This article was downloaded by: [Heather Diack]On: 18 May 2015, At: 06:23Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: MortimerHouse, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Click for updates

Visual StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rvst20

Hand over fist: a chronicle of Cold War photographyHeather DiackPublished online: 15 May 2015.

To cite this article: Heather Diack (2015) Hand over fist: a chronicle of Cold War photography, Visual Studies, 30:2,182-194, DOI: 10.1080/1472586X.2015.1024963

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2015.1024963

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) containedin the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose ofthe Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be reliedupon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shallnot be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and otherliabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematicreproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in anyform to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Hand over fist: a chronicle of Cold War photography

HEATHER DIACK

Group Material’s Timeline: The Chronicle of USInvention in Latin and Central America (1984) at P.S.1’sCenter for Contemporary Art explored the framing devicesof installation art and photography in tandem, as a meansof reconfiguring the distribution of the sensible at theheight of the Cold War. In response to escalating crisis(including continuous Central Intelligence Agencyoperations being carried out in Nicaragua and ElSalvador), this activist project employed postmodernstrategies such as appropriation, pastiche and a resistanceto conclusiveness in order to suggest provocative andunexpected dialogues between disparate artworks andartefacts across time and geopolitical difference. Artistsranging from Richard Prince and Barbara Kruger to JohnHeartfield, Tina Modotti and Arellano Bolivar, amongothers, come together as signs of political and aestheticconflict, as networks of visual culture that complicatedominant narratives of spatial and temporal reality duringthe Cold War era. Closer analysis of such works revealshistorical ruptures alongside continuities, relayed byofficial government policy, mass media and the art worldmore broadly. By excavating a long-standing history ofconflict, Timeline addresses the stakes of the ownership ofmeaning itself in the mid-1980s, with implicationsregarding art production and politics for generations tocome.

Rather than ask, ‘What is the attitude of a workto the relations of production of its time?’ Ishould like to ask, ‘What is its position inthem?’

Walter Benjamin ([1938] 1978)

Imagining and imaging the reconfiguration of perceptualforms is a political act. In theorist Jacques Rancière’s(2009, 25) formulation, politics itself ‘consists inreconfiguring the distribution of the sensible’. Moreover,since ‘[p]olitics revolves around what is seen and whatcan be said about it, around who has the ability to seeand the talent [la qualité] to speak, around theproperties of spaces and the possibilities of time’(Rancière 2004, 13), visual culture and discoursecompose deeply connected and fraught political terrain.For Rancière (2009, 59), ‘the dream of a suitable political

work of art’ then ‘is […] the dream of disrupting therelationship between the visible, the sayable, and thethinkable’. Such an act entwines politics with poetics,creating the possibility of rethinking crucialrelationships between space, time and people. Between1979 and 1996, Group Material produced more thanforty-five projects linking political and artistic issues,and provocatively reformulating aesthetico-politicalrelations.1 This New York-based collaboration of youngartist activists repeatedly insisted on exposing thecomplicity of the culture of capitalism, as embedded indaily life in the United States, with atrocities abroad, aswell as making visible the collapsed spaces betweenpublic and private realms. Throughout the Cold War,Group Material attempted to unsettle oversimplifiedbinaries (democracy versus socialism, capitalism versuscommunism, radical versus conservative) and demystifythe commercial and aesthetic guises of capitalism, bycomplicating and clarifying the connections betweenphotographic alignments and political alliances. In otherwords, in highlighting the instrumental role of visualculture in that system, Group Material raised awarenessof the exploitative relationship between the United Statesand Latin and Central America.

Timeline: The Chronicle of US Invention in Latin andCentral America presents a compelling example ofGroup Material’s focus on social interaction andcollaboration. Installed in a single room of P.S.1’s Centerfor Contemporary Art in Queens from 22 January to 18March 1984, Group Material desired ‘to illustrate thecrucial issues of the Central and Latin American–USrelationship’, through the installation of ‘disparateobjects, artworks, commodities and historicaldocuments’ (Ault 2010, 83).2 Staged within a public-school-turned-modern-art-gallery, the institutionalchoice for this ephemeral project appropriatelyunderscored the artists’ pedagogical impetus. GroupMaterial’s assembled mélange of art, artefact,commodities and mass culture confused aestheticexpectations by exceeding the traditional categories of‘art’. By combining a range of visual forms, Timelinepositioned the viewer in an interrogatory space, as anactive agent. Moving through the space, one was

Heather A. Diack is an assistant professor of Art History at the University of Miami. The author of Photography Collected Us, Diack has received fellowships andawards from the DAAD/Goethe Institute, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Centre for Architecture and theWhitney Museum of American Art.

Visual Studies, 2015Vol. 30, No. 2, 182–194, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2015.1024963

© 2015 International Visual Sociology Association

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Hea

ther

Dia

ck]

at 0

6:23

18

May

201

5

confronted with the task of trying to piece togetherthe underlying logic. As the art critic Thomas Lawson(1984, 83) noted, ‘Those seeking exact correspondencesbetween dates and display items would have beendisappointed, for the evidence was put to different use. Apoint-by-point demonstration would simply have beenanother accretion of power’. Rather, as a counter toentrenched power and traditional modes of viewing,Group Material’s exhibition evocatively worked towardsreconfiguring the sensible by engaging with modes ofresemblance, recognition and repetition, using acombination of photography and installation, and,furthermore, by actively drawing parallels between thetwo. This multimedia project refused to give priority toany material over another. Instead, it suggested crucialinterrelationships between images and material goods,between media and spatial organisation. The exhibitionresisted simple conclusions by offering multiple entrypoints for understanding the complex constellation ofUnited States-driven imperialism in Latin and CentralAmerica. By considering how Group Material combinedinstallation and photography, this article sheds light ontheir shared spatio-temporal characteristics, makingapparent the intersections between different forms ofvisual culture during the Cold War era. Together, the

photograph and the space of exhibition revealinglyreflect the conditions of contemporary geopoliticalconfigurations (Figure 1).

GROUP MATERIAL DRAWS THE LINE

In the early 1980s, Secretary of State Al Haig declaredforcefully that Central America was the place for theUnited States to finally ‘draw the line’ against the spreadof international communism (Oferdorfer 1981).3

Between 1945 and 1989, the United States ‘destabilizedgovernments in Argentina, Brazil, British Guiana(Guyana), Bolivia, Chile, the Dominican Republic,Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua […]perpetuat[ing] and spread[ing] violence, poverty, anddespair within the region’ (Rabe 2012, xxix). Reaching acrescendo by the 1980s, Central America at last tookcentre stage in Western political and economic debates.In the light of such rhetorical moves, Group Materialsought to redress the Manichaean metaphysical divisionof Cold War ideology. In part, the challenge was how toreveal the hegemony of the East–West divide, addressthe North–South paradigm and deconstruct thehistorical and contemporary narratives that promulgatedthese reductive ideologies.

