— Neha Cherian
We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!… Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday.
In 1908, a young Italian poet, Filippo Marinetti, was driving his Fiat near Milan when he encountered a cyclist. To avoid the bike, he veered into a ditch. The frenzy of the moment and the conviction that in the future, old contraptions like bicycles must give way to modern cars, inspired him to write The Futurist Manifesto- a short document in which he called for artists to reject history, embrace the future, scorn all things feminine and succumb to the seduction of war, speed, technology and disruption. Every point on the manifesto sounds more moronically brash (or inspirationally refreshing as it may be) than the last and suspiciously close to what is applauded as “visionary” today in the likes of Elon Musk. Although Marinetti and his crowd, for all their grand declarations, could not shrug off the yoke of a moribund past, they created an aesthetics of Futurism that is associated with speed, energy, restlessness, not a small amount of male chauvinism- and fascism.
There is no easy explanation for a relationship between art and politics that is not somewhat disingenuous. There are sound arguments to be made about how art may describe societal conditions, or slap them in the face, embody certain ideological positions or skewer them or do everything at once. There are art movements like Futurism that anticipated, perhaps gave expression to the political ferment of the age. The Futurist enthusiasm for machines, progress and a gloriously violent overturning of the existing order augured the emergence of a fascist Italy under a fellow admirer of technology and war- Benito Mussolini. A quick survey of futurist works- Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space and The City Rises, Carlo Carrà’s, The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli, Mario Bellusi’s Modern Traffic in Ancient Rome- and one is struck by the conspicuous absence of faces.
Individuals cede way to the powerful dynamism of modern capital, again presaging the totalitarian impulse to organise “masses- not classes.” However, this group of angry young men, for all their bluster and bravado, did not directly precipitate the authoritarian regime that would lead Italy into World War 2. Futurism tapped into the undercurrents of discontent in a country that came late to the imperialist party and was raring to compensate for lost time.
Totalitarian art or the aesthetics that light up the eyes of bonafide dictators, is of a slightly different flavour. In the Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera describes kitsch as the ideal aesthetic of all politicians. The German word calls to mind all that is cheap, excessively or tastelessly sentimental, offers instant gratification without intellectual engagement, or in Kundera’s less genteel but more memorable words, “in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist.” To deny the existence of misery, is of course, the business of all governments. Totalitarian kitsch is particularly pernicious because individualism and irony, which can make regular kitsch subversive, are off-limits for they threaten the image of utopia. The films of Leni Riefenstahl or Cultural Revolution posters featuring happy revolutionary peasants would suggest that totalitarian kitsch is little else but propaganda. It is now possible to appreciate the irony of a Chairman Mao-themed kitsch economy- little red books, badges, mugs and figurines walking off the shelves as totalitarian memorabilia. This is not to say that dictators have the monopoly of purveying philistinism. Philosophers of the Frankfurt School, Adorno and Horkheimer, were wary of a different kind of totalitarianism that posed the same dangers as political authoritarianism- mass culture. By churning out an endless supply of lowbrow entertainment, the mass culture industry synthesises a false sense of harmony, shearing individuals of autonomy and making them a member of the masses. Well-aimed criticisms of elitism do little to take the sting out of their argument.
Any discussion of art and totalitarianism seems to come back to a common theme of masses and the dangers of conformity- so much so that the HS-favourite enfant terrible, Zizek, called political correctness also a form of totalitarianism. This idea was echoed by the controversial artist Ai Weiwei, who is well-known for making the Chinese government grit their teeth in frustration. Individuals are a recurring feature of his activist art. In the monumental sculpture Straight, Ai Weiwei uses thousands of separate components to signify the individuality of the lives lost in an earthquake. In the installation Sunflower Seeds, he fills a room with 100,000 porcelain sunflower seeds, each uniquely handcrafted by a Chinese artisan. In doing so, he skewers the dehumanising and homogenising mass production that is Made in China.
It is tempting to argue that the awareness of manipulation is a sufficient antidote to totalitarian art. And why not? Once you are conscious of duplicity, the art loses its power over you. But this requires one to be possessed of an aesthetic judgement. And therefore, individualism and the absence of censorship are more appropriately the antithesis of totalitarian art.
Edited by Anoushka Agastya
Design by Alphin Tom
Article 19 