Propaganda Art in the 21st Century

239 Pages·2019·11.521 MB·English

by  Jonas Staal

Propaganda Art
in the 21st Century

Propaganda Art
in the 21st Century

JONAS STAAL
The MIT Press | Cambridge, Massachusetts | London, England
© 2019 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including
photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval)
without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book was set in Gotham and Bembo by The MIT Press.
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Staal, Jonas, 1981- author.
Title: Propaganda art in the 21st century / Jonas Staal.
Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, 2019. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018056266 | ISBN 9780262042802
(hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Art- - Political aspects— History— 21st century. |
Art and society— History— 21st century. | Power (Social sciences) |
Propaganda in art.
Classification: LCC N72.P6 S73 2019 | DDC 701/.03- - dc23 LC
record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018056266
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is dedicated to my parents.
My mother, Michèle, the environmentalist,
My father, Henk, the socialist,
My stepfather, Gerard, the pilgrim.

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 1
1 PROPAGANDA AND DEMOCRACY, A SHORT HISTORY 17
2 PROPAGANDA ART, FROM PAST TO PRESENT 47
3 IMAGINING TERROR 77
4 POPULAR REALISM 111
5 THEATER OF THE STATELESS 149
CONCLUSION 187
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 193
NOTES 197
INDEX 223

INTRODUCTION
My name is Jonas Staal and I am a propaganda artist. This book
deals with the question of what that statement entails by consid-
ering the negative historical associations that the term evokes,
which resonate strongly with the various authoritarian forms of
government emerging the world over, from Erdoğan to Trump,
with their own newspeak vocabulary of “fake news” and “alter-
native facts.” What is propaganda and what is propaganda art
today? I will argue that propaganda can be defined as the per-
formance of power, and propaganda art as the performance of
power as art. Here, the notion of performance has a dual mean-
ing. On one hand, it relates to performance as an enactment: the
activation of infrastructures of power, ranging from politics to the
military-i ndustrial complex, with the aim of constructing reality
after a specific set of interests. On the other hand, we will be
dealing with performance as a narrative power: the process of
visualizing, staging, and performing the new realities that propa-
ganda brings about.
If, based on this definition, we ask the question of what it
means to be a propaganda artist, then the answer depends on
the kind of power we are dealing with. Being a propaganda artist
for the Trump regime, for example, as with Steve Bannon’s cin-
ematic work, is evidently different from acting as a propaganda
artist for the revolutionary underground of the Philippines, as with
the protest puppetry of the UGATLahi Artist Collective. As struc-
tures of power and the kind of realities they aim to bring about
differ, so does propaganda, and, consequently, propaganda art.
For this reason, I will insist on speaking of propagandas in the
plural throughout this book. Our reality is constructed, in part,
1