With the US mid-term elections just a few weeks away, politics is much on my mind lately. It's a dirty business that I wish I didn't take so seriously, but here in the USA, the stakes seem so much higher than in England, my home country. Anyway, to relieve myself of my worries over whether or not the Democratic Party will preserve its congressional majorities, I thought about some political art that I used to see very often here in Chicago:
It's a mural on the interior wall of the post office at Irving Park and Southport, near the apartment where we used to live. It was painted by Harry Sternberg for the WPA, back in the 1930s. It's a classic WPA image, with its celebration of industrial progress, collaborations of workers and scientists, the city and the country. We no longer believe much in this idea of the unbridled benefits of progress, just as artists don't much believe in unironic portrayals of political ideals. I think we've gained some things from these changes, but we've also lost some things.
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It's a mural on the interior wall of the post office at Irving Park and Southport, near the apartment where we used to live. It was painted by Harry Sternberg for the WPA, back in the 1930s. It's a classic WPA image, with its celebration of industrial progress, collaborations of workers and scientists, the city and the country. We no longer believe much in this idea of the unbridled benefits of progress, just as artists don't much believe in unironic portrayals of political ideals. I think we've gained some things from these changes, but we've also lost some things.
Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader