RIP Trump Art
The Trump years are (probably, 2024 notwithstanding) over. Cosmopolitan liberals are banging pots and pans in the streets and the warriors of the resistance can set their paint brushes aside to celebrate, sure that their aesthetic contributions led to the downfall of the 45th President of the United States. They did not. The political art of the past four years (even the past four months!) was an allergic reaction to Trump. Its inflammation changed no hearts or minds, but can now be subdued by a large dose of Benadryl administered by a candidate even less inspiring or up to the task than his defeated 2016 predecessor.
On the morning of November 8, 2016, an odd thought popped into my head: Donald Trump is going to win the election. It was a feeling that the candidate who conjured genuine excitement was the more likely winner, and that the art world—for all our talk of the people, publics and knowledges—had no idea what fucking country we were living in. In my Notes app, I hastily dashed off the first lines of what would become “‘Political Art’: A Failed Project,” ready for the unlikely event that the media and the pollsters had all been catastrophically wrong.
The “Baby Trump” balloon has been a fixture at protests since 2017. iStock.
I suppose I owe Mr. Trump some gratitude. The piece would not have been nearly as good, or received any fraction of the modest attention it did, had it been merely a complaint about the liquidation of so-called political art into the most base impulses of neoliberalism and a gentle reminder that Hillary’s victory was not representative of good defeating evil. No one would have cared; there would have been no stakes.
But instead the unthinkable happened. Trump won, and for a brief moment, liberals seemed interested in genuinely asking themselves where they went wrong. It was possible to ask why artists, once known for countercultural bohemianism, had so comfortably become squares—no more radical than the most conservative impulses of the Democratic Party. I wrote:
The most important artists and cultural producers of our time sided unequivocally with Hillary Clinton, that is, with the status quo, with more of the same. It should come as no surprise that their efforts failed to sway the election for the Democrats. They were talking to themselves and each other. They did nothing to address the real conditions that gutted the livelihoods of so many Americans and propelled Trump to victory.
Trump, on the other hand, represented a rupture in an unbearable world, no matter what form exactly that rupture might take. I concluded:
We do not need more “political” art. We need better art, art that is challenging, critical and uncomfortable, art that provokes instead of soothes. We need to drain the swamp and reevaluate our field. We have a choice: will we continue to impotently champion a social and political reality that has failed us time and again? Or will we dare to imagine something, anything, different?
That November might have been a moment of reckoning for an artworld steeped in scratchy replays of a radicalism that wasn’t even radical when it debuted in the 1960s. Artists and the various layers of cognoscenti that determine which of them get air time might have realized that the vice grip of anti-Trumpism, in which any truly imaginative impulses or dissenting bumps are quickly sanded away, is no place to make art. That was not the case.
I’ve spent the past two weeks sifting through a dizzying four years of “political” art in the age of Trump. It’s difficult to untangle its various forms as blue chip artists have dabbled in caricature and political cartoonists have apparently risen to the level of fine art; as what once would have been the porn parody has become an incisive performance. Objections will surely be raised that some of my referents are not fine art per se and serve only in the construction of a straw man, but to those critics I say only that perhaps you ought to spend a bit less time adjudicating what is and isn’t art and ask yourselves how we got to this place where such trials become necessary.
As Grant Tyler recently discussed, the political caricature, even at its very best, doesn’t quite muster the energy we would wish from works of art:
Daumier’s caricatures, from which all caricatures sprung... are an expression of a new experience of looking at pictures. They are bite-sized laughs, a single frame of a comic, and there are thousands of them. They reveal the new insatiable desire for images, so characteristic of modernity, and they foreshadow serial novels, photography, moving images, memes, etc. Some of his caricatures evince shades of moral chastising… but this is applied to aristocrats, townspeople, and workers alike. But these images, even his contorted illustrations of wealthy Parisians, did not serve to provoke a critical recognition of reality. They did not demand that we confront the task of modern society, they only tugged at its loose ends.
And yet, that critical distinction seems wholly absent from the nascent, prolific genre of anti-Trump art. The impulse of actor Jim Carrey’s cartoons and Alexandra Bell’s 2019 Whitney Biennial contribution is essentially the same: look at what he did.
Bell’s contribution to the Biennial reproduced coverage in New York City papers of the Central Park Jogger case, culminating in a print of the full page ad taken out by then-real-estate-mogul Donald J. Trump calling to “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!” The inclusion of Trump’s ad overshadows the challenges and nuance posed in the preceding prints and takes up the gotcha! attitude that has become so familiar in the nascent (and likely brief) resistance art movement. The evil of the orange man is so self-evident that any other opinion appears absurd.
Alexandra Bell’s work in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Artnet.
Much of the political art of the Trump presidency has already aged quite poorly. Russiagate proved fertile territory for Trump-Putin imagery that is all a bit embarrassing now that the boogeyman of collusion has been dispensed with. Other artifacts are so specific to the President’s various offensive remarks that whatever heft they had melts away within weeks, if not days.
