Nov. 13, 2024
The United States appears as a giant spider with missiles for legs. In the center of its web is the acronym for the Strategic Defense Initiative, also known as “Star Wars” – the Reagan-era, space-based, anti-missile defense program. Billed as a defense initiative, its elaborate network of military technology was viewed by the Soviets as a form of imperialist expansionism.

The United States appears as a giant spider with missiles for legs. In the center of its web is the acronym for the Strategic Defense Initiative, also known as “Star Wars” – the Reagan-era, space-based, anti-missile defense program. Billed as a defense initiative, its elaborate network of military technology was viewed by the Soviets as a form of imperialist expansionism.

The following is the fourth in a series of inside looks at the current exhibition in Princeton University Library's Ellen and Leonard Milberg Gallery in Firestone Library - “Monsters and Machines: Caricature, Visual Satire, and the Twentieth-Century Bestiary.”

“Monsters & Machines: Caricature, Visual Satire, and the Twentieth-Century Bestiary” examines the global use of bestiary in visual satire during the period from the beginning of World War I through the end of the Cold War. The exhibition is curated by a team of PUL librarians: Thomas Keenan, Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Librarian; Lidia Santarelli, (formerly) Metadata Librarian, Modern Greek Specialty; Deborah Schlein, Near Eastern Studies Librarian; and Alain St. Pierre, Librarian for History, History of Science, and African Studies.

Images of a variety of mammals are regularly used to represent specific forms of moral grotesquerie. Canine images often represent mindless ferocity and a slavish subservience to a master – the pack mentality and blind devotion to the alpha. Porcine figures are used to represent conservative, light-skinned European imperialism, with pigs displaying immoderate appetites and a slothful, gluttonous wallowing in the filth of ill-gotten excess. These images are aimed at a variety of imperialist, colonialist, and socially conservative targets, here Nazis, capitalists, and their enforcers. 

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The exhibition is open and free to the public during Milberg Gallery hours of operation, September 12 through December 8, 2024.

Discover more through the accompanying digital exhibit.

Media Contact: Stephanie Oster, Library Publicity Manager