FIGURE 1. Installation view of Timeline: The Chronicle of US Invention in Latin and Central America, 1984, showing work by John Heartfield and Bolivar Arellano,among others. Photo: Dorothy Zeidman, courtesy Group Material and Four Corners Books.

A chronicle of Cold War photography 183

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Hea

ther

Dia

ck]

at 0

6:23

18

May

201

5

Because polarising references to spatial organisationfigured prominently in Cold War metaphors, GroupMaterial sought to reformulate the cultural arena inspatio-temporal terms. One could in fact say that GroupMaterial responded to the abundance of spatialmetaphors circulating during the Reagan–Thatcher erato describe, neutralise and justify Cold War carnage bydemanding more historical specificity and by addressingthe persuasive power of metaphor more broadly.Consider, for example, the nominal gesture of the ‘IronCurtain’ or of describing Latin America as ‘the backyard’of the United States. Such language partitions anddomesticates the ideological conflict that shaped theCold War, when some walls were physically built andothers were rhetorically implied, in a paradoxicalattempt at both ‘containment’ and ‘expansionism’ (Pike2010; LeFebvre 1991). Timeline thus attempted toproblematise the critical role of visual alliances in theformulation and dissemination of Cold War politics byasking viewers to question spatial relationships and thecorrelations between subjects.

Group Material’s mobilisation of photographicrepresentations can be seen in part as a rejoinder to thecirculation of images of state-sponsored horrors thatwere appearing contemporaneously in majornewspapers such as The New York Times, as well as ariposte to a sense of superficiality in much art of theearly 1980s. In response to the escalating crisis inCentral America (intensified by continuous CentralIntelligence Agency (CIA) operations in Nicaraguaagainst the Sandinista Liberation Front and in ElSalvador against the Frente Democrático Revolucionarioand the Frente Farabundo Martí para la LiberaciónNacional), Group Material excavated a long-standinghistory of conflict by connecting politically significantevents from different places and times, demonstratinghow time is always qualified by space, both local andgeopolitical, and furthermore how photographsthemselves function as mediations between temporaland spatial politics. As such, Timeline included the workof artists and photojournalists, photographers withdocumentary leanings as well as conceptual aesthetics,ultimately revealing the insufficiency of such categoricaldistinctions. Susan Meiselas’ photographs spoke to thecrisis of humanitarian photojournalism, with itsemphasis on ‘history making and the frailty ofwitnessing’ (Pelizzari 2009, 205). Images by BarbaraKruger and Richard Prince, on the other hand,approached the problem of distantiation as a method asmuch as a subject. While Meiselas’s photographs soughtto bring realities from afar closer to the viewer, mendinggaps in understanding between ‘here’ and ‘there’, Krugerand Prince employed strategies of appropriation and

displacement, in effect reinforcing photography’sproximity problem. In this way, it is not simply thecontent or photographic styles that differ throughoutTimeline, but additionally the temporalities andsituations suggested by each work’s individual frame.The inherent tensions of the medium provide aproductive metaphor for Timeline. Like the liminal timeembodied by the photograph, history in Timeline issimultaneously characterised by dispersal as well asattempts to bridge the distance between events, effectsand afterimages across time and space.

This focal ‘line’ of Timeline draws attention to ‘time’ as aframing device, functioning as a metonym for temporalorder (Lawson 1984, 83). Pointing to the ways in whichconceptions of time rely on visualisation, the hard-edgedgraphic provided a spatial structure to guide viewersthrough the chronology of events and images on display.This spatial marker shaped the way the exhibition’scontent would be perceived and interpreted. Thisgesture, which highlights the matrix of a particular timeand space, is arguably integral to all exhibitions,although it is usually concealed. Or, as John Tagg (1979,70) has noted, ‘every exhibition’, like a photograph, ‘is amap’, which masks its own conventions. The outlinecreated here by this framing device connotes a series ofadditional paragons, including the forensic tracecollapsed with the architectural plan, reminiscent of MelBochner’s series of Measurements Rooms from the late1960s. Such gestures of institutional critique subtly callattention to the influential role of the traditionallyinvisible supporting structure.

Without explanatory text, at varying intervals thechromatic ‘timeline’ was interrupted by decisive blackfrets and numbers marking the years of US interventionsin Central and Latin America between 1893 and 1984.Group Material combined a mélange of images andobjects (including banners, coffee grinds, paintings,cotton, bananas and photographs) in a suggestivenetwork to animate this labyrinthine history.4 Theseriousness of the subject did not occlude the use ofhumour as a mode of critique. One critic even noted theclever way in which the loose piles of coffee, bananasand sugar were able to comment on ‘hemisphericeconomics’ while also functioning as ‘parodies of ’60sprocess art’ (Lippard 1986, 21). Timeline circumventeddominant assumptions regarding both geography andperiodisation.

Take for example a 1933 photomontaged cover of AIZby the Dadaist John Heartfield at the fret marking 1982.As with many images constructed by Heartfielddepicting ‘clenched fists, open palms, and raised arms’,this work focuses on the determination of the individual

184 H. Diack

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Hea

ther

Dia

ck]

at 0

6:23

18

May

201

5

in relation to the many.5 It is an activist work, and thephotomontage technique asks viewers to makeconnections across disparate signs. In the context ofGroup Material’s installation, Heartfield’s image ofvoters coerced to cast ballots for the Nazi party becomesaligned with electoral corruption in El Salvador (Grace2001, 34).6 Heartfield’s strategic use of appropriationand montage at this moment in Weimar Germany wasintended to reflect, and intervene in, the rising tide offascism. Group Material’s aesthetic choices in 1984 servesimilar ends, striving to make ‘visible the invisible andintegrally meshing the representation of politics with thepolitics of representation’ (Solomon-Godeau 1999, 264).Performing such thematic correlations between historicand contemporary events positions the viewer as a kindof detective-historian within the exhibition space. Theyare confronted with instances of seemingly incongruentworks that provide provocative, anachronistic andsometimes counter-intuitive opposition to the hard-edged order often connoted by the use of a ‘timeline’.

