Undead aesthetics / Bountiful feast
Today: Journalist and architecture critic Kate Wagner; and Jennie Rose Halperin, digital strategist and librarian at NYU’s Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy.
Issue No. 535
Fascist Art as Vampire
Kate Wagner
Come In and Eat!
Jennie Rose Halperin
Fascist Art as Vampire
by Kate Wagner
Art always has the potential to be subversive, even when it is ostensibly under state control. But because its primary focus is on total productive forces (in the past industrialized, in the present technologized), art offers no material benefits to the fascist state. Art, then as now, is inherently feminized and egalitarian, and one of the key tenets of fascism is its pathological hatred of women and of marginalized people. And finally, fascist art is aesthetically and politically reliant on an imagined, glorified past, and is thus necessarily at odds with even the idea of innovation. (The Futurism of Marinetti is an exception, on which more anon.)
The art critic Clement Greenberg once said that fascism vampirizes other historical and artistic movements for its own ends. This was true in the ’30s and ’40s, and it is true now. Despite their ceaseless use of the rhetorical cudgel of “beauty” to defend their authoritarian obsessions, fascists contribute nothing to art.
The vampirism of 20th-century fascist art concerned itself not just with “high culture” but with mass culture. The Nazis, for example, appropriated the operas of Richard Wagner—thus irrevocably linking Wagner to fascism, much to the detriment of his posterity. Wagner’s virulent antisemitism is legible in a number of places in his oeuvre (hence Hitler’s love for him). However, the majority of Wagner’s work falls under the broader purview of critiques within and about 19th-century art writ large. Whatever is radical in it (which, as I’ve discovered, is quite a lot) has mostly been lost through this political appropriation, in something like the manner of “cancelled” modern artists whose criminality, racism or sexism has rendered their works permanently suspect.
When Wagner wrote the Ring cycle he was already two degrees of mediation away from the Norse mythology on which it is based. As part of the 19th century’s predilection for trying to define nationalist boundaries via ancient sources, as well as the concurrent movement known as Medievalism—in which material from the Middle Ages was reimagined for the contemporary moment, in part as a reaction against the nascent age of industrial capitalism—these myths were widely translated, disseminated, and adapted into new works of art. Wagner’s Ring cycle added a third layer of mediation in the form of opera. What allowed the Nazis to appropriate Wagner so effectively was the final link in the mediation chain, which was the development of recorded sound. Suddenly Wagner’s audience wasn’t limited to those who could attend extremely expensive productions of Der Ring des Nibelungen in the empire’s opera houses. Instead, he was everywhere, and could be assimilated into nearly every context.
Today’s internet makes absolutely vertiginous layers upon layers of mediation commonplace. Though their influence in fascist art somewhat obscures its other mechanisms, there can be little doubt that memes are the lifeblood of modern fascist propaganda. A key example can be seen in the appropriation by the Department of Homeland Security of the image of a penguin who runs off away from his clan and into his own frozen doom at the end of Werner Herzog’s film, Encounters at the End of the World; the official Department of Homeland Security Twitter account repurposed this image in a bizarre tweet with a caption that read, cryptically, “Americans have always known why.”
Here is the humiliating end to which our current crop of fascists aspires: a kind of noble suicide, itself a testament to Pure American Grit in the face of some unknown but ominous Endsieg. It is incomprehensibly stupid that the penguin meme is the U.S. equivalent of Götterdämmerung but here we are. Crucially, however, the fascist interpretation of the media itself is always insanely wrong, bordering on the illiterate.
Keep us breathing fire!
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