John Heartfield: German photomontage artist.

John Heartfield (formerly Helmut Herzfeld) was a German artist born in 1891. He is best remembered for his anti-Nazi propaganda. He was a communist and a feature on the initial Berlin DADA scene. Choosing photomontage as a form of political and artistic representation, he was published largely in the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (The Workers Pictoral Newspaper). After the rise of National Socialism in Germany in 1933, he fled to Czechoslovakia and in 1938, to England. He returned to East Germany in 1954, where he died in 1968. These photographs were published in the AIZ from exile Czechoslovakia.

1(7 June 1934, Dialogue in the Berlin Zoo [the monkey is reading an anti-semitic newspaper])

2(31 may 1934, As in the Middle Ages...So in the Third Reich)

3(19 December 1935, Hurrah! All the butter is gone [quote from Hermann Goering during the food shortage, 'iron has always made a nation stong, butter and lard have only made people fat'.])

(source: towson)

Erwin Wurm: Austrian photographer and sculptor

Edwin Wurm (b. 1954, Vienna) is rad. He creates in the lines between the quotidian and 'art' and provides a commentary on art's dependence on social qualification (it's art when everyone says it's art). Wurm isolates, catalogues and makes beautiful the small performances of the every day: weight gain and weight loss, cheap, homogenous housing, political correctness, beauty products, long horrible dates, unobjectionable sex etc. Wurm makes you realise that whole lives are spent following social mores, erring on the side of caution, participating in intellectual snobbery, forgetting the beautiful and having no fun; and makes you want to scream, not mine! Of Wurm's coolest are his One Minute Sculptures: developed spaces that give people instructions as to how to become the sculptures themselves and that question the stationarity assumption of sculpture. He has also made scale sculptures of a Fat Car and Fat House which are a hilarious commentary on society's obsession with appearance and weight. Simply delightful.

An interview with Wurm can be accessed: here. Butter your popcorn.

Instructions on How to Be Politically Incorrect, 2003.

(Looking for a bomb)

(Looking for a bomb)

(Spit in someone's soup)

(Inspection)

(Two ways of carrying a bomb)