“Georgie’s Diner” by Michael Amato.
Propaganda, says Madison-based artist Bernhard Geyer, is like a camera lens, zooming in and out, revealing images without their full context.
In Shhh… an exhibition opening Feb. 3 at Arts + Literature Lab, Geyer and 23 other artists riff on themes inspired by WWII propaganda. The title, Shhh…, is a nod to posters that encouraged patriotic U.S. citizens to keep their knowledge of military matters quiet during wartime; the slogan “Loose lips sink ships” is an example. A number of actual World War II posters are part of the exhibit, on loan from local collectors. “Propaganda is a very intense way of limiting or editing things,” says Geyer, 58, a native Austrian and a translator at Epic who, for much of his life, did translation work in the art world. “There are certain things that you have to excise and maybe not mention because it’s not possible to tell the whole story.”
Geyer’s contributions to the show, part of his series “The History of the Art of War,” are gouache, or opaque watercolor, on square cardboard packaging. Some of the paintings feature the name of a historic battle site, written in midnight blue, and the silhouette of one soldier, atop white textured paint. Other works are rough landscapes of battlegrounds.
“In battles, so many people died; it’s just a number. I wanted to focus in on this instance of one person dying or being dead,” says Geyer, adding that he wanted to “zoom out” to represent battles in different places and time periods. “Gettysburg” and “Wounded Knee” carry much resonance in the United States, but Geyer also depicts battles from World War I and the oldest known battle site in Karkar, Mesopotamia.
Peter Kursel, the exhibit’s curator and former painting faculty member at UW-Madison and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says channels for information have changed vastly since the mid-20th Century. Then, World War II posters were hung in bars, town halls, libraries and office buildings, in an orderly distribution network that reached the public.
“Now we’ve got this multi-mega-channel culture,” says Kursel, who lives in Madison. A reading and opening reception for Shhh… will take place on Feb. 3 from 6-9 p.m. It includes technological and performance pieces that transcend the 2-D relics that came before them.
“Pero No Ganarán” (“But They Will Not Win”) by L.A.-based artist Allison Yasukawa, draws from Australian rock band Crowded House’s 1986 hit “Don’t Dream It’s Over.” In English, the song’s chorus ends “They come/To build a wall between us/We know they won’t win.” The Spanish translation responds to Trump’s proposed wall on the U.S.-Mexican border and the move to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. During the exhibit’s opening event, the song will be sung, karaoke-style, by Madison-area DACA Dreamers, among others.
“In the 1940s, art was seen as a vehicle to construct a democracy,” says Kursel. “It has become clear that [President Donald] Trump’s ideology, in many ways, uses information to destruct the democracy.”
