Pictures and the Past: Media, Memory, and the Specter of Fascism in Postmodern Art

By Alexander Bigman

A fresh take on the group of artists known as the Pictures Generation, reinterpreting their work as haunted by the history of fascism, the threat of its return, and the effects of its recurring representation in postwar American culture.

The artists of the Pictures Generation, converging on New York City in the late 1970s, indelibly changed the shape of American art. Rebelling against abstraction, they borrowed liberally from the aesthetics of mass media and sometimes the work of other artists. It has long been thought that the group’s main contribution was to upend received conceptions of authorial originality. In Pictures and the Past, however, art critic and historian Alexander Bigman shows that there is more to this moment than just the advent of appropriation art. He presents us with a bold new interpretation of the Pictures group’s most significant work, in particular its recurring evocations of fascist iconography.

In the wake of the original Pictures show, curated by Douglas Crimp in 1977, artists such as Sarah Charlesworth, Jack Goldstein, Troy Brauntuch, Robert Longo, and Gretchen Bender raised pressing questions about what it means to perceive the world historically in a society saturated by images. Bigman argues that their references to past cataclysms—to the violence wrought by authoritarianism and totalitarianism—represent not only a coded form of political commentary about the 1980s but also a piercing reflection on the nature of collective memory. Throughout, Bigman situates their work within a larger cultural context including parallel trends in music, fashion, cinema, and literature. Pictures and the Past probes the shifting relationships between art, popular culture, memory, and politics in the 1970s and ’80s, examining how the specter of fascism loomed for artists then—and the ways it still looms for us today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Jun 25, 2024
• ISBN: 9780226833088

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Cover Page for Pictures and the Past

Pictures and the Past

Pictures and the Past

Media, Memory, and the Specter of Fascism in Postmodern Art

Alexander Bigman

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2024 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2024

Printed in the United States of America

33 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24     1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83307-1 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83308-8 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226833088.001.0001

This publication was made possible by the support of a grant from the New Foundation for Art History

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bigman, Alexander, author.

Title: Pictures and the past : media, memory, and the specter of fascism in postmodern art / Alexander Bigman.

Other titles: Media, memory, and the specter of fascism in postmodern art

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023048021 | ISBN 9780226833071 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226833088 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Charlesworth, Sarah, 1947–2013. | Goldstein, Jack, 1945–2003. | Longo, Robert. | Brauntuch, Troy, 1954– | Bender, Gretchen, 1951–2004. | Pictures Generation (Group of artists) | Art, American—20th century. | Fascism in art. | Art and society—United States. | Art and popular culture—United States. | BISAC: ART / History / Contemporary (1945–) | ART / Criticism & Theory

Classification: LCC N6512.5.P53 B54 2024 | DDC 709.7309/04—dc23/eng/20231117

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023048021

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Natasha

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Beyond Fascinating

1  Sarah Charlesworth at the End of Modern History

2  Memory Traces in the Work of Jack Goldstein

3  Troy Brauntuch and the Figuring of Distance

4  Robert Longo in the Shadow of Empire

5  Gretchen Bender’s Mnemonic Theater

Epilogue: Fascinating Again

Plates

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Illustrations

Figures

Fig. 0.1  Art Spiegelman, cover of RAW magazine, volume 1, number 1, 1980

Fig. 0.2  Joy Division, An Ideal for Living, 1978

Fig. 0.3  Eddie Chambers, Destruction of the National Front, 1979–80

Fig. 0.4  Leon Golub, Interrogation II, 1981

Fig. 0.5  Google Books Ngram Viewer graph plotting frequency of the terms fascism and fascist, 1920–2019

Fig. 0.6  Robert Morris, poster for Robert Morris: Labyrinths—Voice—Blind Time, 1974

Fig. 0.7  Frank Stella, Die Fahne hoch!, 1959

Fig. 0.8  Atelier Populaire, Untitled [May 1968. Hitler tenant à la main le masque de De Gaulle], 1968

