Phantasmagoria
noun

1: an exhibition of optical effects and illusions
2: a constantly shifting complex succession of things seen or imagined
3: a bizarre or fantastic combination, collection, or assemblage

- Merriam-Webster

Since March of this year I have been working on an art project that tries to capture where we are as a nation, and speculate about some of the factors that led us to our current status quo. Trying to think out loud about it today, so bear with me, it’s going to be all over the map.

It started by renting a house in L.A. that had belonged to artist Jirayr Zorthian (1911-2004). The living room was lined with small prints of an originally large mural, Phantasmagoria of Military Intelligence, which he had been commissioned to paint by the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the U. S. Intelligence Agency preceding the CIA,) during WW II. How did someone who fled the Armenian genocide at age 11, received an MFA from Yale and studied art in Italy during the late 1930s, become enthusiastic about Psy Ops for the military, serving first in the 603rd Camouflage Engineer Battalion and then at Camp Ritchie, working for army intelligence? I guess – and it is only my guess – when you have escaped a murderous regime, and encountered the stirrings of early fascism, and now see the country that gave you safe haven engaged in a war against fascism, you surely want to give back and join the forces. (He went on to be a successful muralist and painter, a bon vivant on friendly terms with many of the rich and famous of his time. He was known for bacchanalian parties on his sprawling property in the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains, and a close friendship with the physicist Richard Feynman.)

In any case, I looked at the facsimile mural each day for a month, seeing depictions of legions of young men squeezed into pipelines of preparation for masculine jobs, a surrealist depiction of a process meant to harden and prepare them, both physically and psychologically, for battle. Allies and enemies were clearly delineated and the presented tribal conformity of the young men hinted at belonging, rather than necessarily brainwashing. Not that one excludes the other, mind you. Below is a short video about the history of the mural and provides a view of the panels.

As my readers know, for much of this year, a short burst of mistaken hope in October excepted, I had feared that this country would vote for a convicted felon and usher in the beginnings of a slide towards oligarchically-led authoritarianism. The question then and now is, of course, how this could happen. The margin of the popular vote was very, very small nationally – less than 1.5%, not a resounding mandate.

But he won news desert counties by a massive average of 54 percentage points. So there is the factor of what messages get sent, who gets reached and who has managed to find means of communication that seem to penetrate more (and are believed more) than the traditional media. The role of social media, talk shows and podcasts was important, depicting or even creating realities that would not be recognized by the opposing parties.

Of course, other factors might be equally or more important. I think one has to differentiate between a loss incurred because people did not show up to vote (1), and a victory secured because new constituencies moved towards the radical right wing (2).

(1) A lot of people who used to vote for the Democratic party or would have voted as first-time voters, decided to sit this one out. Why? Let me count the ways, all connected to varieties of hopelessness which made voting seemingly irrelevant. A large basis of the Democratic party experienced some degree of state-sponsored safety net during the pandemic, which was taken away from them in the early years of the Biden administration. What seemed to be perfectly doable was now gone, government once again forsaking a struggling group of people, and yes, the price of eggs went up. More importantly, though, since the price of eggs is not existential for the larger part of the Democratic base, solidly middle class, we were seeing no intervention by the administration regarding the skyrocketing prices of housing, health insurance, child-care support. There was no accountability – not for the industries given free reign to fleece the middle class, nor for those flouting the law, our President elect among them, who got away with everything from illegal enrichment to insurrection, thanks to Republican obstruction and AG Garland’s decisive running out the clock. The dread that the majority of Americans feel regarding climate change was ignored, for the most part, by the Biden administration, an existential fear for many that increased a sense of hopelessness. What the administration did to protect the environment did not get communicated sufficiently to the base either. And then there was Gaza – with significant swaths of voters incredulous that Harris would simply adopt Biden’s support of a state they perceive to perpetrate genocide.

(2) As it turns out, the Biden administration did pass the most economically progressive legislative agenda in two generations. Why did that not score? Because study after study finds that ‘racial resentment’ is a far bigger motivator to vote for Trump than ‘economic anxiety’. Which brings us to a factor that has nothing to do with economics: the psychological need, felt, and now expressed, by many to exist within a social hierarchy where someone is beneath them. The far-Right worked hard to reinforce and establish those structures. If you look at who benefits from turning back the clock to an earlier age of White male supremacy in this nation, you find who flocked to vote for everything promised by and associated with Project 2025, including abandonment of any efforts towards equality, diversity and inclusion: male voters.

Indeed, male Black and Latino voters as well, because they, too, are happy to abandon any notion of social equality if they can find a rung on the ladder that is not the lowest one. Anti-Black racism, the strongest historic impulse in our nation’s existence, can certainly be found in Hispanics as well, not just Whites. And who might be on the bottom? Why, a small new class of people labeled as enemies of our culture, namely trans people, an easy target. Immigrants, wrapped in narratives that were misleading at best and propaganda at worst, regarding their influx, their contributions and their purported criminality, never mind their racial origins. But then there was also a much larger group, some 50% of the population: women. Women who could be and were deemed unequal to men.

Again, the added new votes that led to the victory of the Republicans were not so much votes against the neo-liberal policies of the Democrats, but votes in favor of a promised world of domination, of identification with high-status males, and in hopes of belonging to some part of a tribe that knew to keep others in their place and keep them out of the professional realm in which they increasingly and threateningly competed with men.

Women have been deprived of the right to bodily autonomy by a Supreme Court dominated by Trump-installed conservative judges. Not satisfied by that, there are now calls for the death penalty for women who have abortions and the doctors who help them. Women have died from ectopic pregnancies and miscarriages not attended to, and infant mortality has gone up in the states that ban abortion after the Dobbs decision. Doctors are leaving those states in droves, with pregnant women increasingly deprived of gynecological care. Access to contraception has become more difficult, and there are laws proposed to hinder pregnant women from traveling to states where they can obtain an abortion. Texas is now suing health providers in other states who provide Texan patients with plan B medication. A federal complete abortion plan with no exceptions for rape or the life of the mother has been called for in republican circles.

