Sometimes a book comes along which defies classification; and although you love it and find it fascinating, stimulating, thought provoking and the like, you find it really hard to write about. Today on the Ramblings I’m featuring one such book, and you’ll have to bear with me a bit while I try and marshall my thoughts about it!
That Picasso once painted a portrait of Stalin at the request of Louis Aragon. Make of it what you will.
The book in question is “The Art of the Great Dictators” by Joshua Rothes, who’s editor of Sublunary Editions, its publisher; he was kind enough to offer a copy to anyone interested on Twitter, and I was very intrigued by the title so stuck my my metaphorical hand up and said “Yes please!” Well, there’s likely to be a Russian connection, isn’t there? Sublunary is a fascinating small press which focuses on issuing short texts – stories, novellas, poetry, fragments – which in our fractured world is certainly very appealing, although it would be a mistake to think that short texts = easy reads!
The Art of the Great Dictators is not an unfinished book; it is a book never earnestly begun, utterly amorphous and orphaned, notes and fodder for a thesis that, brought to bear, would not suffer the faintest of blows.
Anyway! “The Art of the Great Dictators” presents as a series of notes for an actual book of that title which was never written, by an art critic who (presumably) didn’t exist. The scope of the work was intended to be wide-ranging, taking in the artistic ambitions of dictators from Hitler and Stalin through to Caeusescu (though interestingly Castro, often reckoned to be one of that body of rulers, doesn’t get a mention.). The notes explore all manner of aspects of art and power, mixing in uncredited quotes, musings on history and politics, and instructions to the author as to how to write the book; which if these notes are anything to go by, would have been a mammoth undertaking…
History in the years since has turned empirical; much like the hard sciences, it seeks models and explanations rather than facts. A working knowledge is what is important. Can one apply the model and get results? It is not only fair to say that the atomic bomb and the horrors of the Gulag must be given credit for postmodernism. There is no abstraction without annihilation. Something must be given over
Initially, it’s hard to quite work out how you should read something like this; a book of notes is not necessarily going to cohere into a whole, particularly when there are quotes and references which may be real or invented, something guaranteed to throw you off guard. However, as I kept reading I became more and more involved in following the narrator’s musings on their subject and the book of notes almost seemed to morph into a book of aphorisms, which was quite fascinating.
The danger is always in seeing in yourself the potential to be an agent of change; the natural end of this is totalitarianism, or else madness.
A portrait of Comrade Stalin 1937… (Isaak Brodsky / Public domain via Wikimedia Commons)
The pieces raised all kind of thoughts about the value and function of art, its place in the world and the eternal debate of art vs money – which I guess, in the end, may be what the author intended! The dictator as failed artist is a trope that runs through recent history, most obviously with Hitler; and here Rothes explores that much more interestingly than I’ve seen before!
The dictator stands as the embodiment of all social guilt, the worst of our nature become flesh, the reification of our demons ruling over us; they are what we deserve, and what we nonetheless must resist.
As you can see, I ended up with a *lot* of post-its sticking out of this little book, and I could have stuffed this post full of quotes from it. “Art…” is a very clever piece of writing, and the notes often hint at the (fictional?) author’s cheeky wish to fool their readers: “Something must be said, of course, about the stolen art of the Nazis, though not what they might think.” I could share with you more than I already have, and I’ll add one final quoted quote below; but instead I’ll encourage you to seek work out. It’s an intriguing and thought-provoking book where almost every paragraph makes you want to stop and think – fascinating!
“It is impossible to be an artist without simultaneously being a utopian, and there is no room for utopia yet; we bear a burden for the past, and utopian thought denies this by skipping the process of struggle and restitution for an end goal that the artist feels we are somehow deserving of.”
(Book kindly provided by the author, for which many thanks! You can find out more about Sublunary Editions here.)
Jul 17, 2020 @ 06:47:23
This sounds fascinating…I discovered a bit of this kind of art in Italy when we went to the Museum of Modern Art there. (The Italian idea of modern is C19th and early C20th, which charmed us after going to the Guggenheim in Bilbao.) There’s quite a bit of it in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow too, and it’s so striking. I quite like it, if not the ideology behind it.
Jul 17, 2020 @ 08:06:41
It *is* really intriguing, and makes you think about the process of making art, who makes it, and what it represents. Certainly some of the works of and by dictators are pretty grim when you think what they stand for…
Jul 17, 2020 @ 09:44:41
Yes, but in the soviet union it’s often about glorifying the workers, factory workers and machinery and so on, which — when you remember that the USSR had such a lot of catching up to do because they’d never had an industrial revolution and were still largely agrarian — was a celebration of the the progress they had made. We hear all the time about the failures of communism, but their rapid industrialisation was what enabled them to turn the Nazis around at Stalingrad. It doesn’t bear thinking about what would have happened if Tsar Nicholas and his ilk were in charge when Hitler was running amok.
Jul 17, 2020 @ 09:53:03
Oh absolutely! There was a cult of the workers as much as a cult of the leaders, and the progress was dramatic (although often at terrible human cost). And I’d be the first to agree with you about the Second World War – Nick couldn’t organise the proverbial piss up in a bewery, so the War would have gone a very different way if his like had been in charge…
Jul 17, 2020 @ 13:22:01
It’s ironic that we in the west have our freedom because Stalin said I want A LOT of tanks and I want them yesterday and Stalin always got what he wanted…
Jul 17, 2020 @ 13:41:58
It really is…..
Jul 17, 2020 @ 12:25:09
What a fascinating little book. I’m not surprised that you wondered how to read it at first. The art vs money thing is especially interesting, money is power after all. I had never considered these dictators as having artistic ambitions before, I shudder to imagine what some of their inspirations may have been.
Jul 17, 2020 @ 12:30:36
It’s most intriguing, and the whole concept of dictators as either artists or subjects of art is fascinating but also potentially troubling. As you say, money is power and those in control can have such a say in art and how it’s defined or perceived. Such an interesting book and subject.
Jul 17, 2020 @ 14:46:20
I guess I’m not too interested in the art of dictators or, as I call them, evil fools. I would be much more interested in the art of good leaders like Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt.
I question whether Fidel Castro really was a dictator or if that is just western propaganda.
Jul 17, 2020 @ 20:37:51
I think that’s probably the point… ;D As for Castro, I kind of reserve judgement. I admire what he was trying to do in for Cuba, but the human rights issues over there are unpleasant.
Jul 17, 2020 @ 18:50:20
Intriguing. I’m reminded of the concept behind David Shields, Reality Hunger – another compilation of quotations (some his own), or the weird multiple ventriloquism of Pessoa. I recall seeing recently online (Guardian or BBC website, can’t find it now) an article about the surprising number of art and sculpture still surviving from the fascist era in Italy. As for the cult of the worker in Soviet Union: yes, agree entirely with you and Lisa about the efficacy of Stalin’s response to fascism – but at what a cost. More died in his gulags and firing squads than were eliminated by Hitler’s death camps… Orwell saw it coming. But enough of that. What a fascinating idea behind this book.
Jul 17, 2020 @ 20:40:32
I must admit I’m fond of a book that blurs the lines, and this one definitely does that. Pessoa’s multiple voices are fascinating – I’ve read some of the poetry – and I need to get onto the prose too.
It’s interesting how fascist art has survived, as so much communist art hasn’t, whether it has artistic merit or not. It’s a terribly ironic dichotomy, isn’t it? The war wouldn’t have been won without Russia, but that kind of makes us complicit in what happened in the country. As you say – Orwell was always so clear eyed…
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