|
|
|
Sunday, April 7, 2002
Life During Wartime
EVIL DOESN'T LIVE HERE: Posters of the Bosnian War, By Daoud Sarhandi and Alina Boboc, Princeton Architectural Press: 200 pp., $25
By LAURA SECOR
Even the most distracted visitor to the former Yugoslavia would
notice the posters. I know I did. On the streets of Slobodan
Milosevic's Belgrade, they were ubiquitous. If you did not know the
faces they depicted or the Cyrillic-lettered words emblazoned across
them, you could not always tell if they were the handiwork of
fascists or of anti-fascist activists. Maybe you felt uncomfortable
looking at them. But you were compelled to. Maybe you needn't be
frightened. But they made you shudder. The colors were aggressive.
The imagery was iconic and urgent. Whole walls were plastered with
multiple copies of a single one.
Americans are not used to visual political propaganda of this
nature. Bosnians, Croats and Serbs have been bombarded with it since
the wars of the Yugoslav succession. Born of a powerful tradition of
socialist poster art (associated above all with postwar Poland), the
Yugoslav posters are stark, sophisticated and searing. Some of them
stoke rage and fear; others portray solidarity and hope. Almost all
of them play on words and symbols with wicked wit.
Of all the posters that came out of Yugoslavia's last 10 years,
those chronicling the pain and aguish of Bosnia from 1992 to 1995
have a chilling poignancy.
From posters that appeared in Bosnia during the war, Daoud
Sarhandi and Alina Boboc have constructed a beautiful and terrifying
book. Most of those they gathered are the work of Bosnian Muslims.
Some are political: They urge young men to enlist; they equate
Serbian nationalism with Nazism; they implore the international
community to intervene. Others are elegiac: They memorialize the lost
lives, the shattered cities, the country dismembered.
The most devastating, however, are the posters that give voice,
color and shape to the hopes many Bosnians nurtured.
"Evil Doesn't Live Here" takes its title from a defiant 1992
poster Sarhandi found in Tuzla. One reaches it after leafing through
page after page of bullet holes, demolished buildings and portents of
fascism. Then there is a sketch of the multiethnic city of Tuzla;
above it, the words of the book's title.
If you know nothing about the Bosnian war, "Evil Doesn't Live
Here" makes a superb primer. That was not Sarhandi's and Boboc's
intention. But Sarhandi's introduction provides one of the best
overviews of the conflict's history to be found anywhere. His
captions lightly but expertly guide even a completely uninitiated
reader through symbolism and events of great weight and complexity.
And then there are the posters. Through them we experience, nearly
unmediated, the power of propaganda and the emotional resonance of
political art in times of terror. The posters speak to us as though
we were there--as though we might enlist or resist, as though we were
neighbors and not strangers a world and a decade away.
- - -
Laura Secor Is the Deputy Editor of the American Prospect.
Copyright 2002 Los Angeles Times
|
|
|
|
