The Art of Populism [Alexandra Mir]

About Aleksandra Mir‘s project Pre-presidential Library which was showcased at Hayward Gallery, London (betwwen 7 January and 4 February 2019)

Changes in communication technologies that have largely influenced the entire media landscape have also brought about unprecedented consequences, as people are learning in the past couple of years. The tools and technologies that were intended to have an emancipatory and democratising effects on societies also became a means for creating populist political discourses, as we call them now, influencing the masses by feeding them with all kinds of unfiltered information. Populism, however, is not particularly new in the history of mankind; it has existed for political or commercial reasons throughout recorded history and got ever bigger with the development of communication technologies such as print, photography, film and video. But it was only in the 20th century that the idea of making any kind of appearance in public necessarily leads to attention and eventually success emerged among advertising and political propaganda professionals. People like Edward Bernays, the notorious guru of propaganda and manipulation who coined the term public relations, gradually developed the idea that there is no such thing as bad publicity.

With the election of the recent US president, however, the standards of political communication have been challenged once again. Donald Trump, who constantly resorts to the most primitive rhetoric and most populist discourses, puts his predecessors such as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush to shame. Trump has been omnipresent in the media since his election campaign and throughout his term in office. Most of the world’s media are obsessed with everything he does, says or publishes. Journalists working for credible media outlets diligently analyse his every public statement or remark, all his threats and insults, despite the fact that he most often doesn’t implement them. The vicious circle thus seems complete: Trump feeds the media with news and the media have to cover stories about him to keep up good ratings. Given the current circumstances serious media outlets are not in a position to resist juicy news that the public, apparently, wants to consume–no matter how banal, trivial and stupid they may be. The media are making Trump what he is now: an ever-present public figure.

But his story is much older than that. Artist Aleksandra Mir undertook a project to explore the media landscape of New York’s yellow press in the period 1986-2000 and revealed that the figure of Trump has been ever-present even in that period. She raised profound questions: How can a random businessman, investor and market speculator become such a celebrity, given that there are thousands of those in New York alone? What does it takes for a person to stand out and become famous?

In a small exhibition space at London’s Hayward Gallery Mir showcased enlarged copies of newspaper covers featuring Trump as a headline and pointed out that there must have been much more to it than market value alone to have always kept him afloat in the news. It clearly feels like a planned political project (that may have been run by Trump himself, with a little help of his friends). The boards in the gallery reveal all kinds of trivialities about him: details of his sex life, rumours about his investments, reports of his public appearances etc. All the materials are borrowed from two tabloid newspapers: New York Daily News and New York Post, both of which have a huge circulation and a telling ownership structure. Trump was obviously used as a smoke screen for other much more relevant issues that didn’t make it to the front pages or on prime time. Such spin is nevertheless common in the modern news industry as there is an abundance of content that can make the news. In these fifteen years leading to the beginning of the new millennium Trump made it to the front page 87 times; an enormous number for such a benign figure (as Trump still was, at that time). Mir also reveals that, in contrast, the AIDS crisis made it to the cover of the newspapers only 13 times during the same period, despite the fact that the disease took a massive toll on New Yorkers.

All these, now almost forgotten, appearances in public by Donald Trump seem quite logical nowadays. He was the enfant terrible of New York, the city with the greatest marketing in the world by far; there are music bands, films, series, books, newspapers, magazines, slogans and images that are constantly reminding the rest of the world why the Big Apple is still the greatest. New Yorkers, nowadays, are not the greatest Trump supporters according to statistics. Nevertheless, it is a fact that this very city made him a national public figure. The question now is how to fight his primitive and shallow populism? The best thing, perhaps, would simply be to ignoring him in the same way that the media successfully ignores so many relevant issues affecting the planet such as overpopulation and climate change. For now, front pages are still reserved for Trump, Putin and Brexit. That is also the only downside of Mir’s exhibition: dealing with such an obvious topic as Donald Trump is giving him even more publicity. It appears that the news industry is always one step ahead of us.

© Miha Colner, January 2019 / proof reading Ana Cavic