Well, ladies and gentlemen, we've all been playing a tribute to a showman we all love. Now I'm going to be different. I'm going to show you a showman that we all hate. And it's gonna be in the form of a ballet. A Panzer ballet, and is entitled the Retreat from Moscow.
Hello my name's Rachel Parris. You might know me from The Mash Report or Austentatious or, , I'm Sorry, I Haven't A Clue on Radio Four. And I'm here today at the Imperial War Museum.
Rachel has joined Curator Sarah Holdaway at Imperial War Museum London to pose the questions that many of us are too embarrassed to ask, about how recent conflicts have shaped our world. In this series, we are exploring the role of the war artist in capturing seismic moments of contemporary history, and today we look at the techniques behind propaganda and protest art. C/O: What on earth do you think you were doing? Civilian (G H Mulcaster): I thought I was doing a victory roll. C/O: Good lad!
The more you and your friends put your hands in your pockets, the sooner we'll all be doing the victory roll. You bet. From shock tactics to satire, through the Spanish Civil War to the invasion of Iraq, we'll look at the artists, filmmakers, and photographers that have pulled on the public's emotional heartstrings.
If I was an Australian, if I was an Australian, I'd be quite cross in terms of that's how you try to mobilise, you know, my resistance to the Hun.
On our way, we'll encounter artistic works that challenge our guests' own practice. All so that we leave with an understanding of the significance of art in a time of war.
Oh my God. Is that a dead body? And it says, underneath Madrid, it says If you tolerate this your children will be next.
All this in under an hour. I'm James Taylor, and this is Conflict of Interest. Our curator for today's tour is Sarah Holdaway, art curator at Imperial War Museums, who has designed this unique experience for comedian Rachel Parris, around various pieces of propaganda and protest art in the gallery.
Rachel, tell me about the last time that you visited a gallery.
A gallery, probably not that long ago. Because I tour a lot with comedy around the country, I end up having half days free in random cities, and I quite often might go to a museum or a gallery. I think the last one I went to was in, Dundee in Scotland actually. Just a really small local museum, but it had a gallery as well. I'm really interested in history. And not as interested in art.
In the entranceway to the gallery, Rachel is presented with a third member of the party. Mark Sealy is the Director of Autograph and Professor of Photography Rights and Representation at University of the Arts London.
My kind of raison d'etre is to think about what's the work that images do in culture? And I'm also very interested in how they change in time and how we see things or how we imagine we see things back then. And then with the knowledge that we have now, how we might reflect on the things that might have been seen as quite normal at the time.
And then think about just because you might be a bit knowledgeable about the impact of them, what kind of things are almost replicating the things that we might have imagined that have changed.
Yeah,
Sorry, it's...
I followed you. Yeah. Yeah! When I think of propaganda, around conflict, the one image that everyone I'm sure says is This Country Needs You. Which was so iconic from seeing that in the history books so often. And I think because it's been so much in the news at the moment, I think of the antisemitic propaganda that was used in Germany, in the Second World War. Those are the two things that spring to mind immediately.
What do you think when someone says protest art? What springs to mind?
Oh God. Graffiti? Some street art is protest art.
Well I think we're gonna go and have a look at some images and see if we can work out the difference.
We have arrived at our first set of images all created during, or immediately after, the First World War. On certain podcast apps you can glance at your phone as you listen, to see some of the works we're discussing.
So we're here in the Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Galleries and this room in particular is called Power of The Image. And as you walk in, you are faced with this wall of posters and I thought we could start here, and with this one just at the top here. Do you want to describe to me what you're looking at?
Sure. It's really monstrous. The words say Destroy This Mad Brute: Enlist. So it's encouraging people to join the Army. But the image underneath those words is, an ape with a bloodied bat and bloodied arms carrying a topless woman in a sort of shroud. And the ape has got a little moustache, FYI, and is wearing a military hat.
It's a US Army poster. What do you think the message is behind this? Obviously to enlist, but how are they trying to get people to enlist?
They're trying to suggest that the enemy is gonna pillage and rape your innocent women and steal them away. Which I find fascinating to have portrayed that with a woman, with her boobs out. In all of this, I feel like the image is titillating deliberately.
