The Palace of the Republic was opened in 1976 to house East Germany's parliament and to provide a cultural and historical center for the public to enjoy. During its construction, the government commissioned sixteen artists to create paintings in response to the question, "Are Communists allowed to dream?" Artists like Bernhard Heisig, Wolfgang Mattheuer, Willi Sitte, Werner TuÌbke, Walter Womacka, and Hans Vent contributed large-size works. They painted in their personal styles, but still staye...
A single book might not change the world. But this utterly original meditation on art and war might transform the way you see the world—and that makes all the difference. “How to live in the face of so much suffering? What difference can one person make in this beautiful, imperfect, and imperiled world?” Through a dazzling combination of memoir, history, reporting, visual culture, literature, and theology, Sarah Sentilles offers an impassioned defense of life lived by peace and principle. It...
The history of post-revolutionary political parties is told through the photographic archives of the group Tercerunquinto. This book analyses of the use of public murals as spaces for political party propaganda and the way in which murals become an economic opportunity for the inhabitants of Mexico's marginalised areas. Text in English and Spanish. Contents: Restoration of a Mural Painting by Taiyana Pimentel; Preface, José Woldenberg; Petrified Memory by Sergio Raúl Arroyo; Images of Restorat...
'Nothing to touch the glory of the great cartoonists!...they teach the historians their trade' said the former Labour Party leader Michael Foot, a view also held by Winston Churchill. However, though many of the cartoons of international conflicts from the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars until the end of the Second World War have become iconic, very little is known about their creators. This book puts the record straight by assembling, for the first time in a single volume, brief biographies of...
An argument that by amplifying alienation in performance, we can shift the emphasis from the sonic to the social.Works in sound studies continue to seek out sound “itself”—but, today, when the aesthetic can claim no autonomy and the agency of both artist and audience is socially constituted, why not explore the social mediation already present within our experience of the sonorous? In this work, artist, musician, performer, and theorist Mattin sets out an understanding of alienation as a constit...
The Nature of Revolution provides the first account of art and politics under the brutal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. James A. Tyner repositions Khmer Rouge artworks within their proper political and economic context: the materialization of a political organization in an era of anticolonial and decolonization movements. Consequently, both the organization's policies and practices?including the production of poetry, music, and photography?were incontrovertibly shaped by and created to further...
Lithuanian-born artist Ben Shahn learned fresco painting as an assistant to Diego Rivera in the 1930s and created his own visually powerful, technically sophisticated, and stylistically innovative artworks as part of the New Deal Arts Project’s national mural program. In Ben Shahn’s New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene author Diana L. Linden demonstrates that Shahn mined his Jewish heritage and left-leaning politics for his style and subject matter, offering insight into his mu...
Adversarial Design (Design Thinking, Design Theory) (Adversarial Design)
by Carl DiSalvo
In Adversarial Design, Carl DiSalvo examines the ways that technology design can provoke and engage the political. He describes a practice, which he terms "adversarial design," that uses the means and forms of design to challenge beliefs, values, and what is taken to be fact. It is not simply applying design to politics -- attempting to improve governance for example, by redesigning ballots and polling places; it is implicitly contestational and strives to question conventional approaches to po...
The Architecture of Percier and Fontaine and the Struggle for Sovereignty in Revolutionary France
by Iris Moon
As the official architects of Napoleon, Charles Percier (1764–1838) and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine (1762–1853) designed interiors that responded to the radical ideologies and collective forms of destruction that took place during the French Revolution. The architects visualized new forms of imperial sovereignty by inverting the symbols of monarchy and revolution, constructing meeting rooms resembling military encampments and gilded thrones that replaced the Bourbon lily with Napoleonic bee...