Maria Stavrinaki. Review of "Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield" by Sabine T. Kriebel.

Encyclopaedia of Silences: Prehistory and Modernity

“…Past and present are engulfed by a vortex: "Concern for the past and apprehension of the future merge together, the idea of a human-less Earth can be understood in the past as well as in the future tense" 16 . Going back in time, the quest for origins ends up turning around and reversing itself: "It cannot be stressed enough: from its constitution as a field of knowledge and time-consciousness object to this very day, prehistory has always been connected to the idea of the 'end'" 17 . The interest in fossils during WWI; the exploration of enigmas by the Surrealists during the 1930s; the connection between Hiroshima and Lascaux, masterfully examined by Maria Stavrinaki in a chapter on post-history; the interest in caves in these times of nuclear threat; the search for origins as a tool for legitimation, or even appropriation, of a Neolithic cultural exception: it is impossible to disjoin prehistoric imagery from the historical circumstances into which it emerges, to the point one could exclaim, following Robert Smithson: "I'm interested in the politics of the Triassic period"!…”