COLD WAR MODERN, VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, SOUTH KENSINGTON, LONDON
COLD WAR MODERN, VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, SOUTH KENSINGTON, LONDON
The Cold War Modern exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum is an attempt to reconcile versions of modernity represented by both sides in the Cold War. The exhibition includes a detailed Cold War chronology beginning after 1945 and then the thaw in East\West relations after the death of Stalin and Kruschev's famous speech denouncing Stalin (and his crimes of the 1920s and 1930s, including the famine in the Ukraine that was probably manipulated for political ends, the show trials and the era of the purges). There was some mention of the pre-1939 era, a prelude to the Cold War, but the chronological division also echoed the ideology of the exhibition which focused on how detonated and defused all the various legacies of the Cold War had become. Later versions of Communism in Eastern Europe, particularly in Yugoslavia, harked back to the 1917 era as a Golden Age which could be somehow recaptured only if Soviet (Russian) Imperalism could be defused.
The Modernist aesthetic is something the West embraced and the Soviets rejected with the exception of the Yugoslavs who were able to keep out Stalinist infringement and retain their ideological independence. James Joyce's magnum opus Ulysses had been denounced by the Party spokesman Radek and banned as a 'degenerate work of art' an oxymoron if ever there were one, summarising the fate of much of the really useful art of the era, novels, poems and plays that are on almost every school or university reading list today, art and architecture that is the very centre of any decent or respectable gallery retrospective. There were depictions and descriptions of the important films that summarised the Cold War, films more famous sometimes for their fashion and kitsch valuelessness than their serious or meaningful message, from Andre Tarkovsky's Solaris to Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey to Dr No, Goldfinger, The Ipcress File, but also Cuban Communist propaganda films such as Soy Cuba (I am Cuba), le Corbusier's film Poeme.
Fascination with Sputniks, Trabants, the Fernsehturm in East Berlin that summed up so much about the Cold War and Berlin itself the quintessential Cold War locale. The residents of East Berlin could go to the top of this monument via the elevator, looking down on West Berlin, but they could never cross the Berlin Wall to the other side. The entire disingenuousness of the Cold War mentality, telling big lies about the wall to conceal the small everyday lies (the wall was an 'anti-fascist barrier' not a blockade aimed at preventing one's own citizens from leaving), coldness and paranoia permeating everything. The exhibition certainly deals with that paranoia, indeed some of the propaganda exhibits are still relevant and telling, a poster dictating to us that the 8 o clock news is the police speaking to us amid other indirections, some of which today clearly seem laughable and nonsensical or still retain their chilling impact. The exhibition also attempts to explain why in the 1950s the Communist Bloc seemed to be on the verge of winning the economic battle and the Space Race too and how this shook the USA, making it realise that it must win the war or witness it's own destruction.
There's also the overall theme of nuclear annihilation, which seems a past aesthetic but at the time was horrifying and chilling. Of course tales of Armageddon have always terrorised the impressionable and have always existed, but this time the human race actually had the means to accomplish its own self-destruction, offering another, added dimension of ultimate terror to the era. The exhibition handles this aspect of the Cold War very well indeed, with a commentary on the ways in which artists incorporated elements of nuclear destruction with the whole kitsch discourse that typified the era, summed up perhaps in Shostakovitch's opera Opus 105: Moscow, Cheryomushki, operetta in three acts (1958) in which the characters sing of their desire for modern commodities, amenities and dance within a Modernist block of flats in an idealised neo-communist estate. Added to this is something about the peace movement, very briefly detailing Picasso's image of the dove and the way in which it was infinitely modulated and all the ways in which Picasso compromised himself or became involved by accident in things he clearly disapproved of or fell into by accident after having joined the Communist Party during the era of the war against fascism when it was practically a pre-requisite for an artist to do so.
