Describing contemporary politicos as “fascist” comes from a postwar tradition of branding anyone presenting as authoritarian with the term. It implies a totalitarian disregard for the rule of law, transmuting a republic into a dictatorship. The term has become a catchall for many on the fringes of the political spectrum, right and left, and as such has lost some of its bite.
The current exhibition at Poster House New York, The Future Was Here: The Changing Face of Fascist Italy (on view through Feb. 22), is a vivid introduction by curator B.A. Van Sise, an author and photographic artist with three monographs. Last week my “Propaganda v. Truth” class was treated to a vibrant and insightful curator’s tour of the exhibition, which is devoted to how graphic design, visual manipulation, memorable symbolism and mythic storytelling contributed to the cult of personality that was endemic to the Fascist party and government.
Below, Van Sise elaborates on the reason this historical exhibit is so relevant—not only to designers, but everyone who sees which way the political winds are blowing.
What inspired you to curate this exhibition? Especially now?
I think Stephen Dedalus had it right all those years ago: History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.
I’m an artist and an author and have taken part, in one way or another, in about 40 exhibitions. Being a curator is in absolutely every way the same job as being an artist, and I stepped up into this one in particular for the reason I step into any project: I think it’s important, and I hope people will want to learn about it. Plus, it’s a period I’m closely tied to: My family was around for this, very real people who I very truly knew. In a very real way I exist because of and in spite of it, and I can—and will, if left unattended—talk about fascism in Italy and its leavings forever and ever. I jumped at the chance to lean into this one, mostly because it’s a story that feels so old and so contemporary—it’s something people need to be thinking about now, reading about now. It felt important to write a whole lot of poetry with a little splash of blood.
I was struck more than anything else by the reality that at almost every turn, the freedom of Italians was not taken by Mussolini but handed to him, and often in advance. I think when you talk about Italians, or people who’ve been through authoritarianism in general, there can sometimes be a desire to deterge that part of our history, to raze our complicity in what occurred and in some places still is occurring.
Authority doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it has to be sold. And it has to be purchased, too.
You were born in Italy and live half time in the U.S. What influence does this have on your curatorial decisions?
I grew up in two worlds, and in a quadrilingual family. I really adore Italy—have family there, friends there, colleagues there—and feel deeply at home there. I like genealogy, and I’ve tracked my mother’s people back 601 years on the Italian peninsula. There’s something about being tied to a place, really intrinsically—but it’s complicated. I’ve lived far more years in the States than in Italy, though I’m more in the latter now, and my artwork and authorship look very directly at American experience. I have twice joined the U.S. military, and to draft ol’ James Joyce back into service, I’ve lived and laughed and loved. And left. To get your heart truly broken, you need to love something completely. And, understand me, believe me: I have loved America completely.
Curating the show, and especially writing the show, I made a point to frame how fully the art world, which should have been in confrontation with Mussolini and with Fascist movements in general, totally buckled. What it did to places I love, art movements I admire …
My grandfather was in the mob that hanged Mussolini from a Milan gas station in 1945, and I was in the merry little band of art nerds that hanged him all over again in New York 80 years later. Mussolini might be disappointed to hear that I am beyond his command. The people who admire him might frown, too, at the same.
The show is superb and varied to the extent that some of it is “commercial,” some of it is political, and all is iconic. Did Italian Fascist branding start a trend for ideological art or extend its reach?
The show is wonderful. The exhibition design by Ola Baldych is simultaneously intimate and claustrophobic, endearing and overwhelming, as complicated a show as its subject was as a leader. And many of the pieces in it, so many of them larger than life, spark like aluminum foil in a microwave.
