It really is weird on the right

I normally save non-political posts for the weekend. This discursive piece, although somewhat political, does not address current events.

I'm here to ask a broad question: Why is the art produced by right-wingers so strange?

Many of you may presume that the right produces no art at all. In America, the intelligentsia and the bohemians all lean left. Obama made his home among the so-called "creative class." All the well-known writers, from Gore Vidal to Stephen King, are liberal or worse. Progs own the cultural infrastructure, from the galleries in New York to the studios in Hollywood.

By contrast, you can find the conservative's idea of a great painting in the Thomas Kinkaide catalog. Anything else scares Mr. Right. He prefers sports. Oh, sure, the wealthier reactionaries may buy experimental contemporary art for investment purposes or for status enhancement, but nobody on that side of the political aisle makes the stuff, or genuinely enjoys it.

So runs the general presumption.

But that presumption is wrong.

Right-wing artists do exist, and some of them have created transcendent, hallucinatory works. Such artists often start on the left and then move to the far right. On rare occasions, they hop back to the left again. These artists tend to be...strange.

Very strange.

I began thinking about the relationship between Weird Art and far-right politics while listening, earlier today, to a recording of Wagner's Parsifal. As you probably know, Wagner segued from a hard-left stance (exiled in 1849 for revolutionary activities) to the tar-pits of reaction. Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal -- the chronicles of a great sin and a great redemption -- are transcendent, hallucinatory and very strange works. In fact, they get stranger every time I look closely at them. (It's no accident that the Liebstod was always a great favorite of the surrealists.)

I was introduced to Parsifal via the work of a man whose name will -- I hope -- be known to some of you: Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, the mad genius of Munich. He's known for ultra-long, ultra-surreal "dissertation" films which defy classification as either fiction or documentary. In 1981, he made a film of Wagner's opera Parsifal, which I saw at a special advance screening at the Samuel Goldwyn theater (the home of the Academy).

Syberberg was there -- yes, he speaks English -- and he was very weird. Charming, but weird. He conveyed a rather gnostic sense of unease in the material world, as if unable to hide his annoyance with all the mundane crap (money, food, clothing, cars, other people, gravity) which impeded his pursuit of the beatific vision.

If you're interested, here's his visualization of the prologue to Parsifal. If you click on that link, you'll see puppets deliver a backstory that can make sense only to those who've already seen the movie. You'll also glimpse the boy and the girl who jointly play the titular hero/heroine. The woman playing his/her mother also plays his/her lover, a combination of Mary Magdalene and the Eternal Jew. Here's a snippet (so to speak) of the film's famous gigantic severed penis festooned with the heads of Marx and Nietzsche.

A movie just isn't a movie without stuff like that.

(To read the rest, click "Permalink" below)

YouTube can't begin to convey the experience of sitting in that theater on that long-ago night, because Syberberg insisted on raising the volume to a level that made your average rock concert seem like the silence of Yahweh. The prologue sequence ends with a Wagner automaton jamming a spike into a giant ear, an image which we in the audience understood all too well. During the intermission, audience members begged HJS to turn it down. He said no. If his English were better, he probably would have said "No, pussies."

I had already seen (in one sitting, dammit!) Syberberg's best-known work, the 7 1/2-hour long Our Hitler: A Film From Germany. (The word "Our" slips in and out of the title, depending on the print. The reference goes to a notorious coffee-table book, also titled Our Hitler, published by the Third Reich.) Syberberg's film is the craziest thing anyone ever saw -- and you can download the whole insane asylum here, online and for free. You must watch all seven hours in one go, at night, alone, missing sleep. Do it that way or I'll call you a pussy. But before you click, you may want to heed this fellow's advice:

Hans Jurgen Syberberg holds a special place in that same sticky heart for directing the longest stoner flick every made, the massive nine-hour Hitler - Ein Film Aus Deutschland. You had to have a kitchen garbage bag chock full of weed to get through all of it, but it is sooo worth it.

All of which brings us to the point of our essay: Syberberg's politics.

In 1977, when I first saw Our Hitler, my friends and I (and you may recall that my friends were mostly Jewish) automatically presumed that Syberberg was situated somewhere on the left, or at least not on the right. A lot of other people jumped to the same conclusion, including George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola (who distributed the unwieldy epic in the U.S.) and the BBC (which helped fund the work) -- not to mention Susan Sontag, who wrote a famous admiring essay.

Her acquaintances pressured her to take back those words of praise when Syberberg later made some surprising statements in his autobiography. Here's an HJS gem:

So now Jewish analyses, images, definitions of art, science, sociology, literature, politics, the information media, dominate. Marx and Freud are the pillars that mark the road from East to West. Neither are imaginable without Jewishness. Their systems are defined by it. The axis USA-Israel guarantees the parameters. That is the way people think now, the way they feel, act and disseminate information.

He goes on and on like that, sounding rather like Xymphora with a hiatal hernia. It's guff. (Yeah, I'm no friend of Israel, but I still call it guff.) "Jewishness" defines neither Marx nor Freud. As I recall, much of the "West" spent much of the last century aiming nukes at the followers of Marx, and Freud started falling out of fashion in the 1940s. When Syberberg's Hitler movie came out, Freud was despised; Jung was all the rage among the college crowd, because Jung wrote about alchemy and flying saucers and other cool shit.

