Saw one of these for the first time today. It was mounted on the rear window of a lefty-mobile, amidst a collage of peace signs and sports team stickers:
What I like about the sticker/placard is how it emphasizes the already-pastness of Obamamania in the moment of its ascendancy.
The old-fashioned-looking graphics were no doubt meant to convey a sense of entering into history, but that notion can be taken two ways: Yes, Barack Obama (PBUH, etc.) has joined the 42 other men who’ve held our nation’s highest office. In irony-free zones to our left, that achievement stands unambiguously as a sign of victory: For some, like the members of the Nobel Peace Prize committee, “hope” was apparently enough – with or without realization of whatever was or might be hoped for. Hope was, as now merely having hoped somehow remains, its own reward. After all, “they” were, as John Hinderaker helpfully recalls for the rest of us, the ones they were waiting for.
If, like Charles Krauthammer in his recent Spiegel interview, you wonder whether what the President will likely best be remembered for is simply having gotten elected; if like Michael Barone you’re asking where “all those Obamenthusiasts…[have] been hiding this year,” the imagery takes on a completely different, desperate set of connotations…
Comments 24
http://mog.com/music/Robert_Merrill/Robert_Merrill_on_Radio:_Unpublished_Broadcasts_from_1940-1946/We_Did_It_Before_and_We_Can_Do_It_Again
November 1st, 2009 at 9:00 pm
That’s so devastatingly appropriate, sis: In 20 years or so the liberals might be able to mount another national campaign without everyone remembering what that means. Or were you referring to the Reagan revolution?
November 1st, 2009 at 9:20 pm
This 1930s-era collectivist propaganda aesthetic is so creepy. They really need to get some new material.
November 1st, 2009 at 9:40 pm
@ J.E. Dyer:
I think the main elements unique to the handbill (as opposed to the HOPE poster) go back further and along a different branch of the political tree. The lettering, especially near the edges, says 19th Century to me. Someone more expert in the history of graphic arts could date the decorations better than I could, but I would not be surprised to learn that much of it was lifted more or less directly from a Lincoln era original – that would much appeal to the pretensions of the Fairey types.
November 1st, 2009 at 9:49 pm
http://cgi.ebay.com/Authentic-HUGE-Campaign-POSTER-AL-SMITH-For-PRESIDENT_W0QQitemZ360201764219QQcategoryZ165560QQcmdZViewItem
November 1st, 2009 at 9:58 pm
http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/presidents/images/bio16a.jpg
Couldn’t find what I was hoping to find in an initial pre-dinner search.
I’m also thinking the frame may have been lifted from or intended to refer to a stock certificate – as in each Obamanaut taking a “share” in the glorious future…
November 1st, 2009 at 10:10 pm
@ CK MacLeod:
Well, yeah, but there is definitely a ’30s vibe with this sticker. Its period aesthetic — portentous contrast, shadows evoking a swirling energy, bounded by reassuringly sedate, traditional- and slightly Gothic-looking looking borders — harks back to the 1900s and 1910s. Those decades in turn revived influences from earlier popular art, home decoration, and printing.
But in the 1930s the progressivists very consciously appealed to this particular aesthetic as a sort of “spirit of the people” kind of manifestation. It was intended to look like turn-of-the-century handbills — in part for the very simple reason that a lot of 1930s progressives had been in their teens and 20s during the Edwardian era.
That period before WWI was one when philosophy, political ideology, science, art, even theology all seemed to combust with each other to produce the aesthetic of a “new world” and a “new man.” One reason the progressives made fewer inroads into US culture than into Europe’s was simply that America never imported, wholesale, the cultural trappings of parlor-progressivism. They were doing some kind of interesting stuff over there in Europe, but Americans were mass-producing the Next Bungalows After the Craftsman, flocking to cheap movies with generic plots, and deciding between Aubusson knock-offs and Colonial oval rugs.
When I say this is a progressivist 1930s aesthetic, I mean just that. It’s not an aesthetic that was embraced by the average family with an Oldsmobile and a Radio Flyer in the garage. Its implication of an interwoven life of politics, emotion, and art — with the portentous evocation of past grandeurs in the “politics of the people” — belonged to a progressive movement that thought the highest form of ordered depiction was political. It was a sort of religious iconry for them. What’s weird is that it still is.
November 1st, 2009 at 11:02 pm
Still says 19th C to me – even in your recitation, JED.
When you say “collectivist propaganda aesthetic,” I think of agitprop and its typically angular and canted, sans-serif look – which had already entered the mainstream of graphic art by the ’30s. If some American progressives of the ’30s were referring to the ’00s and ’10s, the base reference would still be pre-avant garde.
