American Artists Paint the City: Katharine Kuh, the 1956 Venice Biennale, and New York's Place in the Cold War Art World

2007 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 31-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Caroline Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Art World ◽  
American Artists ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The City ◽  
Venice Biennale ◽  
War Art

Atomized urbanism: secrecy and security from the Gulag to the Soviet closed cities

Urban History ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Asif Siddiqi
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Urban Geography ◽  
General Public ◽  
Early History ◽  
Physical Isolation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Camp System ◽  
Spatial Terms ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The City

Abstract This article recovers the early history of the Soviet ‘closed city’, towns that during the Cold War were absent from maps and unknown to the general public due to their involvement in weapons research. I argue that the closed cities echoed and appropriated features of the Stalinist Gulag camp system, principally their adoption of physical isolation and the language of obfuscation. In doing so, I highlight a process called ‘atomized urbanism’ that embodies the tension between the obdurate reality of the city and the goal of the state to obliterate that reality through secrecy. In spatial terms, ‘atomized’ also describes the urban geography of these cities which lacked any kind of organic suburban expansion.

A Tower of Tangled Histories: The Upper Silesia Tower in Poznań and the Making of an Unromantic Poland, 1911–1955

Slavic Review ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 566-590
Author(s):  
Patryk Babiracki
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Cold War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Material Structure ◽  
World War ◽  
Upper Silesia ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The City ◽  
Over Time

Engaging with regional, international, and spatial histories, this article proposes a new reading of the twentieth-century Polish past by exploring the vicissitudes of a building known as the Upper Silesia Tower. Renowned German architect Hans Poelzig designed the Tower for the 1911 Ostdeutsche Ausstellung in Posen, an ethnically Polish city under Prussian rule. After Poland regained its independence following World War I, the pavilion, standing centrally on the grounds of Poznań’s International Trade Fair, became the fair's symbol, and over time, also evolved into visual shorthand for the city itself. I argue that the Tower's significance extends beyond Posen/Poznań, however. As an embodiment of the conflicts and contradictions of Polish-German historical entanglements, the building, in its changing forms, also concretized various efforts to redefine the dominant Polish national identity away from Romantic ideals toward values such as order, industriousness, and hard work. I also suggest that eventually, as a material structure harnessed into the service of socialism, the Tower, with its complicated past, also brings into relief questions about the regional dimensions of the clashes over the meaning of modernity during the Cold War.

scholarly journals De-centring Managua: post-earthquake reconstruction and revolution in Nicaragua

Urban History ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 663-685
Author(s):  
DAVID JOHNSON LEE
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Modernization Theory ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The City ◽  
Earthquake Reconstruction

ABSTRACT:The reconstruction of Managua following the 1972 earthquake laid bare the contradictions of modernization theory that justified the US alliance with Latin American dictators in the name of democracy in the Cold War. Based on an idealized model of urban development, US planners developed a plan to ‘decentralize’ both the city of Managua and the power of the US-backed Somoza dictatorship. In the process, they helped augment the power of the dictator and create a city its inhabitants found intolerable. The collective rejection of the city, the dictator and his alliance with the United States, helped propel Nicaragua toward its 1979 revolution and turned the country into a Cold War battleground.

scholarly journals Narracje zniszczenia. Trauma wojenna w muzeach miejskich Petersburga, Warszawy i Drezna

2010 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-21
Author(s):  
Zuzanna Bogumił ◽  
Joanna Wawrzyniak
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
National History ◽  
Innocent Victim ◽  
Local Experience ◽  
Cold War Era ◽  
Dominant State ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Interpretation Patterns ◽  
The City

The authors analyse the presentation of WWII in the city museums of St Petersburg, Warsaw and Dresden. These narratives, they argue, are the effect of merging and interconnection of themes and elements coming from various types of discourse, shaped respectively by the local communities and by the state’s historical policy. Having characterised the most important elements of these two discourses, the authors indicate that to this day, the exhibitions contain interpretation patterns characteristic for the Cold War era. The dominant state discourse strongly influences the presentation of the city’s destruction and its inhabitants’ trauma. The exhibitions in both Warsaw and St Petersburg emphasize the image of an innocent victim attacked by the enemy, and present the city’s destruction in terms of lost but heroic struggle. In Dresden, there are visible references to the discourses of German guilt and German suffering. The exhibitions cannot detach themselves from the context of national history, and they fail to present many aspects of the local experience of WWII.

scholarly journals Deviating memories: Armando Lulaj’s seriously playful excursions into Albania’s history

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (32) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Grgic
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Visual Memory ◽  
National History ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Balkan Region ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
First Time ◽  
Venice Biennale

This paper examines how certain contemporary audio-visual works from post-socialist countries in the Balkan region, employ archival footage from the communist period, to address and problematize the notion of remembering and suppressing national history through collective memory. I specifically focus on the work of the Albanian artist, Armando Lulaj and his videos Albanian Trilogy: A Series of Devious Stratagems (2011, 2012 and 2015) exhibited at the 56th Venice Biennale. By re-using images and narratives produced during Enver Hoxha’s regime, and still ingrained in Albanian visual memory, these films provide alternative readings of Albanian history from the Cold War to the present day. What is more, some of this archival material is made public for the first time, while the rest has been dormant and purposely forgotten in archival vaults. Lulaj’s playful excursions, create connections between a problematic and suppressed past and the difficult and selective present, by juxtaposing evocative and politically charged visual records and contemporary footage of artist’s commissioned performances.

scholarly journals Tribeca Belfast and the on-screen regeneration of Northern Ireland

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Baker
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
City Centre ◽  
Global Competitiveness ◽  
Marginalized Groups ◽  
Professional Class ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The City ◽  
Mobile Professional

This article looks at media representations of the projected regeneration of Northern Ireland, paying particular attention to a recent promotional film made to elicit support for the redevelopment of a part of Belfast’s city centre. Commissioned by Castlebrooke Investments, ‘Tribeca Belfast’ offers a future prospectus of the city that is as superficial as it is bland. It is, however, illustrative of two influential ideas and strategies that took flight at the end of the Cold War and the ‘triumph of capitalism’. One seeks peace through the application of neo-liberal nostrums; the other combines brand theory with state-craft in pursuit of global competitiveness. Both propose models of citizenship that are politically benign, either preferring middle class solipsism or demanding brand loyalty. In Castlebrooke’s projection of a future Belfast, this translates into a city peopled by a mobile professional class, waited upon and entertained by servile locals. But such a sterile vision is inimical to building peace and political progress because it underestimates and downplays the significance of marginalized groups who through their activism and expressions of solidarity can lay better claim to the ‘heart and soul’ of Belfast evoked by Castlebrooke.

scholarly journals Operation “Lifesaver”: Canadian Atomic Culture and Cold War Civil Defence

2008 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frances Reilly
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Canadian History ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Rich ◽  
War Experience ◽  
Civil Defence ◽  
Ma Thesis ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The City

On September 28th 1955, the city of Calgary executed one of the only major civil defence evacuation operations in Canadian history. The exercise, Operation “Lifesaver,” was a product of careful planning over a series of months but failed to attract the interest of most Calgary citizens. The operation exhibited both the Canadian government’s concern for civil defence during the 1950s and the desire for civic pride in a decade that favoured a homogenous and functional society. Operation “Lifesaver” was not an accurate representation of a nuclear attack; instead it was a controlled exercise devised to calm the fears of civilians in the face of possible war. Despite the rich primary sources available, Canada’s civil defence experiences during the Cold War remain an allusive topic in Canadian historiography. Operation “Lifesaver” holds a prominent position in Alberta history in an era that defined much of Canada’s nationality and society. This article is the third chapter of my History MA thesis which examines the place of Atomic Culture in Canadian history and the Canadian Cold War experience.

Making New Music in Cold War Poland

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Jakelski
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
Eastern Bloc ◽  
Art World ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Institutional Organization ◽  
Arts Administrators ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
East West

This book presents a social analysis of new music dissemination at the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, one of the first and most important venues for East-West cultural contact during the Cold War. The festival’s stylistically diverse programs ranged from Soviet-sponsored socialist realism to the modernism of the Western avant-garde. It also facilitated encounters between people (performers, composers, critics, arts administrators, government functionaries, and general audiences) from both sides of the Cold War. Drawing on Howard Becker’s model of the art world, and Stephen Greenblatt’s model of cultural mobility, the book contends that the performance of social interactions in particular institutional frameworks (such as music festivals) have shaped the practices, values, and concepts associated with “new” music (or “contemporary” music). Moreover, the book contests static notions of East-West division and challenges the metaphor of an impermeable “Iron Curtain.” Chapters 1-3 examine the Warsaw Autumn’s institutional organization, negotiation, and reception in socialist Poland during the post-Stalin Thaw. Chapters 4-6 consider the festival’s worldwide ramifications, particularly the ways that it contributed to the performance of cultural diplomacy, engendered international and transnational ties, sparked change within the Eastern Bloc, assisted the globalization of avant-garde ideas, and facilitated the cross-border circulation of people, objects, and ideas. The epilogue briefly considers how new music is being defined and disseminated in post-socialist Poland.

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