Making Images of National Identity
A rather academic book I’ve been reading talks about the usurpation of “art” by the Nazi regime in order to make the German public their stooges in the Final Solution.
Eric Michaud's The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany talks about how Hitler convinced his already malleable citizens to be so totally under his control (which films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will had already began to condition them into the requisite somnambulists).
Hitler’s approach came from all sides.
* The German people entered the knighthood of artists, but Hitler was the supreme artist.
* These same citizens contributed their art through creative work, but it really became the frenzy of construction workers building bridges, roads and edifices.
* The German spirit had to manifest itself into visible artistic forms (paintings, sculptures, architecture), but the supreme artist, Hitler, made the ultimate decision as to what to make.
* Art (sculpture, paintings, architectural sites) were to be created and constantly on display, but there was nothing original about these works. Hitler “borrowed” from ancient Greek and Roman cultures, and ignored any authentic German folk art that could have been used.
So everything was a lie to start with. The people were not in control of their destiny – they were not artists. The work was not creative. The visible art forms which manifested the German spirit were only copies.
All image makers have to worry about being dictators, inciting the public into false creative participation (you really chose that dress, that fashion, that logo), copying long forgotten images with no reference to the present, and deciding what images belong in a culture and what don’t.
The questions I have been asking are:
* What is national identity?
* How do we produce images that reflect this identity?
* Who gets to choose these images?
* And how do these images become flexible, fluid and organic, rather than static and final, as in the Nazi German case.
In Canada, we’ve recently swore in a Governor General who took it upon herself to design her own Coat of Arms. It looks more Haitian than Canadian, an ode to the GG's foreign ancestors.
It looks like we took flexible, organic and fluid ten steps down the road and said “anything goes” instead.
In fact, it is more macabre than that. It is still the dictatorial, alien approach of the Nazi’s here except the ones in charge are saying “Only anything non-Canadian goes”.
