Kanan Makiya, reviewing Igor Golomstock’s Totalitarian Art, reflects on the aesthetic sterility of absolutist movements:
[Totalitarian art] is often indistinguishable from propaganda. Consider the amateurish poster of Saddam on a white horse (à la Vasily Yaklovev’s portrait of the Soviet marshal Georgy Zhukov) that was plastered all over Baghdad in 1989 — the year he rode under his Victory Arch on that very horse. Because they are so bound up with the state and its politics, the works of totalitarian art rarely outlast the regimes that produced them; they are quickly consigned to oblivion or destroyed outright by enraged populations. After the U.S. invasion of Iraq, for example, jubilant Baghdadis clambered on top of the toppled bronze statue of Saddam in Firdos Square and dragged the severed head through the streets. Totalitarian art, in other words, seems to be rejected once the political conditions that led to its creation are lifted. The art that has survived in Germany and the former Soviet Union has only recently begun to be pulled out of museum basements, largely for the purpose of study, not admiration.
More important, totalitarian art has not yet produced masterpieces that, irrespective of the odious systems that birthed them, could be said to have made permanent contributions to human culture. Perhaps this is because, unlike Islamic art, for example, totalitarian art’s production has everything to do with a top-down, state-driven project to bring about an aesthetic and spiritual union of government and people according to a prefixed dogma.
Benito Mussolini was the first political leader to propagate the idea that art should serve the revolution and the state. But Italian fascism was never quite able to realize this vision. It was never able to fully fuse ideology, organization, and terror into the kind of state-run cultural machine that Mussolini’s own fascist doctrine called for. Whereas Hitler and Stalin used both threats and rewards to co-opt artists, Mussolini used only the latter, and so pre-Fascist Italian culture was never laid to waste the way German and Russian culture were. The concrete implementation of the concept of total realism — in paint, marble, and building materials — was left to Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, and Mao’s China. Italy’s inability to realize the totalitarian cultural project highlights how unimaginable such a project would have been in the formative centuries of Islam, when no state or empire had the resources, repressive agencies, or organizational wherewithal to bring about the necessary fusion that Mussolini called for and that Hitler and Stalin put into effect. Totalitarianism is a twentieth-century enterprise that would have been impossible to realize in premodern, nonindustrialized societies.
Someone could name a few counterexamples to Makiya’s claim that no totalitarian artist “could be said to have made permanent contributions to human culture,” but not enough to undercut the thesis. For example, even modern critics consider Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and Sergei Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin–movies stumping for National Socialism and Bolshevism, respectively–to be among the most important films ever made. However, only the latter is appreciated in-of-itself as a cinematic narrative with accessible emotional resonance, whereas Triumph is considered significant for its technical contributions to cinematography.
Not a few “great” authors penned apologies for total regimes. The Austrian philosopher Martin Heidegger enthusiastically supported Hitler and the National Socialist project, even going so far as to denounce his mentor, Edmund Husserl, a Jewish convert to Protestantism. However, though Nazism is not irrelevant to Heidegger’s thought (he believed the movement to be a potential vessel for “authenticity,” the ruling virtue of his system), it is also not essential to it. The first edition of his magnum, Being and Time, was published seven years before Hitler was elected, and even the Heideggerian formulation of “authenticity” does not hinge on the success of any one political project.
Then, of course, countless Western authors stumped for the Soviet Union at various points in its history–including at least three Nobel Prize winners, George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell*, and Jean Paul Sartre. But again, their support for it was only indirect; none actually lived under it, or participated in its daily administration. Should they have, their work would never have had the room to grow and become what it did. Stalin would have no use for Shaw’s pacifism, and Sartre’s ontology of intersubjectivity would outrage the party line of materialism.
So in the end, the glib romanticism of the useful idiots only supports Makiya’s point. No one with a truly adequate grasp of what totalitarianism real entails and promises will be inspired to produce a positive, unironic paeon to it that would be comprehensible to the non-fanaticized.
*Though to his credit, Russell recanted his support for Bolshevism after actually visiting the Soviet Union in 1920, and went on to become a staunch left-wing critic of Communism.
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