Much has been written, in both the mainstream media and blog-o-sphere, about the verbal gifts possessed by Barack Obama. With respect to inspirational speech-giving, the promised "Change" will certainly be evident should Obama be the candidate to replace G.W. Bush at the podium for the next Inaugural or State of the Union Address. While off the teleprompter, Obama was, at best, Clinton's equal in the head-to-head debates earlier this year. I believe his ability (and his speech-writer's abilities) to deliver a speech won him the nomination. Hillary certainly bested him in other areas which seem important to Democratic voters...policy, experience, glass ceilings, etc.
Obama himself has expressed his belief in the power of "words", in his speech (heavily "borrowed" from Deval Patrick) given in Wisconsin earlier this year while on the campaign trail. As a response to the growing recognition of emptiness of his heavy rhetoric, Obama asked "Just words?", indicating his deep belief in the importance of what is spoken and heard.
But a picture is worth a thousand words, right? Some reporting has been done on the imagery put forth by the Obama campaign, but it has mostly been found in the blog-o-sphere, and then more often as the butt of a joke than found in an analysis. Perhaps this is because most reporting in the media and blogs is done by writers, with backgrounds in journalism or at least a comfort with the written word. However, historians of art and architecture, graphic designers, advertisers and marketers no doubt understand the language of the Obama campaign throughout the primaries and now entering the general election. My background (a double major in Art and Engineering, a Master's degree in Architecture, and owner of a small design firm) I hope gives me a better than average understanding of the message behind image and form. And what I've seen has increasingly set off warning signs.
Just as "Hope and Change" without specifics causes the acute listener to wonder what that means, just as Rev. Wright's "God damn America!" offends the ear of most Americans, and just as several of Michelle Obama's "pre-convention Michelle" words might make the average Joe reasonably question what she and her husband think of this country, the stylized campaign posters, the Obama website imagery, the infamous Obama Presidential Seal, and now the faux Greek temple/stage at Invesco Field speak volumes.
Now, all politicians use imagery...sometimes successfully and other times, not. To wear a flag pin or not to wear a flag pin? What color pantsuit works best in front of this muted, patriotic without being Republican patriotic reddish, whiteish and blueish motif?
Most Americans, consumer culture savvy as we are, understand and accept this careful consideration for backgrounds and fashion and signage for what it is...marketing. However, art historians recognize the history of political imagery that goes beyond marketing...the history of visual political propaganda.
Now before I go further, I should make clear that I typically despise when either the far Right or Left throw around Bush as Hitler or "fill-in-the-blank Liberal" as Stalin comparisons. Bush is not a fascist bent on world domination through military force. Obama has no manifesto laying out his path to a Socialist utopia that I know of. My point in what follows is not that Obama has the good intentions of classic Marxists or Socialists or Communists that have so often paved the road to terrible moments in our history. I believe he is a quite typical American Left Democrat, with no over-reaching intent. I don't fear for my 3 children's future under an Obama Presidency. I think he's intelligent, practical, and a realist.
However, with both the verbal rhetoric and the visual choices that either he or the people he has chosen to express him visually have made, I have strong questions regarding judgement.
At the beginning of the Democratic campaign, I began taking an interest in some of the graphical choices Obama's campaign was putting out. Highly stylized posters and web images, bumper stickers and t-shirts display Obama as iconography reminiscent of the propaganda posters of the worst regimes in modern history...Nazi Germany, the USSR, and more recently North Korea and Saddam's Iraq. In each, political graphic artists use a simple, cartoonized version of a political leader or populist scene along with simple, bold text meant to raise up and in some ways immortalize the person or idea in a generic form to be digested to the masses. Posters are plastered throughout the country, on walls and billboards and storefronts. Think Saddam paintings, posters and statues in pre-war Bagdad. Think of Chairman Mao's prevalence in China. The psychology and power of this type of imagery has a long and documented history in the arts. A dark history.
These Obama posters have been a home run with the Che t-shirt wearing crowd and the college crowd, who love plastering these images all over my beloved college town of Tempe. They're almost as bad as the Ron Paul nuts. And although the historical bloodlines of the imagery were immediately clear to me, I assumed the young designers in the Obama campaign were simply clueless and at worst had bad taste in their choice of marketing. "Yes, we Can!" couldn't possibly be the grandson of Hitler's "Ja!" posters. Obama gazing off to the distant horizon expressing HOPE could not be a distant cousin to Stalin and Lenin gazing towards utopia. Was Alexander Rodchenko still alive and working? Storefronts plastered with Obama's visage could not be the same thing as Saddam or Mao's visage similarly plastered in their respective cities and towns.
Then came the Great Seal of Obama, advertising Obama's web site and declaring "Vero Possumus!".
The Seal was a visual gaffe equivalent to John Kerry's "I was for it before I was against it" verbal gaffe, and it disappeared into political history after I believe one appearance. It was so ridiculous that it actually resulted in a day of pure joy on the conservative side of the blog-o-sphere, as bloggers scoffed at the presumption and ego displayed by such a stunt. The Seal quickly made its way onto the national news media and even late night talk shows. The Obama campaign quickly put the Seal to bed, but not before several bloggers investigated and speculated about the origins of the design. Though I don't believe the Obama campaign has fessed up to who's grand idea the Seal was, or who was hired to design it, solid speculation points to the graphic artist Shepherd Fairey, the creator of the Hope and Change and Progress Obama propaganda posters. A great article on Fairey's work and intent on the Obama posters is here.