Fig. 1.1  Installation view of Sarah Charlesworth, Stills, 1980

Fig. 1.2  Sarah Charlesworth, Unidentified Man, Unidentified Location, 1980

Fig. 1.3  Sarah Charlesworth, Herald Tribune, September 1977, 1977

Fig. 1.4  Detail of Sarah Charlesworth, April 21, 1978, 1978

Fig. 1.5  Clipping of The Toll in Israel: 16 Are Killed and 70 Wounded, New York Post, May 15, 1974

Fig. 1.6  Detail of Sarah Charlesworth, April 21, 1978, 1978

Fig. 1.7  Sarah Charlesworth, Fourteen Days, 1977

Fig. 1.8  Temporal and perspective keys for Sarah Charlesworth, Fourteen Days, 1977

Fig. 1.9  Detail of Sarah Charlesworth, April 20, 1978, 1978

Fig. 1.10  Sarah Charlesworth, Unidentified Woman, Hotel Corona de Aragon, Madrid, 1980

Fig. 1.11  Clipping of Nel Vuoto: Piu’ di Ottanta Morti, Gente, 1979

Fig. 1.12  Sarah Charlesworth, Unidentified Woman, Genesee Hotel, 1980

Fig. 2.1  Still from Jack Goldstein, The Jump, 1978

Fig. 2.2  Still from Jack Goldstein, The Jump, 1978

Fig. 2.3  Jack Goldstein, The Pull, 1976

Fig. 2.4  Jack Goldstein, Untitled, 1980

Fig. 2.5  Detail of Jack Goldstein, Untitled, 1980

Fig. 2.6  Jack Goldstein, Untitled, 1981

Fig. 2.7  Jack Goldstein, Two Fencers, 1977

Fig. 2.8  Still from Jack Goldstein, A Ballet Shoe, 1975

Fig. 2.9  Still from Jack Goldstein, Shane, 1975

Fig. 2.10  Garrard Martin, cover of ZG, number 2 (Future Dread), 1981

Fig. 2.11  James Welling, Jack Goldstein’s 11th Street Studio Wall, New York, NY, February 1978, 1978

Fig. 2.12  James Welling, Jack Goldstein’s Studio Wall in the Pacific Building, 506 Santa Monica Boulevard, Santa Monica, CA, July 1978, 1978

Fig. 3.1  Troy Brauntuch, Untitled (Sculptor with Figures), 1981

Fig. 3.2  Troy Brauntuch, Untitled (White Head), 1981

Fig. 3.3  Troy Brauntuch, Untitled (Black Head), 1981

Fig. 3.4  Troy Brauntuch, Untitled (Statue), 1981

Fig. 3.5  Troy Brauntuch, White Statue, 1976

Fig. 3.6  Troy Brauntuch, Untitled (Rally), 1980

Fig. 3.7  Berlin, Kroll Oper. Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler während seiner Rede vor dem Reichstag zur Kriegserklärung an die Vereinigten Staaten

Fig. 3.8  Troy Brauntuch, Thorak Studio, 1980

Fig. 3.9  Josef Wackerle, Rossebändiger-Skulptur, 1938

Fig. 3.10  Michael Lantz, Man Controlling Trade, 1942

Fig. 3.11  Louis Asscher, A Group of Children Sitting in Front of a Barracks, undated

Fig. 3.12  The Big News (March 7, 1972)

Fig. 3.13  The Big News (November 30, 1972)

