form. They contain an exhilarating amalgam of pop culture and literary
references, ranging from Herman Melville to Bill Hickok, James Joyce to
punk rock. As Seuss says in “[My first crush was Wild Bill Hickok, not
the actual guy but the guy who portrayed him]”: “I was wise enough at
age three to own my projections. I would become what I loved. . . .” Her
gorgeous poems capture our hauntings and contemporary lore.
The six illustrations presented in TMR’s Curio Cabinet offer a rare
peek into the lives of a liberated German woman of the Weimar years,
before Hitler came to power. As a young woman, at the outbreak of World
War I, German artist Jeanne Mammen was forced to leave Paris for Ber-
lin. Despite the cultural and intellectual richness of the era, she felt like
an alien until she began to explore with notebook in hand the cafés,
bars, revues, and nightclubs that were attracting Europe’s amusement
seekers. Soon she became one of the few women artists of Berlin’s 1920s
able to support herself with her illustrations, publishing them in life-
style, fashion, and satirical magazines until Hitler came to power, shut
down magazines that did not promote the party line, and declared work
such as Mammen’s “degenerate.”
Following upon her popular urban art features “Street Disorder” and
“The Urban Canvas,” in “Subvertising: The Art of Altering the Message,”
Kristine Somerville looks at contemporary artists who alter, satirize,
and replace advertisements as a means of commenting on consumerism.
“Subvertising” offers a brief history of advertising as a science of manip-
ulation, moves on to Pop art’s appropriation of the medium as a tool for
social commentary, and then arrives at the present day, when artists are
openly and brazenly changing both the message and the medium.
Speer Morgan
