showing Mon grand récit – Weep into stones… (2005) Photo by the author
Nearby is a big ‘cave’ made of shiny plastic, with a ‘door’ to go in through, a ‘window’ to look out of, and walls decorated with a mosaic of mirror fragments.
Installation view of Lee Bul at Hayward Gallery showing Bunker (M. Bakhtin) (photo by the author)
Best of all, from an excitable teenager’s point of view, are two big transport machines.
Downstairs in long, low room two, is what appears to be a space-age hovercar not unlike the one Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi use to go to the city of Mos Eisley to look for Han Solo in the first Star Wars movie.
Installation view of Lee Bul at Hayward Gallery showing Live Forever III (photo by the author)
To my amazement, visitors are actually encouraged to get into this device (once they’ve slipped on some protective plastic bags to go over their shoes). As I was saying to myself the immortal line ‘These are not the droids you’re looking for’, the gallery assistant lowered the roof and sealed me in.
You’re forced to lie quite low in the beautifully upholstered leather chair and watch a TV monitor placed right in front of you. If only I could have flicked the ignition, heard the engine roar, made a secret tunnel door open up and slid down a chute into the nearby River Thames to begin a high-speed boat chase against the baddies who’d just blown up the MI6 building.
Alas, all that actually happens is that the screen hanging in front of your face plays tacky Korean karaoke videos. You’re invited to put on headphones, pick up the handy microphone and join in which I was far too intimidated to do.
Finally, up the Hayward’s heavy concrete stairwell to gallery four where a) the entire floor has been covered in futuristic reflective silver plastic, giving it a Dr Who-TV set appearance, and b) and in which floats one of Lee Bul’s most iconic works, a huge model of a zeppelin made from shiny reflective silver foil.
And thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought…
My son, a big fan of manga, animé, graphic novels and sci-fi, would have loved all this, consumed purely as spectacle, as weird and wonderful objects of fantasy and imagination.
However, art is rarely this simple or free. The artists themselves, and certainly their curators and critics, are all too ready to catch the butterfly of fantasy in a net of explanations, drag it back down to earth, and pin it to a board next to all the other specimens in their collection. For example, when you look up the Wikipedia article about Lee, it begins:
Lee’s work questions patriarchal authority and the marginalization of women by revealing ideologies that permeate our cultural and political spheres
firmly dragging Lee’s art into contemporary art discourse with its all-too-familiar obsessions of gender, race, ideology and politics.
The free exhibition handout and the wall labels are where you go for more information about Lee, and they certainly are extremely informative and illuminating. In addition, there are two timelines printed on walls – one telling the history of South Korea since the 1950-53 war to the present, and one describing the development of modern art in Korea from the time of Lee’s birth (1964) to the present day, with a special emphasis on women’s art and issues.
All very interesting, but the more you read, the more you become weighed down by interpretations of art which see it all in terms of ponderous ‘issues’ – of ‘challenges’ and ‘subversions’ and ‘questionings’ – the more it feels like you are sitting through a dreary two-hour-long sociology lecture.
Korea
The South Korea Lee was born into was ruled by a right-wing dictator who had come to power in a military coup, General Park Chung-hee, who ruled with an iron fist from 1963 to 1979. Park inaugurated a series of five year plans designed to modernise Korean society and the economy at breakneck speed.
But Lee’s parents were left-wing dissidents and, although they weren’t arrested, were subjected to harassment, periodic house searches, banned from government employment and hassled into keeping on the move, never settling long in one place.
Thus Lee’s childhood memories are of often cold and bleak makeshift homes and the oppressiveness of the authorities set against a vista of brave new towns, cities, motorways and buildings built quickly of shoddy cement, destined soon to crumble and become seedy and derelict.
The failure of utopias
Amidst all the other ‘issues’ addressed in the art, it was this latter notion – the failure of utopianism – which interested me most. It seems to me that we are currently living through just such an epoch of failure, the slow-motion failure of the dream of a digital future.
Having worked in four British government departments or agencies on their websites and IT projects for the past eight years I have seen all manner of cock-ups and mismanagement – the collapse of the unified NHS project, the likely failure of the system for Universal Credit which was launched in 2010 and still doesn’t work properly, let alone the regular bank failures like the recent TSB collapse. All this before you consider the sinister implications of the recent Facebook-Cambridge Analytica-U.S. Presidential elections debacle.
I have also observed the negative impact of phones and laptops on my own children i.e. they have both become phone addicts. As a result of all this I have very strong, and generally negative, opinions about ‘the Digital Future’.