There are some key things in there, aren't there? There's the, culture baton been kind used as a-
Oh yeah.
-as a bludgeon in terms of there. I think that's a really important part of that. The other thing I think is that there's a, for me, looking at this from the work that I do, there's a kind of racialised element within that as well.
Oh yeah.
It's almost as if the 'Destroy This Mad Brute' is because the history of the representation of the gorilla and its racist implications to the past representations of the African subject. And I think that idea that, you know, the most vulnerable thing as a man is to protect women-
yes.
-from this foreign dark gorilla-like invader. So it plays to a very, I think because this is an American poster, it plays to, plays to lots of sensitivities.
I also think the interesting thing about this poster is that it looks filmic to me. . Narrator: Whilst posters recruiting British soldiers tended to be informative and full of text, those in the US and elsewhere were emotionally charged and persuasive. In some respects, this was due simply to the fact that Britain had conscription. Yet by 1917 when this poster was created, the US had that too. Just to the left of this image in the same display, Sarah draws Rachel's attention to a new poster.
There's a little thing in the corner that says Win The War League. I serve. With a little fleur-de-lis type thing. There's a big spooky face wearing I think a German military helmet, who's appearing in a big puff of smoke from the ruins of a burning building. And then there's a sort of Little Lord Fauntleroy pampered little boy character who's running away from the buildings and from the enemy. And the words say, Don't Falter. Go and Meet the Hun Menace.
And the little boy is standing on, Australia? is it Australia?
Yeah.
I guess you don't want to be that little boy.
If I was an Australian, if I was an Australian, I'd be quite cross in terms of that's how you try to mobilise my, you know, my resistance to the Hun. So there's that part of it. I'm wondering whether it sees itself as a young nation that needs to grow up and it needs to stand on its own. That's interesting. And it's still in that kind of Commonwealth space, i.e. Europe is standing up to this-
Yeah.
-to this beast, this menace, this Hun. Why don't we grow up and take off our children's clothes and go and face the enemy too.
So that youth figure could be representing-
-standing up as a nation and showing standing on Australian soil.
The youngness of the nation. Yeah.
Maybe thinking, maybe it's like that, as I read that.
I came across a video that was, I would say, it reminded me of this, but it was a TikTok video of a very attractive, possibly AI blonde, beautiful girl talking about how weak the new generations are and how boys don't know how to be men anymore and they haven't fought in a war. And how the young are pampered and we need to learn to be strong again. And all of this, it was really, strange. And the fact that it was presented by this beautiful young woman, telling men to be strong, it was so weird.
It caused a family argument. And it just reminded me of like, so that same message is still going on, like wielding, using femininity and womanhood to try and wield that as a, like you should be strong and only saying that men should be strong, boys should be strong, not that girls should be. And these, I look at these now and I'm like, it hasn't changed that much. Like, the way they've used, like the vulnerability of women. The sexuality of women.
And the idea that the nations who this is calling to are vulnerable. They're young or female, or you know, being destroyed by someone else.
We move on away from the propaganda of the 1920s and into the 1930s where new threats require new shock tactics. And a content warning: this section discusses powerful imagery that some may find upsetting. You can check the show notes for this episode to see if this may apply to you.
Oh my God. Is that a dead body? Jesus Christ. it says madrid. And it says, underneath Madrid, it says the "military", in inverted commas, practice of the rebels. If you tolerate this your children will be next. And the image it's talking about is the image of a dead child with a number on it, with military planes in the background. And it's really awful and harrowing and triggering, which is obviously the point.
And I find that interesting because I've often talked in recent times about how easily people put dead children on the news and on social media now, you see images all over begging for help, for donations. They use the image of dead or dying or injured children. And I've often talked about like how that's a modern phenomenon. And I didn't know that it wasn't a modern- I didn't know they used that.
What conflict do you think we are looking at through this poster, and who do you think the target audience is for this one?
Well, it's in English. I don't know enough about Spanish military history. It's the Spanish Civil War but we were involved?
