The Wall You Will Never Know

✍ Scribed by Preuss E.

• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 14
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Article. — Perspecta. — 2005 — Vol. 36. — (Juxtapositions) — p. 19-31.

The fronts of the Second World War had collapsed less than a year before, when Winston Churchill proclaimed, in March 1946, that an "lron Curtain" had descended upon Eastern Europe, "[f]rom Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic." His metaphor likened the Eastern part of the continent, and especially its threshold, the German-German border, to a window, a stage or, The Berlin Wall given the design of movie halls in those days, a movie screen. All of these devices render an object or scene visually accessible but, at the same time, also keep the spectator at bay. The access they seem to grant is a virtual one, since the distance, or screen, that separates the viewer from the viewed .-" . impedes her ability to verify what she sees and to become a part of it herself. By casting his metaphorical curtain into iron, Churchill underscored the inaccessibility of the viewed, as his image associates cages, shackles and grids that keep people or animals in place and arrest free movement. This The Israel-Palestinian Separation Wall imaginary of the "Iron Curtain" eventually materialized in concrete: the Berlin Wall.

✦ Subjects

Искусство и искусствоведение;Искусство архитектуры;Урбанистика