There's a sense in which the artist is the final victor of the Cold War, after all the interminable propaganda is trundled out. The quality of innocence and suffering in Picasso's work seems to come over more palpably than ever. However there was a strange silence over Africa and African Marxism, which is apparantly where most of the Cold War was fought with an apparant total of 55 million dead, just as big and violent as WW2. This is a big reference to omit. Also and surprisingly, apart from Che Guevara there was no mention of the alternate visions of Marxism in Latin America, groups such as the FARC (still active) and The Shining Path guerillas of Peru, some of whom pursued violent revolution, and others pursuing a mix of violence and democracy and others still so spaced out as to be pursuing just about every conceivable agenda simultaneously.
Where the exhibition was successful was in mixing its discourse of the Space Race with those films of the era we have come to love, the real visions of both Utopia and Dystopia. That's the dichotomy the era revolved around, revolving still like the glass cased structure of the Berlin Fernsehturm in Alexanderplatz (not near Alexanderplatz as the exhibition sign insists) which shines in the sun like a vast cross and which came to be dubbed 'the Pope's revenge' by wags on the other side of the wall. The uses and abuses of language are also highlighted, although a useful section on language might have been interesting. There was a focus on political language, on Cold War acronyms, the most famous being MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) perhaps typifying the Cold War era.
Even so there's a tongue in cheek quality that appears somehow imperceptibly in the Bond films and in other areas of Cold War kitsch that insists that we should never take anything we see very seriously. The outer reaches of sci-fi somehow manage to permeate the last bit of the Cold War, with the cold philosophical limits of Solaris and the enigmatic ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey perhaps maintaining that a sense of mystery hangs over the ultimate conclusion of the war (the conclusion of all that is inconclusible). The exhibition outlines how visionaries had somehow seen beyond the end to sci-fi possibilities such as Cybernetics, Cyborgs (men uniting with machines, becoming Soft Machines) and the whole unique creativity and palpable insanity of the Cold War summed up perhaps in its most lasting symbol, Peter Sellers performance/s in Dr Strangelove or Buckminster Fuller's Geodesic domes and other outlines, creations and anti-creations.
Paul Murphy, London
The Cold War Modern exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum is an attempt to reconcile versions of modernity represented by both sides in the Cold War. The exhibition includes a detailed Cold War chronology beginning after 1945 and then the thaw in East\West relations after the death of Stalin and Kruschev's famous speech denouncing Stalin (and his crimes of the 1920s and 1930s, including the famine in the Ukraine that was probably manipulated for political ends, the show trials and the era of the purges). There was some mention of the pre-1939 era, a prelude to the Cold War, but the chronological division also echoed the ideology of the exhibition which focused on how detonated and defused all the various legacies of the Cold War had become. Later versions of Communism in Eastern Europe, particularly in Yugoslavia, harked back to the 1917 era as a Golden Age which could be somehow recaptured only if Soviet (Russian) Imperalism could be defused.
The Modernist aesthetic is something the West embraced and the Soviets rejected with the exception of the Yugoslavs who were able to keep out Stalinist infringement and retain their ideological independence. James Joyce's magnum opus Ulysses had been denounced by the Party spokesman Radek and banned as a 'degenerate work of art' an oxymoron if ever there were one, summarising the fate of much of the really useful art of the era, novels, poems and plays that are on almost every school or university reading list today, art and architecture that is the very centre of any decent or respectable gallery retrospective. There were depictions and descriptions of the important films that summarised the Cold War, films more famous sometimes for their fashion and kitsch valuelessness than their serious or meaningful message, from Andre Tarkovsky's Solaris to Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey to Dr No, Goldfinger, The Ipcress File, but also Cuban Communist propaganda films such as Soy Cuba (I am Cuba), le Corbusier's film Poeme.
