Creeps

Seeing as we live in a world governed by desire, advertising, even the re-branding of the real, it is useful to look back at the great propagandists of the past for lessons. We may, after all, be being horribly duped. 

This embarrassing collage is a piece of Nazi propaganda, or Nazi seaside humour.  

This is the Weissenhof Seidlung (1927) collaged (long before photoshop) as an Arab village for Nazi laughs. Given the tradition of anti-Nazi collage (John Heartfield) to our eyes the superimposition seems witless, even crass. You imagine the creep doing it, cutting out all those figures, painstakingly pasting, and worse you imagine the person who told him or her to do it, grinning at his own joke, in fact you imagine the whole hierarchy in all their so called, self styled, smug, pathetic, supremacy. Thank goodness this image survives, it tells us a great deal about how nasty things really were.

Let's consider just Le Corbusier, a man of the Mediterranean (all shores) he made his little version of a domestic acropolis at one end of that site, a cute couple of buildings that one can't quite see working except as delightful evocations of the acropolian spirit for the machine age. He'd had Pessac labelled as an Arab village years earlier, maybe he wasn't surprised. His interpretation of Ancient Greece in the background just puts in to perspective that histrionic, hysterical version the Nazi's preferred; monumental doom laden classicism as circus, for show, while they built their own colossal machines for dying in hidden in the clearings of the forest.