Art

James D Yound reviews 'CLR James: a political biography' Download PDF

The Disobedient Objects exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, emits a strange atmosphere. It is a curation of works, or “objects” which have contributed to social change, collected over the last three decades. The room is filled with seemingly random objects, from DIY signs made by the Karnataka Farmers’ Association trying to protect their farms, bust cards made in the UK for those campaigning for gay rights in the 60s and Burmese currency made illegally, secretly featuring the face of Aung San Suu Kyi. The tone inferred by the descriptions of each piece, left by the creators...

According to the curators Paul Gravett and John Harris Dunning and artistic director David McKean, the exhibition explores the British Library’s collection of comics and plumbs the depths of private collections, to show the history of British sequential art, as well as its writers and artists. It partially succeeds. The curators wanted to show the political history of comics, the medium’s ability to subvert, and its role as a medium for analysing class, sexuality and ethnicity, not to mention the many occasions when it has become the subject of political battles. The exhibition has some very...

This review was originally published by the Labor and Working-Class History Association, and appears on their website here . To orders copies of the book, click here . This new book of political cartoons, In an Era of Wars and Revolutions: American Socialist Cartoons of the Mid-Twentieth Century , edited by Sean Matgamma, should be of interest to labour historians and those interested in mid-20th century Left politics. The title page of this unique volume of reprints indicates the art is “By Carlo and others.” Jesse Cohen, the artist who called himself “Carlo” was, along with Laura Gray, the...

Jeremy Deller is a populist artist in the best sense of the word. His 2012 retrospective was entitled ‘Joy in People’ and his works are often concerned with everyday life and the things people do with their leisure. They sometimes involve their direct participation as with his procession through Manchester and his recreation of the Battle of Orgreave during the miners’ strike. He has been described as a social cartographer and shows a deep interest in working class culture and history expressed through his use of the style and materials of trade union banners to transmit his 21st century...

"Playtime", a video installation by Isaac Julien. Victoria Miro Gallery, 16 Wharf Rd, London N1 7RW (to 1 March). Of the six segments of film comprising Isaac Julien's "Playtime" video installation, the most ostentatiously playful and fictional is also the most literal and documentary. It is a parody of the adulatory celebrity interview, with the actress Maggie Cheung portraying an extravagantly gushing interviewer. The interviewee, Simon de Pury, one of the world's most famous art auctioneers, is however playing himself. When a wealthy person commissions him to sell an artwork, says de Pury...

Socialist propaganda, defined by the Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov, conveys many ideas to a few people, whereas agitation conveys only one or a few ideas to a whole mass of people. So what’s the point of socialist political cartoons? Pictures can sometimes convey ideas more vividly than a thousand words or a 10-minute speech. Cartoons are both valuable propaganda and effective agitation. This 300-page book of cartoons spans the end of the period of high imperialism, from the 1920s to the Second World War, and culminates in the mid-1950s at the beginning of post-war US hegemony. The first...

Vicki Morris reviews a major exhibition of works by Nottingham-born artist Paul Waplington. The Paul Waplington exhibition at Nottingham Castle showed works from what the exhibition notes call “a recent but by-gone age”, the 1970s and 80s. A Central TV documentary about Waplington, broadcast in 1984, forms part of the exhibition. In it the artist comes across as the original “Grumpy Old Man”, mourning the passing of this by-gone, almost golden, past. Happily, Waplington’s pictures — even of the East Midlands (he now lives in sunnier, rural Portugal) — are the opposite of grumpy: warm...

Between the 1930s and the 1950s the revolutionary socialist press in the USA had talented cartoonists such as “Carlo” (Jesse Cohen). A new collection of their work gives a snapshot history of the times — the rise of the mass trade union movement in the USA, the great strike wave of 1945-6, the fight against "Jim Crow" racism, World War Two, the imposition of Stalinism on Eastern Europe... It puts socialist policy proposals — opening the books of the corporations, organising workers' defence guards... — in vivid form. For readers who already know a bit about the politics, it gives an...

This exhibition is expansive, comprehensive, chronological, and as well-ordered as the work on display. All that is good. However, I felt less inspired than I thought I would be. Klee should be my thing. Early 20th century, modernist, hated by the Nazis — what’s not to like? In truth nothing here is not to like. Klee’s vast collection of work, in slightly different styles at different points in his life, shows him to be an artist who was constantly experimenting and pushing at boundaries. It is true, as has been said, that the close texture of musical composition is reflected in the small...