Now, please remember: Advertising, in reality, is the artform that most often touches the life of the everyman. You wanna see a painting, you go to a museum. Wanna see your favorite jazz band? Truck down to a club. Wanna see a photograph? Hie thee to a gallery. But if you wanna get to the people? Advertising comes at them every second of every day. And it was and is fundamental to what fascist regimes do. Mussolini preached a totalitarian ideal where business and governmental interests were in lockstep. But what it shows is not the start of the merger between corporate and political trends. It’s the middle. Allow me to explain in the most neutral way possible: Here in the United States, in 2020, we had a sweeping wave of social movements throughout the country—continuing LGBT protests and legal progress, BLM and George Floyd protests, the list goes on. Corporations with their fingers finding the breeze all changed their logos every June to rainbow flags, and you began to see in advertising far greater representation of persons of color, of multiethnic relationships, of gay folks, etc. The list goes on.
But those same exact companies, with their same fingers finding a new breeze, might completely change their tack to fit what they feel is the newly more profitable national mood. Gone are those rainbows, gone is that diversity. There’s a lot of flags. Sydney Sweeney, I hear, has great jeans.
In Italy, the same thing happened. Mussolini comes to power, and all the advertising changes—art nouveau optimism turns into a particularly unwelcoming brand of futurist art to match the mood of his cronies. People lose their details. There’s a lot of flags. Ersatz products coated with the syrup of jingoism. Cars are named after throat-opening shock troops. It’s all very, very fast. But this isn’t new: I guarantee you that if you went back to ancient Rome, or the agora, or the square in front of the Forbidden City, you’d find criers changing their tune with each and every new leader. I’m sure if I was standing in the forum long ago, between ads for fine Roman grains for fine Roman citizens, there’d be a man telling me how Brutus is an honorable man.
Duce used and advanced a lot of Fascist tropes. What were the main ones and how did they operate in building support among Italians and elsewhere?
Italian fascism was a total and complete cult of personality. It’s Mussolini being sexy, Mussolini chopping wheat, Mussolini riding things and driving things and pointing at things. He isn’t a part of Italy, he is Italy in this period. And his actual, physical body is very important to it; he’s shirtless and on horseback and doing all of this stuff because there’s a real testosterone driven machismo in all of it.
This is, perhaps, a big part of why it was so crucial for the mob that hanged him to mutilate his body when they finally got ahold of it. He felt not one scratch, of course, but they got to complete the ultimate desecration of this horrid, often silly national symbol.
Was he an evil genius or a clever PR man, or both or more?
So, nobody really wakes up thinking they’re an evil anything—nobody outside of cartoons and Roger Stone’s house gets out of bed, twirls their mustache, cackles maniacally in front of the mirror and declares to themselves the full breadth of their evil plans for the day.
Mussolini, were he to walk into my living room right now [ptoo ptoo ptoo] would have said that he was a benevolent dictator. He would have had a decent argument to make, too: He could have pointed to improvements in Italian infrastructure, alimentary self-sufficiency, industrialization and militarization and so on. He was also, in many ways, a moron who collapsed his nation, imprisoned and killed his own citizens, dragged his nation into a disastrous alliance with Germany and a disastrous war to follow. Matteotti and Gramsci wouldn’t have considered him benevolent; contemporary Italian Jews don’t say “aw shucks, what a swell guy.”
But he was certainly a clever PR man. Outside of the shadow under his thumb, the most dangerous place to be in Italy was between Mussolini and a camera. He was widely photographed, widely publicized; he understood the cult of personality that had grown under his feet, wanted to be synonymous with Italy and attained it. He became an odd sort of sex symbol. He appeared shirtless on magazine covers! (There’s one I am fascinated by, with a picture of him skiing topless emblazoned “dictateur sportif!”)
He had been a reporter. He was good at being a public figure. And lord almighty, was he good for pull quotes. If there’s one thing the man understood, it’s that a word after a word after a word is power.
Why was Fascist iconography so wed to Art Deco styling?
Timing. Mussolini, when he rises to power, has at his side Margherita Sarfatti—he loves her, he’s nuts about her, she’s in many ways the uncrowned queen of Italy—and she’s a patron of the arts, she’s surrounded by all these futurist artists and writers (Umberto Boccioni, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Marinetti and all the rest of the lot). Mussolini isn’t an artist, unlike other Fascist dictators of Europe, but he’s surrounded by them, and in many ways the lion’s share of the Italian futurist art movement is the breeze that becomes the bombogenesis of Fascism in Europe.
