The Violence of Vision: Wild Plakken and the Crisis of Dutch Political Identity, 1977-1996

This research will examine the work of Dutch graphic design collective Wild Plakken and their collaborations with political pressure groups in the post-sixties Netherlands. It will interrogate the shifting concepts of Dutch political identity - advanced by the Netherlands Anti-Apartheid Movement (AABN), the Dutch Women's Movement (NVB), and the Communist Party of the Netherlands (CPN) - and assess the ways in which these shifts are rendered in the visual forms and techniques particular to the posters of Wild Plakken. In tackling key dialogues that surrounded political identity in this period - including post-colonial tensions, women's rights, economic stagnation, and under-employment - Wild Plakken's posters provide a lens through which we may study the evolving concerns, ideologies, fears, and ambitions of the period's political psyche. It is the primary aim of this research to investigate the formal and material representation of these dialogues, and to consider the ways in which Wild Plakken's posters served as a site for both their construction and dissemination.