Totalitarian art
Lisa Needham
We all know Donald Trump’s aesthetics are terrible. The
man has the very worst taste, slathering everything in gold, designing every
building to be comically oversized.
But Trump’s taste, such as it is, doesn’t come out of
nowhere. Wittingly or not, he has joined a long tradition of fascists imposing
a grinding totalitarian aesthetic on the populace.
Trump’s personal imposition of his taste is a different
story than that of the administration’s overall totalitarian aesthetic, which
can best be described perhaps as “free tier AI image generator with the white
supremacist dial turned to 11.”
That stuff is bad, but it isn’t really about Trump’s
aesthetics as such. Rather, it’s the aesthetics of those folks agencies like
ICE like to recruit. What better way to make sure you get virulently xenophobic
groyper types to join Trump’s brutal immigration crackdown than by speaking
their (visual) language.
Nor is this the same as Trump’s penchant for posting AI slop
of himself. That, of course, ranges from the relatively low-key, like making
him look thinner and younger thanks to some AI editing of an actual photo,
to the pathetic, like his NFTs displaying him as Superman, a cool motorcycle
dude, and whatever the futuristic glasses thing is supposed to be.
And of course there’s the genuinely unhinged AI slop, like a
picture of himself as Jesus or a video of him in a fighter jet dumping poop on
No Kings protesters.
This is Dear Leader stuff, to be sure, but this is far more
about a crumbling, aging, soft-handed man who has never done a lick of actual
work in his life, indulging in some fantasy of himself as a perfect specimen.
All of this slop is grotesque and dangerous, but it’s a bit
separate from Trump’s attempts to remake the things we might group under the
banner of “the fine arts” — architecture, sculpture, painting, and so on.
He’s trying to use those things to reshape the story of
America, but the story he has to tell is cramped, stupid, and wrong — and it
makes for terrible art.
If the jackboot fits …
It seems so facile to try to draw a line from Trump’s
aesthetics to Hitler’s, but the fact is he shares Hitler’s fixation with
classicism, a belief that he, like Hitler, is somehow the heir to the Ancient
Greeks and Romans. He also shares Hitler’s fixation with burnishing not just
his own image, but the image of an idealized country.
Trump’s artistic vision, such as it is, might get better
reach if he had his own Leni Riefenstahl. She was a genuinely talented monster
who became Hitler’s propaganda filmmaker extraordinaire, and without
Riefenstahl, we really wouldn’t have gotten the full Nazi aesthetic.
“Triumph of the Will” is exactly the sort of film Trump
would love to have made about him someday if any reputable, talented filmmaker
were willing to sign on to such a project. Ostensibly marketed as a
documentary, it was, of course, no such thing. Rather, it was a tightly
coordinated photo opportunity without room for error.
In her classic 1975 essay about Riefenstahl, “Fascinating
Fascism,” Susan Sontag was writing about the Nazi era, but she could be
writing about Trump’s artistic vision today: “Fascist aesthetics … flow from
(and justify) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior,
and extravagant effort; they exalt two seemingly opposite states, egomania and
servitude.”
Even Trump’s twin fascinations with combat sports and
military marches, especially those staged just for him, like the military
birthday bash last year and the UFC fight at Freedom 250 this year, stem from
this same fascist wellspring. Sontag pointed out that “mass athletic
demonstrations, a choreography and display of bodies, are a valued activity in
all totalitarian countries.”
Part of Riefenstahl’s job was to make Hitler look good. Now,
in our modern era, Trump is, likely much to his chagrin, unable to control how
he is photographed, but he definitely controls how he is depicted.
Look at the banners he slapped up in DC, his giant visage
glowering. In those banners, Trump is positively looming.
It’s not just that they are oversized, though that is its
own fascist aesthetic writ, well, large. It’s also that he is being shot from
below, much like Hitler was in “Triumph of the Will.”
As with Hitler, what you see from Trump is a sort of
hyperrealism, but an incredibly boring one. He’s larger than life and
everything he wants to erect is as well. The oversized ballroom, the oversized
arch … even the statuary he wants to put up is wildly large.
