The Devil’s Rope

While barbed wire has always cut across property, war and politics as a tool of control, it has other histories, constructed through image and text in the arts, media and popular culture, which have never before been examined. Invented in France in 1860 and welcomed by the frontier farmers of America, the menacing qualities of barbed wire became evident in the Boer War, the barbed wire no-man’s-land of World War I, and the Nazi concentration camps of World War II. Barbed wire became synonymous with repression. In the art of the late-twentieth century, its ambivalent character has made barbed wire the perfect symbol of post-modernity. Alan Krell’s amazing story investigates the place barbed wire holds in the social imagination.