Because all art students need a pretentious name, a cool picture, and a vastly bloated sense of self-importance.
Investigation 2020-2021 Supposed Heritage and Adherence to Authority
Insecurity disguised as hatred, wreathed in a false veneer of strength and power
Since its named inception in the early 20th century, fascism has pervaded our world in some way or another. After the defeat of the Third Reich and the revelation of its crimes against humanity, Nazism has become a cultural staple: an easy comparison in an argument, the villains with excellent fashion sense in our new sci-fi film, or cartoonishly evil zombies in a new game. But more important is the rise of fascism in our modern day. There's been a surge in people, young and old alike, taken in under a new wing of thinly veiled fascism. "Ethno-nationalists", they may call themselves. "Embrace tradition", they may say.
Modern fascists have developed a new, but familiar style of propaganda. The hypernationalism and the authoritarianism of fascism almost always involved a claim to a past cultural identity, one that must be reclaimed to restore glory and destroy degeneracy. The Nazis made posters using Teutonic Knights (as well as other Germanic historical images, monastic militants bound to Catholicism and destruction of pagan beliefs, cultures, and peoples. Mussolini wished to restore Italy to the fully fledged Mediterranean imperium that was the Roman Empire. The Nation and its racial and cultural makeup (however selective that may be decided) come first in all ways. The military are glorified as the greatest defenders, and the enemies are not only numerous, but simultaneously weak and cowardly enough to be destroyed, yet still strong and cunning enough to warrant constant resistance. Strength, masculinity, and traditional power structures and hierarchies are revered and maintained.
This comes back in 2020, as communities of younger people will become wrapped in seemingly innocent communities centered around history. The Metal band Sabaton has written many songs centered around the 2nd World War, and many fans get too wrapped up in the Nazi aspects inherent to them. People will make jokes posing as pious crusader knights or Roman legionnaires needing to purge heretical and barbarous Saracens from Jerusalem, and slowly move themselves over to legitimately blaming Muslims and Jews for the supposed degradation of the world.
This inability to healthily engage with irony pervades other communities as well. Warhammer 40K, a franchise built on the horrors and death inherent to all-out war, has a massive and widespread Nazi and Fascist-adjacent problem. The Imperium of Man is a planet-spanning empire of Humans, who wish to purge all non human "xenos" from its borders. Their insignia is a golden eagle with spread wings (similar to the Romans and Third Reich), and shares many linguistic and aesthetic qualities with the Roman Empire. Its citizens will either support its nation or die. Its religion is a cult like worship of a 10 foot tall, 48,000 year old vegetable, the God Emperor of Mankind. Its elite soldiers, the Astartes or Space Marines, are genetically pure super soldiers in hulking armor, bred to kill and die in his service. It's a satire of the Fascist ideology, yet many will simply ignore this and get legitimately drawn into the fantasy. They cannot separate the irony from the ideas, and begin talking in coded whispers about driving the xenos of Earth from the West to secure a future for human children.
This brings me to the thesis idea of my investigation. I seek to reclaim images of Greco-Roman statues, knights, and even the Imperium of Man from those who would throw this world into a selectively populist, racially segregated, chauvinistic death cult. I want unironic glorification of the Vikings and their religion, the Romans, Medieval Europe, and colonialism to stop being hailed as what made "the West" what it was. Traditionalism was not what ever made the West any better, it was the progressivism of the Enlightenment and early 20th century that continues today. It was not racial separation, gender roles, war, and the authoritarian nature of monotheism that made the west, it was democracy, freedom, and looking towards the future; for diversity, progress and a better world. I wish to show this disconnect between the stolen figures modern fascists use to further their ideas and the ideas actually held by either those figures or other western ideals of personal liberty.
"Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.” - Umberto Eco, author of Ur-Fascism
This idea was ignited because I am very interested in roleplaying in games. I build costumes. I carve swords, wood spirits (a North Germanic tradition), and I don't like it when knights I wish to play dress up with could get me confused for a lesser person who wants me dead because I don't fit in their mold for an ethnostate. Fascism interferes not just with my creative ambitions (including censorship of dissenting art), but my ambition to live, and to live freely. This project begins as a turnaround on modern fascist propaganda, but broadens as it continues to include messaging relevant to combating authoritarianisms of all kinds. I am nothing if not an intersectionalist.
Also worth mentioning is the copious amount of blood and warlike imagery ahead. I believe visual media is important for showing the horrors of mass violence, and should be used that way in place of glorifying it. One should be shocked, disgusted, or saddened by seeing these things. In America, there is a common cultural habit of supporting military operations that happen to have a star-spangled stamp of approval on it. War, as it turns out, is in fact hell, and that adage should be used to discourage war, not to focus on the suffering of soldiers without ceasing their trauma.
Investigation 21-22 A gaze into brutality
Writing this in the closing of the previous year-long project, I found that I labored a little too much with direct politics, and direct politics in a manner that is lost on many who do are not terminally in online spaces, or just those who live in my part of America. I spent too much time in abstract messaging that changed slightly with each iteration, each with a different pre-existing media that took too much time explain properly. By the same token, much of the drive to create the project came from specific political anxieties that proceeded to cool by the end of the reigning president's term. It may have taken a failed insurgency to cool fully, but largely the power base has shifted to where the same energy was being poured less into later pieces. The anti-authoritarian feelings have been expressed, at least those that pursue the defeat of direct fascist ideas.
I aimed to explore horror aesthetics and monster designs, but the voicing would not come out. I was diametrically opposed to gore for it's own sake, instead firmly in favor of gore to show melancholy or resignment in the subject, but the idea was not being explored properly. I ambled about, with some vague idea of bloody symbols of death as metaphor for very human topics. The idea of monsters, as we created them, could never simply be a beast. We have no insight into what a Grendel or a werewolf could be thinking beyond animal instinct, unless their monstrosity was meant to evoke something already within humanity. These things are figments of our imagination by design, constructs we use to explore our very souls. There is no beast ravaging our mead halls, or waking in the night with a thirst for blood under cover of the moon; there is simply us. Humans have killed more people and committed more horrors than any violent carnivore, be they real or fictitious. Great thesis, right? I think so. You'll be disappointed to learn I couldn't figure it out and the plan got scrapped.
Now here we are, in the third, fourth, maybe seventh scheme for an investigation with half a plan, and half a mind to toss in the clay and just have fun. However, I need this. So I remain with a few concepts in mind, the aesthetics of death and corpse-like features, and intended meaning imparted on the subject of life. In death, there is always renewal and rejuvenation. A corpse sinks into the soil, feeding each scavenger it can and giving life to the vegetation below; in essence, new life from death. At once, are our miniscule lives simply there to rise and fall, and return to dust? Our shells contain in them such wonder but such misery, and our minds can turn the whole endeavor into a prison of form, outside of which no one truly knows the terrain of. Themes of pain and mental health will often be showing up in metaphor and symbolism throughout the investigation, and a proper thesis for it all will eventually come through.