The exhibitions at the ICP and Bobst share their broad theme - the Spanish Civil War, and focus - the print propaganda material used during the war, while primarily representing the Republican faction. But they differ in scope of content, choice of sub-themes, their handling, the overall presentation, and the conveyed message. Beside the matters of content and presentation, process and the product, the exhibitions can also be compared with each other in the light of the institutions they come from and therefore the audiences that they draw or relationships they foster with them.
OTHER WEAPONS: PHOTOGRAPHY AND PRINT CULTURE DURING THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR, ICP
The exhibition at the ICP forms a part of other exhibitions on photography. The audiences are not only photography aficionados but anyone who might be interested in the subject of Spanish Civil War. The exhibition is drawn form the larger international exhibition ‘Magazines and War 1936-1939: Spanish Civil War Print Culture’. Perhaps conscious of its current exhibiting venue and its mission to interpret the power and evolution of Photography, the exhibition is reconfigured in scope. It includes not just magazines but also posters and ephemera to convey a broader application of the innovative photomontage techniques, which were heavily employed to construct and convey an emotionally and politically charged story of the war.
The strength of the exhibition lies in its choice of six sub-themes, and the efficiency with which it employs the visual and textual material to clearly communicate these along with various nuances of propaganda strategies and material. By also talking about the design and artistry behind some of the powerful images, the exhibition succeeds in effectively underlining the manipulation of photographs for propaganda purposes. Thus, when one walks out of this exhibition into the other three concurrent exhibitions at ICP, one is always aware and conscious of how a particular photograph contains or does not contain
the right ingredients for turning it into a propaganda image. This aspect favors the placement of this exhibition within the other exhibitions of prominent photographic works.
Content: Central to the six themes within the exhibition is the use of the technique of photomontage. We know form an earlier reading on the Pedagogic Misson undertaken by the Second Republic that photographs were often subject to manipulation. Photographers like Val del Omar and Ramon Manendez Pidal used close crops and clever captioning to render potency to their photographs of rural Spaniards. (Mendelson, week 1) At the onset of the war artists took this technique a step further and began combining several images to communicate the intended war narratives. In this respect, the exhibition mentions the contribution of two artists who were influenced by the work of German photomontage artist John Heartfield, and heavily employed the photmontage technique to create evocative (Republican) commentaries on the war. The artists are Josep Renau and Manuel Monleon Burgos. Two out of six sub-sections of the exhibition are devoted to these artists and their work.
The work of the Valencian artist Monleon is presented in the context of the Valencian anarchist magazine Umbral. Monleon’s cover pages of the issues of Umbral use photomontage renditions of war commentary in rich and vibrant- almost psychedelic-color. Incidentally, even the exhibition derives its name from a series of articles printed in Umbral regarding the potent role of artists as propagandists during the war. Josep Renau, who held a prominent position as the creative director with the Republic in Madrid, is represented no less than an institution in himself with an appropriately grandiose section title: The Polemics of Josep Renau.
Other artists briefly discussed in another section of the exhibition include the team of Barcelona artists - photographer Pere Catala-Pic with his simple but captivating black and white photomontage, and studio photographer Josep Sala whose work follows a simple, symmetric layout of two juxtaposed black and white photographs and minimal text to create another captivating poster. The work of another graphic artist Salvador Ortiga is noticeable in surrealistic covers for AIRE.
Together all the aforementioned artists represent the key production centers of Republican propaganda material viz. Barcelona, Valencia and Madrid. The exhibition also takes our attention to the design nuances of printing and binding in relation to the produce from each of these centers, which in turn goes on to illustrate the larger impact of the war on the centers . E.g. Valencian magazine like Umbral largely used newsprint with economy of print space while Barcelona, last to come under the control of Franco’s forces, could afford expensive metal spiral binding & full page colored illustrations in a
magazine like AIRE.
The insights into the artistry of the posters are valuable and contribute to an understanding of the politics of representation. The remaining three sections take this understanding further by focusing on the human subjects of these propaganda prints,
namely women, children and Moroccan people.
Wars have always been fought on battle fronts by men but the women and children end up being most victimized. The Republican posters used both these factions effectively in their propaganda to gather sympathy and help by showing destitute women and children. The most provocative of the posters are those with the pictures of dead children. However, there is a contrary upbeat depiction of women too, favoring the Republican ideal of liberty and equality of women. Depiction of women’s participation on the front, and later as rear guard, is employed to raise the morale of their forces.
The Moroccan people were another minority that Republican propaganda used, though less frequently than the insurgent propaganda. The two examples presented in the related section of the exhibition show two opposite attitudes towards the Moroccan people employed in the Republican propaganda. One shows them as friends, thus instilling a sense of brotherhood and at the same time encouraging the Moroccans to join Republican forces, and the other showing them as barbaric and greedy enemy, thereby warning Spaniards against the Moroccans.
Together, the choice of the sub-themes helps reveal different extremes of the Republican propaganda by reading into the material with respect to the larger but precise context of its creation. The exhibition realizes the deliberateness of expression and the political motive behind the choice of expression. It highlights that the propaganda material was a work of design.
