The Devil's Rope: A Cultural History of Barbed Wire - Softcover

Krell, Alan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 186189144X ISBN 13: 9781861891440

Publisher: Reaktion Books, 2002

Synopsis

While barbed wire has always cut across property, war and politics as a tool of control, it has other histories, constructed through image and text in the arts, media and popular culture, which have never before been examined. Invented in France in 1860 and welcomed by the frontier farmers of America, the menacing qualities of barbed wire became evident in the Boer War, the barbed wire no-man's-land of World War I, and the Nazi concentration camps of World War II. Barbed wire became synonymous with repression. In the art of the late-twentieth century, its ambivalent character has made barbed wire the perfect symbol of post-modernity. Alan Krell's amazing story investigates the place barbed wire holds in the social imagination.

About this title

About the Author

Alan Krell is Lecturer in Art History & Theory at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

Reviews

This compact and dense volume's subtitle describes it accurately, warning the reader to expect less narrative or technological material than reflections on the meaning of barbed wire. The opening chapter does summarize the development of this instrument of war, which took the title nickname from the Plains Indians. Its beginnings were somewhat less violent: in a scramble for patents, three men who attended an 1873 DeKalb, Ill., county fair together separately invented barbed wire for cow control. A chapter on military uses of barbed wire focuses on the Holocaust and World War I before it (1,300 miles of wired-in trenches), but only tangentially mentions how the wire (in partnership with the machine gun) came to exert a four-year stranglehold on that war's Western Front. In "Making Familiar," the author devotes section to a cadre of barbed wire collectors. Similarly, chapters on the sexualization of barbed wire and its image in modern art explore many unconventional aspects of both sexuality (gay and straight) and protest art. The plentiful, high-quality graphic material, thorough annotation and occasionally opaque jargon are Reaktion trademarks, and regular readers of the British house will not be disappointed. Along the way, British art historian Krell (Manet and the Politics of Contemporary Life) does justice to the comic book renderings of barbed wire, as well as the movie Barb Wire, the Italian artist Toscani's Benetton advertisements and the Australian Jon Rose's surprisingly tuneful musical instruments made from strands of the wire.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 186189144X
• ISBN 13: 9781861891440
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 223