Bolshevik Revolution: hammer for the industrial proletariat bonded to the sickle for agricultural workers; red from the red banner of the Paris Commune, 1917
No letters here, just action: the hammer as the tool of industrialisation, the sickle the tool of agriculture. They are wielded by hands, neither of them are weapons. One could be writing in the world of synecdoche here, and perhaps that adds depth to a symbol, but one can also write about hammers and sickles, factories and ploughs literally, without losing any meaning.
In pre-revolutionary Russia Orthodoxy, red was the colour of Easter and the resurrection: how easy it was to elide that with the resurrection of the Russian people, the peasants and serfs, over the European aristocracy that ruled Russia. And how simple to equate Christ's blood with martyred revolutionary blood.
The Phrygian cap of Liberty, le bonnet rouge of the French Revolution: Phrygia – today's Anatolia in Turkey. Paris, the cause of the Trojan War, was a Phrygian and wore what we could now describe as a soft Turkish fez. Red as the colour of liberty dates from the Roman Empire when freed slaves wore red Phrygian caps. It is interesting how involved ancient Greece was in what we consider today to be the hotbed of the Middle East. It is contiguous by land and shares the eastern Mediterranean. Modern Greece's default from European values, as it is being put, is perhaps more deeply rooted than the EU can accept.
In 1976 Andy Warhol did a series of silkscreens called Hammer & Sickle where he photographed an actual hammer and a hand scythe in various collaborations. No one will ever be able to convince me that Warhol and pop art were not political. One can say Warhol valourised the American commercial landscape and endorsed celebrity, but this does not allow him a deep anarchic sense of irony, if that is not an oxymoron.
In the depths of the cold war, by de-coupling the symbol from the tools, he referred to the Soviet Union as industry and agriculture, not nuclear bombs. After the fall of the USSR when many previously inaccessible 'ordinary' people were interviewed and we were able to read literature of the era from the other side, what was revealed was a fear of the west and its weaponry, precisely what we had been taught to fear about the east. What a waste of the twentieth century it all was. So many died.
Andy Warhol.
Hammer & Sickle, 1976
acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas (182.9 x 218.4 x 3.2 cm.)
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh