Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Propaganda? - GOMA Curator Reuben Keehan - INTERVIEWS




Don't Believe The Hype

Politically motivated art gets an airing in GOMA exhibition Propaganda?. Curator Reuben Keehan discusses the medium and the message with Paul Andrew.

Gallery Of Modern Art curator Reuben Keehan is fondly recalling a childhood memory – “propaganda” broadcasting before him in lieu of regular children’s television programming.

“[It was] cartoons, strangely enough,” he reveals. “As a kid in the early ‘80s I remember Channel 9 screening some ‘50s or ‘60s Cold War-era odes to capitalism, how private control of industry led to wealth for everyone. Maybe they’d gotten mixed up with the Tom & Jerry and Wacky Races tapes, or maybe it was because the Cold War wasn’t quite over yet. I thought they were supposed to be educational until my dad walked in and said, ‘What the hell is this?’ Later I became a big fan of political caricatures in the news – if cartoons could be used for propaganda, they could also be used for satire.”

One of the centrepieces in the survey show of propaganda art is a set of banners by the Indonesian collective Taring Padi. “They are outstanding,” says Keehan. “Taring Padi having been working in Yogyakarta since the fall of the Suharto regime in 1998. They were quite important organisers during that period.

“The collective is very much focussed on grassroots activities with various minority groups, such as farmers and the rural poor, and they produce some really vibrant projects in vernacular forms such as street posters, comic books and T-shirts. We’re showing four huge banners that have been produced very cheaply as woodblock prints – a bit of an activist tradition – but they’re also extremely well accomplished, graphically sophisticated and visually captivating.”

So, how do we define “propaganda”?

“It’s a tricky question, actually, as my example of the Cold War cartoons perhaps demonstrates,” Keehan says. “It’s worth noting that the word ‘propaganda’ hasn’t always had negative connotations, that it simply meant spreading a message as far as possible, propagating it. In that sense it’s no different from what we now call public relations and publicity.”

The exhibition shifts from the most widely accepted definition of propaganda, which is that associated with totalitarian regimes – in this case the Socialist Realist-derived art of North Korea and cultural revolution-era China – to more contemporary takes on the idea. Work featured comes from artists such as the Luo Brothers, who show connections between traditional communist propaganda and the advertising culture of contemporary China, and Tuan Andrew Nguyen, who shows cola ads, communist posters and wild-style graffiti jostling for attention in the streets of Vietnam.
You could argue that propaganda is as old as language itself, particularly when words or images are associated with communicating the value of one form of social organisation or another.  

In that sense, courtly or religious art and even mythical texts could be considered propagandist, at least to some degree. Its use in contemporary politics probably extends back to the European Enlightenment, when ideas of press freedom found various political factions starting their own newspapers and even commissioning artists to design and stage-manage mass spectacles. But just about every form of hegemony has sought legitimacy through art, music, literature and even sport.

“One of the key attributes of propaganda is its tendency to brush over some of the more monstrous aspects of an ideology. Its purpose is to sell the idea, not to unsettle people.“

Propaganda? runs until 21 October, Gallery Of Modern Art.
Paul Andrew
Time Off (Jul 18, 2012)


Q&A....more....



Where and how will these Taring Padi banner works hang in the exhibition and in what geographic or historical context ?
Formally they hang in a part of the exhibition concerned with print traditions in political art, which allow for easy reproducibility and mass exposure of various messages. Taring Padi’s work shows the clear influence of Socialist Realism, the official visual culture of Stalinism, with heroic figures paused in mid-action. But their composition is dense and non-linear, with an energy that is quite alien to totalitarian art, and their message is one of empowerment and mutual respect, rather than obedience of state ideology.

