Fabric of Democracy: Printed Textiles and Propaganda During the Cold War

本项目将考察1946年至1970年间纺织品的宣传作用。绝大多数关于纺织品的文章关注的是国内领域，而宣传则被视为塑造公共领域的问题。宣传艺术主要是在极权主义国家的背景下考虑的。然而，一些西方宣传纺织品对这种划分提出了质疑。冷战时期英国和美国印花纺织品的三个案例研究将构成这个策展研究项目的基础，这将导致一篇书面论文和两个策展成果，在时装与纺织品博物馆（伦敦）和英国纺织品双年展（兰开夏）。这些设计将被置于更广泛的宣传背景下，作为视觉和物质文化中有争议的术语，并将研究策展宣传对象如何与它们在多学科和动态之间占据的交叉空间进行批判性接触。跨学科的方法将纺织档案定位为书面论文和两个策展产出的基础。本文将试图通过接近分裂的术语“宣传”，通过仔细理解冷战公众的中介形成及其伴随的公民身份，使用最近的方法，将公众和身份理解为不稳定和复杂的，通过公众和反公众的交叉构成和建立（Warner 2002）。

This project will examine textiles as propaganda between 1946 and 1970. Textiles have overwhelmingly been written about with a focus on the domestic sphere, while propaganda has been examined as a matter of shaping the public sphere. Propaganda art has predominantly been considered in the context of totalitarian states. However, several Western propaganda textiles trouble these compartmentalisations. Three case studies of Cold War era British and American printed textiles will form the basis for this curatorial research project, which will result in a written thesis and two curatorial outputs, at the Fashion & Textile Museum (London) and British Textile Biennial (Lancashire). These designs will be placed within the wider context of propaganda as a contested term in visual and material culture, and will examine how curating propaganda objects involves a critical engagement with the intersecting space they occupy between multiple disciplines and dynamics.An interdisciplinary approach will situate the textile archives as the basis of a written thesis and two curatorial outputs. The thesis will attempt to nuance debates by approaching the divisive term 'propaganda' with a careful understanding of the mediated formation of Cold War publics, and their concomitant civic identities, using recent methods which understand publics and identities as unstable and complex, constituted and instituted through the intersection of publics and counter publics (Warner 2002).