DISPLAY: The combination of posters displayed on the walls, with magazine covers & spread-outs, a selection of which is displayed on the walls with the posters and others in vitrines placed against the walls, creates an engaging display. The peripheral display makes the best use of allocated space, leaving enough breathing space and yet holding the exhibits cohesively. A simple strategy to paint the wall in parts with shades of gray helps demarcate the different sections of the exhibition. Gray, further helps render a neutral tone to the exhibition in accordance with the tone maintained in the content, which highlights the politics of representation without sounding judgmental. It also helps make
the exhibition room look wider than it is.
SUGGESTION: There is a possibility of adding an audio explanation, wherever possible, for some of the key artworks which could help to substantiate the exhibition text without using any more of the exhibition space.
CONCLUSION: Other Weapons largely succeeds in presenting not just politics through images but also the politics of images.
ART AND POLITICS: POSTERS FROM THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR, NYU
Although it is very tempting to contrast this exhibition with the one just discussed, and even when the exhibition has some obvious flaws, I would like to deliberately refrain from comparing the two. For, not only is the institutional setting very different, the motive of the exhibition too seems to be markedly different. The purpose of this exhibition seems to be displaying a selection of posters from the large archival collection at the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives of the Tamiment library at the NYU for the purpose of illustrating the political undercurrents of the Spanish Civil War, and to perhaps underline political history from the Republican point of view. It does not seem that the exhibition even wished to enter into the realm of politics of representation and to look at the culture of print propaganda that such material was heavily employed for. To this former end, the exhibition does succeed in creating a somewhat thematic storyline.
CONTENT: It uses representative posters to crisply fit into four (formerly five) political themes such as representation of the enemy, gender and masculinity as heavily depicted in the posters, social reform and regional autonomy.
In absence of any text to explain the choice of these sections, the selection may seem arbitrary or based primarily on the visual content of the posters. At some point it even begins to seem that the criterion of selection was an aesthetic grouping and then political themes were derived out of the grouping. Within the constraints of an archival collection, this might be a valid way of working except that the synergy that one expects to see between the explanation and the visuals is not as strong and evocative as it can be. The posters merely seem to illustrate the textual description and the text merely seems to describe what’s on the posters. A lot of questions about the reasons and patterns of representation are thus left unanswered.
In addition to the posters, in the current version of the exhibition, there are also various significant ephemera related to the war, which are distributed on a vitrine that forms an island between the parallel arrays of posters. This brings some disjointedness in to the display of posters and even the visual impact of the posters is diluted. Thus, in spite of the sectional storyline that attempts to tie up and contextualizes the artifacts, the evocative quality of the posters is somewhat lost. Perhaps it is the distribution of posters in space, or perhaps it is other design issues.
DISPLAY /AUDIENCE: Further, the entire exhibition is situated in a cozy corner of the lobby of the Bobst library which is only accessible to students, staff and faculty of NYU, and very rarely to few outsiders. In this way, there are hardly ever any focused visitors who would come into the space with the intention of understanding the nuances of propaganda in the Spanish Civil War. The largest percentage of daily visitors is that of students who move into this secluded corner for a moment of privacy over mobile phone, or for some other reasons of seeking similar moments of solitude. Rarely, perhaps when there is nothing better to do, the students drop in for a casual glance.
With this sort of an audience the exhibition can not afford to delve into any subject which is not of popular interest. An exhibition relating to current popular culture or relating to achievements of NYU or its history seem appropriate for this space. But Spanish Civil War posters, even when they are pristinely displayed and carry high aesthetic appeal with the use of bright colors and bold figures, muster less interest.
The aspect of display is again to blame for this. The design could have been manipulated to make the exhibition more stimulating than it is currently. This does not mean that the display had to be loud, for it would conflict with the visual impact of the artworks, but minor details of typography such that it would not demand high levels of concentration, easy to follow labels, an interesting layout of vitrines within the space and an element of surprise here and there would have added interest to audience’s interaction with the exhibits and the space.
Thus, ironically enough, while the exhibition deals with a potent tool of propaganda i.e. the posters, it suffers from a spirit to propagate itself within its everyday audience. Perhaps the posters could have been interpreted better!
EXHIBITION TEXT: In terms of the explanation of the exhibition’s content, the flaw that pops out is an overtly sympathetic tone for the Republicans in the introductory text. At one place, the text addresses the Republican faction as ‘weak’. Even though I try hard not to bring in the comparison, I am prompted to think of the completely opposite picture that ‘Other Weapons’ gives of the Republicans – even in the face of loss how it was shrewdly employing best possible tactics to persuade widespread attention, help & sympathy, and at the same time continuously boosting the morale of its forces.
On another level, the use of a qualifying words like ‘weak’ might even reveal a subconscious bias, a sympathy, for the situation of the Republic in the mind of the copy-writer. Similarly the use of words ‘enemy’ and ‘horrors of fascism’ in the exhibition text could have been avoided in favor of a neutral explanation.
CONCLUSION: Perhaps the exhibition lacks the tact in handling such politically charged material. Or perhaps it just needs a better location or an appropriate design with respect to whatever space it is in. Perhaps it suffers because of the constraints of the budget and that of the collection itself. It’s true that when something fundamental is not right everything else seems to be making all the difference. But then, perhaps I am being unwisely judgmental or perhaps even after promising not to compare the two exhibitions I am but writing a comparative critique. Or perhaps…!!
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