It is a poster from the Spanish Civil War and as you pointed out it's in English. So the posters were produced in English and in French. And it's interesting to note that both of those countries took an approach of not getting involved. It's really targeting that to draw at the heartstrings and ask, begging for support.
The Spanish Civil War saw the right wing nationalists, led by General Franco, receiving munitions, personnel and air support from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The left wing Republicans received support from the Soviet Union and Mexico. But France, the United Kingdom and the United States were among a number of countries that did not take part. This powerful poster was, in effect, part of a battle for hearts and minds in the western world.
What's interesting with this piece is it's photographs. So we are moving away from the illustrative element of the First World War posters and moving into photo montage on this one. And by putting the words in English, it's telling and warning of the fact that fascism could become a wider- it's not gonna be isolated to one area. And that with this kind of aerial bombardment is what we're gonna see in future conflicts.
There was quite a lot of left wing activists from the UK that went to fight for the, so-called Rebels as such. So it was a- I think it was trying to recruit two things. Those that were part of the kind of socialist movement to fight against fascism as a kind of international brigade, and also to provoke the sovereign powers to get involved. So it's got this weird kind of duality across it. I think it's more of a complex one 'cause it's like the military practice of the rebels.
It could be read on first instance that the rebels are the ones doing the military work, which is the formation of the planes. So it's a bit ambiguous for me, this one.
But it's quite clear that once you know that there's an involvement of both Germany and Italy in supporting Franco's Spain, then you know that it's in- the people are being bombed from outside forces and that the rebels are victims to this moment, and it is the youth and the children that are paying the heaviest price 'cause it is, it does seem to be recognised as an unfair, unjust involvement from external forces.
This is the time as well Guernica has been made, and Picasso's making these great- it's a traumatic time where I think probably one of the most iconic pieces of artwork gets made as a protest, you could argue, which is Picasso's Guernica out of that place. So that bombing has a- this moment has a huge resonance in the kind of prelude to World War II and the things- and it's very, it's actually quite accurate. It's really quite, it's really quite something.
No, but it is interesting that degree of photorealism now becomes part of the package and that montage becomes, that use of photography. And it's interesting 'cause there's always this idea about truth in images, whereas for me photography's always had this manipulative quality within it. And you can begin to cut and paste the montage and collage work into that propagandist or protest like moment. So it's a powerful piece, this one.
Images like this really become quite sophisticated because they're a journey to a new form of communicating, once you begin to start cutting and pasting things together. They're not made by you know, the hand of the artist. They're made by, you know, mechanical reproduction begins to come into play, mass circulation, probably more posters of this than the ones that were, that were rolled off. So they begin to play with like, is this real? Is this not? Is photography doing this?
What am I looking through? And they have that realist quality rather than this made-up quality, which make them much more emotive. And it was interesting 'cause you said it's triggering. It's triggering in a way because it brings you closer to the reality of the violence.
But it's both because it is real and the photography means it does feel like more truthful and also it is artistic. The way that obviously the placing it with the formation of the planes and the clouds, they've kind of made it a bit ambiguous about what is the child's hair and shadow looks almost like darker clouds, part of the cloudy landscape. So it is a work of art, as well, which feels really gross, somehow, like to make a work of art out of that.
Do you know what I really like about this piece? Just as we think about it, it's doing several things. You, it's the point of view is really interesting. It's not that direct. You're looking down at the child who's died, who's passed away. They're also, they're numbered as well, so they're on the way to some form of, indexicality of their death. But you're looking down at the same time you're looking up.
So you're looking down and you're looking up and you're looking- so that kind of, that's what I meant by like this surrealist vision. You are looking both ways at the same time, and very real. So it's a way of looking down at death, but looking at this threat from above. Which you could argue, we begin to understand how dangerous this aerial world becomes in this moment, that bombing becomes a really heavy strategic part of changing conflict.
All of a sudden it's not on the ground, it's not in the trenches. The threat is coming from above.
We continue our tour of the gallery descending upon another piece of photo montage from some 40 years after the Spanish Civil War. And it includes one of the most iconic images of the Cold War.