The bold line here is not simply employed as a trajectorybut also as the demarcation of space, and by extensionexperience. The directive of the red thread can be readconventionally as moving progressively through history,and thus leadingly, from left to right. However, multipleentryways and awkward corner junctures interrupt thespace, denying such coherent continuity. The timeline isthus employed as a form of détournement, in effectdisorienting and misleading the positivist viewer.7

Group Material used this strategy to disruptconventional relations of space and time. ReadingTimeline’s looping logic as a reflection of historicalexperience, we can see it mirrors the déjà vu of recurringUS intervention in foreign affairs.

POSTMODERNISM AND THE POLITICS OFPROXIMITY

Group Material worked with, and was influenced by,Artists Call Against US Intervention in Latin America(active between 1983 and 1985), an organisation thatsought solidarity from within the US art world andcurated numerous exhibitions and events to this end.With some 700 participants ranging from Hans Haacke,Ana Mendieta, Louise Lawler, Barbara Kruger, RichardPrince and Robert Rauschenberg, projects often reliedheavily on photography. Within the ethos ofpostmodernism, Group Material challenged thecredibility and efficacy of Cold War photojournalism intheir address to chronological and teleological time.8

Using strategies of appropriation and juxtaposition, theTimeline installation pits temporalities productivelyagainst one another, thereby unhinging the comforts of

photographic legibility and problematising the politics ofproximity.

As the opening lines of a letter Artists Call (with theinput of Julie Ault and Doug Ashford of GroupMaterial) sent out to ‘Fellow Artists’ in the summer of1983 warned: ‘We’re starting down the Vietnam roadagain. After the ’60s, we felt a sense of defeat, but in factwe helped deflect the full might of this country fromlanding on the Vietnamese. Now we have to hold backthe fist in Central America’ (Ashford 2007, 104). Not bychance, images of fists recur throughout Timeline. Thesemay be seen as an ambivalent reference to force as wellas a call for solidarity. Alternatively, they suggest labourand struggle. The crimson timeline is replete withimplications as well, and may be read, following ClaireGrace (2001, 29) as an allusion to blood loss orcommunism. Via further visual associations, includingconnections with the factographic strategies of theRussian avant-garde, in particular the work ofConstructivists using photography such as Gustav Klucisand Alexander Rodchenko, such analogies work togetherto form a nuanced and charged ensemble of meanings.

Through a series of syncopated design elements and aninterrogatory stance in the face of the ubiquity ofphotographic imagery, Group Material attempted tomake visible the invisible and undermine the possibilityof authoritative readings. Using pastiche, an importanttechnique in postmodern art, Group Materialstrategically mobilised photography in order ‘to point tointernal inconsistencies, its inadequacies, its failures, itsstereotypical unreality’ (Grundberg 1999, 8).9 Take, forexample, the unvaried row of William Allen posterslining the ceiling. Each is an identical black-and-whitediptych – the right side showing a grainy photograph ofa soldier confronting another man and the left sidelisting a name of a country in which the United States‘intervened’. The specificity of ‘Haiti’, alongside the signfor ‘Brazil’ and ‘Mexico’, is obscured, underliningphotography’s deceptive capacity to level dissimilarthings and make them ‘appear’ equal. Thismisrecognition at the base of ‘Allen’s spare andrepetitive image-text aesthetic’ (Grace 2001, 35) turnsmilitary confrontations into a kind of droning cliché, ofinterchangeable signs.10 Neither the image nor the textprovides anchoring information, thus causing theseriality of the posters to connote the unreliability ofevidence, as well as the nearly rote predictability of USintervention. The Cold War was rife with disconnectionsbetween appearances and reality, aesthetic surfacesconcealing complex histories. As historian Stephen Rabeexplains, ‘Throughout the Cold War, US officialspresumed that the Soviet Union promoted subversion in

A chronicle of Cold War photography 185

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Hea

ther

Dia

ck]

at 0

6:23

18

May

201

5

the region and were often surprised when they could notfind evidence to sustain their fears’ (Rabe 2012, xxx). Forexample, no direct link between Moscow and Guatemalacould be found in 1954, even after the overthrow of theGuatemalan government. In fact, in retrospect, there ismore evidence of fabricated connections, such as theCIA planting arms with markings from communistnations on the coasts of Nicaragua in 1954 andVenezuela in 1963 (Rabe 2012, xxx).

It seems a desire to address such acts of displacementand misrepresentation in order to encourage ‘activatedspectatorship’ were among the impetuses for GroupMaterial’s use of both photography and installation art.Highlighting each structure as a series of frames withinframes, Group Material worked to demystify theideological space and time of the medium as well as thesubject matter. Claire Bishop discusses how suchpoliticised aesthetic practices tackled the dynamics ofpower, authority and exclusion by making art morebodily, more of a phenomenological experience. Bishop(2008, 102) notes that it is ‘conspicuous that the drivetowards activating the viewer (so that we are surroundedand given a role within the work, as opposed to “justlooking at” painting or sculpture) becomes over time

increasingly equated with a desire for political action’.More than the literal inclusion of viewers as participants,the additional fact that more than one person may be inthe space experiencing the work at any given time, withthe possibility of communication between viewers,further ruptures the imaginary view of art as a purelyprivate experience. Instead public experience is here seenas constitutive of private experience, implying that theviewing subject is never exclusively an individual, butmoreover always already a member of a community orcollective.

The precedent for this kind of installation work finds itsroots in the practices of Brazilian artists such as LygiaClark and Hélio Oiticica who envisioned theirinstallations as ethical interactions in the face of anoppressive dictatorship (Bishop 2008, 106). Beginning in1969 with his now famous Whitechapel experiments,Oiticica created ‘total environments’ to be exploredbarefoot, which included live parrots, as well as floorscovered with sand, hay, dry leaves and tropical plants.11

Timeline’s inclusion of perishable agricultural productsthat make reference to North–South relations extendsthis logic. The coffee grinds lining the edges of thegallery, the pile of United Fruit Company bananas

FIGURE 2. Installation view of Timeline: The Chronicle of US Invention in Latin and Central America, 1984, showing work by Richard Prince and William Allen, amongothers. Photo: Dorothy Zeidman, courtesy Group Material and Four Corners Books.

186 H. Diack

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Hea

ther

Dia

ck]

at 0

6:23

18

May

201

5

rotting progressively over the course of the two-monthexhibition, the wall draped by tobacco leaves, gauzycotton and sheets of copper all served as visceral floatingsignifiers of the economic realities at work in an era ofincreasingly international trade networks.

The homely domesticity of these materials keyed directlywith the legacies of US intervention into Latin America.For example, the decaying bananas sprawl against thewall beneath the year 1932, marking the crescendo of the‘Banana Wars’ (1898–1934), in advance of theestablishment of the ‘Good Neighbor Policy’ underFranklin Roosevelt in 1934. The ‘Banana Wars’ were ofcourse concerned with far more than bananas. Thisseries of occupations, police actions and interventions bythe US Marine Corps in Central America and theCaribbean were aimed at protecting the United FruitCompany’s significant financial stakes in the productionof bananas, tobacco, sugar cane and various otherproducts throughout the Caribbean, Central Americaand Northern South America. The ‘Good NeighborPolicy, on the other hand, was an attempt to subdueunrest in response to such US interventionism in theregion, and signalled the end of the US occupation ofNicaragua and Haiti. The film star Carmen Mirandarose to fame at this time, as the cover girl of tropicalkitsch and the muse of the ‘Good Neighbor Policy’, in aneffort to improve public relations between NorthAmericans and Latin Americans more broadly.12 Backedby the Motion Picture Division of the Office of theCoordinator of Inter-American Affairs, the director JohnHay Whitney tellingly described the imagined ‘powerHollywood films could exert in the two prongedcampaign to win the hearts and minds of LatinAmericans and to convince Americans of the benefits ofPan American friendship’ (O’Neil 2005). It is notsurprising, given the shifting and often paradoxicaldefinitions of what it might mean to be a ‘GoodNeighbor’ within this geopolitical context, that thepolicy was abandoned promptly in 1945, at the outset ofthe Cold War and rising fears regarding Soviet influencein the region.

Despite the appearance of random pastiche, Timelinerefuses ‘cool indifference’ (Grace 2001, 31). In fact, in apostmodern twist on factography, the photographsprovide a strikingly conceptual and phenomenologicallynchpin. As Grace (2001, 31) has eloquently argued,‘unlike the vacuous metronome temporality ofConceptual art, or the clean phenomenological time ofMinimalism, Timeline pumped its 161-year span full ofhistorical affect’. One compelling example is GroupMaterial’s hanging of Richard Prince’s re-photograph ofa Marlboro advertisement from the artist’s Cowboy

series (1980–1992), Untitled (Cowboy Saddling Horse)(1980–1983) above the year ‘1823’ (Figure 2). Prince’swork has become emblematic of the PicturesGeneration’s brand of postmodern photography.Working between the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s, this loosely knit group of artists used images toengage with the desires and disillusionments of post-warconsumer culture in the United States, often employingappropriation as a key device. Curator Douglas Eklund(2009, 17) has related astutely: ‘The famous last line of[Roland] Barthes’ essay – “The birth of the reader mustbe at the cost of the death of the author” – was a call toarms for the artists of the Pictures Generation’.Disavowing the traditional tenets of authorship, PicturesGeneration artists seized and re-contextualised pre-existing images as a means of opening up theoperational assumptions of the economy of images morebroadly.

In this particular photograph, Prince registers theromanticisation of conquest, picturing the Western heroas a kind of endangered species. The fact that thisphotograph is the result of appropriation, a bold-faced,slightly altered recapitulation of a widely circulatedadvertisement, reinforces the theme of cultural andpolitical annexation.13 Additionally, as an imageremoved from its ‘origins’, it exacerbates the dissolutionof historical continuity that is the act of all photographs.That is to say, it highlights the fact that all photographsare forms of appropriation, and perhaps morepoignantly, there is ‘always a violence implied inappropriation’ (Welchman in Evans 2009, 139). It is notclear if the protagonist, seen only from behind, isreaching for the horse’s bridle with the intention tomount or alight. The ambiguity of the horseman’s actionserves as a visual metaphor, which is made morepoignant by the knowledge that 1823 is the year theMonroe Doctrine was introduced. In other words, themove towards ‘solidifying the US’s expansionist positionin the Western hemisphere and providing the rhetoricalarsenal cited on numerous future occasions to legitimiseUS interventions in the Americas’ (Grace 2001, 32).Much like the harnessed steed in Prince’s picture, from1823 onwards, the United States not only claimed LatinAmerica as its protectorate, but it also rode it as a vitalvehicle of its economic influence.

It is no accident that Prince began to re-photograph the‘Marlboro Man’ advertisements during the early years ofthe Reagan administration. Furthermore, the artist’sinterest in the links between American capitalistideology, appropriation and Latin America coincideadditionally with the fact that Prince himself was born inthe United States-controlled Panama Canal Zone in

A chronicle of Cold War photography 187

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Hea

ther

Dia

ck]

at 0

6:23

18

May

201

5

1949. Mobilising the image of the cowboy as thequintessential icon of individualism and Americanmythology at this precise moment addressedmanipulations of ‘the new conservative agenda and itsritual invocations of a heroic past’ (Solomon-Godeau1999, 262; see also; Corkin 2004), as well as recalling thatRonald Reagan came to public attention first as aHollywood actor in the 1950s, popularly cast in the roleof cowboy.14 As a dominant genre of Cold War film,Westerns helped mediate the US imperative to maintainits superpower status by grafting the historical onto themythic. The persuasive power of these narratives wouldwork to Reagan’s advantage. By lassoing theconstructedness of the cowboy mythology for his ownpurposes, however, Prince subtly points at the relaybetween entertainment and ideology. One could sayPrince responds to the supply-side economics of

‘Reagonomics’ by performing what Abigail Solomon-Godeau (1999) referred to as ‘supply-side aesthetics’.The artist’s refusal to create anything with the pretenceof ‘originality’ acknowledges the unwieldy extant excessof material and cultural meaning already in circulation.

The artistic act of Prince’s appropriation thus furthersthe discourse of capture more broadly, confounding anybelief in modernist notions of originality and authorship,let alone purity. As Andy Grundberg (1999, 133)expressed it, ‘Prince sticks a pin in the balloon of artphotography, which exists by virtue of our faith in thepossibility of an endless image-making frontier’. In otherwords, the myth of reigning in an ever expansive andwholly accessible ‘frontier’ is demystified. Beyond thescope of art, this gesture ‘directs attention to themutually reinforcing roots of North American myths of

FIGURE 3. Tina Modotti, Worker’s Hands, 1927. Platinum print, 7 1/2’ × 8 7/16’ (19 × 21.5 cm). Anonymous gift. Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/ArtResource, New York.

188 H. Diack

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Hea

ther

Dia

ck]

at 0

6:23

18

May

201

5

masculinity and expansionist foreign policy’ morebroadly (Grace 2001, 32). Additionally, the link totobacco is foregrounded as a product loaded withmaterial, cultural and political meaning, includingmasculinist associations and hierarchies of power.

The spectre of the hidden means of production issimilarly raised by a number of photographs in Timeline.For example, Tina Modotti’s 1927 photograph HandsResting on Tool (Figure 3) – also sometimes referred toas ‘Worker’s Hands’ – hangs between ‘1865’ and ‘1885’and shows a detailed close-up of a labourer’s worn anddusty hands atop an indistinguishable tool,‘simultaneously conceding to work while issuing a silentrefusal’ (Grace 2001, 35). As Andrea Noble (2000, 60)has noted, this photograph raises a wealth of theoreticaland practical issues, which mark both the history ofphotography and the oeuvre of Modotti. These includethe gendered lens through which the distinction betweenoriginal and copy have often been viewed, as well asassumptions regarding hierarchical difference. Insofar asoriginality has often been interpreted as a male domain,much writing on Tina Modotti credits Edward Weston’smentorship for her insightful photographs. Perhaps inthis way, though created much earlier than the work ofthe Pictures Generation artists, Modotti’s photographcan be viewed as an antecedent to the postmodernistattitude evident in Prince’s work. Despite the gulf of

time and divergence in subject, Modotti’s and Prince’sworks share an investment in issues of appropriation,artifice and slippage, as ways of undermining theoverdetermined and often masculinist certainty of muchAmerican modernist photography.

As with other works by Modotti, it is difficult todetermine what language was originally used to title thisphotograph. The Spanish title of Hands is Manossosteniendo un palo, that is, hands ‘holding’ a shovel. AsRoberto Tejada (2009, 71) notes ‘The object at once heldand withheld in this photograph – where hands and toolare rendered both one and discrete’ further denies one’sability to ‘hold’ a coherent meaning. In this way,Modotti’s Hands serve a kind of iconic function, inwhich they may be read as positing the dynamic ofdirect information in conjunction with the frustrationproduced by untethered meaning. Legibility is at hand,by virtue of the photograph, and yet out of reach in faceof the reticence of surface appearances.

Furthermore, the art-historical drive to identify thedirect and individual trace of the author/creator as ameans of understanding the work is challenged by themedium of photography. Without painting’sidiosyncratic brushstrokes as indices, the antiquatedpractice of connoisseurship is eroded, and with it theability to weight valuation on the basis of artisticsignature. We could perhaps refer to this practice

FIGURE 4. Barbara Kruger, Untitled (You make history when you do business), 48’ by 96’, photograph, 1982. © Barbara Kruger. Reproduced courtesy of Mary BooneGallery, New York.

A chronicle of Cold War photography 189

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Hea

ther

Dia

ck]

at 0

6:23

18

May

201

5

of connoisseurship as the mastery of recognition. Thephotograph, after all, ‘is also about the false resemblanceof manual labour to aesthetic production, and about theincommensurable gaps separating physical expenditureand (its) representation’ (Tejada 2009, 69).Provocatively, it is precisely an inability to either masteror recognise, particularly in the face of the reticence ofsurface appearances, which is at stake both politicallyand aesthetically in Modotti’s image, and by extension inGroup Material’s Timeline. In each, Kunstwissenschaft-derived concepts of individualism and authorship aredismissed in favour of a much more socially contingentview of historical process and associated meaning.History does not proceed steadily forward, hand overfist, but rather is a culmination of fits and starts, relaysand repetitions, tightening and slackening.

The motif of hands reinforces this critique. Indeed, thenotion of the invisible hand is deeply rooted in capitalistideology. In the seminal text ‘The Wealth of Nations’(1776), Adam Smith introduces the metaphor of theinvisible hand of the market to describe free enterprise,which does not need government intervention but ratherself-regulates. The excesses of US intervention in thename of free enterprise highlight the irony of this so-called invisible hand. From a Marxist position, GroupMaterial’s project seeks to acknowledge the hand oflabour as well as the hand of intervention. From anotherangle, the subject of hands, as Noble (2000, 70) hassuggested, ‘embody the very notion of tactility’. Beyondthe fact that the likeness of photography seems to solicittouch in order to verify its illusionism, tactility inphotography is also a manifestation of the desire tograsp; or, in other words, ‘comprehension’ as connectedto compre-hand-sion, or knowledge, linking back to theword’s etymological roots denoting both seizure and acoming together.15 Further, a connection to‘apprehension’, as in capture and hesitation, herereinforces a self-consciousness regarding the tenuousstatus of photographic knowledge specifically. Withinthe context of Timeline, such valences add to thepostmodern proliferation of contradictory meanings.

Notably, the year 1885, the edge of where Modotti’sphotograph sits in Timeline, marks the year thatPresident Grover Cleveland sent US troops to Panama,supported Panama’s separation from Colombia and ineffect began the takeover of the construction of thePanama Canal. This decisive move on the part of theUnited States was an economic and militaristicinvestment: ‘For Latin Americans, the Panamaexpedition of 1885 was one of the early actions whichconfirmed the reality of “Yankee imperialism”’ (Wicks1980, 600).16 The hands in this image then are all the

more convincing as the metonym for ‘worker’, as well as‘other’, and in their inclusion make reference to thedeeply colonial roots of photographic culture during theCold War period. Hands Resting on Tool is part of aseries of images of hands by Modotti, produced over anumber of years, including for example, Hands Washing(1927) and Hands of the Puppeteer (1929). Asmentioned, the versatility of the hand motif recursthroughout the Timeline installation, calling to mindonce more Heartfield’s contribution, as well as otherfamous photographic limbs not on display, ranging fromAugust Sander’s Hands of the Farmer (1930) to GustavKlucis’ Let’s Fulfill the Plan of the Great Projects (1930).Meanings become associative and accumulated inTimeline’s photographs, each summoning the recurrenceof, and entwined logic behind, histories of economicallymotivated military intervention.

Consider the dialectic that is created in relation toModotti’s Hands by the inclusion of yet another ‘posterchild’ of the Pictures Generation, Barbara Kruger andher bold print Untitled (You make history when you dobusiness) (1982), hanging above the year ‘1896’(Figure 4).17 Each of these photographs suggests adialogue regarding the ‘self-conscious awareness of beingin a camera-based and camera-bound culture’(Grundberg 1999, 9). Both images play on photographicrepresentation as an arena of conflicting meanings, andthe richness of hands as motif.18 Seen together, thetemporal expectations of the singular photograph areruptured; each is changed by its relation to the other, aprocess which, like the ideals of installation art, evokesthe importance of opposition and agonism in order toeffect social change, and truly grasp the pluralistic natureof the social world. Chantal Mouffe (2007, 2, 2000)frames a similar argument in her discussion of ‘ArtisticActivism and Agonistic Spaces’, explaining that,‘Properly political questions always involve decisionswhich require us to make a choice between conflictingalternatives’. In providing visitors to Timeline with aseries of alternative discourses, the viewer is politicallyactivated with the task of weighing contingencies andinterconnections.

Kruger’s work is an appropriated image, in manyrespects closer to Prince and Heartfield in method.However, both Modotti’s and Kruger’s photographs arecropped explicitly, closing in on anonymous hands as ameans of extending the implications of bothphotography and representation more broadly as spacesof exploitation and objectification. Notably, Kruger’shands are in the act of scrubbing, suds foamingdemonstratively over fingers grasping a bar of soap anda nailbrush. Maintaining ‘cleanliness’ on the domestic

190 H. Diack

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Hea

ther

Dia

ck]

at 0

6:23

18

May

201

5

home front was one of the key tropes of Cold Waradvertisements aimed at women (Catalano 2002). Thepredominance of photographs picturing womencleaning in this era further underscores the ways“photography was used not simply to represent bodiesbut also to control them” (Godfrey 2008, 130). Focusingon these hands in the process of washing and polishingalso provides a visual counterpoint that makes Modotti’sworker’s hands look all the more worn. This inversion isironic, since Kruger’s deliberate evocation of capitalistlanguage, conjoined with the look of advertising frommid-century America (conspicuously the outset of theCold War), suggests that the hands within her frame arefar from innocent. The harsh contrast between black andwhite in Kruger’s image enhances a film noir sense ofomniscience, providing the sneaking suspicion that theprotagonist, driven by forces beyond their control,inevitably moves towards impending doom (Vernet1993; Kackman 2005). Such a predetermined narrativeoperates in contrast to the stoic intimacy of Modotti’ssepia tone. The ‘dark’ mood of Kruger’s work is all themore melodramatic when juxtaposed with the pensivequality of Modotti’s photograph.

The ambiguity of the interpellation of the remonstrative‘You’ in Kruger’s Futura Bold Italic text, is, however, bothambivalent and accusatory. Stylistically recalling Sovietpropaganda posters, the ‘look’ of which is black, whiteand red all-over, is an anachronistically complex device.Having worked as a graphic designer for Condé Nast,Kruger is tapping into the visual language of commercialmagazines from the 1980s. This sardonic ‘recourse tographic modes that are linked to the design vocabulariesof both persuasion and propaganda is not coincidental onKruger’s part, because the pictures not only have thelook of power, they are about power’ (Grundberg 1999,128). Like Modotti’s anonymous hands, or Prince’sanonymous wrangling cowboy for that matter, Kruger’smontage gestures at the promises and deceptions that areaided and abetted by photography with or without theimmediate context of advertising. In Kruger andPhillips (2005) own words, ‘Whether rendered by hand orcaught by camera, a picture is never opaque. To say that itis, to speak of a mysterious evocativeness, results in justanother promotional mystification’. Actions against suchmystification form the political impetus of Timeline as aradical work of Cold War art and account for GroupMaterial’s decision to include artists such as Kruger. Andwhat of the bracketed caption more specifically? Thenotion of making history by doing business effectivelysummarises the motives and legacy of US intervention.The ability to possess the narrative of the past too oftenresides in the hands of the powerful; power isfrequently elided with capacities of economic wealth.

A critique of this kind of hegemony is evidenced by thisinstallation. Group Material’s particular use ofphotography attests to the slipperiness of both perceptionand surface appearance. It is a means of engaging viewersbeyond the mode of mere aesthetic contemplation andseeks to move more poignantly into the realm of politicalactivation.

TIMELINE’S REDISTRIBUTION OF THE SENSIBLE

Meanings accumulate throughout Timeline and, in partas a result of the multivalence of the installation, someechoes between works are clearer than others. Installedlow on the wall towards the entrance to the show, onefinds two photographs by Ecuadorian photographerBolivar Arellano. These graphically depict the bodies ofDutch journalists murdered in El Salvador, layinginversely, one atop another, in the morgue. Presentedwithout background information to guide the viewer’sreading, these photographs, like the other photographsin Timeline, apply pressure to the limits of the frame andto the act of appropriation, both conceptually andaesthetically. Once more, we have a set of clasped hands.Yet unlike the previous examples, we are made aware inthis case that they belong to two separate bodies. Thefirst image shows the full bodies, the second the croppedclose-up. Revealing the shared space between the twohands, the two people, even in death, creates a powerfulsense of the affective weight of communal relationships,leaning more towards comprehension as ‘comingtogether’ rather than ‘seizure’. This moment literally andfiguratively encapsulates a kind of ‘distribution of thesensible’, by returning the concept of ‘distribution’ to itsFrench roots – namely the verb partager – meaning atonce to divide as well as to share. Symbolically, thejoined hands here are touching reminders of gaps thatcannot be mended, shares that have already been lost.

Pressing the logic of the edges of the individual person andthe individual image as self-contained, Group Material’sTimeline unhinges the boundaries of the exhibitionaryspace, and by extension expands the spatio-temporalpossibilities of art as a political act. GroupMaterial declaredin the early 1980s that, ‘If a more inclusive and democraticvision for art is our project, then we cannot possibly rely onwinning validation from bright, white rooms and full-colour repros in the art world glossies’. They insistedinstead on tapping into and promoting ‘the lived aestheticof a largely “non-art” public’, in spite of and in favour of thecontradictions embodied by such a gesture. Furthermore,Group Material stated their goal of ‘occup[ying] theultimate alternative space – that wall-less expanse that barsartists and their work from the crucial social concerns ofthe American public’ (reprinted in Stiles and Selz 1996,

A chronicle of Cold War photography 191

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Hea

ther

Dia

ck]

at 0

6:23

18

May

201

5

895). I would like to suggest that Timeline: The Chronicle ofUS Invention in Central and Latin America accomplishesthis goal by challenging, in ways both subtle and poignant,the framing devices of Cold War ideology itself. Even in1984, Group Material recognised the challenges andcontradictions of their position. On the one hand, theywere aware of ‘the entwinement of photographic activity indiscourses concerning globalization’ and its limits,19 andon the other hand, they also knew that though Timeline‘included Latin American artists living in exile in NewYork, the exhibition, due to the socio-political complexitiesand limited means of communication of the time, lackedthe inclusion of artistic and intellectual production fromthe region itself’ (Guerrero and Mavlian 2014, n.p.). FelixGonzalez-Torres, a member of Group Material between1978 and 1991, argued that not only are aesthetics in factpolitics, but moreover ‘the most successful of all politicalmoves are ones that don’t appear to be “political”’ (cited inKennedy 2007). In this way, Group Material seems toanticipate Rancière’s insights regarding the distribution ofthe sensible, realising the power of the installation as aperformative act above and beyond any single work ofart.20 The seemingly ‘given’ frame of any individualphotograph is pliably put into relation with any and allother photographs. Much in the way that postmodernphotography shows us that ‘meaning is always withheld,and to believe the opposite is tantamount to mythology’(Grundberg 1999, 6), Group Material’s Timeline grappledwith the difficulties of its moment in relation to the past inthe hope of imagining and activating a more equitablefuture.

NOTES

[1] Group Material, ‘best known for blurring installation artand exhibition making’, was founded as an artist-runcollective dedicated to the creation, exhibition andpromotion of art committed to social change. GroupMaterial’s inaugural exhibition was staged on 4 October1980 in the Lower East Side of Manhattan (Bishop 2008,110). As of September 1980, the official members of GroupMaterial were Hannah Alderfer, George Ault, Julie Ault,Patrick Brennan, Liliana Dones, Anne Drillick, YolandaHawkins, Beth Jaker, Mundy McLaughlin, MarybethNelson, Marek Pakulski, Tim Rollins, Peter Szypula andMichael Udvardy (see Ault 2010, 15). After 1981, thegroup was reduced to three members – Julie Ault, MundyMcLaughlin and Tim Rollins. Doug Ashford joined in1982, Felix Gonazalez-Torres in 1987, Kren Ramspacherin 1989 and Thomas Eggerer and Jochen Klein in 1995.Group Material ceased its activities in 1996.

[2] P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center was founded in 1971 byAlana Heiss and remained an independent art space until2000, when it became an affiliate of the Museum ofModern Art, New York. Artists involved in the

production of this exhibition included Julie Ault, DougAshford, Barbara Westermann, William Allen and AnnMessner, among others.

[3] Don Oferdorfer (1981). See also William M. LeoGrande,Our Own Backyard: The United States in CentralAmerica, 1977–1992 (University of North Carolina Press,1998) p. 80, fn. 41. The phrase ‘drawing the line’ was firstused by Alexander Haig when he briefed theCongressional leadership on the State Department’sWhite Paper, Communist Interference in El Salvador,Special Report Number 80, 23 February 1981 (reportedin The New York Times, 18 February 1981).

[4] ‘Mirroring the various forms of representation thatstructure our understanding of culture, our exhibitionsbring together the so-called fine art with products fromsupermarkets, mass-cultural artefacts with historicalobjects, factual documentation with homemade projects.We are not interested in making definitive evaluations ordeclarative statements, but in creating situations thatoffer our chosen subject as a complex and open-endedissue. We encourage greater audience participationthrough interpretation’ (Group Material cited in Wallis1990, 2 and; Bishop 2008, 112).

[5] See http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/heartfield/Accessed 1 March, 2014.

[6] See New York University’s Fales Library SpecialCollections for the Group Material Archive. Heartfield’simage served as the cover of a 1933 edition of theGerman leftist magazine, AIZ (Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung, or Worker’s Pictorial newspaper). For more onHeartfield’s ‘proletarian art’, see Zervigón (2012) andKriebel (2014).

[7] Guy Debord and the Situationist International describean interventionist technique known as détournement. InEnglish, the word translates as ‘derailment’ or‘overturning’ and refers to the act of appropriatingimages, words and gestures from mass-mediated popularculture in order to alter the ‘original’, thereby producingnew, subversive meanings and connotations andchallenging the given conditions of everyday social life.See Debord and Wolman (1981); trans. Knabb (1981).

[8] Group Material’s Timeline: The Chronicle of US Inventionin Central and Latin America tellingly coincides with thepublication of the first English translation of FrançoisLyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report onKnowledge (1984).

[9] A version of Grundberg’s essay was first delivered as alecture in February 1984 at the Friends of Photography inCarmel California, in conjunction with an exhibitionorganised by Grundberg entitled ‘Masking/Unmasking:Aspects of Postmodern Photography’.

[10] Ault described how Allen’s posters ‘[m]ark variousviolent interventions from the North using the sameimage repeatedly’. From author’s email correspondencewith Julie Ault.

[11] In an email to Bishop (2008, 139), Guy Brett describedthis installation as an ‘abstracted evocation of a Rio deJaneiro backyard’.

192 H. Diack

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Hea

ther

Dia

ck]

at 0

6:23

18

May

201

5

[12] See the 1995 documentary Carmen Miranda: Bananas isMy Business, directed by Helena Solberg.

[13] In addition to cropping, Prince excised the text fromMarlboro cigarette’s advertisements.

[14] Among Reagan’s most famous performances in the roleof cowboy are the films Law and Order (1953), CattleQueen of Montana (1954) and Tennessee’s Partner(1955). On Reagan, see Corkin (2004).

[15] From the Latin comprehendere, meaning to comprise orinclude, to take together, to unite; to seize or arrest.

[16] See also the first-hand account in Rose Van Hardeveld’smemoir, Make the Dirt Fly! (1956).

[17] 1896 marks the invasion of Honduras by US Marines aswell as US troops intervening in Nicaragua. Nicaragua inparticular would become a focal point of the Cold War,as the Reagan Administration strongly backed right-wingexile forces in fighting the new-leftist Sandinistagovernment.

[18] Kruger’s work returned frequently in this era to thecurrency of ‘hands’ as motif for critique. For example, itfeatured taglines such as ‘We will undo you’, ‘I shoptherefore I am’, ‘You invest in the divinity of themasterpiece’ and ‘You are seduced by the sex appeal ofthe inorganic’.

[19] For a discussion of Christopher Williams’ work regardingthis issue, see Godfrey (2008).

[20] Dorothea Hantelmann (2010, 10) argues that ‘above andbeyond the artwork … it is the format of the exhibitionthat is the key factor in art’s relevance to society’.

REFERENCES

Ashford, D. 2007. System Error: War Is a Force that Gives UsMeaning. Milan: Silvana Editoriale.

