war
Robert Baden-Powell’s Entomological Intrigues
In 1915 Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the worldwide Scouts movement, published his DIY guide to espionage, My Adventures as a Spy. Mark Kaufman explores how the book's ideas to utilise such natural objects as butterflies, moths and leaves, worked to mythologize British resourcefulness and promote a certain 'weaponization of the pastoral'. more
Ignorant Armies: Private Snafu Goes to War
Between 1943 and 1945, with the help of Warner Bros.' finest, the U.S. Army produced a series of 27 propaganda cartoons depicting the calamitous adventures of Private Snafu. Mark David Kaufman explores their overarching theme of containment and how one film inadvertently let slip one of the war's greatest secrets. more
Vernon Lee’s Satan the Waster: Pacifism and the Avant-Garde
Part essay collection, part shadow-play, part macabre ballet, Satan the Waster: A Philosophic War Trilogy (1920) is one of Vernon Lee’s most political and experimental works. Amanda Gagel explores this modernist masterpiece which lays siege to the patriotism plaguing Europe and offers a vision for its possible pacifist future. more
Gallipoli: Through the Soldier’s Lens
AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL - To mark the 100 years since Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) fought the Gallipoli campaign of WW1, Alison Wishart explores the remarkable photographic record left by the soldiers. Made possible by the birth of Kodak's portable camera, the photographs give a rare and intimate portrait of the soldier's day-to-day life away from the heat of battle. more
Propagating Propaganda: Franklin Barrett’s Red, White, and Blue Liberty Bond Carp
Toward the end of World War I, as the US peddled hard its Liberty Bonds for the war effort, goldfish dealer Franklin Barrett bred a stars-and-stripes-colored carp: a living, swimming embodiment of patriotism. Laurel Waycott uncovers the story of this “Liberty Bond Fish” and the wider use of animals in propaganda of the time. more
Luigi Russolo’s Cacophonous Futures
What does the future sound like? In the early 20th century, one answer rang out from Luigi Russolo’s intonarumori — lever-operated machines designed to pop, sough, shriek, and shock. Peter Tracy explores the ambitions behind Italian Futurism’s experiments with noise and the sensory, spiritual, and political affinities of this radical new music. more
Images from the Collective Unconscious: Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn and the Eranos Archive
In the 1930s, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, mystic and founder of the multidisciplinary Eranos forum, began compiling a diverse visual archive that would allow dreamers to cross-reference their visions with the entirety of cultural history. Frederika Tevebring explores this grandiose undertaking and its effect on the archivist, as images from the collection began to blur with her psyche. more
Little Boney: James Gillray and Napoleon’s Fragile Masculinity
Of all the caricatures of Napoleon Bonaparte, representations of the French emperor as a miniscule megalomaniac continue to haunt the historical imagination to an unparalleled degree. Peter W. Walker searches for the origins of “Little Boney” in the early 19th-century caricatures of James Gillray, the English illustrator who took Napoleon down a peg by diminishing his reputation and scale to the point of absurdity. more
Windows Onto History: The Defenestrations of Prague (1419–1997)
Throwing people out of windows (or defenestrating them, as the Latin has it) is an act imbued with longstanding political significance in Prague. From the Hussite revolt in the late Middle Ages through the Thirty Years’ War to modern instances of “autodefenestration”, Thom Sliwowski finds a national shibboleth imbued with ritual efficacy. more
Our Mortal Waltz: The Dance of Death Across Centuries
The sight of a skeletal corpse rarely inspires a rollicking jig. Yet for more than half a millennium, the dance of death in European visual art has imagined a tango between the quick and the dead. Allison C. Meier tracks the motif’s evolution across history, discovering how — through times of disease, war, and economic inequality — printmaking offered a means to both critique social ills and reflect upon new forms of human devastation. more
Cybernetic Attention: All Watched over by Machines We Learned to Watch
Before the attention economy consumed our lives, “pursuit tests” devised by the US military coupled man to machine with the aim of assessing focus under pressure. D. Graham Burnett explores these devices for evaluating aviators, finding a pre-history of the laboratory research that has relentlessly worked to slice and dice the attentional powers of human beings. more
