Clegg & Guttmann "Eye Contact: The Origins of Totalitarianism"

Opening: Sunday, April 23, 3 –6 pm

Clegg & Guttmann
Eye contact: The Origins of Totalitarianism (excerpts, to download full text please click here)

The New political context

Q: The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt covers the gallery walls and your artworks are hung on top. What made you decide to do that?

A: When we wallpapered the gallery with The Origins of Totalitarianism we (literally) made its political content part of the context of the artworks in the exhibition. The present political condition is anything but business as usual; the world-order that had emerged after WWII in virtue of which peace reigned in Europe for 70 years is threatened by a new breed of rightist politicians in a number of countries– by Trump in US; by Farage and other Brexiters; Marine Le Pen in France, the Alternative for Germany, Geert Wilders in Holland, etc. These new challenges joined older ones like Putin’s and Erdogan’s authoritarianism; the totalitarian regime in communist China; the populists in Hungary and Poland; Khameni in Iran etc.

These threats to liberal democracy and the post-war order created together a new political context that impacts anything produced today including the present exhibition. The wallpapered gallery emphasizes the importance of the new political context and its strong influence over the meaning of the artworks in the exhibition.

Q: Why did you choose The Origins of Totalitarianism?

A: The Origins was published in 1951 – not long after the end of WWII. The book contained an extraordinarily lucid analysis of the totalitarian ideology of the 1930’s that ignited the war. Many of the theses in Arendt’s book were forgotten for a while; now that we are faced with a new wave of authoritarian impulses, they should be discussed once more.

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Eye contact during a social upheaval

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Q: Can you explain further how the anti-elitist ideology influences the way we look at portraits?

A: Ordinarily, artists follow a special code in order to present the sitters in a positive way – almost the same code people use in real life when they make public speeches or interviewed in the media. The code pertains to their clothes, their body language, the interiors they occupy etc. From our point of view, one of the most important aspects of this code is that it places the person within a certain historical lineage - one of the most effective strategies to present the sitter as a powerful, intelligent person is to allude to past images of powerful and intelligent people…

Q: Art history collaborates with politics on creating visual codes of power and authority…

A: Exactly. With anti-elitism in ascendance, though, the codes themselves are under attack; populist authoritarianism, as Hannah Arendt argued, is a revolutionary ideology that rejects the traditions of the past and casts those who follow them as ‘empty suits’, buffoons etc. This attitude has an immediate impact on the meaning of portraits – when viewers ‘conditioned by populism’ look at an image where the subject is wearing an expensive suit that would have been admired or envied in ordinary circumstances, they suddenly respond in the opposite way - the suit becomes a symbol of the hated elite and it no longer functions as an effective way to shed a positive light on those who wear it whether in reality or in portraiture. Commissioned portraits simulate ‘real’ responses; when the latter undergo a transformation, so will the former.

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The underlying project

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Q: Can you explain how the exhibition came about?

A: It is important to say at the very outset that we are dead serious about the question we are asking, namely, whether the anti-elitist, anti-establishment, authoritarian frame of mind that brought Trump to the White House is creeping up on us already, corrupting our cognitive routines. The last time we were asking such questions was when Reagan was elected. That was when we began making our portraits; in a very real sense, they responded to Reagan’s neo-liberal ideology. Our first artwork was a hybrid of a group portrait of Franz Hals and a group photo of IBM executives taken from an annual report. We thought that superimposing an image from the beginning of capitalism on a 1980’s corporate group portrait we were constructing an image that summarized the history of mankind under free market capitalism.

Q: Was it a political statement?

A: Like many artists who worked at the time our conception of politics was influenced by the semiotic world-view: We felt we were giving our viewers the tools to analyse images of power designed to shock and awe them into believing that the corporate structures and hierarchies that surrounded them were an omnipotent, eternal reality.

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The disappearance of history

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A: One of the most alarming aspects of the rise of the alt-right is that it comes at a time when we are deprived of one of the most important tools to deal with it - the historical perspective. People are aware, of course, of certain analogies between contemporary figures like Trump and the strongmen of the 1930’s; what they lack, though, is an understanding of the historical dynamics involved – how someone who is initially considered a joke manages to capture the soul of an entire nation. The fact that history disappeared on us exactly when we needed it the most seems almost conspiratorial!

Q: Does the show address this cluster of issues?

A: Let us briefly return to the ‘disappearance of history’; here we are, worried about the rise of Donald Trump. One of our questions concerns the depth of Trump’s influence: Did he get his tentacles everywhere? Is there already a Generation Trump made of teens and pre-teens waiting in the wings? In order to answer such questions one must conduct interviews and analyse various contemporary sources; but first of all, one must understand the ideology well! Intellectual history – the study of ideas as they were understood in a particular place and time - can be the best guide to questions about ideology. The field has an Achilles heel, though – projecting the contemporary meaning of certain concepts on the past; historical immersion is necessary to avoid these problems and benefit from intellectual history. Perhaps artworks like the present installation can motivate the viewers to engage in various forms of historical immersion.