Without prior knowledge, if you like, of what it is we can see a big mushroom cloud which has been very artistically and cleverly set against an image of a skull, human skull where the eye holes fall sort of in the gap of the mushroom of the cloud. And there's a symbol on it, which I think is the CND symbol. So I know that's the mushroom cloud of Hiroshima. I assume and it says, Stop Nuclear Suicide. Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and their address.
The artist, FHK Henrion, was a German artist. He came to England during the Second World War and he was actually interned at a camp on the Isle of Man I think. He produced Second World War posters for the Ministry of Information, around lots of different subjects, health and safety, awareness of sexual diseases. After the war set up his own design studio and as an artist pioneered corporate branding, I think.
So when you think of that, and the campaign for nuclear disarmament as a brand, as an organisation-
It's interesting. The key thing for me is Stop Nuclear Suicide. That's an interesting term because it's almost as if somehow you're gonna kill yourself. So the enemy isn't actually that clearly identified if we talk about Stop Nuclear Suicide. And then it's the campaign for nuclear disarmement, well, we're going to- you're killing yourself by investing in this kind of future of nuclear weapons.
So it's funny, I'm reading this more of a kind of internal conversation about how you address the nation, how you address your fellow citizens.
So by saying suicide, would they be trying to imply, if we are involved in nuclear war-
Absolutely.
-that's gonna bring it on ourselves.
If we embrace that past, which is the nuclear past, something's gone off and that's its impact. Then if we embrace that, then we are committing suicide. So it's the ultimate weapon in war at the time of its making and still probably is, and then, but it also becomes the ultimate weapon of self-destruction.
Here's what's interesting, is that poster of the dead child and this poster then, are both using you will hurt yourselves eventually to persuade people, rather than-
Your future is death.
-you'll hurt other people. Look at this poor person's dead child. Look at this poor child who's dead. It's, yeah, but what, when your child is dead, that's when it'll matter. And they're saying no matter that all of these thousands of people have died horribly, but it might happen - in saying suicide, I feel like it's not enough to say don't bomb thousands of millions, they're saying it only matters because it might happen to us.
I think that's absolutely right. I think that's the key message there. And I think that's the, you know, the campaign for nuclear disarmement is, you know, it's a global - we all lose. There's no winners in that, there's no winners in that conflict. It's complete annihilation of everybody and everything in that sense.
Thinking about a wider conversation around propaganda and protest, where do you think this sits?
Interesting. Yeah, because I feel like CND were against government arming themselves. So this was from the people, if you like, wasn't it, crying out to the government, stop doing this. So this was more protest art than propaganda.
We move again. This time back to the Second World War. But this film seems years ahead of its era. . It features a popular song of the time, set against thousands of goosestepping Nazis.
Well, I've never seen anything like it from that era. It reminds me of TikToks and Instagram reels so much. And not even that has been happening for the last 10 years, but what has been specifically this era of what a lot of people are doing, chopping up editing, like movement and dance to a song of their choice. But it's about the retreat from Moscow.
So that film is edited to the Lambeth Walk-
Which is a banger.
Of course. The person who introduced it actually appeared in the play of the subsequent film that made that song famous again. The Nazis were very theatrical and liked to put on almost, like these, they were performances. There were parades and rallies that were meant to boost morale and show this kind of sense of belonging and how powerful it is in power in numbers. And you see that with the marching. It was captured by a filmmaker called Leni Riefenstahl. Hitler actually saw one of her films.
She was a filmmaker and an actress, and he saw one of her films, liked the film and invited her to film some of the rallies and the parades. So this was actually some of her footage from probably the most famous film that she did from 1934 called The Triumph of the Will. It was like a big budget movie. It had, you know, tracking, there was lots of people sort of from the Nazi party supporting her, huge numbers.
They did sort of high up shots, they were filming from planes, it was this big production. And the British have got hold of this and turned it into this mockery of performance really, isn't it? It's this performance and they've mocked it. That feels very British as well. To go, like, to take something that's very grandiose and formal and big and to go, that's silly. We'll make it really silly and small, and reverse it actually. It appeared on a newsreel.
Without saying that it was by the Ministry of Information. So it appeared as part of a news. So how do you think that would've been received?
Well, it would've gone out in British news?
Yeah.
Oh, that's really funny. So it would've just really taken people by surprise.
Essentially the underlying raison d'être for this is to own the narrative. If Nazi Germany's rallies and the theater and bringing people to a sense of heightened excitement through that rally of wanting to be associated with this space, and then to turn that into a pantomime, literally, and a form of mockery and to be laughed at. Then that offers a degree of security to the audience because, you know, Britain is under threat at this time.
So this all mighty goosestepping in formation, flag-waving, führer-bearing rhetoric gets turned into a comic pantomime, then I think people like think, okay, then it's not as scary as it looks.
Yeah, if we can still have a bit of a laugh-
...we can still have a bit of a laugh. We can still actually defeat it and it's not as serious as we imagine.
'cause all the other, the posters we've looked at so far, it feels like the purpose of them as propaganda is to persuade people to act, whether it's to enlist or to try and get a government to join people in a war. Whereas with that, it feels like it's there, like you say, to reassure and to encourage people to sort of hold tight, keep going, don't give up kind of thing 'cause some good stuff is happening and we can still have a laugh.
Also that all of it well, I think what's interesting in terms of this film and the parade, Nuremberg Rally, wherever it was, it just also shows that it is also just theatre. So this is all just one big performance and we can easily manipulate it, change it, and challenge it and give you a totally different message. So it's meaning might be scary if you look at it in the raw, but at the same time it's all edited. What it does do is it just shows that you can control the narrative.
And that this is how we're gonna control this narrative for you. This narrative in its original state is being controlled and made for you, so that you feel scared and intimidated by this rise of power. But here's what you can also do, which is just disseminate it, recut it, repaste it. And this is, it's actually, I think, really smart for its time. 'cause it's actually showing you what you can do with the medium.
Yeah. Which I didn't know they knew.
Oh yeah, they, yeah. I think they're super smart in that context, yeah.
We move to our final object. One that has been seen millions of times on the internet.
Yes, I have seen it before. It's an image of Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister, taking a selfie, or it looks like he's taking a selfie in front of a massive cloud of an explosion in what has been reduced to rubble. His grin, it's worth saying, he's grinning, looking smart in a blue shirt in front of this big black cloud.
it was made, I think originally it was made in 2005.
That's interesting because, yeah, I remember, I'd just started university and there were protests against the war down the street. I, at that time, was pretty clueless about everything and didn't really have many political opinions, I don't think I was for the war, I didn't really understand what was going on, but I was interested. That was probably the start of me getting interested in politics. But I remember the antiwar feeling.
But it's interesting to me that it was created like a couple of years after that.
But thinking about this as a photo montage again, so two clearly different images, Different vibes, yeah. Yeah. So the Tony Blair taking a selfie while smiling, it was taken, I think on his campaign, where he took a selfie in front of some young Sea Cadets. And then the artists saw this and put the two images together from that.
Two things spring to mind. One is that it was an era when taking selfies was at its height, at its beginning, and also was, I would say, less so these days, it was a real kind of culture war thing of like the taking of the selfie was an act of narcissism.
But also that Tony Blair, this image will have helped to create, I think, the caricature that satirists look back on of Tony Blair which is this grinning, this monstrously grinning, caricature and the like, Spitting Image and Dead Ringers and a lot of satire depicts him with this manic grin on his face. And it's interesting 'cause this image will have been part of the folklore around that creation of that image.
So the artist, it's listed as Kennardphillipps, and it's a collaboration between Peter Kennard and Cat Phillips. And they started working together around 2002. I think what's really interesting about the way they collaborate, they see it as a conversation between two artists talking about how their work would have very different outcomes if it was just singular artists working on this, and it's very much about collaboration.
I don't really associate it with a damning scenario of the individual. I think it asks you to think the potentiality of the self and how corrupting that power offers, you become absorbed in the self, in the moment of the politics, and you think that you are doing that and you become the story rather than the circumstances that bring around that conflict or those tragedies or those events. And I think Peter's very good at that. I think these are the keys, this is what power does.
It becomes all about the self. But you, in making that selfie, you are seeing Tony's caricature, we're seeing Blair's caricature and the consequences of losing the capacity to think about the social and political responsibility that power has. So for me, it's more an image about how power corrupts-
-than it is about Tony blair.