In the run-up to Constitution Day, Trump demanded that the
Smithsonian install an 11-foot statue of George Washington that he had recently
displayed
in his ridiculous Freedom 250 IndyCar race.
But that’s not all. He wants that to eventually be replaced
by a 30-foot statue of the first president, and he wants the “Infinity”
sculpture, an abstract masterpiece that has been there for over 50 years, taken
away.
Why? His complaint
is “that strange modernist sculpture tells visitors nothing about America,
inspires no one, and honors none of our Great American Heroes.”
Trump is, unwittingly, telling us a lot about himself in
that sentence. First, why on earth does he think it tells visitors nothing
about America?
 |
| The “Infinity” sculpture. (John Greim/LightRocket via Getty) |
The point of an abstract piece like Infinity is that it
allows anyone, everyone, to see themselves, to see America, in it. That’s a far
more open invitation, to far more people, than “giant animatronic George
Washington” or whatever Trump envisions.
There’s a reason stuff like that is in theme parks, designed
to amuse and educate children. It’s simplistic, it papers over all of the rough
spots — chasms, really — in the American past, and tells a pat, heroic tale.
But it’s not art, and it’s not history.
Trump even seems to be gearing up for his own “Degenerate
Art”-style show someday.
After taking power, the Nazis purged German museums of
anything they labeled “degenerate,” an amorphous category that scooped up
16,000 works of avant-garde and modern art, among others. Modern art, felt the
Nazis, was tainted
by Jewish and communist influence and was intended to weaken the good, pure,
Aryan German society.
To really whip up some two-minute hate all across the
country, the Nazis made an exhibit of the hated degenerate pieces and trucked
them around, calling them “exhibitions of shame.” They later sold off works to
collectors and dealers with the promise that funds would be used for German
museums and not for war.
Spoiler alert: the funds were of course used for war.
It feels weird and hyperbolic to draw this parallel, but
save for the fact that Trump hasn’t yet decided to send disfavored art to the
hinterland to whip up white conservative anger, this feels a lot like his
attempt to rid
the Smithsonian of “improper ideology.” Trump has tried to pull funding from
the nation’s premier museum, and functionally forced out the head of the
institution.
The National Park Service just announced it will be placing signage
outside Smithsonian museums, particularly the National Museum of American
History, to “warn” people that the museums are not telling the true story of
America because “the leadership of the Smithsonian and NMAH have altered the
museum’s role from accurately and coherently telling America’s story to using
the museum as a tool to advance personal, radical ideologies.”
And then, of course, there’s the architecture. Trump is
fixated on Corinthian-style columns, considered “the most luxurious in
classical architecture.” This predates his election, as he’s used them on his
own properties for decades. He wants to replace the Ionic columns at the White
House entrance, all part of his efforts to turn the White House into the Trump
House, now and forever.
Last year, Trump issued an executive order
called “Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again,” outlining his artistic
vision for the District, one which literally boiled down to just “do more Greek
and Roman stuff, please.”
There’s no real way to know if Trump genuinely loves Greek
and Roman art and architecture or if he just thinks that is the kind of art
that rich, cultured people like. Trump is the ultimate dumb man’s idea of a
smart man, so it only makes sense he’d adopt the artistic worldview of a high
schooler who is pretty sure he’s cooler than everyone else because he talks
about Michelangelo’s “David” or some such.
In the end, there’s perhaps nothing more quintessentially
artistically Trumpian than his fixation on Mount Rushmore.
His favorite presidents! No pesky non-realistic art to be
found, just giant carvings slapped into the side of a granite slab, faces six
stories high, plopped into the middle of land we stole. He’s even got toadies
in Congress teeing up legislation to add him to the tableau.
And given that neither the conservatives on the Supreme
Court or in Congress seem inclined to stop him, who’s to say we won’t have a
fifth resident of Mount Rushmore before 2029?
A minor comfort? You know if this happens, Trump will do it
on the cheap, sliding the got to some unqualified cronies or pals of Barron
Trump or something. It’s gonna look even worse than all that AI slop Trump
posts of himself, and we’ll dynamite it to oblivion the first chance we get.
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