Saturday 13 February 2016

i drive a rolls royce, because it’s good for my voice

The always compelling Nag on the Lake invites to visit an expertly curated gallery, showing in London, of early 1970s political protest posters to come out of the workshop of the University of California’s Berkeley campus.
These bold and iconic posters really capture the Zeitgeist of distrust and dissolution that framed the era of Vietnam, Nixon and violent kettling of rallies, and the quality and artistry of these prints, incidentally, inspired some to believe that the peace-movement was backed by the Communists in order to corrupt the youth and overthrow the government. This conspiratorial belief only strengthened the hubris of the politicians in their thinking that they surely could not have genuinely engendered such disaffections on their own. There are some fifty posters to view but I especially liked this one that recalls Goya’s nightmare vision of the paranoid Titan Cronus (Saturn) devouring his offspring, the Olympian gods.