What is Propaganda exactly- and who decides if something is propaganda- how and when and where do they decide this, perhaps by way of reference citing two or three references from the exhibition?
It’s a tricky question, actually, as my example of the cold war cartoons perhaps demonstrates. It’s worth noting that the word “propaganda” hasn’t always had negative connotations, that it simply meant spreading a message as far as possible, propagating it. In that sense it’s no different from what we now call “public relations” and “publicity”. The exhibition shifts from the most widely accepted definition of propaganda, which is that associated with totalitarian regimes, in this case the Socialist Realist-derived art of North Korea and cultural revolution-era China, to more contemporary takes on the idea, such as the work of the Luo Brothers’, who show connections between traditional communist propaganda and the advertising culture of contemporary China, and Tuan Andrew Nguyen, who shows cola ads, communist posters and wild-style graffiti jostling for attention in the streets of Vietnam. We’ve also looked at visual representations of Australian nationalism, through the critical work of artists like Dianne Jones, and Tarryn Gill and Pilar Mata Dupont. Sometimes, propaganda can just be the work of passionate individuals expressing their frustration, as in Alfredo Jaar’s ‘Rwanda’ (2004) and Gordon Hookey’s ‘Defy’ (2010).

And what are some recent examples of propaganda, North Korea for example- tell me about the way artists represent the ideal/s?

State-sanctioned art in the DPRK is generally directed toward promoting the ideal of “juche” or the self-reliance of the North Korean state, which is primarily expressed through images of hard work and cooperation. Stylistically, the work draws on Soviet Socialist Realism, but it is inflected with local traditions, such as ink brush techniques and academic painting traditions left over from the Japanese occupation of Korea prior to World War II. The artists are particularly skilful and innovative – they need to be to make the work and its ideas attractive.

What are some of the most monstrous ideals portrayed in the exhibition?

One of the attributes of propaganda is its tendency to brush over some the more monstrous aspects of an ideology. Its purpose is to sell the idea, not to unsettle people. Sometimes it’s behind images of the greatest celebration that you find mass starvation and systematic abuses of human rights. Monstrous acts are usually only depicted critically, as in the example of John Heartfield’s brilliant anti-Nazi montages. One thing I love about Heartfield is that his images were so effective that he was just about the only major avant-garde artist in Germany not included in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition of  1937, which was itself a propaganda act by the Nazi’s intended to denigrate modernist art as brutal and inhuman. Heartfield’s work was just too powerful – they couldn’t dilute its message that they were the ones who were brutal and inhuman.

Tell me about the historical setting for this propaganda and what the image tries to convey and indeed waht you understand about the way the work was received interpreted and followed or of influence?

It’s really the social documentary work that is most interesting in this regard. The photographs of Li Zhensheng, for instance, documented his experiences of the cultural revolution in Harbin in China’s north-east. At the time, they were largely published in his local newspaper, for which he was a journalist. We’re included images of public rallies and performances in the exhibition, but there are also shots of denunciations, humiliations and executions. Yet these were considered in a positive light by the Chinese government of the time. It’s only with the passage of time that they begin to reveal the daily horror that period must have held for people. This is an instance of a propaganda becoming an important historical document. We can learn a lot from propaganda – it reveals so much about standards of social discourse in given societies at various times. Studying it can show those without a voice ways to be heard by broader publics. And it can make us think twice about the images and political messages we take for granted in our own lives.

Queensland went through a very long period of extreme right wing government in recent history- are there propaganda works from this dark period?

There are some terrific works critical of the Bjelke-Petersen era that we wanted to include but couldn’t for lack of space. But the posters produced by the Queensland Film and Dance Centre (now Griffith Artworks) were especially good, as was a lot of what 4ZZZ was doing at the time. 





Below
TARING PADI
Indonesia  est. 1998
Buruh bersatu (The workers unite) 2003
Woodcut print on canvas, open edition
242 x 122cm
Purchased 2010. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant
Collection: Queensland Art Gallery

Left
TARING PADIIndonesia  est. 1998
Petani (The farmer) 2003
Woodcut print on canvas open edition
242 x 122cm
Purchased 2010. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant
Collection: Queensland Art Gallery




No comments: