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1 June, 2013Discovery Channel Magazine, June 2013
“Art,” wrote the great Russian artist and poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, “is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.” He should know: in revolutionary Russia, Mayakovsky was one of the most talented and powerful exponents of propaganda art.
What is propaganda art, really? The author Colin Moore, in his book Propaganda Prints, calls it “art in the service of social and political change”, and if that seems a broad definition, it’s because propaganda is universal, covering the world, the ages, and a host of different evil and noble intents.
Chairman Mao’s face beneath a red-starred cap. Your Country Needs You. Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin holding a hammer and sickle aloft while satellites soar into space behind him from with the words: “Glory to the Soviet people – the pioneer of space!” A feisty American housewife with a red and white spotted handkerchief knotted in her hair, her bicep curled, saying “We can do it!” Posters from Cuba, from Mexico, from Vietnam; from the First World War, the Second, the Cold War. Hitler in a suit of armour, holding a flag with a swastika on it. Obama in stylised red white and blue stencil above the single word “Hope”. Posters warning you that Careless Talk Costs Lives, imploring you to grow vegetables, to buy war bonds, to avenge the sinking of the Lusitania, to send your husband to war, to Fight for the Dear Old Flag, to Keep Calm and Carry On. All of this is propaganda.
We tend to think of propaganda as a negative word, but in fact it really means any effort to persuade by the use of art and other media. “When most people talk about propaganda, what they have in their head is Nazis and totalitarianism: it’s what the bad people do, and it’s all lies,” says Ian Cooke, a curator at the British Library, which will launch an exhibition called Propaganda, Power and Persuasion in London in May. “But when you start looking at people who saw themselves as propagandists, it gets blurred. Public health propaganda, for example, saves lives. Even in wartime, you can argue that it saves lives if your aim is to get people to surrender rather than to keep fighting.”
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