Fig. 4.1  Robert Longo, Sword of the Pig, 1983

Fig. 4.2  Robert Longo, American Soldier, 1977

Fig. 4.3  Robert Longo, The Fall, 1979

Fig. 4.4  Robert Longo, Untitled (Eric), from Men in the Cities, 1979–83

Fig. 4.5  Robert Longo, National Trust, 1981

Fig. 4.6  Installation view of Robert Longo, Men in the Cities, 1981

Fig. 4.7  Robert Longo, Pictures for Music, 1979

Fig. 4.8  Robert Longo, Untitled (Drawing for Glenn Branca Album Cover), 1981

Fig. 4.9  Robert Longo, Surrender, 1979

Fig. 4.10  Robert Longo, Empire, 1981

Fig. 4.11  Page from Robert Longo and Ed Bowes, Empire screenplay, 1982

Fig. 4.12  Page from Robert Longo and Ed Bowes, Empire screenplay, 1982

Fig. 4.13  Page from Robert Longo and Ed Bowes, Empire screenplay, 1982

Fig. 4.14  Page from Robert Longo and Ed Bowes, Empire screenplay, 1982

Fig. 5.1  Gretchen Bender, Total Recall, 1987

Fig. 5.2  Gretchen Bender, Untitled (The Pleasure Is Back), 1982

Fig. 5.3  Gretchen Bender, Gargan I, 1981

Fig. 5.4  Gretchen Bender, Autopsy, 1983

Fig. 5.5  Nürnberg. Reichsparteitag der NSDAP, Reichsparteitag der Ehre, Lichtdom mit Flak-Scheinwerfern über Zeppelinfeld und Zeppelinhaupttribüne

Fig. 5.6  Gretchen Bender, Dumping Core, 1984

Fig. 5.7  Sony Betamax SL-5800 advertisement, 1980

Fig. 6.1  Troy Brauntuch, detail of A Strange New Beauty (White Cases), 2019

Fig. 6.2  Troy Brauntuch, Selected Shoes, 2019

Fig. 6.3  Robert Longo, Untitled (Defaced Jewish Cemetery; Strasbourg, France; December 14, 2018), 2019

Fig. 6.4  Robert Longo, Untitled (Nathan Bedford Forrest Statue Removal; Memphis, 2017), 2018.

Fig. 6.5  Robert Longo, Insurrection at the US Capitol; January 6th, 2021; Based on a Photograph by Mark Peterson, 2021

Plates

Plate 1  General Idea, FILE Megazine, volume 4, number 2 (Special Transgressions Issue), 1979

Plate 2  Andy Warhol, Little Race Riot, 1964

Plate 3  Still from Jack Goldstein, The Jump, 1978

Plate 4  Jack Goldstein, Untitled, 1980

Plate 5  Jack Goldstein, The Chair, 1975

Plate 6  Troy Brauntuch, 1 2 3 (Opera, Staircase, Tank), 1977

Plate 7  Troy Brauntuch, Untitled (Mercedes), 1978

Plate 8  Troy Brauntuch, Untitled, 1980

Plate 9  Troy Brauntuch, Three Effects, 1977

Plate 10  Installation view of Robert Longo, Figures: Forms and Expressions, 1981

Plate 11  Robert Longo, Sound Distance of a Good Man, 1978

Plate 12  Robert Longo, Culture Culture, 1982–83

Plate 13  Robert Longo, Tongue to the Heart, 1984

Plate 14  Gretchen Bender, Dumping Core, 1984

Plate 15  Gretchen Bender, Gremlins, 1984

Plate 16  Gretchen Bender, Untitled (Landscape, Computer Graphics, Death Squad), 1987

Introduction

Beyond Fascinating

Toward the end of the 1970s, several groups of recent art school graduates converged on New York City and began to push the established traditions of minimalism and conceptual art in newly figural directions. In the course of this retooling, one particular motif emerged repeatedly: the image of the falling body. This appeared with dazzling luminosity in Jack Goldstein’s 1978 film The Jump, an animated loop in which the shimmering silhouettes of four high divers sequentially spring, somersault, and disappear into an inky void. It proved equally central to the early work of Robert Longo, who had exhibited alongside Goldstein (as well as Troy Brauntuch, Sherrie Levine, and Phillip Smith) at Douglas Crimp’s storied Pictures exhibition, held at Artists Space in the fall of 1977. His Men in the Cities drawings (1979–83) rendered the conceit in the shape of so many flailing, formally attired urbanites. These in turn materialized, airborne, in a music video that Longo and the artist Gretchen Bender produced for the 1986 New Order track Bizarre Love Triangle, a song with a relevant refrain: every time I see you falling / I get down on my knees and pray. Sarah Charlesworth’s Stills (1980), for their part, greatly enlarged seven newspaper photographs depicting people plummeting from buildings. That same year, the graphic artist Art Spiegelman illustrated the inaugural cover of Raw magazine, sardonically subtitled the graphix magazine of postponed suicides, with a similar image (fig. 0.1). This one is set inside the black-and-white apartment of an imagined reader. Framed within the window beside him, a wild-eyed and brightly colored counterpart tumbles through the air.¹

Fig. 0.1 Art Spiegelman, cover of RAW magazine, volume 1, number 1, 1980. Copyright © Art Spiegelman, used by permission of the Wylie Agency LLC.

