This essay was written in 2019 and is included in the catalog Cleon Peterson: Blood and Soil, published by the artist and the Cranbook Academy of Art Museum in 2022.
Color will codify on both visual and figurative levels in any successful piece of agitprop. White propaganda sincerely communicates its message and source. Black material is deceitful, published by the enemy. (1) BBC grey, according to historian Zbynek Zeman, is ambiguous in its message and origins. Where to place red on this scale? In Cleon Patterson’s graphic arenas, red drips and flows where it can bleed out and arouse suspicions.
Each of his Monument to Power works shown in Blood and Soil—Corruption, Freedom, Homeland, and Oppressor—are universal in their posturing, while omitting enough detail to allow us to fill in the blanks ourselves. We have no trouble identifying these classical images of powerful male archetypes on pedestals because all of them are lauded so faithfully and frequently in public spaces. From the chiseled nude lifted from the side of the Greek urn, pumping an automatic rifle above his head in Freedom or nursing a flame in Homeland to the towering man in uniform on horseback in The Oppressor, Peterson’s essentialist figures stand boldly against the blood red skies behind them. All of the works in Blood and Soil are in high relief: the stress-inducing palette of crushed crimson, dutiful white and false black push every composition further over the edge.
During the 1930s, when fascism was spilling over much of Europe, Austrian author Robert Musil wrote that there was “nothing as invisible as a monument … They are impregnated with something that repels attention, causing the glance to roll right off, like water droplets off an oilcloth, without even pausing for a moment.” Anthropologist Michael Taussig marginalizes the monument further, arguing that it’s not until one is destroyed or slated for removal that it draws our attention.” (2)
Our monuments are falling, tripping up on their way down. Once British colonialist Cecil John Rhodes came crashing down on the grounds of the University of Cape Town during the 2015 Rhodes Must Fall campaign, a student action opposing the institutional racism that continued to govern the post-Apartheid campus, a succession of bronze horsemen quickly followed. Confederate general Robert E. Lee was to come down from his literal high horse at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, too, in 2017, after many of his peers were pulled down in colleges and town squares across the South. This prospect was so unsettling to American neo-nationalists, independent militias, and neo-Nazi groups that they felt compelled to come together for the Unite the Right rally in an attempt to protect the statue of the defeated Lee. In midtown Manhattan, Christopher Columbus has recently drawn the ire of crowds gathered at Columbus Circle to celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day, which shares a date with Columbus Day. Artists and academics have petitioned the city to remove the Central Park statue of Dr. J. Marion Sims, who performed surgical experiments, without anesthesia or patient consent, on enslaved African American women and children. Citizens have also taken issue with statues of French Nazi collaborators Phillippe Petain and Pierre Laval that stand in lower Manhattan’s Canyon of Heroes, the site of more than 200 black granite plaques that commemorate every ticker tape parade in the history of New York City. (This also was the site of the headquarters of the Occupy Wall Street action of 2011).
These icons aren’t all menace, though, and some offer potential solutions along with intimidation. The Sturmabteilung, Hitler’s Brownshirts paramilitary group, modeled after Mussolini’s Black Shirts, were instruments of propaganda and threat designed to maintain order in a single streamlined look. Stop fighting and give in, as the figures of Peterson’s Tent City, Submission, and Bootlickers do. Resist and face the consequences, as do the figures in There is a Hand and We Pay with Blood. Peterson’s restrained approach to sketching takes as much from the artist’s experience drawing skateboard decks as it does from graphic design. Some delve further into neutral territory, standing alone, without commentary, as newsgathering. Blood and Soil I, II and III and Blood in the Streets show police officers assaulting protesters in the roads surrounding the White House following Turkish President Erdogan’s 2017 visit to the Oval Office. Dogs and cops went after the crowd just as they did in the race riots of the 1960s, and in Charlottesville.
Indoctrination campaigns can be constructive, inspirational even, and don’t necessarily have to be sinister or aggressive. Messages adapt themselves in service to their mission to every technology and innovation in communication, from the printing presses of the Reformation to Hollywood films. The German Imperial Eagle, plucked from the nation’s coat of arms, represented the protection the Reich offered to “pure” blond families in the face of the perceived Jewish threat. On the other side of both the War and the ocean, Rosie the Riveter knew that the best way to support her man was by keeping his seat warm at the factory while he was off in Europe winning the Second World War. Shepard Fairey’s Che Guevara-like portrait of a young Barack Obama staring off into the middle distance, brought a cynical generation back to voting booths following George Bush’s invasion of the Middle East and his string of diplomatic slip-ups. Fairey’s portrait allowed Americans to take pride in their flag once again.
The CIA’s jaded “long leash” policy allowed Abstract Expressionism to symbolize America’s creative freedom as a progressive alternative to communism’s empty promises. America’s International Organizations Division (IOD) underwrote travel guides and toured jazz bands and exhibitions showcasing work by Rothko, Pollock and de Kooning; The New American Painting, Modern Art in the United States, and Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century were just a few of them. (3) The fact that the U.S. government exploited radical leftists, many of whom were sympathetic to communism, to say nothing of being generally misunderstood by the public, and used them as soft power ambassadors, was perhaps the most classified information of the entire operation.
Blood and Soil takes its title from a slogan coined in the late 19th century, referring to a campaign for restricting German citizenry to a racially united, homogenous group (blood), in a land with clearly defined borders (soil). Rural areas were regarded as the nation’s most essentialist expression of this ideal, and this catchphrase came to define the National Socialist Party and laid the groundwork for Hitler’s rigid yet romanticized Germanic regionalism; the noble peasant would hold the keys to the kingdom. Anything that did not uphold these ideals was by definition degenerate, and even worse, modern.
Today we live in an insecure political era, and we have our own tools of resistance. As “clicktivists” (4), social media networks allow us to overthrow, or at least destabilize, governments. The Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and Cairo’s Tahrir Square uprising were made possible by Twitter; whether the platform earnestly supported these movements or simply allowed like-minded individuals to find one another is irrelevant: The necessary connections were made. Wikileaks and Anonymous, a shadowy network of “hacktivists” are, depending on your political leanings, liberators of truth or treasonous traitors. As users become more comfortable on these platforms, notions of activism continue to broaden: retweeting the correct virtue-signaling meme is as good as marching in the street, be it for Bernie, women or intersectional leadership. The left-leaning infographic videos presented by Upworthy and Buzzfeed far surpass the circulation of news items generated by Fox News and the BBC combined. (5) Adding the hashtag—literally, the least we can do—has the power to lift the statute of limitations on the court of public opinion, and, occasionally, wondrously, reverse a verdict.
Zbynek A. B. Zeman, Selling the War: Art and Propaganda in World War II (Exeter, England: The University of Exeter Press, 1982), 21.
Joel McKim, Architecture, Media, and Memory: Facing Complexity in Post-9/11 New York (New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018), 2.
Frances Stonor Saunders, “Modern art was CIA ‘weapon’,” Independent (October 22, 1995).
Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan And Tumblr To Trump And The Alt-Right (United Kingdom: Zero Books, 2017), 10.
Ibid, 45.