Fascination with Sputniks, Trabants, the Fernsehturm in East Berlin that summed up so much about the Cold War and Berlin itself the quintessential Cold War locale. The residents of East Berlin could go to the top of this monument via the elevator, looking down on West Berlin, but they could never cross the Berlin Wall to the other side. The entire disingenuousness of the Cold War mentality, telling big lies about the wall to conceal the small everyday lies (the wall was an 'anti-fascist barrier' not a blockade aimed at preventing one's own citizens from leaving), coldness and paranoia permeating everything. The exhibition certainly deals with that paranoia, indeed some of the propaganda exhibits are still relevant and telling, a poster dictating to us that the 8 o clock news is the police speaking to us amid other indirections, some of which today clearly seem laughable and nonsensical or still retain their chilling impact. The exhibition also attempts to explain why in the 1950s the Communist Bloc seemed to be on the verge of winning the economic battle and the Space Race too and how this shook the USA, making it realise that it must win the war or witness it's own destruction.
There's also the overall theme of nuclear annihilation, which seems a past aesthetic but at the time was horrifying and chilling. Of course tales of Armageddon have always terrorised the impressionable and have always existed, but this time the human race actually had the means to accomplish its own self-destruction, offering another, added dimension of ultimate terror to the era. The exhibition handles this aspect of the Cold War very well indeed, with a commentary on the ways in which artists incorporated elements of nuclear destruction with the whole kitsch discourse that typified the era, summed up perhaps in Shostakovitch's opera Opus 105: Moscow, Cheryomushki, operetta in three acts (1958) in which the characters sing of their desire for modern commodities, amenities and dance within a Modernist block of flats in an idealised neo-communist estate. Added to this is something about the peace movement, very briefly detailing Picasso's image of the dove and the way in which it was infinitely modulated and all the ways in which Picasso compromised himself or became involved by accident in things he clearly disapproved of or fell into by accident after having joined the Communist Party during the era of the war against fascism when it was practically a pre-requisite for an artist to do so.
There's a sense in which the artist is the final victor of the Cold War, after all the interminable propaganda is trundled out. The quality of innocence and suffering in Picasso's work seems to come over more palpably than ever. However there was a strange silence over Africa and African Marxism, which is apparantly where most of the Cold War was fought with an apparant total of 55 million dead, just as big and violent as WW2. This is a big reference to omit. Also and surprisingly, apart from Che Guevara there was no mention of the alternate visions of Marxism in Latin America, groups such as the FARC (still active) and The Shining Path guerillas of Peru, some of whom pursued violent revolution, and others pursuing a mix of violence and democracy and others still so spaced out as to be pursuing just about every conceivable agenda simultaneously.
Where the exhibition was successful was in mixing its discourse of the Space Race with those films of the era we have come to love, the real visions of both Utopia and Dystopia. That's the dichotomy the era revolved around, revolving still like the glass cased structure of the Berlin Fernsehturm in Alexanderplatz (not near Alexanderplatz as the exhibition sign insists) which shines in the sun like a vast cross and which came to be dubbed 'the Pope's revenge' by wags on the other side of the wall. The uses and abuses of language are also highlighted, although a useful section on language might have been interesting. There was a focus on political language, on Cold War acronyms, the most famous being MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) perhaps typifying the Cold War era.
Even so there's a tongue in cheek quality that appears somehow imperceptibly in the Bond films and in other areas of Cold War kitsch that insists that we should never take anything we see very seriously. The outer reaches of sci-fi somehow manage to permeate the last bit of the Cold War, with the cold philosophical limits of Solaris and the enigmatic ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey perhaps maintaining that a sense of mystery hangs over the ultimate conclusion of the war (the conclusion of all that is inconclusible). The exhibition outlines how visionaries had somehow seen beyond the end to sci-fi possibilities such as Cybernetics, Cyborgs (men uniting with machines, becoming Soft Machines) and the whole unique creativity and palpable insanity of the Cold War summed up perhaps in its most lasting symbol, Peter Sellers performance/s in Dr Strangelove or Buckminster Fuller's Geodesic domes and other outlines, creations and anti-creations.
Paul Murphy, London
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