That’s why I warmed to this aspect of the work of Chinese art superstar, Ai Weiwei, as displayed at the 2015 Royal Academy retrospective of his work. Twitter, Facebook and all the rest of them sell themselves as agents of ‘liberation’ whereas they are, quite obviously in my opinion, implements of a new kind of surveillance society, instruments of turbo-charged consumerism, and the tools of Russian hackers and any number of other unknown forces.
Yet people love them, ignore the scandals, can’t give up their phones or Facebook accounts, and big corporation, banks and governments carry on piling all their services online as if nothing could possibly go wrong with this technology.
With all this in mind I was surprised that there was no mention anywhere of the digital utopia, of digital technology, of phones and screens and big data anywhere in this big exhibition. Instead the utopias Lee Bul is concerned with seemed to me very dated. People wearing futuristic (manga) outfits or living in futuristic cities – this all seemed very Flash Gordon to me, very old tech, a very 1950s and 60s definition of what the future is going to look like.
This feeling that her art is very retro in its vision was crystallised by one of her most iconic works, which was a star feature of the 20th Sydney Biennale in 2016 – the enormous foil zeppelin – Willing To Be Vulnerable: Metalized Balloon.
I’m perfectly aware that the Hindenburg Zeppelin is an enduring symbol of technological hubris and disaster – that it burst into flames and crashed to the ground in 1937. I’ve seen the black and white film footage many times, I’ve even watched the terrible 1975 disaster movie they made about it.
Willing To Be Vulnerable is one of Lee’s most recent works and yet… isn’t it a very old reference to a long-ago event. It would be like discussing the rise of right-wing populism by reference to Adolf Hitler (German Chancellor when the Hindenburg crashed). It’s a plausible reference, sort of, but it’s not very up to date, is it? It’s not where we are now.
And then again, it isn’t even a detailed or accurate model of the Hindenburg. It’s just a big shiny balloon. An awesomely big shiny balloon. My kids would love it. I couldn’t really see it interrogating or questioning anything.
Architecture
The grandiose rhetoric of Korean President Park Chung-hee’s regime, and its relative failure to build the utopia it promised, also explain the strong theme of architecture throughout the exhibition.
When you look closer, you realise that the big model of the kind-of super highway emerging from a phallic mountain – Mon grand récit – Weep into stones… – pictured above, is accompanied by a series of paintings and sketches on the walls showing aspects of architecture, visions and fantasies of architecture which come to ruin.
They are subtler, quieter work which would be easy to overlook in the first impact of all the big models and installations. I particularly liked one collage painting which gives an impression of some kind of disaster involving a glass and chrome skyscraper. The idea – urban apocalypse, skyscrapers in ruins – has been done thousands of times – but I admired the layout and design of it, the shape of the main image with its ‘feeler’-like hairs at the left, and the way the small fragment floats freely above it.
Untitled (Willing to be vulnerable: Velvet #6 DDRG240C) 2017 by Lee Bul
Political criticism
Again, it’s only if you read the wall labels and exhibition guide quite carefully that you realise there is a thread of political satire running through the show. In room one, in between the more striking cyborgs hanging from the ceiling, are a couple of small mannequin models of President Park, naked, in full anatomical detail (reminiscent in the way they’re less than life size and so somehow feeble and vulnerable, of Ron Mueck’s mannequins of his naked dead dad, back in the 1997 Sensation exhibition).
Next to the ‘bat cave’ installation (Bunker), which I described above, is what at first seems like an enormous ‘rock’, made out of some kind of plastic. It’s titled Thaw and if you look closer you just about see another model of President Park, wearing his trademark dark sunglasses, as if he’s been frozen in ice in some alternative science fiction history, and is only waiting to thaw out and rise again…
Thaw (2007) by Lee Bul
Next to this is a very big installation of a bath. Unusually, you are allowed to walk across the tiled floor which makes up a good part of the installation, towards the bath itself – a big rectangular affair as if in a sauna or maybe in the bath rooms of some kind of collective housing – to discover that it is ringed with what looks like white meringue tips, and that the bath itself is full of black ink.
This is Heaven and Hell and without the exhibition guide there’s no way you’d be able to guess that it commemorates Park Jong-chul, a student protester who was tortured and killed by the South Korean security services in a bathtub in 1987.
Installation view of Lee Bul at Hayward Gallery showing Heaven and Hell (1987) Photo by the author
Thinking about political art, Peter Kennard’s blistering photomontages flaying political leaders such as Mrs Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Tony Blair come to mind, for example the enormous photomontage of Tony Blair plastered with images of atrocities from the Iraq War which was on display at the recent Age of Terror exhibition at the Imperial war Museum.
Installation view of Age of Terror at Imperial War Museum London showing Head of State, a photomontage by Cat Phillipps and Peter Kennard, and a marble sculpture of a CCTV camera by Ai Weiwei
There is nothing that overt or emotional here. Everything is much more controlled, inflected, allusive. Given that Lee Bul is sometimes referred to as a ‘political’ artist, there’s nothing at all that – for me anyway – packed any kind of real political punch.
Women’s bodies / desire
With a certain inevitability, what the exhibition probably showcases most consistently is Lee Bul’s identity as a woman artist coming from a society which was extremely repressive, not only of political dissent, but of any form of feminism or gender politics.
The historical timeline tells us that a women’s movement only got going in Korea in the later 1980s and that Lee Bul was an enthusiastic part of it. It tells us that her earliest work went beyond sculpture to explore the possibilities of performance art.
Thus room two contains six screens on which we see some of Lee’s performances – ‘provocative performance works involving her own body’, as the commentary describes them – which she carried out between 1989 and 1996.
In Abortion (1989) she suspended herself from the ceiling of an auditorium for two hours and entertained the audience with lines from poems and pop songs as well as a description of her own abortion, a medical procedure which is still, to this day, apparently, illegal in South Korea.
The Monsters at the start of the show, the wriggly worm creations, turn out to be costumes which Lee wore either writhing around on the ground or walking the streets in order to question received ideas about X and subvert assumptions about Y.
Throughout the exhibition the ‘issue’ of gender and the ‘problematics’ of the female body are reiterated. For example, the timeline of women in Korean society describes ‘the rise of a generation of artists concerned with the representation of the female body‘ who also began ‘subverting the way that women are depicted in the media’.
The guide explains that
at the core of Lee’s recent work is an investigation into landscape, which for the artist includes the intimate landscape of the body…
It turns out the her interest in the manga-style cyborgs comes less from a feeling for science fiction tropes or ideas around artificial intelligence and the possibility of improving human bodies by combining them with machine parts (from pacemakers to prosthetic limbs), no, she
is interested in what the figure of the cyborg – a transhuman hybrid of flesh and machine – can tell us about desire, our relationship to technology, and cultural attitudes towards the female body.
Or, as the press release puts it:
Shaped by her experience of growing up in South Korea during a period of political upheaval, much of Lee Bul’s work is concerned with trauma, and the way that idealism or the pursuit of perfection – bodily, political or aesthetic – might lead to failure, or disaster. Questioning women’s place in society, particularly Korean society, she also addresses the ways in which popular culture – in both the East and West – informs and shapes our idea of ‘feminine’ beauty.
Actually, rather like the so-called ‘political’ works (Thaw and Heaven and Hell) I only discovered that Lee was addressing the ways popular culture shapes our idea of femininity or questions cultural attitudes towards the female body by reading the guidebook. It really wasn’t that obvious from just seeing the works themselves. The three or four cyborg fragments hanging from the ceiling are probably, but not very obviously, female. They could belong to any gender, and be about anything.
Later on there are a couple of ‘busts’ made of lurid plastic of human thoraxes encased in cyber-armour but they aren’t very obviously female. The fact that they’re made of garish pink plastic and the design of the manga-style armour is the striking thing about them.
In one or two of the videos, the artist is seen naked or semi-naked, which even I picked up on as probably a reference to the female body, although I’ve never understood how young, nubile women artists stripping off is meant to subvert anything. To me it plays directly to society’s expectation that the most important or interesting thing about nubile young women is their nubile young bodies.
But if you hadn’t been told by the exhibition website, press release, guide and wall labels that her work ‘questions ideas of femininity’ I’m not sure you’d particularly notice.
I was, for example, surprised to learn that the silver zeppelin ‘addresses the ways in which popular culture – in both the East and West – informs and shapes our idea of feminine beauty’. Really?
Willing To Be Vulnerable by Lee Bul (photo by the author)
Via Negativa II
I haven’t yet mentioned another of the really impressive installations, Via Negativa II (2014) which is a maze made out of metal sheets suspended on stands, a bit like the stands you get at conferences but arranged to create an entrance into a convoluted labyrinth of shiny metal plates.
It’s not a very big maze – only three people are allowed in at a time. The ‘justification’ or ‘idea’ behind it? Well, the walls are covered with a text by an American psychologist, Julian Jaynes, in which he argued that early humans experienced a split consciousness when messages from one hemisphere of the brain to the other were experienced as auditory hallucinations. To make it art, the text is printed in a mirror image of itself i.e you can’t actually read it. You’d need to hold up a mirror to the text to see it printed properly.
I suppose this small metal maze is designed to recreate that sense of mild hallucination that Jaynes describes. At its heart there is certainly a great experience when you find yourself in a cubicle dominated by grids of yellow lights reflected to infinity in parallel mirrors. The other two visitors and I all jostled for the best position to take photos from. Maybe it’s meant to make you think about something, but it’s also just a great tourist photo opportunity.
This is all great fun, but is it ‘questioning the limits of the human’ or ‘interrogating cultural ideas of the female’? Not really.
The international language of art
In fact, you don’t learn very much about the art or culture or history of Korea from this exhibition nor even – surprisingly – about feminism.
What comes over loud and clear is that this is now the international language of art – the same kind of brash, confident, well-manufactured, high concept work which you also see being produced by (the workshops of) Ai Weiwei, Damien Hirst, and numerous other superstars.
(Hirst sprang to mind as soon as I saw Lee Bul’s Majestic Splendour, a work consisting of rows of decomposing fish with sequins on, from 1997 which, of course, echoes Hirst’s A Thousand Years, a vitrine containing a cow’s decomposing head which he displayed in 1990. Great minds think alike.)
Not long ago I visited the fascinating exhibition of everyday products from North Korea held at the House of Illustration behind King’s Cross station. There I learned about the unique political system, the Cult of the Leader and the special economic policy (Juche) of North Korea. I learned about the importance of opera, theatre and enormous public performance in their culture, about the way the Korean language lends itself to blocky futuristic design, and about their fondness for a much brighter, more acid colour palette than we in the West are used to.
In Lee Bul’s exhibition I don’t think I learned anything at all about South Korea apart from being reminded of the name of its military dictator, and that its repressive military dictatorship was, well, repressive.
For me this exhibition shows that whatever her origins, whatever her personal biography may have been (the difficult childhood, the early anti-establishment and feminist performances), Lee Bul is now – in 2018 – on a par with Ai and Hirst in creating aroma-less, origin-free, international objets d’art for the delectation of equally rootless, cosmopolitan art critics, and for transnational buyers and billionaire investors.
I went to the press launch where the show was introduced by the director of Hayward Gallery – the American Ralph Rugoff – and the show’s curator – the German Stephanie Rosenthal. As they spoke I was struck by how all three of the people behind the microphones were members of an international art élite, a cosmopolitan, transnational art world which seems impossibly glamorous to those of us forced to earn our livings in the country of our birth and unable to jet off to international biennales in Venice and Sydney, to visit art shows at the Met in New York or the Foundation Cartier in Paris or the Mori Gallery in Tokyo or the Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul (all places where Lee has exhibited). Wow. What a glamorous jet-setting life!
Summary
This is a very well-put together overview of the career to date of one of the world’s most successful and distinctive artists. It’s packed with big, bold, funky, cool objects and installations.
If you think art needs to be ‘about’ something, then you will enjoy the way the commentary invokes issues around the female body, around social utopias, about architecture and landscape, about the interface of technology and humans, to explain Lee’s work.
Or, like me, you may come to the conclusion that these issues, ideas and texts may well be important to motivate and inspire the artist, to get her juices flowing – but that most of the works can just be enjoyed in and of themselves, as highly inventive three-dimensional objects – fun, strange, colourful, jokey – without requiring any sort of ‘meaning’ or ‘interpretation’.
Related links
Lee Bul continues at the Hayward Gallery until 19 August 2018
This account of the Korean War (1950-53) is thirty years old this year, and so dates from before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Nevertheless, although there are several shorter accounts on the market, this seems to be the only lengthy, in-depth, narrative history of the Korean War in print – an indication of the general lack of interest in the war, both at the time and since (compare and contrast the number of books which come out every year about WW2 or Vietnam).
Why the neglect? The Korean War lacked the scale of the Second World War, so only a relatively small number of soldiers’ families were involved. Around 100,000 British troops were posted to Korea in total, but the British population was more concerned with its own problems – ongoing food rationing, a general election – or the Soviet threat on the continent of Europe. Who cared whether Korea was partitioned along this line or that line?
a) The war was on the other side of the world and
b) After the dramatic reverses of the first year of the conflict, the latter two years dwindled down to a grinding stalemate, demoralising and inglorious. In the end there was no Allied victory (as in WW2), merely a ceasefire which created a border not very much different from the pre-war line. So it turned out to have been a boring, faraway war which achieved nothing.
Background to the partition of Korea
A newcomer to the subject might ask, Why was Korea partitioned between north and south at the 38th parallel in the first place?