The figure of the falling body is hardly a novel one within the history of European art, of course. One thinks of Pieter Bruegel’s famous illustration of the Icarus myth from 1560, or any number of early modern religious paintings—Dieric Bouts’s The Fall of the Damned (1460) would be exemplary, as would Peter Paul Rubens’s iteration of the theme from 1620—depicting the descent of doomed souls on Judgment Day. Andy Warhol had more recently treated the subject in his Death and Disaster silkscreen paintings from the early 1960s, one of which Charlesworth reproduced as part of her Stills. So had Alfred Hitchcock in his 1958 thriller Vertigo: Saul Bass’s iconic poster for the film featured two silhouetted bodies, spiraling into an orange expanse. Falling is a physical event, but as its enduring centrality to myth and other forms of storytelling suggests, it is also an embodied metaphor connoting failure and fallibility (no etymological relation); death and sacrifice (consider the innumerable monuments to fallen soldiers); sin and, in the Christian mythos, the possibility of redemption too. The aforementioned works by Goldstein, Longo, Bender, Charlesworth, and Spiegelman cannot help but mobilize these deeply ingrained associations in unpredictable combination, discouraging art historical efforts that would attribute to them any one specific meaning. Indeed, there is no shortage of ways that the motif might have resonated at the conclusion of the 1970s, a decade beset by spectacular failures, crises, and scenes of violence (Vietnam, Watergate, recession, terrorism, Three Mile Island . . .) in the United States and other Western democracies. It is tempting to conclude that the resurgent trope of the falling figure functioned simply as an emblem of the times, if not the alienation and disorientation endemic to modernity writ large.

Such generalizations founder, however, on the fact that so many of the artists who employed the motif of the falling body around 1980 did so in close connection with a particular set of historical referents that might not be immediately apparent from the works themselves: namely the rise of Nazism, the Second World War, and the atrocities that attended these cataclysmic events. Goldstein, the son of a Jewish World War II veteran, characterized The Jump as a work about control and manipulation, inspired by the seductiveness of Nazi pageantry and spectacle.² Longo pointedly described the figures in his Men in the Cities drawings as doomed white people and likened them to the ecstatic partisans in Triumph of the Will (1935), Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous documentary tribute to the Nazi regime.³ Several of Charlesworth’s Stills likewise alluded to the past and present threat of fascism. One of them, based on a source photograph from 1942, features a window-mounted poster exhorting passersby to support the then-ongoing war effort against Hitler; another, illustrating an incident from 1979, depicts a burning hotel in Zaragoza, Spain, that was believed to have been set ablaze as part of an antifascist assassination plot. The pattern persists even outside the relatively hermetic art world that Goldstein, Longo, and Charlesworth inhabited: Spiegelman produced his Raw magazine cover not long after beginning work on Maus, his major opus—still a target of the culture wars today—centered on his father’s experiences as a Holocaust survivor.⁴ Although by no means uniform in strategy, these works clearly spiral around a common subject. What are we to make of their apparently consistent iconography?

