Was Shamai helping to enforce the Absentee Property Law of 1950, a legal instrument that the State of Israel used to confiscate Palestinian property vacated due to Israel’s own aggression? Was Shamai quelling the monthlong protests set off by the Wadi Salib Riots, a series of events where Mizrahim objected to the comprehensive Ashkenazi oppression of Jewish-Arab immigrants? Was Shamai guarding the supposed “textile factory” where Israel was attempting to develop nuclear weapons with heavy water imported from Norway? What was Shamai being thanked for?
Clearly, neither Shamai nor his family desire this object or are willing to maintain tribute.
Presently, the Down Barracks site serves as an industrial park. Other vestigial cultural fragments are the local baseball team, known as the Blackhorses, and a thoroughfare, Black-Horse-Straße. Moreover, Eurodance is a globally recognizable outgrowth of Cold War–era US military bases and can be traced back to the Fulda Gap; the development of this percussion- and rhythm-driven music genre emerges just prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Milli Vanilli, the production phenomenon organized by Frank Farian in 1988, included three backup singers who had been raised on the edges of the Fulda Gap because their fathers were soldiers on base. What political insight is rendered by considering Milli Vanilli as Cold War trench art?
Talking to BFBS Forces News, military historian Lt. Col. Dan Snedeker dispels an oft-repeated myth about how the 11th Armored Cavalry got the appellation “Blackhorse Regiment.” Legend has it that the name comes from a 1924 California oil fire battle that left the cavalry’s white horses covered in soot. But Snedeker instead claims that the nickname probably comes from when the regiment was stationed on the border of Mexico and California to enforce the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. On their off time, the troops played extras in Hollywood films, where they were asked, for cinematic effect, to only ride black horses. Why subsequent generations of soldiers insisted on an alternate history might be rooted in white attachment to supremacist aesthetics, particularly blackface and its uncanny application to service animals. See →.
For a checklist that includes all bird species presently found in Fulda, see →. During the Cold War, local birders reporting from the edges of the fencing noted the presence of endangered birds not found elsewhere.
The joke not only hinges on how brief the soldier’s agency might be, but on the near impossibility of the bodily stretch. Few could contort themselves enough to kiss their own ass; even a whiff of the perineum is the stuff of fantasy. We, the powerless, glean pleasure in at least sharing that we are wise to the nature of our subjugation.
The British Museum’s secretum of phallocentric artefacts, now dismantled, provides a precedent for another possible use of the middle finger.
A pacifist archivist on an ego trip, possessed by a dream that their own comprehensive cataloging would render peace, might pause to conjure what cannot be collected: that which has been atomized.
Here smoking functions as a spatial device that clears the ground for thinking. It is toxic to be sure, but hardly registers in comparison to nuclear annihilation.
One WWII helmet, while still incorporating a rather standard symbol of liberty, gets complicated. It features two cartoonish statues in dresses celebrating, one waving a torch in the air and the other a sword. These revelers are New York City’s own copper giantess, the Statue of Liberty, and Kiev’s taller titanium colossus, Mother Ukraine. Mother Ukraine was erected by the Soviets in 1979 and was initially named “Mother Motherland.” She was intended to be a personification of Russia. The statue-chimera has since been modified to represent Ukraine, but with Russia’s invasion, could it be recycled yet again? Here too, material from one war is refashioned for the sale of propaganda for another war. This particular business was a woodshop before the invasion, and its shift in merchandise is central to its economic survival.
As of February 12, 2025.
The drone fragment ready-mades fall short of the parameters of therapeutic trench art: there is little material reflection of the seller’s shell shock, which reveals the conditions of this particular seller’s monetization. I will stop short of calling it a conceptual line.
See →. Last accessed February 12, 2025.
Fred Pearce, “As War Halts, the Environmental Devastation in Gaza Runs Deep,” Yale Environment 360, February 6, 2025 →.
Zain Hussain, “How Top Arms Exporters Have Responded to the War in Gaza,” Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, October 3, 2024 →.
Hannah Ryggen’s 1935 tapestry Etiopia was featured in the same 1937 Paris exhibition as Picasso’s Guernica. Ryggen’s depiction of Mussolini’s skewered head was censored but Guernica was displayed in full.
Artists invested in stopping war often feel obliged to generate graphics for campaigns that are bureaucratic and that feel incredibly dull—like a boycott, or a phone bank. They might have to conjure luminous images of war tax resistance, whether made of clay, video, wool, or oil. It is hard to “go dull”—to resist seeing something like Hannah Ryggen’s anti-fascist tapestries as a better solution. But what is measurably instigated these days by works that fall squarely into the realm of protest art—that are eventually shipped across an ocean, and strung up in a museum, and maybe reviewed? I wish to be surprised.
In order to avoid sharpshooters, soldiers burrowed into the sides of their trenches, where they could maintain a certain level of stillness, even while carving.
This flip-flop of pronouns is not just about gender expansion; it cleaves more closely to the pressure of material facts: from the Revolutionary War through the US Civil War, a smattering of females passing in male uniform fought alongside male soldiers; both ate and smoked and whittled in between successive carnage. Within the subset who lived beyond the war, some veterans reconstructed a femme surface and others remained as men, undetected within their masculine frame.
Although the trench is attributed to WWI, its European iterations can be traced back several hundred years prior. For example, see Sébastien Le Prestre, Marquis of Vauban’s use in 1673. However, this European application of the trench was borrowed from detailed reports of Ottoman trenches at the siege of Candia (Crete, 1648–69). Vauban simplified the Turkish structure. Further siege-craft genealogies of the trench stretch back even further to, for example, the Siege of Medina, 1053–54.
How many images in a vigilante’s USB will be harvested by contemporary artists? Hito Steyerl establishes the wired mainstream and contemporary art economy’s tendencies towards the poor image, and we see the resulting gallery mutations, sourced from the relentlessly casual Abu Ghraib torture pics to bacchanalian January 6 video feeds. See Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” e-flux journal, no. 10 (November 2009) →.
The stone bibles are not so much a lover’s token. A series of stone bibles were carved by a Confederate soldier while in detention at a POW prison and appear to have been commissioned by fellow detainees. Wooden chains, also produced by prisoners of war, symbolically flex between literal imprisonment and the hackneyed “chains of love.”
The Gungywamp is an archeological complex in the woods of Groton, Connecticut rife with competing archeological and folk narratives of stone structures ritually based or agrarian, Indigenous, or colonial. All is overlaid with supernatural tales and wandering Irish monk fantasies. Pricey tours of the private site are conducted by the local nature center.
Vaginal transudation is sometimes referred to as “cyprin.” It differs from vaginal fluid in that transudation is specifically generated by sexual arousal—increased blood flow and pressure instigates the passage of the fluid, consisting of water and proteins, through membrane, onto vaginal walls.
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