Floating on oil and antiquities: Iraq Petroleum, Al Amiloon Fil Naft and Iraqi cultural modernism

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 85-101
Author(s):  
Tiffany Floyd
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Relations ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Cultural Ideologies ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Petroleum Company

The Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) played a paradoxically contentious and constructive role in the development and distribution of Iraqi modern art and visual culture during the twentieth century. During the 1950s and 1960s, the IPC sponsored a wide-ranging public relations platform that not only advanced the company’s agendas but also opened spaces for Iraqi artists, writers and thinkers to articulate their own cultural ideologies. In its publicity campaigns, the IPC often triangulated oil, antiquity and modernity into narratives of sociocultural progress to promote its brand. This article explores how the Baghdad-based editors of the IPC’s Al Amiloon Fil Naft reformulated this vision of Iraq’s ancient and modern history to fit within the locally constituted cultural trends, fashioning Al Amiloon Fil Naft into a cultural journal that circulated a nationalist vision of Iraqi modernism.

Images of Insurgency: Reading the Cuban Revolution through Military Aesthetics and Embodiment

2020 ◽  
pp. 213-241
Author(s):  
Jane Tynan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
Cuban Revolution ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
The 1950S

A growing global visual culture in the 1950s and 1960s made image and self-presentation techniques critical to the transnational impact of the Cuban revolution. This chapter explores how popular culture shaped the interpretation of events by photographers, journalists and designers, who were often inspired by the anarchic forms of militarism the rebels adopted. When the rebels came into view, they were hypermasculine, complete with cowboy hats, long hair, cigars, and a cheerful contempt for uniformity; they created images of insurgency that were a compelling form of cultural exchange for revolutionary Cuba. They appeared to highlight creativity and subversive visual practices, but their performances were also raced and gendered. The chapter draws on a range of primary sources to consider the significance of aesthetics and embodiment to understanding the images, textures and experiences that characterised the Cuban revolution, but also what it reveals about the shape of twentieth century military insurgencies.

Lam, Wifredo (1902–1982)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Hartman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Trojan Horse ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
Cultural Meaning ◽  
Intimate Knowledge ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The 1950S

The work of Cuban artist Wifredo Lam is internationally recognized for its blending of European modernism, especially cubism and surrealism, with the visual culture of Africa and the Caribbean. Lam is most famous for his paintings of mask-like figures and animal–human hybrids arranged in geometrized tropical spaces. These figures often suggest the spirit of orishas, divine beings associated with Santería, a Cuban religion that fuses Catholic saint imagery with the sacred practices of the Yoruba in West Africa. Lam’s hybrid figures engaged and subverted the modernist technique of primitivism—a technique that entails the appropriation of non-Western visual forms regardless of cultural meaning, as in the African mask-like faces of Picasso’s famous painting Les Demoiselles D’ Avignon (1907). With an intimate knowledge of Afro-Cuban cosmologies, Lam asserted that his appropriations embodied a kind of "Trojan Horse"—recombinant visual forms that challenged bourgeois tastes based on Western stereotypes. Lam’s most famous work comes from his time in Cuba, before he settled in Paris in the 1950s. The Jungle, created in 1943 and currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is considered Lam’s masterpiece.

Frontiers of Visibility

Transfers ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franziska Torma
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Current Understanding ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
History Of ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Popular Images ◽  
Cinematic Technology

This article deals with the history of underwater film and the role that increased mobility plays in the exploration of nature. Drawing on research on the exploration of the ocean, it analyzes the production of popular images of the sea. The entry of humans into the depths of the oceans in the twentieth century did not revitalize myths of mermaids but rather retold oceanic myths in a modern fashion. Three stages stand out in this evolution of diving mobility. In the 1920s and 1930s, scenes of divers walking under water were the dominant motif. From the 1940s to the 1960s, use of autonomous diving equipment led to a modern incarnation of the “mermen“ myth. From the 1950s to the 1970s, cinematic technology was able to create visions of entire oceanic ecosystems. Underwater films contributed to the period of machine-age exploration in a very particular way: they made virtual voyages of the ocean possible and thus helped to shape the current understanding of the oceans as part of Planet Earth.

Alive Still

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathy Curtis
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Severe Form ◽  
The Other ◽  
Left Hand ◽  
Right Hand ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Village Voice

In 1942, at age twenty, after a vision-impaired and rebellious childhood in Richmond, Virginia, Nell Blaine decamped for New York. Operations had corrected her eyesight, and she was newly aware of modern art, so different from the literal style of her youthful drawings. In Manhattan, she met rising young artists and poets. Her life was hectic, with raucous parties in her loft, lovers of both sexes, and freelance design jobs, including a stint at the Village Voice. Initially drawn to the rigorous formalism of Piet Mondrian, she received critical praise for her jazzy abstractions. During the 1950s, she began to paint interiors and landscapes. By 1959, when the Whitney Museum purchased one of her paintings, her career was firmly established. That year, she contracted a severe form of polio on a trip to Greece; suddenly, she was a paraplegic. Undaunted, she taught herself to paint in oil with her left hand, reserving her right hand for watercolors. In her postpolio work, she achieved a freer style, expressive of the joy she found in flowers and landscapes. Living half the year in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the other half in New York, she took special delight in painting the views from her windows and from her country garden. Critics found her new style irresistible, and she had a loyal circle of collectors; still, she struggled to earn enough money to pay the aides who made her life possible. At her side for her final twenty-nine years was her lover, painter Carolyn Harris.

Australia

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Ville
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Multinational Corporations ◽  
Business Model ◽  
Capital Markets ◽  
Business Groups ◽  
Business Group ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Resource Base ◽  
Australian Economy ◽  
Diversified Portfolio

Business groups have been limited in number and influence for most of Australia’s modern history. Several entrepreneurs managed a diversified portfolio of interests, and business families often cooperated with one another, but this rarely took the form of a business group. When the Australian economy diversified into manufacturing from its initial narrow resource base, multinational corporations formed a dominant presence. Governments built infrastructure but did not facilitate groups. Maturing capital markets negated the need for in-house treasuries. Business groups temporarily dominated the corporate landscape for several decades towards the end of the twentieth century, but their business model was flawed in relation to the Australian environment and most failed to survive the downturn of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Coda

2020 ◽  
pp. 734-743
Author(s):  
Laura U. Marks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious Fundamentalism ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
Grassroots Politics ◽  
International Solidarity ◽  
Guerrilla Movements ◽  
History Of ◽  
Armed Resistance ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Arabic Speaking

In the twentieth-century Arabic-speaking world, communism animated anticolonial revolutions, workers’ organizations, guerrilla movements, and international solidarity. The communist dream was cut short by Arab governments, deals with global superpowers, the rise of religious fundamentalism, and historical bad luck. But recently a remarkable number of Arab filmmakers have turned their attention to the history of the radical Left. Filmmakers from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco have been urgently seeking models for grassroots politics in the labor movements, communist parties, and secular armed resistance of earlier generations. This coda explores two strata of communist audiovisual praxis: the radical cinema that supported labor movements and guerrilla actions from the 1950s to the 1980s, and recent films that draw on that earlier movement. The coda argues that the Arab audiovisual archive holds flashes of communism that have been neither fulfilled nor entirely extinguished. The new films release their unspent energy into the present, diagnosing earlier failures of Arab communism and making plans for new forms of solidarity.

"Us" vs. "Them". Communist Dialectical Images from Interwar Europe and Soviet Russia

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adri Kácsor
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Propaganda ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Soviet Russia ◽  
Interwar Europe

Brawny male workers vs. bulging bourgeois men. Working-class mothers burdened by the hardship of poverty and childcare vs. elegant upper-class women enjoying a lifestyle of privilege. Such juxtaposed images of workers and the rich were prevalent in the visual culture of communism throughout the twentieth century, appearing on posters, illustrations, and other genres of political propaganda across countries and continents. Although these didactic propaganda images have rarely been considered in histories of modernism and the avant-garde, this article argues that they were among the key visual inventions of twentieth-century communist visual culture given their highly innovative aesthetics and juxtaposed structure that provided them a potential to become dialectical. Drawing on examples from interwar Europe and Soviet Russia, this article examines how didactic juxtapositions could become dialectical images, triggering political transformations while also making revolutionary class consciousness visible for the viewer.

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