This book takes up that question as part of a larger inquiry into the work that Charlesworth, Goldstein, Brauntuch, Longo, and Bender—key members of what has recently been dubbed the "Pictures Generation," after Crimp’s exhibition—produced around 1980, much of it fixed on Europe’s fascist past.⁵ Brauntuch took a particularly direct approach to this domain: between 1977 and 1983, the artist focused almost exclusively on photographs of the Third Reich that he discovered in contemporary books and magazines. These he would reprint, without caption, on fields of saturated color. In 1980 he began transforming them into large and ghostly drawings, executed in white crayon on black supports. Bender’s works of electronic theater—immersive video installations comprising upward of a dozen monitors—were more wide ranging and associative in their relation to the topic. Examples like Dumping Core (1984) and Total Recall (1987) intertwined footage of state-sponsored violence in Central America with army recruitment commercials, state-of-the-art computer graphics, and recorded corporate logo animations to evoke the militarized theatrics of authoritarian regimes. Notwithstanding her emphasis on contemporary technologies and geopolitics, however, Bender’s view remained, like Brauntuch’s, a largely retrospective one. In the newly digitized spectacles of corporate America, she avowedly discerned and sought to amplify an echo of the Nazi Party’s Nuremburg rallies, with their visually arresting colonnades of spotlight beams (see ahead to fig. 5.5).⁶

Brauntuch and Bender’s projects aligned with those of Goldstein, Longo, and Charlesworth not only in their latent political allusions but also in the emphases they placed on media and mediation. As Crimp observed in a 1979 revision of his essay for the Pictures catalogue, a defining characteristic of the exhibited work had been its tendency toward palimpsestic layering: taking images and image types from films, books, newspapers, magazines, and the like, and treating them as a kind of ground to be reframed, effaced, or built on. Underneath each picture, he wrote, there is always another picture, setting imagined points of authorial origin and pictorial reference into an infinite recession.⁷ Brauntuch encouraged such a distanced perspective by fragmenting his source photographs or plunging them into darkness, often to the cusp of illegibility. Bender achieved a similarly fugitive effect through multiplication. Aggregating video channels and television monitors in increasingly complex configurations, she intentionally pushed her viewers’ attentional capacities to a point of overload and (so the artist hoped) beyond.⁸ Conjuring the familiar icon of the falling body was another way in which this group of artists framed and mediated its source material. And, as its recurrence indicates, the device was a privileged one. In this culturally loaded and phenomenologically resonant motif, the Pictures cohort found an emblem that captured something central to its emerging project, something that the existing critical and scholarly literature has only glancingly addressed.

Several of the group’s earliest and most sophisticated interpreters, among them Crimp himself and his associate Craig Owens, characterized its work as deconstructive in the sense elaborated by philosophers and literary theorists like Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man: attuned to the constructed nature of meaning—its contingence on systemic and historically variable networks of interrelated signs, operating independently of authorial intentionality—and inclined to subvert received clichés by appropriating, restaging, or recombining imagery selected from the ever-expanding storehouses of mass media.⁹ Might the artists’ dual gravitation toward falling figures and authoritarian politics have borne some relation to this modus operandi, with its implicit critique of authorship and ideological convention? Though neither Crimp nor Owens made the connection, Derrida in fact evoked the Christian Fall of Man throughout his 1967 book Of Grammatology. This mythic framework, he argued, tacitly underlay the entire onto-theological edifice of Enlightenment-era metaphysics, a system premised on dividing intellectual or experiential presence from the degraded (fallen) systems of writing or depiction used to represent it in absentia. The sign is always a sign of the Fall, he wrote. Absence always relates to distancing from God, the ultimate author and authority.¹⁰ The embrace of the falling figure by Goldstein, Longo, and Charlesworth might accordingly be understood as yet another act of subversive appropriation: the transformation of a religious symbol into an icon of skepticism toward onto-theological dogmas and Romantic efforts to recapture primal truths—absolutes imagined to exist beyond the politicized and historically contingent realm of representation.

Poststructuralist readings like these are in many ways insightful; they inform the arguments I advance throughout this book. They also possess some pitfalls, however. For one, they have tended to cast the Pictures artists’ stated concerns with fascism as a coded critique of representation writ large—what Owens, glossing the positions of Michel Foucault and Louis Marin in an essay from 1982, identified as the founding act of power in our culture.¹¹ He could have cited Roland Barthes as well. To speak, and, with even greater reason, to utter a discourse is not, as is too often repeated, to communicate; it is to subjugate, the semiotician asserted in a lecture from 1977, a translation of which appeared alongside Crimp’s revised Pictures essay in the spring 1979 issue of October magazine. Hence, language itself—or, more broadly, the power-laden representational systems through which reality is divided up and made intelligible—was neither reactionary nor progressive but quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.¹² Such avenues of interpretation aptly register the political stakes of the Pictures group’s appropriation tactics, but in their critical orientation toward the dynamics of representation in general, they overlook something important about this cohort’s sustained and particular point of historical focus: namely its complex positioning in time. Interwar fascism was, in one sense, an episode from the past, located just beyond the lived experiences that bound the Pictures artists into what might credibly be classed as a generational group. By the end of the tumultuous 1970s, however, it was one whose relationship to the present had come to appear in many ways unresolved—complicated not only by its endless representation in the world of popular entertainment, but also by the rise of novel right-wing groups with roots in fascist ideology, and a counterpoised questioning of postwar victory narratives by activists and cultural producers on the left. This sense of chronological irresolution, I propose, is one thing that the work of Charlesworth, Goldstein, Brauntuch, Longo, and Bender set out to address. And it is something that the motif of the falling body was deeply primed to capture.

To fall, in Western culture, may imply departure from a realm of divinity and self-present truths. But it is also true, on a more immediately experiential level, that to fall (or, to use the word’s Latinate correlate, to lapse) is to enter a state of momentarily dilated or otherwise altered temporality, suspended between past and future, that the continuous flow of life does not ordinarily occasion. (To lapse can mean to revert; a related term, elapse, foregrounds these chronological implications.) The two connotations, one cultural and the other experiential, are not unrelated: the Fall of Man, pointing at once backward toward original sin and forward toward the Last Judgment, retains the experience of falling’s complex temporality, even as in Christian doctrine the temporal itself becomes a metonym for the worldly and contingent as opposed to the spiritual and transcendent. The works that I explore in this book pursued an analogous state of being—temporally suspended in both the phenomenal sense and the sense of being worldly, rooted in a political world of man’s making.¹³ At a time of perceived social crisis and conservative reaction, they thematized the variously mediated processes that enable us to perceive reality as not only chronological but more specifically historical, with all the power dynamics that such worldviews entail. Another way of putting this is to say that they converged on the workings of collective memory, a phenomenon that social theorists were at the same moment beginning to address with newfound zeal.

In the decades since, art historians have productively applied the concept of collective memory, understood as something inextricably bound up with identity and thus inherently political, to a wide variety of socially engaged work. Some have focused on the role of art in memorializing or otherwise working through historical traumas like World War II, the Holocaust, the war in Vietnam, and the AIDS crisis.¹⁴ Others have extended the field’s focus to include phenomena like critical Black memory and the rise of diasporic consciousness, in which the painful histories and afterlives of slavery loom large.¹⁵ The Pictures artists have sometimes been positioned in contradistinction to such politically committed projects, their appropriation tactics cast as toothlessly academic if not accommodating of the mass cultural artifacts they mimicked and reframed.¹⁶ This book will not entirely rescue the group from such criticisms, but it will complicate some of the assumptions that underlie them, opening up alternative ways to conceptualize the critical currents that subtended this particular movement in postconceptual figuration. The result will be a revised understanding of the Pictures artists’ position within larger cultural histories—histories of postwar art as well as of postmodernism, a concept that evolved in tandem with their pioneering work. Influential theorists like Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and Fredric Jameson approached the notion of the postmodern from different perspectives in their writings of the 1970s and 1980s, but each of them understood it to betoken a changed way of relating to the past: skeptical of the Enlightenment tradition’s grand (and Eurocentric) master narratives, and unmoored from the edifice of historical thinking that rest on them.¹⁷ The contemporaneous work of Charlesworth, Goldstein, Brauntuch, Longo, and Bender attests to an artistic culture more directly and critically engaged with such ideas (even in advance of their articulation by famous philosophers) than is usually assumed. To understand these artists’ interventions, it is necessary to parse the various ways that the specter of fascism manifested in their work from circa 1980.

