Sabine Kriebel: Left-wing Humour, or, Heartfield’s Holy Hate
“Holy hate,” according to Georg Lukács, is the driving force behind penetrating social satire, its Marxist ‘holiness’ rooted in a political ethics of equity that prevents parodic forms from becoming trite or vulgar. This paper interrogates the politics of subversive laughter in John Heartfield’s AIZ photomontages, demonstrating that while his motivations might be holy in Lukács’ lexicon, his pictorial tactics are mischievously regressive, grotesque and often in bad taste. Embedded in contemporaneous theories of critical humour, this paper proposes to take Heartfield’s transgressive play seriously as a radical political tactic, shedding light on an often-overlooked aspect of interwar Marxism.
Ed Krčma: Wols, Smallness and Creaturely Life
The first post-war exhibition of German-born artist Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze) consisted entirely of drawings. These tiny raw worlds, set down ‘on little scraps of paper,’ were compared by Jean-Paul Sartre to ‘pullulating viruses under a microscope.’ Rather than developing the kind of poetics of angst in relation to which Wols’ work has often been discussed, this paper offers a phenomenological reading of his drawings, taking their remarkable smallness as a starting point. Smallness in Wols is immersive and vertiginous, lending the drawings a magnitude in the imagination, as these teeming worlds are brought up arrestingly close. In thinking about the stakes of such a project for making art in a devastated post-war France, I will also briefly explore the usefulness of Eric Santner’s concept of ‘creaturely life’. For Santner, this term refers to the realm of compulsions and excitations, where the animal and human are brought into a peculiar proximity by the latter’s exposure to the exertions of sovereign power and uncanny desire.
