Volume 2, Issue 2

Abstract

Abstract

The political in representation, as active dissent, has no meaning if it is denied that the visual can mean – propose, argue, reason, contend – in ways comparable to that achieved in language. In the first part of this article, working through the analysis of a number of political posters (above all the Obama Hope poster from 2008) the case was made for seeing the visual configuration of the work (its design or disegno) as structuring the work in potentially the same way as arguments and propositions are structured in language. Working from the comparison between a moment from Hamlet and Margaret Bourke-White’s famous photograph from Louisville 1937 (which shows a line of people standing queuing for flood relief below a poster boosting the American Way) part two takes much further the analysis of the Bourke-White photograph opened in part one but it balances this with an exploration of a remarkable, but little known, 1993 Holocaust memorial in Berlin by the artist and art historian couple Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock. As the only Holocaust memorial centred on a distributed series of printed, poster-like images, the memorial is analysed both in its economy and in the force of its political gestures. Taken together the two analyses offer the embryo of a theory of the politics of visual dissent.

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/content/journals/10.1386/post.2.2.171_1
2011-12-01
2024-03-29
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http://instance.metastore.ingenta.com/content/journals/10.1386/post.2.2.171_1
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Keyword(s): configuration; dissent; event; history; holocaust; politics; poster; proposition

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