The Hitler movie is not pro-Hitler, and it certainly betrays no anti-Semitism or insensitivity to the Holocaust. But even on first viewing, it did give the impression that Syberberg can't help loving German Romanticism, even though he also sees Hitler as the end product of Romanticism. After Hitler, art was dead -- at least the kind of art that Syberberg liked. Adolf had given it the baddest of bad names.

Jonathan Bowden, the former "cultural advisor" to the racist British National Party, offers an erudite introduction to Syberberg in an ill-recorded audio presentation which begins here. I was a little unnerved to find myself enjoying his lecture, since his vaguely Nazified weltanschauung differs sharply from my own way of thinking. (Although his former party promotes an obnoxious Holocaust revisionism, Bowden does not seem to buy into that nonsense. Other nonsense, to be sure, but not that nonsense.) Like many others, Bowden seems confused as to where to locate Syberberg politically -- placing him, ultimately, somewhere on the right, though not within those extreme realms that the BNP, David Duke and the ghost of Adolf would call home.

So why, back in the 1970s, did my friends and I -- and Susan Sontag -- presume that Syberberg was hip, liberal and one of us? Because the guy served up one big bowl-full of bug-ass weird, and we liked weird. He was surreal, he was avant-garde, he cared not a shit about lucre, and he had a fuck you attitude toward the established order. He just had to be a compatriot, a fellow citizen of Bohemia who shared our basic ideology.

How naive we were. In the late 1970s, my merry band of bohos had yet to learn that fascist rabies tend to infect the masters of Weird Art.

Think of Salvador Dali, the artist generally considered the king of surrealism. He pissed off his less-talented Marxist comrades in the surrealist movement when he painted a picture of Lenin with a five-foot-long butt. Then he pissed off everyone else on the left by embracing Catholicism and sucking up to Francisco Franco.

Think of Ezra Pound, a mad genius (certified as such) who spent the war years plumping for Mussolini on the radio. In the process, he even pissed off Benito himself, because Pound tossed away the script and wrote his own propaganda screeds.

Think of T.S. Eliot, the mad genius who gave us The Waste Land (another spacey Grail tale). He once wrote:

"What is still more important is unity of religious background, and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable."

(He later regretted the fact that his ragged claws had ever typed those words.)

Think of Jean Cocteau, the French surrealist who neither fled nor criticized the Nazis after they had invaded his nation and sicced the Luftwaffe on the lines of refugees. Even though Cocteau was bisexual, and even though he had come close to sharing the fate of those who wore the pink triangle, he had nevertheless flirted with fascism during the Occupation, having worked hard to further the cult of Arno Breker, Hitler's official sculptor. (After the war, he was acquitted of charges of collaboration.)

Cocteau was the alleged leader of a right-wing secret society called the Priory of Sion, which is either a thousand-year-old mega-conspiracy or a two-man hoax, depending on which books you read. Although the Cocteau connection is probably spurious, the two fellows who did run the society (Philippe de Chérisey and Pierre Plantard) had links to the Vichy government -- and to surrealism. Quite a few people suspect that their massive hoax was actually a work of surrealist conceptual art. (That's a long story which nearly everyone on the web has gotten wrong. I'll get into it one of these days.)

Even American surrealist David Lynch was once an admirer of Ronald Reagan and Libertarianism -- although I'm told that his politics are now more centrist/Democratic.

You can probably come up with a half-dozen further examples. My point is this: One can indeed find major artists on the right, even on the wacko far right. They are not all hacks like Breker. Some of them do astonishing work. Not all surrealists are right-wingers, but the really good right-wing artists are usually surrealists. If you don't like that term, then let us simply say that they tend to be major oddballs. Mad geniuses.

(One exception: Degas. A reactionary, an anti-Dreyfusard, and a great painter. But not a weird painter.)

Why the conjunction of surrealism and reaction? I think I have an answer.

Surrealism, like religion, provides a door by which the dream world invades waking reality. Fascism does the same. Fascism will always possess an insidious appeal because it disdains logic and unfetters the Id. (Forgive the Freudian terminology.) As the proverb has it, the sleep of reason breeds monsters. A Ustashi thug burning down a barn filled with Serbian enemies probably had no desire to go home and read a Croatian translation of John Steinbeck -- but he might have enjoyed looking at the works of H.R. Giger, if Giger had been around at the time.

Conversely, a nice, sane liberal like John Steinbeck could not have written a surrealist book even if asked to do so by someone holding his family hostage.

And so we come to the present day. The Bush presidency, at least in its first term, gave our nation its closest scrape with out-and-out fascism. Yet (Lynch aside) the jingoistic culture of those years produced no Weird Art of any lasting value. America has not yet given up on reason. How do I know? Because conservatism -- still the predominant ideology of this culture -- has yet to whelp up a mad genius like Syberberg.

When that happens, get ready either to heil or to head for the hills, because the jig is up.