Propaganda exhibition at BL

There is an exhibition on at the British Library right now called "Propaganda" - a collection of books, leaflets, posters, videos, etc all about propaganda of all types from any and all countries. I was interested to see how they succeeded in making these types of objects engaging and display them effectively - how does one make quotes and books exciting? Well, you could start by printing those provocative quotes on creepy face-less human forms and dispersing them around the entrance...

Quite effective really. 

The exhibition began with the "origins' of propaganda...Trajan's column can be seen as one of the earliest manifestations of propaganda. Coins and medallions with profiles of emperors/politicians/etc were also a forms of propaganda

We then moved onto printing and books...Reformation propaganda is an obvious place to start - who doesn't love looking at pictures of "the donkey-pope of Rome?"

I loved this - American anti-British propaganda - this below was designed by Paul Revere and shows a (grossly distorted) version of the Boston Massacre.

This is cool - the British went to new lengths by literally making board games for children about the conquest of their colonies. The game below refers to British domination of South Africa. Players re-enact Britain's campaign under the command of Lord Roberts as they march on Pretoria.

I was happy to see they included a painting - this is a whole subject in itself (political portraits as propaganda) and there was a nice explanation of the conventions Napoleon used next to this portrait of him (the laurel crown, the scepter, the coronation robes, the throne etc all legitimize him as the inheritor of France's monarchical tradition)

I thought this display was an engaging way to talk about political propaganda - bright flags with small windows to display the propaganda from various countries helps make the space visually exciting despite the small size of the actual objects displayed.

These were produced during the South African elections in 1994 - the comic book is awesome. It is all about a young man convincing his father that the elections will actually be fair and allow for non-whites in South Africa to have a voice. The first elections in which all adults could vote was this year, 1994...less than 20 years ago.

I thought this was interesting was an curatorial move - how does one present videos? If you just played it out loud, you could only do a few so the sounds didn't compete. By putting headphones here, one can listen if they want to and get a really personal experience. The movies were only a few minutes long (usually speeches or political parades) and I didn't have to wait in line for any - I thought it was very effective. 

This was something I had never thought about before - souvenirs as propaganda tools? Yep.

I had never seen this before - a book literally full of Hitler greeting and being nice to children. Nazi propaganda at its best? 

THIS I thought was very applicable to recent events - the poster is from 1971, more than 40 years ago. It is from the Soviet Union and is called "Freedom American-Style." In the poster, the Statue of Liberty is parodied as a look-out tower for the American police to observe its people, mocking the idea that it is a symbol of freedom. The poster attacks and subverts American propaganda that promoted the idea of the democratic freedom of the West. I think it is particularly applicable to the recent Edward Snowden controversies.

I listened to this vid - George Bush coining the term "axis of evil" in his state of the union address. 

We've all seen this image a million times, but cool to see one of the original posters.

 This was probably my absolute favorite piece of the whole exhibition - it is a silk scarf trying to discourage people from discussing war and other political matters out loud in public (on the bus etc)...clearly aimed at women (the object is a silk scarf after all), it shows five different scenarios where women could be overheard by enemy agents - produced during WWII.

Last but not least, this was another headphones-only piece - I listened to some good old Nazi Jazz (which I never even knew existed?)...the words are basically political propaganda demonizing enemies of the Nazi regime and praising its leaders, all to the jolly tunes of 1940s jazz. Really interesting.