Ault, J., ed. 2010. Show and Tell: A Chronicle of GroupMaterial. London: Four Corner Books.

Benjamin, W. [1938] 1978. “The Author as Producer.” InReflections, edited by D. Peter. New York: Harcourt.

Bishop, C. 2008. Installation Art. London: Tate Publishing.Catalano, C. 2002. “Shaping the American Woman: Feminism

and Advertising in the 1950s.” Constructing the Past 3(1): 6.

Corkin, S. 2004. Cowboys as Cold Warriors: The Western andU.S. History. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Debord, G.-E., and G. J. Wolman. 1981. “Mode D’emploi DuDétournement’.” Les levres nues, no. 8 Paris May 1956trans. In Situationist International Anthology, editedby K. Knabb. Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets.

Eklund, D. 2009. The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984. NewYork: Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Evans, D. 2009. Appropriation. London: Whitechapel Gallery.Felshin, N., ed. 1995. But Is It Art? the Spirit of Art as Activism.

Seattle, WA: Bay Press.Ferguson, B., W. Reesa Greenberg, and S. Nairne. 1997.

“Mapping International Exhibitions.” Art & Design 52:30–37.

Glueck, G. 1984. “Art: Interventions on U.S. Latin Role.” NewYork Times, February 3. http://www.nytimes.com/1984/02/03/arts/art-interventions-on-us-latin-role.html

Godfrey, M. 2008. “Cameras, Corn, Christopher Williams, andthe Cold War.” October 126: 115–142. doi:10.1162/octo.2008.126.1.115.

Grace, C. 2001. “Counter-Time: Group Material’s Chronicle ofUS Intervention in Central and South America.” AfterallSpring: 27–37.

Group Material. 1982. “Caution! Alternative Space.” New York,1982 reprinted in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, eds. 1996.In Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, 895.Berkeley: University of California Press.

Grundberg, A. 1999. Crisis of the Real: Writings onPhotography since 1974. New York: Aperture.

Guerrero, I., and S. Mavlian. “A Chronicle of Interventions”text accompanying exhibition at Tate Modern’s ProjectSpace, London 2 May - 13 July, 2014 and TEOR/eTica artspace in San Jose, Costa Rica, 9 October 2014–22February 2015.

Kackman, M. 2005. Citizen Spy: Television, Espionage, andCold War Culture. Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress.

Kennedy, R. 2007. “Tough Art with a Candy Center.” The NewYork Times, June 7. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/07/arts/design/07bien.html?pagewanted=all

Kriebel, S. T. 2014. Revolutionary Beauty: The RadicalPhotomontages of John Heartfield. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press.

Kruger, B., and L. Phillips. 2005. Money Talks. New York:Skarstedt Fine Art.

Lawson, T. 1984. “Group Material, Timeline.” Artforum 12: 8.LeFebvre, H. 1991. The Production of Space. Translated and

edited by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Blackwell: Oxford.Lippard, L. R. 1986. “One Foot Out the Door”. In These Times,

July 9–22, 21.Lyotard, F. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on

Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Mouffe, C. 2000. The Democratic Paradox. London: Verson.Mouffe, C. 2007. “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces.” Art

& Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts, and Methods 1(2): 1–5.

Noble, A. 2000. Tina Modotti: Photography, Image, Texture.Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Oferdorfer, D. 1981. “Salvador Is ‘the Place to Draw the Line’on Communism, Percy Says.” Washington Post,February 20.

O’Neil, B. 2005. “Carmen Miranda: The High Price ofFame and Bananas.” In Latina Legacies: Identity,Biography, and Community, edited by V. L. Ruiz andV. S. Korrol, 175–192. New York: Oxford UniversityPress.

Owens, C. 1992. Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power,and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Pelizzari, M. A. 2009. “Towards an Impossible Closure: SusanMeiselas.” History, Photography & Culture 2 (2): 205–209.doi:10.2752/175145109X12456654102966.

A chronicle of Cold War photography 193

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Hea

ther

Dia

ck]

at 0

6:23

18

May

201

5

Pike, D. L. 2010. “Wall and Tunnel: The Spatial Metaphorics ofCold War Berlin.” New German Critique 37 (2, 110):73–94. doi:10.1215/0094033X-2010-005.

Rabe, S. G. 2012. The Killing Zone: The United States WagesCold War in Latin America. New York, UK: OxfordUniversity Press.

Rancière, J. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution ofthe Sensible. Translated and introduced by GabrielRockhill with an afterword by Slavoj Zizek. London:Continuum.

Rancière, J. 2009. Aesthetics and Its Discontents. First publishedin French as Malaise dans L’Esthétique, Eng. trans.Cambridge: Polity Press.

Solomon-Godeau, A. 1999. “Living with Contradictions:Critical Practices in the Age of Supply-Side Aesthetics.” InOverexposed: Essays on Contemporary Photography, editedby C. Squiers, 247–268. New York: The New Press.

Steedman, C. 2002. Dust. The Archive and Cultural History.New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Stiles, K., and P. Selz, eds. 1996. Theories and Documents ofContemporary Art. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Tagg, J. 1979. “A Socialist Perspective on PhotographicPractice.” In Three Perspectives on Photography, edited by

P. Hill, A. Kelly, and J. Tagg. London: Arts Council ofGreat Britain.

Tejada, R. 2009. National Camera: Photography and Mexico’sImage Environment. Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press.

Van Hardeveld, R. 1956. Make the Dirt Fly! Hollywood, CA:Pan Press.

Vernet, M. 1993. “Film Noir on the Edge of Doom.” In Shadesof Noir, edited by J. Copjec, 1–32. London: Verso.

Von Hantelmann, D. 2010. How to Do Things with Art; WhatPerformativity Means in Art; The Meaning of Art’sPerformativity. Zurich: JRP Ringier.

Wallis, B., ed. 1990. Democracy: A Project by Group Material.Seattle, WA: Bay Press.

Welchmann, J. C. 2001. Art After Appropriation: Essays on Artin the 1990s. Amsterdam: Overseas PublishersAssociation/G+B Arts International.

Wicks, D. H. 1980. “Dress Rehearsal: United StatesIntervention on the Isthmus of Panama, 1885.” PacificHistorical Review 49 (4): 581–605. doi:10.2307/3638968.

Zervigón, A. M. 2012. Photography, Persuasion, and the Rise ofAvant-Garde Photomontage. Chicago: University ofChicago Press.

194 H. Diack

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Hea

ther

Dia

ck]

at 0

6:23

18

May

201

5