Constructing The Memory Of War In Visual Culture Since 1914

This collection provides a transnational, interdisciplinary perspective on artistic responses to war from 1914 to the present, analysing a broad selection of the rich, complex body of work which has emerged in response to conflicts since the Great War. Many of the creators examined here embody the human experience of war: first-hand witnesses who developed a unique visual language in direct response to their role as victim, soldier, refugee, resister, prisoner and embedded or official artist. Contributors address specific issues relating to propaganda, wartime femininity and masculinity, women as war artists, trauma, the role of art in soldiery, memory, art as resistance, identity and the memorialisation of war.

"This book examines the confrontational war pictures of Otto Dix (1891-1969) and explores their role in shaping the memory of World War I in Germany during the years 1914-36. Dix's thirty-eight months on the World War I battlefields profoundly influenced his post-war artistic career, saw him produce some of the most enduring images of the conflict and establish himself as one of Europe's leading modernists. Offering substantial new research and presenting numerous primary sources to an English readership for the first time, the book examines Dix's war pictures within the broader visual culture of war in order to assess how they functioned alternatively as cutting-edge modernist art and transgressive war commemoration. Each chapter provides a case study of the first public display of one or more of Dix's war pictures at key exhibitions and explores how their reception was subjected to changing socio-political and cultural conditions as well as divergent attitudes to the lost war. Bringing a unique perspective and original scholarship to Dix's war works, Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture, 1914-36 is essential reading for art historians of the First World War and the visual culture of Weimar Germany"--

The essays and artworks gathered in this volume examine the visual manifestations of postcolonial struggles in art in East and Southeast Asia, as the world transitioned from the communist/capitalist ideological divide into the new global power structure under neoliberalism that started taking shape during the Cold War. The contributors to this volume investigate the visual art that emerged in Australia, China, Cambodia, Indonesia, Korea, Okinawa, and the Philippines. With their critical views and new approaches, the scholars and curators examine how visual art from postcolonial countries deviated from the communist/capitalist dichotomy to explore issues of identity, environment, rapid commercialization of art, and independence. These foci offer windows into some lesser-known aspects of the Cold War, including humanistic responses to the neo-imperial exploitations of people and resources as capitalism transformed into its most aggressive form. Given its unique approach, this seminal study will be of great value to scholars of 20th-century East Asian and Southeast Asian art history and visual and cultural studies.

This book provides an in-depth and thematic analysis of socially engaged art in Mainland China, exploring its critical responses to and creative interventions in China’s top-down, pro-urban, and profit-oriented socioeconomic transformations. It focuses on the socially conscious practices of eight art professionals who assume the role of artist, critic, curator, educator, cultural entrepreneur, and social activist, among others, as they strive to expose the injustice and inequality many Chinese people have suffered, raise public awareness of pressing social and environmental problems, and invent new ways and infrastructures to support various underprivileged social groups.

This is the first book to focus on Helhesten (The Hell-Horse), an avant-garde artists’ collective active during the Nazi occupation of Denmark and one of the few tangible connections between radical European art groups from the 1920s to the 1960s. The Danes’ deliberately unskilled painterly abstraction, embrace of the tradition of dansk folkelighed (the popular) and its iterations of egalitarianism and consensus reform, called for the political relevance of art and interrogated the ideologies underlying culture itself. The group’s cultural activism presents an alternative trajectory of continuity, which challenges the customary view of World War II as a moment of artistic rupture.

This volume is an anthology of current groundbreaking research on social practice art. Contributing scholars provide a variety of assessments of recent projects as well as earlier precedents, define approaches to art production, and provide crucial political context. The topics and art projects covered, many of which the authors have experienced firsthand, represent the work of innovative artists whose creative practice is utilized to engage audience members as active participants in effecting social and political change. Chapters are divided into four parts that cover history, specific examples, global perspectives, and critical analysis.

This volume offers a multidisciplinary approach to shaping and imposition of “formulas for betrayal” as a result of changing memory politics in post-war Europe. The contributors, who specialize in history, sociology, anthropology, memory studies, media studies and cultural studies, discuss the exertion of political control over memory (including the selection, imposition, silencing or ideological “twisting” of facts), the usage of “formulas for betrayal” in various cultural-political contexts, and the discursive framing of the betraying subject for the purpose of legitimizing various memory regimes and ideologies.

This book traces the influence of the changing political environment on Czech art, criticism, history, and theory between 1895 and 1939, looking beyond the avant-garde to the peripheries of modern art. The period is marked by radical political changes, the formation of national and regional identities, and the rise of modernism in Central Europe – specifically, the collapse of Austria-Hungary and the creation of the new democratic state of Czechoslovakia. Marta Filipová studies the way in which narratives of modern art were formed in a constant negotiation and dialogue between an effort to be international and a desire to remain authentically local.