To go back a bit, Japan had interfered in Korea’s affairs since the late 19th century. In 1905 Japan made Korea a protectorate; in 1907 the Japanese took control of Korean domestic affairs and disbanded their army; and in 1910 Japan formally annexed Korea.
In the following decades Japan forced some 100,000 Koreans to join the Imperial Japanese Army, and up to 200,000 Korean women were forced into sexual slavery to service Japanese soldiers in Korea and Japanese-occupied China.
Then in 1931 Japan invaded Manchuria, the huge block of territory between northern China and Russia, and in 1937 attacked the rest of the coastal regions of China (as well as into Indochina, Malaya, Burma and so on). Korea was the earliest conquest of Japan’s Far Eastern empire.
Korea became an armed camp, in which mass executions and wholesale imprisonment were commonplace, and all dissent forbidden. (p.16)
When the Second World War broke out in Europe, Stalin was careful to remain at peace with Japan. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Japanese did not declare war on Russia or attack in Siberia, which they could easily have done from their base in Manchuria. Stalin, for his part, maintained Russian neutrality even after Japan attacked Pearl Harbour in December 1941 thus provoking war with America, and Japan and Russia remained at peace right up to the closing days of the war.
In February 1945, at the Yalta conference, Stalin promised Roosevelt and Churchill that he would enter the war against Japan but he delayed till the last minute. (This, among other things, meant that the Japanese government held out the vain hope right into August 1945 that ‘neutral’ Russia would somehow stand up for them and negotiate good surrender terms with the Allies – a delusion.) So Stalin’s Soviet Union only abandoned its policy of neutrality and declared war on Japan on 9 August 1945. A huge Soviet army crossed the border from Siberia into Japanese-occupied Manchuria and swept south.
A glance at the map shows that the southern border of Manchuria is mostly sea, the Sea of Japan to the east and the Yellow Sea to the west of the Korean peninsula, which dangles down from the Chinese mainland like an Asian Scandinavia. So, with the goal of attacking the Japanese wherever they found them, it was natural that the invading Soviet army crossed the Chinese-Korea border (formed by the Yalu river) and headed south into the peninsula, defeating Japanese forces as they went.
‘Suddenly’ the Americans who, according to Hastings hadn’t really considered the strategic significance of Korea, realised they didn’t want Stalin to occupy the entire peninsula create a communist stronghold so close to soon-to-be-defeated Japan. So the Americans requested Stalin to halt his forces and informed him that American forces would invade Korea from the south.
Two American officers were put in charge of figuring out where the dividing line should be between the uneasy allies. Poring over a map, they reached the ‘hasty’ decision that the 38th parallel was a handy dividing line: it more or less divided the country in two, with the capital Seoul, the best agriculture and industry, and most of the population, to the south i.e. in the American sector.
President Roosevelt duly contacted Stalin with the request that he stop his forces at the 38th parallel and, to the Americans’ surprise, Stalin readily agreed. Stalin didn’t want to risk confrontation with the ally he was working so closely with in Europe, and was also very aware of the atom bombs the Americans had just dropped on Japan. Yeah, sure, you can keep half of Korea.
(There is a nice irony here, that the Americans from Roosevelt down were vehement opponents of the European empires, and actively tried to sabotage the return to European imperial rule of Burma, Malaya or Indochina. But quite quickly they found themselves dragged into drawing precisely the kind of arbitrary lines and borders which they had criticised the Europeans for making in Africa and the Middle East. The existence of separate states of North and South Korea and the fates, the life chances and premature deaths of tens of millions of Koreans, were determined by this hurried decision made in the last gasp of the Second World War.)
North and South Korea
So Stalin stopped his troops at the 38th parallel, when he could easily have pressed on and seized the entire peninsula. American forces landed at Incheon on September 8 and liberated southern Korea from their Japanese occupiers. In time both countries put their own regimes in place in their sector, the Soviets basing their government in the northern city of Pyongyang, the Americans in the traditional capital, Seoul, permanently crystallising the distinction between communist North Korea and capitalist South Korea.
While the Russians proceeded with their standard process of step-by-step managing the local communists into government and then picking off the opposition one by one to create a mini Stalinist state, Hastings describes the Americans as making a number of important mistakes in the South.
For a start, the Americans found the native Koreans completely unused to governing their own country. Thus, against their intentions, in the early days they ended up being forced to work closely with the now-defeated Japanese authorities, for the simple reason that the Japs had the experienced men in place to carry on carrying out the function of the state. Only slowly were these replaced by native Koreans, and then the Americans had the devil of a time selecting which of the many groups of clamouring Korean politicians to choose to run things.
As the threat from Soviet communism became more palpable into 1946, the Americans found themselves setting up a government run by the smooth-talking, right-wing émigré Syngman Rhee. Hastings recounts how left-of-centre Korean groups were too quickly marginalised because of the taint of communism and how the Americans, despite their best intentions, found themselves installing Rhee, and then coming to regret the choice of such a corrupt, brutal figure. Rhee ended up being president of South Korea from 1948 to 1960 and was an early example of the kind of brutal, repressive and corrupt right-wing regime which the Americans would find themselves supporting again and again throughout the Cold War.
This had the result of fuelling left-wing and communist agitation against his government, which led to a spiral of repression, and left many Americans feeling ambivalent and uneasy in their support for Rhee. This was epitomised by a reluctance to arm his air force, artillery and infantry with more than a token minimum of equipment, since there was good evidence that arms were mainly used against his own civilian population.
Meanwhile, throughout the late 1940s North Korea kept up a steady stream of propaganda broadcasts to the south, designed to appeal to all Korean patriots, calling for the reunification of the country, as well as predictable calls for the overthrow of Rhee and his unlikeable clique. In the spring of 1950 this rhetoric became steadily more heated and experts in the U.S. State Department warned of the growing threat of some kind of attack by the North on the South. The American government, under President Harry Truman, had its hands full coping with crises in the more obvious cockpit of the Cold War, Europe, beset by a sequence of crises including the Berlin Airlift from June 1948 to May 1949, the communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948, and so on.
The Korean War
1. The North invades Thus it came as a complete surprise to the world when Kim Il-Sung’s North Korean army invaded South Korea on 25 June 1950. The United Nations immediately voted it an illegal act and sent forces to stop the advance. These were at first mostly American, but in time came to consist of a coalition including other Western countries and eventually 20 nations from round the world. But before this could be organised, the North Koreans succeeded in storming through the south, pushing the under-equipped demoralised Republic of Korea’s army back until it and its American support were, by September 1950, pinned into a pocket in the south-east of the peninsula, the Pusan area.
2. Landing at Inchon Not only did the Americans reinforce their troops who fought bravely to hold the line at Pusan but General MacArthur, the hero of the Pacific War, who had been ruling post-war Japan as American Vice-Consul, now conceived his last great strategic coup, which was to organise a massive American amphibious landing at Inchon in mid-September 1950, on the coast near Seoul, thus attacking the North Koreans in their rear, and threatening their supply lines.
The Americans broke out of the Pusan pocket and drove north, pushing back the demoralised and exhausted North Koreans, back across the 38th parallel and further north. At this point Hastings’ account dwells on the massive disagreements within the American administration on whether or not the Allies should halt at the parallel or press on to take the entire peninsula. This latter view prevailed and the American, ROK and other UN national forces (British and Commonwealth as well as a large contingent from Turkey) pressed north.
3. China enters the war Allied forces had come within sight of the Yalu river which forms the border between Korea and China when they were horrified to learn that a vast contingent of the People’s Republic of China had crossed the border and was attacking along the line. Briefly, sheer weight of numbers overran Allied positions, creating confusion and panic, and it is chastening to read accounts of Allied troops dropping their guns and equipment and running in panic fear. The Chinese routed the Allies, pushing them relentlessly southwards back towards the 38th parallel.
Hastings excels, in this book as in his later one about the War in the Pacific, at combining at least three levels of analysis:
Carefully chosen eye witness accounts (from letters, diaries and reports made at the time along with highlights of the scores of interviews with veterans which he conducts for each book).
Detailed descriptions, with maps, of specific battles and the broader military situation.
But what I enjoyed most is Hasting’s ability to pull out of this narrow focus to explain in detail the strategic and geopolitical issues behind the war. Thus there is a lot of analysis throughout the book of the conflicting aims and strategies of the Allies, and particularly within the US administration and armed forces. It is riveting to read how war aims a) can be so contradictory and fiercely debated within a set of allies b) change over time according to all sorts of pressures, like domestic opposition, political attacks from opponents, looming elections, threats elsewhere.
4. Shall we bomb China? The largest issue raised by the Chinese victories and our troops’ humiliating defeats was whether to broaden the war to attack China itself i.e. why only fight the Chinese forces inside Korea, why not bomb mainland China, as we did Germany and Japan? 1. The scattered terrain of hilly Korea, lacking main roads and railways, and the methodology of the communists, moving across country, made it difficult to attack enemy formations in Korea. 2. All their supplies were coming from factories in China, and Chinese MiG jets were flying from airfields in China – why not attack those?