However you look at it, I think my main point stands regarding the historic pretensions, and ironies, embedded in the design.
November 2nd, 2009 at 12:38 am
This companion or predecessor poster uses portions of the same crowd scene in the foreground, and it uses the same Obama image that is the subject of the AP fair use controversy.
http://obeygiant.com/prints/inauguration-print
Looking at it made me note the waving leader silhouetted in the poster above. I’ve got the feeling I’ve seen that silhouette before. Perhaps Teddy Roosevelt, perhaps V.E. Lenin. I’ve looked around for it and can’t find a picture of either one of those from the back addressing a crowd.
If you can enlarge the poster C.K. you might find a clue in the dress of the crowd as to the era in which it was taken. This artist collages and modifies images made by other people. Maybe he took both the silhouette and the crowd scene from the same source. He used all sorts of period motifs in the frame. Maybe he used a period crowd. From the limited enlargement permitted here it appears to be a crowd of men with perhaps some white dressed women in the front row.
Also, it appears he used the star in the lower left hand corner before in this poster:
http://obeygiant.com/headlines/update-obey-x-levis
November 2nd, 2009 at 1:07 am
Reminds me a bit of a faux-vintage blue jeans label.
November 2nd, 2009 at 1:29 am
Sully, that’s funny – just looked at your link.
November 2nd, 2009 at 1:38 am
Shepard Fairey really likes that star with the stylized face in it. It’s all over his stuff almost like a trademark. Here it is again
http://obeygiant.com/prints/world-police-state-champs-gold
and again I think in the medal on this fellow’s chest
http://obeygiant.com/prints/no-im-vegetarian
and again in a print designed for the chinese audience
http://obeygiant.com/prints/the-beloved-premiere-we-are-blinded-by-your-majesty
November 2nd, 2009 at 1:48 am
@ Sully:
My initial assumption was that the crowd scene was the actual event, and that the placard was designed at a later date, possibly much later.
Here’s the largest version I’ve turned up so far: http://blog.theartcollectors.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/shepard-fairey-move-on-yes-we-did-poster.jpg
The directory name on the URL suggests – though doesn’t prove – that the image was available by November 2008 (the directory is the same kind of image directory as this blog uses, created automatically at the change of the month). I could place images in this blog’s “uploads/2009/10/” directory at any time, but it wouldn’t serve much of a purpose. Normally, and there’s little reason to change it, items uploaded via the blog software in October go in the October directory, November in November, etc. Files uploaded by some other means go somewhere else entirely.
Now, it could have been designed and handed out beginning some time later in November: No reason to assume that Fairey spent months agonizing over the creation. But it’s also possible that the thing was a handbill actually handed out on Nov 4, 2008. In which case the crowd scene could have been any of a number of big BO events – possibly his San Antonio King Canute speech, for instance. Doesn’t look right for the Convention speech on first glance.
(Remember Jan from Amherst who had the Obamessiah blog? She might know the whole story. I kind of lost track of her when she got po’d at the Contentionistas and it also seemed like she and her colleagues had mainly migrated to Facebook.)
November 2nd, 2009 at 2:14 am
@ CK MacLeod:
My point remains that in using these forms today, the modern left is evoking not the 19th century but the progressivists’ 1930s-era appeal to it. There’s no unaccountable skip past a nearer past to a more distant one. The thread runs right through the FDR years.
I do understand what you’re saying about agtiprop (which frankly always makes me think of Ayn Rand as much as of Stalin. Had there been no Lenin, Stalin, or Hitler, there would have been no Ayn Rand. She was all antithesis).
November 2nd, 2009 at 2:31 am
JED, I’d like to see some examples of what you’re talking about.
Since the state socialists did exist… there had to be an Ayn Rand. She may have been nuts in a lot of ways, but on balance I’m glad her books were written.
November 2nd, 2009 at 2:49 am
Rand came to my campus in 1960 all dressed in black, smoking with the help of a long ivory cigarette holder, surrounded by humorless young women in black turtlenecks and black shawls and long black skirts and black leotards all smoking with the help of cigarette holders.
November 2nd, 2009 at 8:55 am
You guys are giving this fellow an awful lot of credit for conscious artistic syncretism, aren’t you?
Btw, Sully, I think your response to my Freudian faux pas should be, “If you think my link looks funny, you should see fuster’s.”
November 2nd, 2009 at 9:29 am
@ CK MacLeod:
I saved it and then was able to enlarge it. It is BHO’s silhouette, based on the ears. And it is a modern crowd, based on people holding up small cameras. But now I don’t think it’s a real crowd but rather a collage of heads from crowd pictures, or else a crowd picture that was taken with a lens that made it look more dense. The heads are too closely packed together.
This guy Shepard Fairey would have been valued and kept busy designing propaganda in any of the 20th Century totalitarian regimes. See his corpus (a very apt word) of work here:
http://obeygiant.com/archives
He uses that big brother face in the star image that says “I’m watching you,” in both anti-totalitarian and outright fawning socialist realism images. I’m surprised, although maybe I shouldn’t be, that moveon didn’t get more flack for using this guy at all. Very creepy stuff. After looking over the rest of his stuff I honestly don’t know whether Fairey came to bury Caesar or to praise him when he took on the commission for this poster.
I suggest that Howard do BHO as the commisar in Doctor Zhivago with that face in the star as the badge in the center of his fur hat.
Now, on to Ayn Rand. I tend to agree with J.E. that Rand was a reaction to the totalitarian outbreak, and with CK that she was totally necessary as a popular counter to that outbreak. I’ve read the counter-Rand stuff in National Review and think I understand the argument; but I think that argument was only possible in a world where Rand had made tens of millions of impressions favorable to the anti-totalitarian position with her novels.
November 2nd, 2009 at 10:12 am
@ Seth Halpern:
Seth,
When in discussion with me you never have to be concerned about giving inadvertent offense, or even advertent offense. In the first case I make it a practice to never react based on first read when in discussion with someone like you or J.E. or CK or others here who can correctly use phrases like “artistic syncretism” or “Freudian faux pas” from actual knowledge without googling to check on the meaning of “syncretism” when used with “artistic,” for example. In the second I like being artfully and subtly slapped when I realize it’s happened.
For your side you should never assume I mean to offend if I use a phrase like that because it’s altogether possible, indeed probable, that I simply liked the flavor and texture of the word or phrase when it popped into my head and used it based on “understanding” that stemmed from skimming scholarly stuff or a novel, combined with (very) thin remembrances of the meaning of the roots of the word sort of learned in high school Latin, French and German classes.
Based on my observation, I’m more like fuster than I am like the rest of you folks in that regard. Which is why I like fuster despite disagreeing with him on almost everything. A case of mischievous kids playing amidst the grownups.
November 2nd, 2009 at 10:34 am
Sully, well, we try to be genteel, if not necessarily gentile.
As for the artwork, I find it kitschy as well as fishy, and for that reason wonder if the artist’s sensibility might not eventually have led to his being denounced and shot as a counter revolutionary..
November 2nd, 2009 at 10:55 am
@ Seth Halpern:
For sure he would have had to be a lot more disciplined if Beria’s boyos were reporting back on everything being done in his studio.
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:32 am
As Paris Hilton might say: That sounds hawt!
November 2nd, 2009 at 12:32 pm
“Artistic syncretism” may attribute too much conscious intentionality or intellectual complexity to a mere pastiche, but a pastiche attached to a political-cultural peak experience opens itself up to complex readings.
Fairey may in many regards be just another art school refugee steeped in theory he doesn’t have a prayer of understanding, but able, like many artists, to negotiate his way intuitively through the graphic arts equivalents of received wisdom. I’d guess he perceives himself to be wielding Stalinism vs. corporatism or some such, from within an artistic compound guarded by miles of barbed wire irony. We may think the joke’s on him but the joke’s on us because he knows the joke’s on him so it’s on us again, while just because we know that the joke’s on us doesn’t mean the joke’s really on him because his side won: Scoreboard!
When I interpret a piece like this one, the process is as much contemporary archaeology as art critique. Whether or not the artist had a conscious intention to make this or that other statement is secondary where not irrelevant. Why doing it this way looked cool to him, or why he thought it would look cool to its intended audiences is one beginning point, but competes with other significations likely beyond the control or interest of the artist.
I do think it’s cool, and in certain versions would be more collectible than your average piece of Obamabilia. The difference between what the artist and the Obamanaut intended and what may be understood from it regardless of their intentions is what opens up the space for a blog post.
November 2nd, 2009 at 12:51 pm
With respect to the aesthetics, the first thing I thought of was playing card. [Caution: stream of consciousness coming.]
Ace.
Ace in the Hole.
Just the Hole.
With respect to the sentiment, the term “has been” is someone who is past his prime, past his moment of fame and relevancy. Can we coin something for BO? “Has Did?”
November 3rd, 2009 at 10:08 am
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