5 presidential candidates and the art that shows how we feel about them
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Version 0 of 1. Late last year, while attending an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, I came across a 3,000-year-old clay model of an ancient Egyptian granary. This was months after Republican Ben Carson, then still a presidential candidate, confirmed his belief that the pyramids of ancient Egypt may have been used to store grain — an idea universally discounted by Egyptologists. Here, miraculously preserved for thousands of years, was incontestable proof of what a real Egyptian granary may have looked like. Anyone who loves art and follows politics will recognize this feeling: the sense that if only politicians knew more about art, they would know more about the world — and themselves. Many of the things that have baffled and astounded us in this bizarre political season — the strange gaffes, the weird spectacle, the shameless games with truth and illusion — are not particularly surprising if you spend much time at all in museums. What artists can imagine outstrips any of the accidental folly and tinsel theater of terrestrial politics. Sometimes politicians inspire no thoughts of art at all. But then there are times when you are looking at a work of art and you realize it perfectly prefigures and more completely embodies a lesser phenomenon in the political spectrum. Here are five of those moments, five interconnections between what one finds in museums and what one finds on the gibbering screens of cable television, the chatter of pundits, the packaged rhetoric and messaging of the campaign trail, in all its vainglory. In 1928, René Magritte painted what remains probably his best-known work, “The Treachery of Images,” a rendering of a pipe above the words “This is not a pipe.” The painting is a favorite of college kids, a staple on dorm walls and often reproduced not only to illustrate accounts of surrealism, but also to introduce a fundamental idea about signs and what they signify. “This is not a pipe” is literally true, given that a painted image isn’t the thing itself. But it also introduces layers of irony into what the image represents and what the painter is trying to do. The painting may not be an actual pipe, but it sure looks like a pipe, and one wonders whether Magritte is asking us to deny the reality right before eyes. A painting that showed Republican front-runner Donald Trump with the words “This is not a politician” underneath it would pretty well sum up his campaign. He is not a politician, in the sense that he presents himself as an outsider, a businessman unsullied by the insider ways of Washington. But he is clearly an expert politician — and the first American presidential aspirant to master the media dynamics of the new reality-television political landscape. He is also the first serious political contender to successfully manipulate the kind of irony embedded in Magritte’s painting. Modern American irony is a complicated thing. On late-night television, it functions as a kind of sarcasm and knowingness, a cosmopolitan eye roll at the absurdity of life. But one also sees a darker American irony at work on social media, where people post comments that are not, word for word, racist, xenophobic or homophobic but are clearly meant that way. Everyone, to some degree, has mastered the dog whistle. Meanwhile, the spectacle of self-contradiction — Trump says one thing today and the opposite tomorrow — becomes so familiar that “gotcha” videos juxtaposing his wildly incompatible claims have lost their impact. To overlook those contradictions requires that voters treat them rather like Magritte’s claim about his pipe: It’s true in a way, but it’s also not. Political analysts have detected anger as the fundamental fuel of Trump’s insurgent campaign. But it also represents the moment when the wink-and-nod irony of progressive urban enclaves arrived wholesale among conservative voters across the country. They know full well that “this is not a pipe,” but they’re happy to vote for the pipe because it’s fun and empowering to participate in this hip new relationship to truth. In New York’s Museum of Modern Art is a curious contraption with several wheels, metal containers, axles and pipes and what may be a tattered flag hanging from an improvised flagpole. It looks a bit like some fanciful machine you might find being pushed around a candy-colored landscape in a Dr. Seuss book. It is called “Fragment From Homage to New York,” and it was made by the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely in 1960. In the early 1960s, Tinguely explored what is known as “kinetic sculpture,” literally sculpture that moves. But he did it with a particularly sharp sense of the absurd and tragic, creating works that he said were “self-constructing and self-destroying.” The work in the MoMA collection is one of the remaining pieces of a larger machine that included a meteorological balloon, a bathtub, a piano and several motors, which were put into motion March 18, 1960, in a bizarre spectacle staged in the museum’s courtyard. Films of it can be found on YouTube. If you have paid attention to politics over the past quarter-century and the dominant role played by Bill and Hillary Clinton during that period, the words “self-constructing and self-destroying” will have powerful resonance. It’s not uncommon for commentators to speak of the Clinton machine, sometimes a sneering allusion to the networks of power and influence that governed inner-city politics a century ago, sometimes an admiring acknowledgment of the formidable power base they have built. But what does that machine look like? Does it have the engineered perfection of a perfect minimalist object? The “fetish finish” sheen so beloved of Southern California artists in the 1960s and ’70s? In fact, the Clinton machine looks like one of Tinguely’s contraptions, curiously chaotic, jangling and clanking in all directions. Often, like Tinguely’s work, the political spectacle of the Clintons seems strikingly overwrought, dependent on a lot of moving parts to perform what should be a simple motion. The most striking example of that, this campaign season, came during a Hillary Clinton interview with Scott Pelley in which Clinton was asked whether she could say, as Jimmy Carter once did, that she would never lie to the American people. Her meandering and overly voluble temporizing was a perfect rhetorical analogue to Tinguely’s mechanical circus. When Tinguely set his “Homage to New York” in motion, it began to auto destruct as planned. But as it burst into flames, someone called the fire department, which shut down the performance, adding a new layer of irony to the show. A self-destructing machine had been robbed of its true destiny by an unwanted intervention. In a sense, it failed before it could fail. That has been, for a generation, the most