Conservative voices are calling for a repeal of the right to no-fault divorce, and some even for abandoning the constitutional amendment that gave women the right to vote. House Republicans will have not a single woman in committee leadership positions (nor any person of color.)

Last week a study identified 30 000 pieces of deepfake pornography-related content targeting members of Congress, 25 women and 1 man. 1 in 6 women are targeted compared to 1 in 386 men. The new administration has numerous members proposed for Senate approval that are associated with sexual misconduct allegations, either adjudicated as the President himself, or with non-disclosure agreements after payments, or still under investigation. This includes the Secretary of Defense, Health and Human Services and Education Department, as well as one of the advisors in DOGE.

Broader attacks on women’s rights have historically always been associated with democratic erosion.

Here is a summary from a Carnegie Democracy, Conflict and Governance program essay that tackles the linkage between misogyny and far-right authoritarianism. (It’s long, but a riveting read since it explores the issue internationally.)

” …authoritarian views—which are associated with an embrace of traditional values, submission to authority, and a perception that the world is a dangerous place—are linked to both paternalistic attitudes about women (“benevolent sexism”) and feelings of antipathy toward women who seek equality (“hostile sexism”). The same link exists for individuals who display a strong social dominance orientation, defined as a preference for inequality and group-based hierarchies. ”

So, voters who hold these traditional views are drawn towards candidates who espouse them, display strong masculinity, and sanction their sexist beliefs.

“..Trump made concerted efforts to appeal to young male voters especially, tapping into their economic anxiety and sense of cultural dislocation and taking advantage of liberals’ general reluctance to speak to the struggles of men.”

Once elected, the leaders  push forward regressive policies and legislation on gender-related issues that are out of sync with majority opinion or threaten vulnerable minorities. They use misogyny, endorsement of gendered violence and hate speech to intimidate and silence critics and opponents.

***

Back to my art project, then. Zorthian’s pipelines of military recruits struck me as perfectly symbolic for the scores of young men flocking to authoritarian institutions. The indoctrination by right-wing radio hosts, piping fake news and hate speech through their channels, also seemed to be captured by the convoluted apparatus. I decided to bury snippets of those murals into classical still lifes for a number of reasons. For one, I never forgot a lesson received as a 12 year-old from a Hungarian refugee, trained by Joan Miró and inexplicably ending up as an art teacher in a small German village, about the role of still lifes. Firmly established during the Dutch Golden Age, with riches accumulating from colonial exploits, these paintings provided a voyeur’s description of what the rich possessed and the poor envied. They assured the wealthy, who commissioned and paid for those beautiful renderings of their belongings, of their status and reminded those who struggled that there was something to aspire to. A notion of hierarchy, class defined.

But still lifes also remind us of domestic beauty, care of the household with the provision of food or flower arrangements, all “women’s work.” This is particularly pertinent with regard to the current fashion of “trad” wives, women who long for the traditional role assignments of earlier times, trying to serve their husbands and family and create feminine beauty round them, preferably instagrammable for lots of clicks. It is about aesthetics, but with the hidden content of ideological beliefs, just as the early still lifes were.

(Let me flag one important exception: the phenomenal 17th Century painter Rachel Ruysch who was one of the few successful women artists of the time and whose botanical still lives sprang from a distinct interest in botanical and biological sciences. My European readers can visit a first major retrospective of her work until mid-March in Munich’s Pinakothek. By mid-April it will be available in Toledo, Ohio, and by mid-August at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Something to look forwards to! )

The combination, then, tries to capture the horrid regression of gender-related norms, the renewed assignment of gender-specific roles (battle-field/home) and our fixation on the beauty displayed in the foreground, at the expense of hate looming in the background and violence lurking in the shadows. Whether it is ignorance, indifference or fear: we blind ourselves to new realities at our own peril.

Last but not least, I added photographs of glass and porcelain electrical insulators to some of the montages. Zorthian was an avid collector of these things, and embedded them in all of his various building projects, inside and on top of walls. When I asked his foreman, who is still alive and active on the property that houses descendants and docents, what the story was with these antique beauties, he thought they just caught the artist’s interest when he bought a bunch of telephone poles to be wired for electricity lines on the ranch and they were lying around in the scrap yard. I have no idea if that is all that’s to it. They sure are perfect phallic symbols.

But for my own purposes the idea of insulation – something being prevented from affecting something else – made perfect sense for my question about the politics of the moment. We are insulated from half of the nation, not knowing what they believe or how they could possibly believe it (and vice versa), no longer experiencing a shared reality, with large swaths of the population living in some kind of phantasmagoria, a landscape of hate, sprouting conspiracy theories fertilized by denial of and hostility towards science, extending so far to question the validity of vaccines, and religious fervor that preaches the superiority of men over women, Whites over all other races.

I was surely not the only one who did not realize how many young, disaffected, perhaps economically, but certainly socially anxious men would be ready to shout “Your Body – My Choice” after the election, freed to voice misogynistic dominance by permission (and example) of the very leader they had chosen.

Today’s images are a sampling of the new series.

Music today is from Wozzeck. That opera tells the story of an impoverished soldier, abused by his superiors and traumatized by war, who murders the mother of his child for fear that she’s cheating on him.

The latest report on domestic femicides was published by the UN less than a month ago, on November 25th, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. In 2023, globally 140 women and girls died every day at the hands of their partner or a close relative, which means one woman killed every 10 minutes. Lives, stilled.