The highpoint of this point of view, strongly espoused by senior figures in the US army and air force, was MacArthur’s request that the Allies use the atom bomb against Chinese forces not only in Korea, but against Chinese cities. The army drew up a list of twenty possible targets. Imagine!
Within Truman’s own cabinet there were – as always – hawks and doves, with some supporting broadening the war, others strongly against. In the event, Truman took the cautious line, and posterity has to agree. If both sides, by tacit consent, limited their confrontation to within the peninsula, it was containable and manageable. In February 1950 Russia and China had signed a defensive alliance committing each to go to war if the other party was attacked, so if the UN forces had bombed Chinese cities, would Russia have been forced to come to China’s defense? Would it have triggered World War III? Was it worth taking the risk?
Hastings brings out how US hawks saw the conflict in terms of the global Cold War against communism. The gruesome way Soviet-backed regimes were established across Europe and the victory of Mao Zedong’s communists in China in 1949, gave a very real sense that communism was advancing on all fronts. The North Korean attack fitted right in with that view of the democratic West being under sustained attack, and revelations of the extent of Soviet spies inside the atom bomb programme and throughout the US establishment, go a long way to explaining the mounting hysteria epitomised by the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his House Unamerican Activities Committee. Truman had to stand up against a great deal of pressure, within the military establishment, from the McCarthyites, from some sections of the media and public opinion, in refusing to widen the war. 60 years later we pay him credit.
Only very slowly, did some parts of the US administration come to realise that China’s motives stemmed at least from simple nationalism as from world communist conspiracies. A captured Chinese soldier is quoted as saying, ‘How would you like your enemies armies, complete with atom bombs, parked just across your 450-mile-long border?’ If the Americans hadn’t pushed on north beyond the parallel, maybe the Chinese wouldn’t have been prompted to invade. Maybe a lot of lives could have been saved.
5. Stalemate Of course, the decision not to widen the war i.e. attack the Chinese mainland – condemned a lot of American, British Commonwealth and UN troops to ongoing slog, battle, injury and death. In December 1950 Lieutenant-General Matthew B. Ridgway took over command of the US Eighth Army and began to turn it around. Retrained, re-equipped and remotivated, his forces held the Chinese and then began to press northwards, retaking Seoul in March 1951, and pressing forward to the parallel.
Throughout this period General MacArthur, in overall command of US forces in the Far East, had given interviews and communicated to representatives of other governments his wish to expand the war, often in direct conflict to the stated aims of the US administration. Eventually, President Truman felt compelled to relieve him of his command on 10 April 1951. This caused a storm of protest within the military, in Congress and among the general public, for whom MacArthur was a great American hero. Truman’s popularity fell to the lowest ever recorded for a US President. And without it being the immediate intention, MacArthur’s sacking sent out a strong message to America’s allies, to China and Russia, that the United States did not intend to attack China, did not even intend to seize the whole Korean peninsula, but would settle for the much more limited aim of returning to the status quo ante.
As spring 1951 turned to summer, the front line advanced and receded around the parallel, slowly settling into a stalemate. A year after the initial invasion, the armies were back more or less where they had started. The North Koreans reluctantly agreed to open ceasefire talks and protracted armistice negotiations began on 10 July 1951 at Kaesong, before moving to the neighbouring village of Panmunjom. Due to the intransigence of the North and the Chinese, these talks dragged on for two long years, while on the ground there was a steady stream of offensives and counter-offensives, none of which really changed the strategic picture, but in which a lot of soldiers died pointlessly on both sides.
The narrative pauses at this point for a series of chapters looking at specific aspects of the war:
The war in the air, where the West learned for the first time the limits of air power – something which was to be repeated in Vietnam – and for the first time jet fighter fought jet fighter, Soviet MiGs against US Sabres.
The creation more or less from scratch of a U.S. intelligence operation, which featured a number of gung-ho operations behind the lines but precious little usable intelligence. I was tickled to read that the CIA’s Seoul station had 200 officers, but not a single speaker of Korean, an attitude of uninterest in local cultures and languages which the Americans repeated later in Vietnam and the Middle East.
The issue of communist prisoners of war, whose numbers had risen to some 130,000 by the end of the war and whose repatriation back to the North became one of the big stumbling blocks of the peace negotiations.
