The politics goes on Politics did not become divorced from art with the revolutions of 1989. However, for all its excellence, its humour and its intrinsic interest value, Signs of the Times is a dense and difficult exhibition. The works are hung closely together two or three high and are hard to appreciate as individual works of aesthetic value. Although these give invaluable insights into the relevance of the posters the competing textual and graphic elements break up the continuity of the exhibition. Moreover, the categorisation of the pictures further confuses things.
Sections are thematic, with areas including depictions of leaders and internal and external enemies.
There is also little attention to the subtle but interesting distinction between those artists who used politics as a means to practice art and those who used art as a means to practice politics. In this respect, the book accompanying the exhibition Political Posters in Central and Eastern Europe 1945-1995 by James Aulich and Marta Sylvestrov fares rather better, taking a chronological tour of the region before plunging into thematics. The book is also a rather better medium for explaining the essential background to the posters, with its linear text and space for more substantial explanation admirably creating the framework for understanding political posters that is so elusive at the exhibition. Celebrating the space race Aulich and Sylvestrov give their subject scholarly attention, and the book is meticulously footnoted and with the text linked to the numerous accompanying pictures. Beautifully presented, the book really has only one fault, which is that it reproduces so many illustrations that few of them get much larger than matchbox-sized.