Entry One—On ‘Mythologies’, Donald Trump, and Images
I’m starting an art journal for my website. I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while but just finally started writing an entry in hopes of it leading somewhere. I hope to keep the tone of these entries somewhat spontaneous and free-flowing, but imagine writing about all sorts of things over time.
I figure this will be a space where I can organize some of my thoughts both around my own artistic practice and my position in the world. I will write to share my ideas, flow toward new ones, and bring more language into my process. After all, language is one of my primary interests despite my inclinations toward visual art, and I believe writing and painting form a mutually beneficial partnership.
Anyway, I want to start my journal by talking about images and signs in hopes of outlining some of my considerations when it comes to making and understanding pictures.
Recently I’ve been reading Roland Barthes’s Mythologies. The book is a volume of short essays in which Barthes meticulously decodes “myths” of Bourgeoise French culture in the 1950s. To Barthes, myths are “parts of speech,” visual or linguistic signifiers which play some crucial role in upholding dominant political structures, values, and cultural expectations. In the book Barthes examines the signifiers embedded in everything from magazines to pro wrestling, laundry detergent to the Catholic Church, analyzing how speech, thought, and image coalesce and come to “mean” in ideologically driven ways.
When I started reading I thought about doing paintings or drawings to accompany all (or some) of the chapters. Maybe I’ll get to it at some point. I’m sure somebody somewhere has already done this. Many artists have already engaged with the “myths” of culture in creative ways. Andy Warhol is the foremost example— his repetitive paintings of commercial objects like soup cans and his screen printing practices captured and duplicated the images and words of his era of popular culture within an art historical framework. Ed Ruscha engaged with words and language by saturating letters with formal and emotional qualities and removing them from their typical scale and function. Jasper Johns focused on the “myths” of signifiers like flags and numbers, granting them new meanings in an artistic, visually and graphically based context. Perhaps most significantly, Rene Magritte simultaneously united and separated the strands of image, sign, and meaning in his “treachery of images,” the famous painting of a pipe that is not-a-pipe because it’s a painting of a pipe. Some of these images even become “myths” in themselves, standing in to describe a totality of work (“pop art” in the case of Warhol’s soup cans, “semiotics” in the case of Magritte’s pipe) and functioning as ideological signifiers in new historical movements.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about “myths” according to Barthes and how to approach images and signifiers in my own work. I’ve always been compelled by the shapes and personalities of letters and numbers and feel there is benefit to examining our languages and structures for how they appear rather than what they “mean.” Artwork helps us see signifiers for what they are, separated from the emotional and political context and any concern for “meaning” or coherence. When Jasper Johns paints the number 3, we are reminded that 3 not only “means” or designates a quantity but also is a specific organization of curves connected and proportioned in a certain way. The same demythologizing process can be repeated for almost any sign or image if we think critically about it and parse its “meaning” from its content.
An example I can’t get off my mind right now is the “iconic” photograph of Donald Trump being guided off the stage after the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania over the weekend. The photograph will no doubt be an important historical moment, but approaching it like Barthes might help us understand what— and how — the photograph signifies.
Donald Trump the politician is already a mythical figure— an alloy of policies, statements, public appearances, photographs, and social media posts that amounts to a totality of a figure in which people can invest either their support or discontent. This recent photograph only emboldens the myth of Donald Trump, solidifying him to his supporters as a survivor and resistor of craven injustice, perhaps even a divinely chosen one (he certainly would support us believing that).
Within this specific photograph there are several myths at play worth at least a brief exploration. Most significant is the raised fist— a universal signifier of resistance, historically used against racial state violence and injustice. By raising his fist and invoking this signifier— even repeating the word “fight” as he pumped his fist—Donald Trump has — mythologically— attached himself to this history of persecution and resistance. Of course, Donald Trump has already repeatedly invoked his status as a victim of oppression to his supporters, claiming no wrongdoing throughout countless scandals and legal woes and using words like “witch hunt” and “hoax” to attack his accusers. But this photograph solidifies his victim status— in fact, it evidences it, with the blood on his face providing real concrete evidence of the mysterious powers-that-be using any means necessary to silence him (in this case, a 20-year-old acting alone). His raised fist subverts his actual identity— a billionaire white male businessman and politician with multiple felonies, impeachments, and dozens of sexual assault accusations — into a freedom fighter, a champion of the silenced, oppressed, and attacked. “Fight,” he repeats, but for what, against whom, all of this is ideologically implied.
There are certainly other visual myths to decode in and around the photograph. The upward angle of the shot which heroizes its subject, the mass of sunglass-clad suit-wearing secret service totalized into an depersonalized muscly bullet barricade, the trickles of blood on Trump’s face, the flag boldly keeping its shape above the defiant scene. There is also the mythical language politicians and pundits have used in response, condemning “political violence” from a moral and political position which requires a specific geopolitical distortion of what constitutes both “politics” and “violence” in its condemnation. Perhaps even more mythological is the language in conservative’s accusations that “the left” bears responsibility for inciting this violence. (One must ask— what is this totalized “left?” What constitutes violent speech? Who has historically incited violence? What forms of violence are acceptable and against whom are they acceptable?)
I will leave these out of this for now and end this initial entry by saying that our images— whether advertisements, photographs, street signs, whatever— mean and matter in ideologically driven ways. Art helps us decode things and place them outside of dominant frames of rationality according to the unclouded lenses of the senses. I’m sure we will continue to see mythologized images and hear mythologized speech about our presidential candidates (and our athletes, actors, rabbis, etc) as this campaign and year drags on, and I’m certain our art will find its own unique responses.
Sources:
Roland Barthes, Mythologies
Evan Vucci, AP Photographer