It’s not Mussolini who comes up with all the visual trappings of fascism—the Roman salutes, the eagles, the trappings of antiquity—but the artists around him. Futurism is not synonymous with Fascism, but futurism—and the related Deco movement—become the dominant artistic style of the period.
What’s wild, really, is that so many of the artists working in Italy—both in history and in the dissection of it on view at Poster House—are older folks who’ve really been doing stile liberty work. They’re Art Nouveau artists who have been doing elegant typefaces and floral motifs and nudes, and nudes, and nudes. And suddenly there’s a new regime and everybody capitulates, just totally buckles. The boss’ girlfriend has got specific tastes.
What was the major distinction between Italian Fascism and German Nazism? And where did they overlap?
Italian Fascism comes first; the leader of Germany comes to power admiring—nigh on idol worshipping—Mussolini, before he makes the common mistake many of us make: One should never meet their heroes. He realises that Mussolini is perhaps less impressive than he thinks himself to be, and acts accordingly in his eventual domination of Italy. The biggest difference between the two—there are others, but it’s the most obvious—is that Italian Fascism does not rise up with the same Aryan, chadbro ethos that the Nazis have. Homosexuality is technically legal in Italy. The antisemitic laws only occur in Italy when Germany forces them following the disastrous alliance. It’s not a priority for the formerly card-carrying socialist leader of a country where people speak dozens of different languages and come in many, many different complexions, ethnic backgrounds, multiple religions, etc.
Why isn’t the Fasci symbol powerful in the long term, as the Nazi hooked cross has become today?
I could give you a long-winded answer, but it’s not complicated: It’s more closely and clearly sewn together with racism, yes, but the reality is one strictly of design: It’s really easy to draw.
Ask a roomful of little kids to accurately draw an American flag—a true, real American flag—and none of them will do it well. Little German kids in 1937? No such problem.
If you could select one single defining piece from the exhibit, knowing that many were left on the cutting-room floor, what would that be and why?
For a defining piece, it’s hardly not the most visually stunning piece, or my favorite piece, but I think all the time about the poster for the motorcycle race in Portogruaro—an odd place to hold a big spectacular-spectacular motor race, until one understands that only a few months earlier a skunked government-mandated diphtheria vaccine had killed 28 children in the town. The poster is merry, bright, exciting, future-focused for a zipping, roaring race through a town full of decomposing children. It exemplifies the “bread and circuses” aspect of the regime that they were very, very good at—if you’re enjoying the show, it’s harder to notice how horrible the rest of it all is.
What do you want your audience to take away from the exhibition?
Alright, so it’s this: Fascism requires a leader who commands a cult of personality. If you remove that personality, it never survives. Just as quickly as cultures move into it—snap! Everything is Futurism! snap! Aufwiedersehen Weimar!—cultures move out of it. In Portugal, Antonio de Oliveira Salazar falls out of his bathtub and Portuguese Fascism gasps out with him. In Spain, fluid fills the chest of Francisco Franco and crushes both his heart and his government. Germany’s worst Charlie Chaplin impersonator shoots himself on his honeymoon, and it’s curtains for the Nazis. Mussolini dies in Italy and thus goes with him Fascism, Futurism, and an entire era. And it’s instant: THE. NEXT. YEAR, Vittorio De Sica is running around the rubble making neorealist films. Five years later, Federico Fellini lenses his first movie. It’s less than a decade from executed fascists to Sophia Loren. And the kids standing in De Sica’s rubble? They turn into the contemporary painters, arte povera creators that populate the worldwide art scene not long after. Yes, the slide into ash is fast, and horrifying—but the rise out of it can be just as quick.
The post The Daily Heller: You’ve Been Hearing a Lot About Fascism. What is it, Anyway? appeared first on PRINT Magazine.