Recently, hoping to distract myself from the news, I visited the Neue Galerie Graz to see the exhibition “Seriously?! “Silliness and Enthusiasm in Art”. After his term in office ended, we somewhat repressed the man, but lately I’ve been thinking more often about Trump’s clownish presidency: the obscenities, the smug misogyny, the grotesque logic White Supremacy, the pubescent character that politics took on during this time – as well as the erosion of the dignity of office and the brutalization of language not only in the media, but also in both chambers of Congress. Because today we are faced with the prospect of experiencing exactly the same thing again: not only in the USA, but also in Europe, including Austria. So we need ideas on how we can avert this danger. And to study subversive strategies, there is nothing better than art.
In the exhibition “Seriously?!”, Saâdane Afif designs a homage to the absurd play Ubu Roi by the French writer Alfred Jarry from 1896. In Play Opposite or Ubu Roi Disseminated Afif has excerpts from Jarry’s play printed on flyers and distributes them to the public. Ubu Roi was so controversial that it caused a scandal at its premiere and was promptly closed. His fame lies in the fact that his revolutionary slap in the face of power still seems timeless almost 130 years later. In a parody of Macbeth a revolutionary kills the king of Poland, becomes king himself, and then performs a series of obscene acts. Fat, infantile, vulgar, greedy and cruel: Ubu Roi is an anti-hero whose relevance remains so enduring that the adjective “ubuesque” is still used in political debates in the French language to this day.
A democracy does not defend itself; you have to fight for them. As a despot, King Ubu represents the abuse of power and authority; at the same time he shows us our own complicity, our complacency, our political laziness. We allow ourselves to be distracted and watch as words erode and lose their meaning in a time of fake news and the distortion of reality. However, if language itself becomes a weapon, we have to arm ourselves differently. Because the path to ever more perfectly manipulated mass opinion and the situation that Hannah Arendt warned about – that at some point people will no longer care what is true or false if you consciously distort the facts for long enough – has been going on for a long time in progress.
Daumier and Chaucer, Rabelais and Swift: the disarming power of mockery, satire and scorn are known from history. Laughter has been used since time immemorial as a means of undermining hypocrisy, bigotry and hypocrisy and inflating the power of small, more ridiculous to appear. But we now know the most effective methods in art – bad taste, embarrassment, impudence, ignoring conventions – from politics. The strategies we need must be more sophisticated, cleverer, more subversive.
More Graz observations
2024-02-04 15:56:50
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