21st Century Boy

If you're in the Liverpool area in the next few weeks, do try to get along to Tate Liverpool to see ‘Portraying a Nation: Germany 1919-1933’.

The exhibition covers the years of the Weimar Republic through the eyes of the artist Otto Dix and the photographer August Sander, and it’s well worth a visit!

I studied Otto Dix back in my student days as part of my ‘Modern European Literature and Culture, 1870-1970’ course and it was great to see so many of his paintings, drawings and sketches gathered together in one place today. Some I loved, others I was rather less keen on!

But what I really wanted to see were the 144 photographs (the vast majority of them portraits) by August Sander. The pictures were selected from his ‘People of the 20th Century’ collection (the full collection runs to over 600 portraits) which is an extraordinarily record of Germany between the wars.

The portraits provide a visual commentary on Germany as it struggled to find an identity for itself following defeat in WW1 - and the parallels with the situation across Europe and the USA today are striking. And very worrying. The nation was divided between socially liberal/left-leaning/artistic/bohemian types and those who felt excluded and humiliated by the economic hardships of extreme inflation, agricultural and industrial decline as Germany was required to pay billions in post-war reparations.

Anyone who’s ever seen ‘Cabaret’ will recognise these conflicting social and political groups, and of course we’re all aware of the outcome.

The blaming of ‘others’ for national misfortunes, the hatred whipped up against people from different religions and cultures - it all seems horrifyingly contemporary.

Sander documented it all - the widows and orphans left in the wake of WW1, the injured and shell-shocked ex-service personnel, the farmers struggling to make ends meet, the migrant workers, the left-wing intellectuals, the writers, performers and artists (including Otto Dix), the Hitler Youth, the Nazi officers, the political prisoners, the Jewish community members who came to him for passport photos as they hurried to leave the country before it was too late. It all makes for sobering viewing.

You can see a video about it here… www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TDJRt3_AU0

The exhibition inspired me to keep on documenting the 21st Century people that I see around me every day. Here's one of them!

And here's Sigue Sigue Sputnik www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRhVieOGQkw

(Sorry Goatee, I almost went for King Crimson but the video wasn't this entertaining!)