Before I turn to survey the broader cultural fascination with fascism that obtained through the 1970s and into the 1980s, forming a crucial background to the Pictures project, I hasten to acknowledge that this term is a notoriously slippery one, commonly wielded as an epithet for all manner of authoritarian or otherwise oppressive institutions, policies, and behaviors. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972) could thus be introduced by Michel Foucault as a book whose strategic adversary was not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini—which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively—but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.¹⁸ Umberto Eco took such expansive usage to reflect the ideological variegation of fascism itself, a patchwork incoherence that renders the subject impossible to define conclusively.¹⁹ Not everyone is willing to accept such indeterminacy, however. The political theorist Roger Griffin, for instance, has argued that fascist ideology can in fact reliably be characterized—and distinguished from other right-wing political phenomena—as a palingenetic form of populist ultranationalism, palingenesis meaning rebirth: as in, the violent dissolution of an allegedly decadent establishment (usually a democratic one) to create a radically new society in which the national community (usually defined in racial terms) and its ostensibly autochthonous culture, protected by a strong state, may at last flourish.²⁰ A reader may find it helpful to keep Griffin’s definition back of mind when evaluating the often-freewheeling uses of the term that crop up throughout this book. Ultimately, however, such efforts to demarcate the boundaries of fascism as a political phenomenon or pinpoint the essence of its motivating ideology are beside the point here. This is not a book about fascism per se or even fascist aesthetics, defined as the artistic values and stylistic conventions promoted by fascist regimes. It is rather a book about the collectively mnemonic imagination of fascism, focused on a particularly intense moment in this discursive process spanning the 1970s and 1980s. More to the point, it is about how fascism—in quotes—appeared to a particular group of artists during these years, and how that group made use of the concept’s very mutability to explore larger processes at the nexus of contemporary politics and historical perception.

Fascinating Fascism

The Pictures artists were hardly the only ones to evoke the specter of fascism when they did. Nor were they alone in highlighting the wide variety of cues with which this increasingly fuzzy signified could be conjured three decades after the Second World War’s conclusion. In 1978, the Toronto-based collective General Idea envisioned the audience for its 1984 Miss General Idea Pageant—a fictive spectacle the group announced thirteen years before that Orwellian date and continuously promoted via FILE Megazine, its self-published periodical-cum-work-of-conceptual-art—as a mass of soldiers at a party rally.²¹ FILE’s fall 1979 special issue, titled Transgressions, returned to the theme: its red-and-black cover presented a young man dressed like a member of the Hitler Youth, cheekily holding a tall glass of milk that appears to have deposited a mustache-like stripe on his upper lip (plate 1).²² That same year, Jenny Holzer began circulating her Inflammatory Essays, a series of capitalized proclamations that appeared to evince extremist positions on one side of the political spectrum or the other. VIOLENT OVERTHROW IS APPROPRIATE WHEN THE SITUATION IS INTOLERABLE, declared one; A CHARISMATIC LEADER IS IMPERATIVE, insisted another. In Europe, meanwhile, the West German painter Anselm Kiefer exhibited darkly expressionistic, epically scaled canvases exploring German cultural identity and its complicity with Nazism. The British duo Gilbert and George, for their part, portrayed London skinheads alongside martial civic statuary in their controversial 1980 Pictures, a series of billboard-scale photomurals that resembled stained-glass windows or heraldic emblems.²³

These examples from the visual arts—especially the ones from Anglophone contexts—invite comparison with the contemporaneous phenomenon of punk, a mostly White subculture that made the détournement of fascist imagery a central aspect of its antagonistic program. The Sex Pistols notoriously defied the patriotic pageantry of Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee by donning swastikas and rhyming god save the queen with the fascist regime.²⁴ (Jamie Reid’s 1977 cover design for the single, originally titled No Future, defaced the regent’s visage with a graphic gag and blindfold. In an alternative version, he replaced her eyes with swastikas and pierced her mouth with a safety pin.) The Manchester-based Joy Division, a band that Longo has described himself as being madly affected by around the time