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"Castillo, Greg"
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Spinifex People as Cold War Moderns
Aboriginal Australian contemporary artists create works that express indigenous traditions as well as the unprecedented conditions of global modernity. This is especially true for the founders of the Spinifex Arts Project, a collective established in 1997 to create so-called “government paintings”: the large-scale canvases produced as documents of land tenure used in negotiations with the government of Western Australia to reclaim expropriated desert homelands. British and Australian nuclear testing in the 1950s displaced the Anangu juta pila nguru, now known to us as the Spinifex people, from their nomadic lifeworld. Exodus and the subsequent struggle to regain lost homelands through paintings created as corroborating evidence for native title claims make Spinifex canvases not simply expressions of Tjukurpa, or “Dreamings,” but also artifacts of the atomic age and its impact on a culture seemingly far from the front lines of cold war conflict.
Journal Article
Cold War on the home front : the soft power of midcentury design
Amid a display of sunshine-yellow electric appliances in a model home at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon squared off on the merits of their respective economic systems. One of the signature events of the cold war, the impromptu Kitchen Debate has been widely viewed as the opening skirmish in a propaganda war over which superpower could provide a better standard of living for its citizens. However, as Greg Castillo shows in Cold War on the Home Front, this debate and the American National Exhibition itself were, in fact, the culmination of a decade-long ideological battle fought with refrigerators, televisions, living room suites, and prefab homes.The first in-depth history of how domestic environments were exploited to promote the superiority of either capitalism or socialism on both sides of the Iron Curtain, Cold War on the Home Front reveals the tactics used by the American government to seduce citizens of the Soviet bloc with state-of-the-art consumer goods and the reactions of the Communist Party. Beginning in 1950, the U.S. State Department sponsored home expositions in West Berlin that were specifically designed to attract residents of East Berlin, featuring dream homes with modernist furnishings that presented an idealized vision of the lifestyle enjoyed by the consumer-citizen in the West. In response, Party authorities in East Germany staged socialist home expositions intended to evoke the domestic ideal of a cultured proletariat.Castillo closely follows the course of this escalating rivalry between competing consumer cultures through the 1950s, concluding that the Soviet blocs inability to make good on the claim that it could emulate goods and living standards offered by the West was a contributing factor in communisms eventual demise. Using a
mosaic of sources ranging from recently declassified government documents to homemaking journals and popular fiction, Cold War on the Home Front contributes an engaging new perspective on midcentury modernist style and its political uses at the dawn of the cold war.
eBook
Making a Spectacle of Restraint: The Deutschland Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels Exposition
The Deutschland pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair depicted West Germany not only as culturally and technologically modern but also as the antithesis of socialist East Germany and the disgraced Third Reich. International-style architecture and modernist exhibition design were mobilized as instruments of cultural soft power to convey these multiple messages. Hans Schwippert of the postwar German Werkbund choreographed exhibition design, deploying the miracle economy's modern consumer culture to celebrate the emergence of a post-Nazi society. Egon Eiermann, aided by Sep Ruf, designed the International-style pavilion, celebrated as the architecture of postwar modernity, but in fact derived from a precedent in Third Reich industrial architecture. As an exercise in cold war soft power, West Germany's Brussels pavilion celebrated the emergence of a West German consumer citizen, while suppressing the presence of a Third Reich past.
Journal Article
Spinifex people as Cold War moderns
Aboriginal Australian contemporary artists create works that express indigenous traditions as well as the unprecedented conditions of global modernity. This is especially true for the founders of the Spinifex Arts Project, a collective established in 1997 to create so-called government paintings: the large-scale canvases produced as documents of land tenure used in negotiations with the government of Western Australia to reclaim expropriated desert homelands. British and Australian nuclear testing in the 1950s displaced the \"Anangu juta pila nguru,\" now known to us as the Spinifex people, from their nomadic lifeworld. Exodus and the subsequent struggle to regain lost homelands through paintings created as corroborating evidence for native title claims make Spinifex canvases not simply expressions of Tjukurpa, or Dreamings, but also artifacts of the atomic age and its impact on a culture seemingly far from the front lines of cold war conflict. [Publication abstract]
Journal Article
Domesticating the Cold War: Household Consumption as Propaganda in Marshall Plan Germany
The origins of the US use of model home exhibitions as Cold War cultural propaganda are traced in this article from the campaign's inception in occupied Germany in the late 1940s, to the Nixon/Khrushchev debate at the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959. The US State Department employed federal design specialists and civilian talent, including Edgar Kaufmann Jr of New York's Museum of Modern Art, to mount exhibits that broadcast the Marshall Plan's conflation of democracy and rising private consumption to both West and East Germans in divided Berlin. As the campaign evolved, straightforward 'Americanization' strategies were shed in favour of a more complex approach that promoted International Style modernism to define a visionary world of postnational consumerism and its 'new man' (most convincingly engendered as a 'new woman') echoed the interwar era's avant-garde utopianism - a motive usually considered absent from the postwar period's International Style. The American programme of cultural influence in Western Europe reached into the East Bloc, where consumer socialism incorporated the Marshall Plan vision of commodified domesticity, as well as exhibition technique employed by the USA in divided Berlin, capitalism's showcase 'behind the Iron Curtain'.
Journal Article
The Nylon Curtain
Architectural historians have long privileged binary opposition as the trope through which to chronicle divided Berlin’s building culture. East Berlin’s Stalinallee and West Berlin’s Hansaviertel districts are the most cited case studies in this adversarial tale of two cities, a pairing that persuasively argues for an Iron Curtain dividing postwar German design practices. However, cultural cross-fertilization was another fundamental characteristic of the relationship between the two Berlins (Ladd 2005). Until the notorious Berlin Wall went up in 1961, Berliners crossed a permeable border to construct daily lives that transgressed the Cold War’s geopolitical realms.
Inspired by the ways consumers exploited
Book Chapter
PROMOTING SOCIALIST CITIES AND CITIZENS
Exploring the distinctions between capitalist advertising and socialist propaganda, art historian Boris Groys has contrasted “commercial, impersonal art that responds to and simultaneously strives to manipulate spontaneous consumer demand” with “the art of socialist realism, which markets not things but ideology . . . free and independent of the potential consumer, since marketing conditions rule out the possibility that the ideology will not be bought.”¹ The socialist-realist reconstruction of East Berlin as an advertisement for a Stalinist model of social and economic modernity defies Groys’s analysis. In the early 1950s, exploiting divided Berlin’s potential as a West-facing “showcase,” the leaders
Book Chapter