The mounting frustration at having to fight and die in bloody, futile engagements while the diplomats at Panmunjom, just a few miles away, drew the peace negotiations out with unbearable delays, is well depicted in this 1959 movie, Pork Chop Hill. It illustrates the brutality and heavy losses incurred for insignificant hilltops, the effectiveness of Chinese propaganda broadcast to Allied troops by loudspeaker across the front line, and the widespread demoralisation of the American soldiers with many, perhaps most, of them expressing intense doubt about what they were fighting for and whether it was worth it.
Hard not to see foreshadowings of the irresolution and crushing sense of futility which were to bedevil the Vietnam War.
6. Ceasefire Josef Stalin died in March 1953 and Soviet policy went into a shadowy period of uncertainty. Meanwhile, Republican President Eisenhower replaced Democrat President Truman. Part of his campaign had included the pledge to bring the war to an end. These final stages include the unnerving plans made by the new administration to: massively boost South Korean armed forces; bomb China north of the Yalu; deploy the new artillery-fired nuclear weapons the US had developed; and to transport Chinese Nationalist fighters from Formosa to the Chinese mainland to carry out guerrilla operations (p.473). These aims were communicated to the Soviets and Chinese and at last broke the logjam. In April the communist delegates at Panmunjom began to respond to suggestions.
Ironically, the final stumbling block turned out to be the obstinate dictator of South Korea, Syngman Rhee, who was refused by America’s decision to ‘abandon’ his nation and refused to agree to a ceasefire or sign the agreement. The Americans, not for the last time, found themselves struggling to contain a right-wing leader of their own creation, but by immense pressure managed to prevent Rhee actively sabotaging the negotiations. It is rather staggering to learn that they developed a plan for kidnapping Rhee and overthrowing his government if he refused to play ball (plan EVER-READY p.479).
On 27 July 1953 a ceasefire was finally declared and a demilitarised zone (DMZ) created either side of the ceasefire line. Legally, the war has never ended and this, along with the belligerent rhetoric which has continued to pour out of Pyongyang, along with the occasional terrorist atrocity and a trickle of shooting incidents across the DMZ, explains why South Koreans have lived in a state of tension and high alert for the past 64 years.
And now that Kim Il-sung’s son and successor as Great Leader, Kim Jong-il, has developed nuclear weapons and is testing long-range missiles to deliver them, who knows what further trouble this barren peninsula might cause.
Stats
1,319,000 Americans served in Korea, of whom 33,629 were killed and 105,785 wounded
The South Korean army lost 415,000 killed and 429,000 wounded
The Commonwealth lost 1,263 killed and 4,817 wounded
The Americans estimate that 1.5 million Chinese and North Koreans died, but this is an educated guess
Wikipedia reports that some 2.5 million Koreans, north and south, were killed or wounded
This huge loss of civilian and military lives is captured in Taegukgi: The Brotherhood of War from 2004, a phenomenally violent Korean film directed by Kang Je-gyu, and saturated with blood-spattering special effects.
The lessons of history
The Korean War is interesting for a number of reasons:
as a dramatic and very hard-fought war in and of itself
as the first armed confrontation between two superpowers in the Cold War
as a template for the Vietnam War
It’s the latter which is, at this distance of time, maybe the most resonant. Their convincing win against Japan gave the Americans the sense that overwhelming might on land and sea and in the air guaranteed victory. Korea disabused them of this confidence. In Korea the Americans stumbled upon issues which were to plague them 15 years later in Vietnam:
the difficulty of supporting an unpopular native regime
the problems of creating a native army to support an unpopular regime, in a corrupt and inefficient society
the cost of underestimating an Asian army
the difficulty of using air power, no matter how overwhelming, against a peasant army with no identifiable infrastructure – this wasn’t like bombing German or Japanese factories
the difficulty of deploying a highly mechanised army in broken country against a lightly armed, highly mobile enemy (p.xvi)
This is an excellent, thorough, well-written and gratifyingly intelligent account of an important war which, paradoxically, makes it clear why it has been so often overlooked by historians in the Allied countries which fought in it, namely America and Britain. It powerfully explains why fighting a pointless war in a faraway country for an ugly regime was so unpopular at the time and has been neglected ever since.
P.S. Japan
Big strategic history like this is full of ironies. I was delighted to learn that the Korean War helped to set Japan on its feet again and kick-started its astonishing post-war economic recovery, helped along by the vast amounts of money poured into the country which served as ‘aircraft carrier, repair base, store depot, commissariat, hospital, headquarters and recreation centre’ for the UN forces in the Far East (p.444). Every cloud has a silver lining.
Credit
The Korean War by Max Hastings was published in 1987 by Michael Joseph. All quotes and references are to the 2010 Pan Macmillan paperback.
Books & Boots 