GUIDED TOUR AND PRESENTATIONS GIVEN TO FIU AND BARRY STUDENTS

This Friday and Saturday, the Wolfsonian library hosted two scheduled library visits by local university students. The first group came from our own university, Florida International and was made up of students learning VTS or Visual Thinking Strategies; the second group hailed from Barry University and were more directly focused on the topic of propaganda.

On Friday, the entire reading room table was laid out with a wide variety of rare books, periodicals and ephemera aimed at encouraging the group to focus on the imagery and design of certain artifacts and to ask questions of the material as they might do with the literary or intellectual content. The session was designed to be a participatory experience, with the students being asked to parse the objects and to delve ever more deeply into the visual narrative by gathering information from the group about what each individual saw. Finally, after exhausting the group’s collective powers of observation, the class was subjected to a series of questions aimed at provoking them into delving ever more deeply. They were asked, for example, to consider such questions as who made the objects and who was the intended audience? Was there a visual narrative, and might there also have been a “subtext” or subliminal message embedded in the design? They were also challenged to consider the historic, social, and cultural context in which the object was created, distributed, or displayed. They were encouraged to think about the possible implications of the techniques and materials used in creating the artifacts.

Almost as soon as this first group was out the door, the display was dismantled and a new one set up for the Barry University students studying propaganda techniques. A few items on the table were ideally matched to the interests of both groups and so left out a second time. Among this latter group were some periodical covers with photomontages designed by John Heartfield (1891-1968). A committed Communist, Heartfield Anglicized his name from Helmut Herzfeld to disassociate himself from the Nazis seizing power in his native Germany, and used collages of photographs to lampoon and ridicule the forces of Capitalism and Fascism. In an age where fascist dictators told lies through the “objective” medium of staged photography, Heartfield used the “subjective” and creative technique of photomontage to recapture “truth.”

Here for your consideration are a few of Heartfield’s masterful creations. See how well you can master the art of VTS. As an added note as to just how effective and transcendent these images proved to be, the top image inspired a rock group in the early 1990s to recycle and adapt it as the artwork adorning their own record album cover. See if you can come up with the name of the band.

AFTER HOURS VISIT BY FIU HISTORICAL METHODS CLASS

Last evening, Dr. Aurora G. Morcillo brought the graduate students in her Historical Methods class to our rare books and special collections library for a presentation by Mellon grant coordinator Jon Mogul and yours truly. The aim was to expose the students to some of the nonliterary primary source materials in our library and to help them learn how to “read” and make sense of the visual imagery and physicality of the artifacts. It is hoped that after their visit the students might began thinking about utilizing such materials not merely as illustrations, but as evidence as compelling and potentially revealing as anything offered in some of the more traditional literary sources. The library table in our main reading room was laid out in advance of their arrival with an array of diverse materials covering five areas of strength from our collection: World’s Fair catalogs and ephemera; a wide variety of items documenting various colonial projects of the late nineteenth and twentieth century; all manner of propaganda produced in the Soviet Union; Spanish Civil War leaflets and vintage postcards; and a variety of rare books, calendars, and portfolios illustrated by American Socialist and Communist artists in the 1930s.

Starting with the VTS (Visual Thinking Strategies) methodology, the students were asked to look at and describe exactly what they saw in the artifacts until the group collectively exhausted the imagery of the items. In order to interpret and make sense of the objects, the students were next asked to think about these same designed objects in the historical, social, and cultural context of the times in which they were made. They were encouraged to think about who produced the work and for what intent? Who was the intended audience? Was there a subtext or subliminal message buried in the text or image that the historical audience might have immediately or subconsciously recognized? How was the message meant to be distributed? Was there some relationship between the design of the object (photograph, photomontage, linocut, illustration, and caricature), its form (exhibition catalog, postcard, leaflet, and handbill) and the ideology its creators espoused?

I have included one item from each of the five categories mentioned above so that my readers might also have a chance to try their hand at parsing and interpreting the items for themselves. Feel free to comment with your own impressions and interpretations of these historical artifacts.