fascinating thing about the Clintons — their extraordinary will to power, their odd capacity to undermine their own success and the magnificent, mesmerizing spectacle of their resilience. More than any other politician in the race for his party’s nomination, Jeb Bush received brutal scrutiny for his campaign logo. It spelled out his name — Jeb — in bold red letters, followed by an exclamation point. And it was the punctuation mark, so enthusiastic, so eager, so cravenly endearing, that brought on the pummeling. All logos are reductive, but the bold color, the pithiness, the implication of first-name familiarity and, yes, the exclamation point made this the great pop-art image of the campaign. Although we associate pop art mainly with commercial imagery and Hollywood iconography — Coca-Cola, Brillo Boxes and Marilyn Monroe — it also borrowed heavily from political imagery, including depictions of Mao Zedong and the Kennedys. Pop art played a complicated game with its borrowings, and one could never be quite sure when the perverse “beauty” it found in magazine ads hawking soap, soda or sex was meant as criticism of consumerist society and when the artists were simply reveling in the pure visual spectacle they found everywhere on display in the 1960s. Eventually, many pop artists created works that had the same sheen, the same pithiness, the same urgent perfection as the popular imagery they appropriated. So the “Jeb!” logo emerged against the backdrop of more than a half-century of commerce among art and politics and visual representation. It was the Robert Indiana “Love” sculpture as political brand. And that was a problem. Bush was competing with candidates who specialized in presenting an “unpackaged” image, yet he came out of the starting gate with a pop-infused logo that reeked not just of marketing, but also a slippery insincerity. In purely visual terms, it looked old-fashioned, like something you find in a museum, where the wall text tells you, “This is about the ironic appropriation and commercial exploitation of images.” After the Trojans brought a wooden horse into their city, the priest Laocoön warned them it was all a ruse: “Either there are Greeks in hiding, concealed by the wood,” he said, “or it hides some other trick.” They didn’t heed his advice, just as voters in New Hampshire didn’t heed Republican candidate Chris Christie’s advice to beware the Donald Trump. But it was the agony that came later that connects Christie to one of the most famous statues of all time, the “Laocoön” group. The statue represents one of the most dramatic “no good deed goes unpunished” moments in ancient literature, from Virgil’s “Aeneid,” when Laocoön and his sons are devoured by a gigantic serpent at the behest of Poseidon, who sided with the Greeks against the Trojans. The style is often referred to as “Pergamene baroque” — “Pergamene” for its stylistic connection to the artists of Pergamon, a Greek kingdom that emerged after the death of Alexander the Great, and “baroque” for the extremity of its emotion and the sinuousness of how it is presented. If one wanted to capture all the ways this current campaign season breaks the rules, “baroque” wouldn’t be a bad label. It’s not just that emotions are running high, but also that all the old rules, boundaries and categories are being violated. Even today, many people will look at some of the extremes of late baroque architecture — for example, the 18th-century Rococo effusions of the Wieskirche in Bavaria, in which seemingly incidental ornament overwhelms structure and solidity — and think only one thing: They were crazy. Christie’s endorsement of Trump was one of the great Rococo moments of the still-developing campaign, and when he appeared uncomfortable standing behind Trump at a campaign event, the videos went viral. His face was scrutinized for signs of internal pain, and the collective Poseidon took its revenge. One of the most powerful things about the “Laocoön” is how it disconnects suffering from any kind of redeeming message or meaning. It is about the ugly politics of the Trojan War, the fickle Gods, the shifting alliances, the brute hatred animating everyone. Christie’s decision was entirely his own, and he must have been fully aware of the opprobrium it would inspire in many circles. But the whole spectacle of his suffering wasn’t just baroque in its intensity — it shared the spirit of the “Laocoön” depiction of meaningless, amoral, unproductive agony. Bernie Sanders has never shied away from his self-definition as a democratic socialist, but it’s one of the strange visual quirks of the campaign that Sanders memes don’t really exploit that. With Sanders, it’s the missing images that are most striking. Where is Sanders as Che Guevara? Where are the Shepard Fairey-style poster images of Sanders? They do exist — on the Internet, everything exists, and images are made and repurposed so rapidly that it is almost impossible to track their provenance. What matters is how they circulate, and whether they gain traction, and the curious thing about Sanders is that the traditional visual vocabulary of socialism hasn’t really attached itself to him. The Soviet-style propaganda-poster memes haven’t gathered much momentum. This may have to do with the generational shift in the resonance of the word “socialist.” One of the creepiest images to emerge in President Obama’s 2008 campaign was a picture of the candidate’s face covered in the lurid and messy Joker makeup from the flick “The Dark Knight.” Underneath Obama’s face was the single word, and accusation: “Socialism.” And yet Sanders, who has embraced the label, has been relatively immune to the visual mockery that might come with it. This may also be related to a larger gap between the optic richness of the Republican campaign and the relatively sedate visuals of the Democratic competition. Nothing the Democrats have produced can match the spectacle of Air Force One as a backdrop to the debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California. Nothing has been quite so surreal as the confusion over entrances at the GOP debate in Manchester, N.H., in February. And neither Sanders nor Clinton has been as adept at creating clear, mental pictures of each other as has Trump when he mocks his opponents (the allusion to menstrual fluids, or the jibes at Clinton’s bathroom breaks). But mainly, the disconnect between Sanders’s embrace of socialism and the curious lack of socialist imagery is explained by the fading power of the old leftist visual vocabulary. Like the word itself, the images don’t threaten the younger generation, who are listening to Sanders without the baggage that socialism once carried. And so it is a visual absence that may matter most this campaign cycle: Sanders managed to put into circulation old ideas about social justice without animating the usual visual caricature those ideas would have attracted even eight years ago. |