Than it is about Tony Blair.
That's really interesting.
And the caricature of Tony Blair becomes a metaphor for Western democracy and hypocrisy, because we imagine that we're in democracies, but when democracy goes wrong, or its alliances fail us, then we may as well end up in a kind of fascistic type place. And I think that's the fault line in the Bush/Blair administrative space. They become as demonic as the thing that they're trying to, in theory, liberate us from.
Rachel, Sarah and Mark make their way through the school groups towards the IWM cafe. As they walk, they begin to question the role and impact of satire and ridicule in conflict.
Personally, I just think that there's a kind of dangerous equation.
It is a fine line. I've questioned it constantly in the last few years. As I say, I only really started doing satire because of a show called The Mash Report, and I didn't do that much of it before then. Really honing down on like party politics, Westminster politics, and satirising key figures, human beings. I feel like we know that we mustn't dehumanise groups of people, vulnerable people, we know not to punch down, we know to punch up.
The question I've found myself asking over the years in all of the writing and presenting of that is, is it still okay to dehumanise people if you're punching up? If I'm dehumanising the Prime Minister, people who have power and who are making policies that affect the entire world, I'm ridiculing them. And that still feels icky. But it feels okay because they're doing things that are so powerful and they have such a high status, but it is still the act of demonising them.
I think that the thing is whether we, in that, where do we leave the audience?
Yeah.
Do we leave the, I think- So the question for me would be, yes, you can criticise, you know, let's just say power. You can call power to account. And I think that's an essential job. But the question is how you do it and where you leave those that are gonna be reading the work.
Yeah. It's hard. I find myself with faultlines I found myself making - Mark: these arbitrary lines about what I would and wouldn't mock, so I wouldn't mock their clothes or their personal appearance or their family life. But that was decided on a day-by-day, joke-by-joke basis, and you wouldn't always fall onto the side of right. There were some things that I look back on and I'm like, I don't love, I don't love that. But it was a form of propaganda, certainly.
I don't know what satirists do, if there's protest comedy?
we've all got an agenda somehow, whether conscious or un unconscious. And yeah, rear view mirror, you think, oh my God, I wished I never supported that, or I missed that thing. But that's the learning part, isn't it? I'm always just more, I'm just mindful of, see institutions like the Imperial War Museum or Autograph, I'm just mindful of the role we have when people have been through it, is it just celebrating what's there or what's the critical path that we want people to actually take away.
So what's the change maker that you are actually putting in play? And I think we can lose sight of that very easily because it becomes about infotaining and not changing.
Yeah, that's interesting. As a comedian, I get criticised because they're like, just be entertaining. Don't try to persuade. That's not comedy; comedy is just entertainment. And it's like... but if you're talking about politics, you can't, you literally cannot do political comedy without taking side. It's It's about change, it's about persuading people.
Thank you so much, Sarah and Mark, for coming round the museum with me and helping me make sense of some of the weird and monstrous things that we saw today. There's loads that I'm taking away from it. Some of which is that techniques of persuasion, I suppose, haven't changed that much from like a hundred years ago to today.
The visuals look different, but demonising groups of people using race and gender and outdated stereotypes is still used to persuade people to do things and to control people. And also that humour can be useful to change people's minds as well. The Nazis doing the Lambeth Walk is what he is gonna stay with me for a really long time.
And that's where we must leave this Conflict of Interest and the Blavatnik Gallery of Art, Film and Photography. Thanks again to our guests, Rachel Parris. Professor Mark Sealy, and Sarah Holdaway. Next week on Conflict of Interest.
I love it now. I know that sounds like the kind of thing that you just say for a thing like this, but I guess you gotta stop and think about it. And now I... I see where he's coming from.
Comedian Jeff Norcott discovers the way artists, filmmakers, and photographers capture the huge technological advances in 20th century warfare. My name is James Taylor. The producer was Matt Hill at Rethink Audio with support from Eleanor Head, Daniel BenChorin, and the IWM Institute team at Imperial War Museums. Thank you for listening, and goodbye.