Fairey became somewhat famous for his "Obey" posters and stickers that anarchist wanna-be skaters used to slap all over walls and street signs in cities all over the U.S. A viewing of Shepherds work, or a reading of his interviews, demonstrate that while Shepherd is more Anarchist than Communist, he recognizes and uses the power of historical propaganda art. Obama or someone in his campaign recognized Fairey's "talent", and set him to work. From the Washington Post:
When the street artist and guerrilla marketer Shepard Fairey got word from the Obama people that they would welcome his contribution to the campaign, he knew what he wanted to create: a phenomenon. All political art is propaganda (that is the point), but most political posters are bland, forgettable, wallpaper, like Fred Thompson on an off day. Fairey wanted something more iconic -- aspirational, inspirational -- and cool. In other words, he wanted to make posters that the cool cats would want. The 2008 Democratic primary season equivalent of the Che poster (with all that implies). More Mao, more right now.
And more from the WashPo, because it's just so good:
Fairey's artwork follows the style of his predecessors. His Obama posters (and lots of his commercial and fine art work) are reworkings of the techniques of revolutionary propagandists -- the bright colors, bold lettering, geometric simplicity, heroic poses -- the "art with a purpose" created by constructivists in the early Soviet Union, like Alexander Rodchenko and the Stenberg brothers, and by America's own Depression-era Works Projects Administration.
Not only has Fairey done Obama, but works on the walls of his studio and on his Web site include depictions of Sid Vicious, Bobby Seale, Chairman Mao, Noam Chomsky, Emiliano Zapata, Patty Hearst, Vladimir Lenin and Richard Nixon. Though Fairey is quoting revolutionary forms (meaning he is playing with Mao, not endorsing Mao), some observers see his Obama poster and think: reds.
Writers for the Clout column in the Philadelphia Daily News said "the Soviet-style heroic Obama, the use of a single word HOPE" reminded them of George Orwell's "1984" and Big Brother.
"There's an unequivocal sense of idol worship about the image," wrote op-ed columnist Meghan Daum in the Los Angeles Times, "a half-artsy, half-creepy genuflection that suggests the subject is (a) a Third World dictator whose rule is enmeshed in a seductive cult of personality; (b) a controversial American figure who's been assassinated; or (c) one of those people from a Warhol silkscreen that you don't recognize but assume to be important in an abstruse way."
Now, what kind of judgement is shown by Obama and his campaign in hiring a graphic designer whose style eminates from Soviet and populist propaganda? Did they think no one would notice? Did they not understand? Fairey himself knew the risk:
"I didn't want to be an unwelcome distraction," Fairey explains. "I've been arrested," he says, referring to his graffiti work in public places. "I really want him to win, so I didn't want to do anything that would cause him problems." The Obama people, somewhat to his surprise, said go ahead. Who said, exactly? "You can assume this came from the highest levels," Fairey says.
How could Obama, a Harvard grad, be so dim as to not see the problem here. How could he then go on and have the Great Obama Seal commissioned? The explanation? Poor judgement...the kind of judgement that allowed him to sit in the pews listening to the likes of Jeremiah Wright all those years, the kind of judgement that allowed him to fraternize with William Ayers, the kind of judgement that allowed him to associate so closely with Rezko.
After the Seal, I expected we had seen the last of the visual gaffes. Obama was ridiculed so thoroughly, I was sure the graphic artists had been reigned in, the advisors eyes had been opened, and Obama himself would not let such a mistake happen again. Although Obama supporters continued to stray down the foolish path of iconic Obama imagery, nothing backed by the Obama campaign surfaced after the Seal abomination. Unless you count the questionable choice of place and imagery for his famous speech in Berlin.
Until today...
Holy crap! Obama decided to move his Sermon on the (Rocky) Mount(ains) from the Convention Center to Invesco Field, so that 70,000 adoring fans could bathe in his rock star glow. Judgement was questioned. He decided to "suggest" that donors "gift" $1000 each for the free event. Judgement was questioned. And then, he decided to hire some young Albert Speer to create the imagery for the largest televised moment of his political life? Was this his idea? His staffers? Did some young designer propose it, and no one thought, "A faux Greek temple facade? Interesting. It says Washington D.C. to me, but could it be understood as anything else? Hmmm...Greek gods? Mythology? Presumption? Ego? Hmmm....NO! Go back to the drawing board and bring me something with flags in the background!"
While the use of Greek classical architecture does have a valid history in our public buildings, it's history goes back much further than 1776, and Obama and his campaign should have had the simple judgement to take this into consideration. While Jefferson's Montecello and the Capitol and innumerable public monuments use the "neo-Classical" to express our governments connection to Greek democracy, the average Joe sees something else. He sees a temple. Imagery of Zeus tossing lightning bolts from the clouds, images of Hercules, of Mount Olympus. Not so long ago, the Facists and the Nazis recognized the power of the classical Greek forms. Spiro Kostof, in his "A History of Architecture", writes:
But if the Duce and the Fuhrer dreaded the big city for its undisciplined social ferment, they were also in need of it, it's throngs and frame, to stage celebrations of their rule. The object was to claim the old cities in the name of the regime by pruning out of them undesireable elements, carving into them theaters for programmed mass demonstrations and political events, and building on a scale and magnificence that would prove the comparative worth of the present agaisnt the stony testimonials of past glories.
And:
It is in such ceremonial architecture and similar ideologically loaded settings like party headquarters, universities, state museums, and memorials that the official international classicism took over. The Doric mode was preferred by Germany; to Hitler it was "the expression of the New Order". ...And these vast, cold, spartan exteriors drew life from the trappings of a quasi-religious nationalism.
I cannot think of a modern American politician so willing to incorporate such imagery, just because it is effective, without any acknowledgement of the historical iconography and symbolism. Just words? Of course not. Just images? I hope so.
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