Few projects have so perfectly crystalized anti-Trump art and so joylessly dispensed with all nuance, than Hyperallergic’s “Drawing In A Time of Fear and Lies” series, which gave a number of middling artists not only a platform but a career-spurring moral upper hand from January 2017 until it trailed off in May 2019. (Did the time of fear and lies end? Had all possibilities for drawing been exhausted?) It aspired to be something different than comics and protest art, “an arena of metaphor, texture, reflection, even ambiguity, but fueled by the same moral outrage that drives the protests in the streets.” Unfortunately, any texture there might have been was washed away by the outrage.
In a text accompanying an image of Trump as a — literal — dickface, artist and regular “Drawing In a Time” contributor Judith Bernstein writes:
...I am HORRIFIED. Once again COCKMAN HAS RISEN, endangering our civil liberties, democracy, and the little peace that women — minorities — immigrants — LGBTQ and others felt during President Obama’s administration. Trump has brought out the worst in our country, and in doing so, reminded us all (especially women)… WE HAVE TO FIGHT!!
Of course, this was in early 2017, a simpler time when Trump was merely a predatory sexist, not a literal Nazi. The phallic fixation is pervasive in the art of the resistance, appearing as a threatening and virile site of repressed desire in many of Bernstein’s comics and in humiliating miniature in a painting by Illma Gore. Like the fascism at the gates that the genre seeks to deter, it’s a fear that is also a wish, an immanent threat that is simultaneously a pathetic non-entity.
Anti-Trump art makes the mistake of thinking that its gestures will directly impact Donald Trump (“I want these drawings to haunt Donald” one artist writes of his drawings addressed to Donald in the first person) or even sway public opinion, but it also takes a stand, if an infantile one, against the complexity of the present and indulges in a perverse fairy tale crisis.
The art that populated this Hyperallergic feature grates because it is just so sure of itself and unprobing in its righteousness. It’s your moralizing #BlueNoMatterWho friend after a couple glasses of wine. It’s political banality playing at radicalism. It cloaks itself in the valor of resistance, as if we spent the past four years in Occupied France, as if anyone participating in that very real resistance would have died for a caricature of Hitler. It’s memes for those too dignified to express their politics in memes.
In the November 2016 rush for critics to screw their heads back on and publish their election takes (I am proud to say the Caesura was dramatically in the lead on that score, although at the time, few would have known about it), Jerry Saltz delivered his prediction that the Trump years, with their inevitable suffering, would be good for art. I don’t begrudge him for saying it. Most of the art world was confused, upset and in utter shock. Sometimes we need our most well-known critic to remind us that art finds a way, and often the worst of circumstances give way to the greatest of art.
He was right about the suffering, at least in the past nine months, but the great art has not materialized. Saltz, and every artist who has spent this presidency urgently, desperately, sincerely resisting, suffers from a misidentification of the cause of his suffering and the naive conclusion that all that is wrong with the world, every real pain or perceived slight can be traced back to one bumbling caricature whose success must never be taken seriously.
The outrage artists express when they paint unflattering pictures of Trump or maddeningly attack copies of the New York Times is not moral. Moral outrage is a messy, desperate scream in the face of an intolerable reality. It’s despairing, broken and fighting when there is no hope. No, this is aristocratic disgust at an uninvited guest’s lack of manners. It’s etiquette outrage, authoritatively sure of itself and ready at a moment’s notice to stamp out any and all misbehavior. The political art of the Trump era is nothing more than illustrations in a Miss Manners manual, and it should surprise no one that a great number of Americans will side with whatever man is willing to toss it in the flames.
The past four years have produced no Guernica because there is no Franco. Artists of our generation are so hopeless that they would rather wish for fascism than confront the real challenge of the present. They are too certain of their moral authority to see that they have none. Even the artists rallied to produce more staid, or at least more friendly, get-out-the-vote campaigns did so with a cynical smugness that winks at the very specific group of people whose votes they intend to rally. Richard Serra, for all the imagination of his decades-long career, produced a poster with the trite conclusion “Fake President.” An illustrious group contributed bespoke “I Voted” stickers for a set of New York Magazine covers, in an effort to make casting a profoundly uninspiring vote for Joe Biden at least aesthetically palatable.
With Trump out of office, I hope that the bacchanale of resistance will give way to a more sober dawn and that art, with a deservedly splitting headache, will take stock of Adorno’s admonition that “nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not it’s inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist.”
Intoxication, however, is rather intoxicating. Predictions already abound that Trump will “barricade himself in the oval office,” giving the valiant resistance one last battle, one last occasion for caricature, one last opportunity for mediocre artworks so absolutely certain of their world historical importance. Trump may be gone, but just as his presidency did not engender a wellspring of art of quality, we can not rely on his departure to do so. We live in uncertain times. This self-assured art does not rise to the task. //
New York Magazine cover, 2020.
