Aesthetics/Politics

Hi gentlemen,

Perhaps my affliction is one that befalls a man with too much time to think and no gutters in which to channel his thinking.

I do watch my share of documentaries. Two come to mind that bear upon the topic mentioned in the subject line. I will provide a brief overview of the two and their connections, and see if you have any insight or opinion on this topic.

According to Adam Curtis’ documentary ‘The Power of Nightmares’ Leo Strauss was influenced by the American Westerns. From them he determined that the U.S. needed an enemy in order to effectively keep a coherent identity. In remaining vigilant against outside enemies it would produce this sense of self. Otherwise it would lose its sense of mission.

More directly to the topic, the documentary, ‘The Architecture of Doom’ explains how Hitler was so moved by seeing one of Wagner's operas that he set about arranging a nation in the vision that this opera provided. As the opera culminates in a battle at the capital, Hitler began building the sets and designing the costumes for what would translate from the dramatic stage to the world stage in Nazism.

Hitler’s work as an architect and his concern for symbolism and aesthetics influenced the Nazi ideology that he helped to create. The stuff was there, he merely put the pieces together into a coherent national identity and political agenda. The heroic profile of the pure German was one piece of it. Large installations that celebrated the enormous grandeur of Nazism were required. They must also decay much like Greek/Roman/Egyptian architecture--slowly over time. They must have ‘ruin value.’

These ideas demonstrate that art, as a broad conceptualization of feeling, form, attitude, and aesthetic sensibility could be the vehicle for giving big ideas, ideas beyond and before words, coherence. And it could mobilize them not only in the regulation of attitudes concerning what is taken as the proper art for a people but the proper people for an art, the proper architecture for a state, the proper destiny for man, and so on.

So the Neocon representative anecdote is summed up in the white-hatted cowboy facing down the black-hatted villain: it culminates in the image of a beige-hatted Bush clearing brush juxtaposed against a turbaned bin Laden hiding in brush.

The Nazi representative anecdote is in this grafting of the Gesamtkuntswerkt (total art) to the administration of a state from every stitch of its uniform to every stone in its buildings and treating the people who populate this ‘scene’ as so many actors and props to be administered according to a formal vision.