Luca Carboni: Keep on charging the enemy so long as there is life
Luca's 20 minute presentation for CONSTANT CRAVING ~ PERFORMING UNDER CONDITIONS - DAI's 3 day performance lecture marathon at State of Concept in Athens, June 2018 was entitled
Summary
In the beginning of the presentation, we see a short segment of a video showing a white man standing on a street corner, a protester behind him holding up a red sign reading “Fight for Socialism over Barbarism”. The man addresses the camera when mid-sentence he is punched in the face by a masked person, then pushed out of the frame by a stampeding group of protesters quickly moving through the image. The video is repeated time and again, refracted into increasingly smaller frames until they form a flickering abstract pattern. Luca reveals later that the man in the video, seen here being punched 87381 times, is Richard B. Spencer, a known white-suprematist neo-nazi who claims to have coined the term “alt-right”.
Luca frames his presentation as an elaboration on themes he encountered when writing his thesis, dealing with some aesthetic aspects of the re-emergence of fascism in contemporary western societies, their relationship to popular culture and art and addressing the question how artists can effectively contrast its rise. His focus lies on Italy, though much of what is gleaned from this situation can be applied to other locations as well. Through a blend of visual aids and rhetorical analysis, Luca paints a picture of how fascism has evolved into a powerful, media-savvy movement that uses aesthetics, culture, and ambiguous language to attract a wider audience. The first part of the presentation focuses on cultural and aesthetics aspects of the first wave of fascism in Italy, while the second part addresses contemporary fascism, focusing on how it has rebranded itself to appeal to a wider audience and using the neo-fascist organization CasaPound as an example.
Luca lays out his understanding of fascism with a quote by Robert Paxton from ‘The Anatomy of Fascism’, then introduces the “squadristi” or “blackshirts” of the early 20th century, members of fascist militias that emerged after the 1st world war in Italy. This paramilitary force was responsible for the death of many political opponents and presented a new aesthetic appeal with their black uniforms, theatrical poses, and the spectacularly staged violence. The blackshirts’ carefully crafted image of the “young, playful, courageous” lads is illustrated by propaganda posters from the later 30s. Luca points out that many artists played an important role in the creation of fascism as a cultural phenomenon, e.g. a group of futurists around F.T. Marinetti. Committed to an image as militant artists, they participated in fascist actions, fighting “the Bolshevik cause”.
Moving on to the present, Luca describes how it is notable that contemporary fascism increasingly plays “the cool card”, with supporters becoming visually unrecognizable as fascists, and by appropriating several aesthetics. He highlights several key strategies employed by fascist movements today, using the example of CasaPound, a neo-fascist organization thriving since decades in Italy. By sharing elements commonly associated with left-wing culture and staging itself as a young, stylish, cultural force – essentially a “marketing campaign glamorizing the same old mix” of fascist ideology – they are harder to visually distinguish from other groups. This aesthetic shift allows them to appear more "contemporary" and less overtly extremist. Other strategies employed are the use ambiguous language and vague, empty terms, as well as the use of labels such as “ethno-nationalist” or “identitarian” that have become common in English speaking contexts instead of fascist. Luca adds that contemporary fascist movements are also adept at using social media and internet memes to spread their ideology. Common aesthetics frequently used and combined are “retro-futurist”, “Greco-Roman / apollonic” and “vapor-wave”.
Luca connects fascism’s use of aesthetics to "the promise of fascism" as described by Hito Steyerl: In today’s complex media environment, fascist groups leverage cultural representation to construct an appealing, simpler world for people who are disillusioned by the chaos of modern life. Luca answers his question if art can be of use in the fight against fascism by stating that as humans, we have a political responsibility for each other. While art might help to imagine what comes next, something the left seems to have been missing, fascisms use of art and aesthetics for its political goals serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of prioritizing aesthetics above content. He concludes that while art may play a role in resisting fascism, it’s perhaps more important to engage in other forms of political action.
Responses:
Sven Lüttiken:
Sven Lüttiken starts his response by pointing out the great urgency of the subject and how the presentation transported this by fleshing out certain genealogies, returns, differences and mutations in contemporary versions of fascist aesthetics. He feels challenged in his response to the presentation as he feels that the thesis is “the real artifact here” and the presentation seemed to be “a walk-through” rather than an academic thesis presentation, staying a bit in-between. A question that emerged for him is about the relation between art and aesthetics, as they were somewhat conflated in Luca’ presentation, and aesthetic strategies are not necessarily artistic strategies. He hooks into artists mentioned in the presentation, Matinelli and D’Anunzio, and relates this to “the transformation of life to art” after Susan Sontag and the fascist version of this, which includes the purification of the political body, the “Volkskörper”.
Sven Lüttiken states that today we live in an aesthetic universe not necessarily founded in art, but rather a general culture in which we participate daily, e.g. by making and sharing memes and participating in the “circulationist cultural economy”. He asks, in closing, in the contemporary version of the cultural industry with its wide variety of aesthetic acts, what the critical, left wing, anti-fascist interventions would be, and what role artistic practice could play within this sphere. He also muses about what added value art would contribute, and what kinds of strategies could be derived from the fact that we deal with visual culture and aesthetic strategies daily and in a supposedly critical framework?
Maria Lind
Maria Lind begins by thanking Luca for taking the audience to “the belly of the beast, the heart of darkness”. In her head she heard Boris Buden say, “it’s not a new fascism, it’s the same fascism”, which she agrees with. This shows up very literally in the context of Sweden, where the Sweden Democrats, the direct continuation of the Swedish Nazi party, are likely to get the second largest or largest vote, she shares. When hearing about the familiar examples of artists Luca used, she was reminded of an affective study she read, Klaus Theweleit’s double volume on masculinity ‘Male Fantasies’ from the late 80s. Maria Lind wonders what would happen if one would read these books again today in relation to the current situation, as it strikes her that there is still an issue connected to masculinity and its codification. Another association she shares, is that the notion of “life as art” as a totalitarian approach, has also been formulated by the art historian Boris Groys in his study of Stalinist art. She understands the presentation to be a snippet of Luca’s thesis and would be interested in seeing how he reads these things in relation to each other. She subscribes to the formulated civil responsibility but doesn’t believe in any possible redemption with the current system.
Marina Vishmidt
Marina Vishmidt addresses Sven Lüttiken’s question about the conceptual aesthetic of the presentation vis-à-vis the thesis: for her this is the “wonders of data visualization”, allowing Luca to show Richard Spencer being punched 87381 times. There are two things she thinks emerged most strongly in the presentation as well as the thesis. Firstly, the history of the culturalization of fascism, which to her feels at this moment like a particularly “culturally saturated” phenomenon – Luca shows how this can be historically specified while drawing certain lines of continuity connected to the erosion between art, aesthetics, popular culture, media and styles of governance, of which masculinity is a big part. Secondly, the question to what extent artistic practice needs to partake of or be parallel to political activism, or perhaps what cultural activism is. How does the responsibility of being active against the manifestations of far-right and fascist violence enter our cultural practices and do what extend can we speak of cultural or artistic practice as intrinsically anti-fascist? She explains that novel avant-garde aesthetics and a self-definition as aesthetically transgressive and anti-establishement are fundamental to fascism as politics and vice versa. Referencing Adorno’s idea of art itself as a practice of domination over materials, she concludes that any act of artistic making then is an exercise of power.
These are the implications that Marina Vishmidt sees emerging out of Luca’s questions in the specific way he framed them in his presentation. The schematic question “do we keep our art and political activism separate or do we find ways of making them continuous?” could be answered with “whatever we do we have to fight it” – linking back to Luca’s title and the argument of his project. Overall, she sees great sharpness, value, and clarity in the impressive thesis, which is “in one sense very complete but also contains many open questions”, and she mentions they will work on getting it published.
About Luca Carboni