Flirting with Disaster by Sebastián F. Leeming

‘Indeed, the moment an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dumb or amazing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman’. ¹

For the enfant terrible, that young and particular breed of artist, commerce is not an area of interest. Wilde himself, an artist who challenged the limits of a Late Victorian culture, declared Art to be the ultimate embodiment of Individualism, an idea personified in our modern conception of the enfant terrible. This individualist artist creates works without compromise, and provocation is the enduring philosophy, the vow made between the enfant terrible and their devoted audience.

Success, if achieved to any noticeable degree, is a tool, one that is utilized to propel the reach of the enfant’s works to a mass audience. Most artists, terrible or not, share a natural egomaniacal tendency; they are to be noticed and appreciated, perhaps worshipped. What differs the enfant terrible from most artists is their insatiable need to provoke. The status quo must be torn apart, destroyed, and everyone must watch.

Whilst they place themselves in opposition to the mainstream, the enfant terrible is a child of the culture they seek to destroy. Sometimes, this relation is by blood. Take for instance Gaspar Noe, whose family ties with the Argentine art world caused no dissuasion for the young filmmaker to make a film so shocking that it caused 200 people to walk out of its Cannes premiere in 2003 in disgust. This is triumph.

Their thirst for attention is rabid, and whether the art they produce is of any merit or not is seemingly irrelevant; sometimes the impression lasts, sometimes it doesn’t. But the theme of fascism, particularly its incarnation in the early to mid-twentieth century, seems to have drawn the attention of the enfant terrible again and again, and its draw is ever prescient. Why is it that fascism in its modern form has appealed to the aesthetic sensibilities of a profession largely assumed to be entrenched in liberalism?

Fascism in the twentieth century drove many artists in Europe into the underground. Art that was considered against ‘German feeling’ in Nazi Germany drove many to exile and persecution, and the stories of artists dying penniless and abandoned are countless. Despite the documented horrors and eventual consequences of such an ideology, the rigid parameters and harsh order that paint the fascist worldview drew the attention of many artists in the subsequent decades after the Second World War and continue to do so. How is it that these seemingly disparate worlds of art and fascism seem to continually align themselves together?

Take for instance Lars Von Trier.

Cannes, 2011. ‘And then I found out I was really a Nazi’.

The auditorium fell silent, bar the smattering of cameras clicking away out of shot. An initial humorous remark concerning his German ancestry had hurtled him very quickly into catastrophe, and the subsequent fumbling attempts at dark humour landed Lars von Trier into very hot water. Jokes like these are not taken lightly in Hollywoodland and he was declared an untouchable by the festival board at Cannes; persona non grata.

Like many other enfant terribles, Lars von Trier soared to the heights of infamy in a fairly short period of time; his debut film landed him a Technical Grand Prize at the ripe age of 28 and his filmography has since been met largely with critical acclaim, though not without an occasional rustle. Controversy has never eluded von Trier, and the decades leading up to his Nazi comments were comprised of a series of releases that often shocked and polarized critics and audiences alike.

Though von Trier’s comments landed him in treacherous waters, the contents of these waters are all too familiar, especially within the art world, where the seemingly disparate ideological realms of the avant-garde and fascism have been oddly intertwined since the 1930s. Why has fascism continued to attract the artist? Are we destined to flirt with disaster in perpetuity?

In his study of Henry Williamson (another artist whose affinity for fascism led to a support of British fascist leader Oswald Mosley), Melvyn David Higginbottom mentions that ‘For most of writers attracted by fascism, it was an amusing means of provocation, a feather with which to tickle the throats of the British liberals’.² Though artists have historically veered to the left of the political spectrum, it is this desire to provoke the establishment, whether Right or Left, that artists like Lars von Trier and many others have followed suit with.

Nazism (and any mention of the Holocaust) appears to be the refuge for any professional controversialist. Tributes after David Bowie’s passing seemed to brush over his fascist period in the mid-70s, and Serge Gainsbourg’s Rock Around the Bunker (an album which discusses Nazis extensively) only helped continue to solidify his status as a French god. There is no question as to why most find this topic touchy, and horror seems to be the only appropriate response from the audience to such attempts at shock value.

Fascism’s aesthetic appeal is something that has been explored by many critics in the aftermath of the Second World War. Susan Sontag once wrote of this appeal in her essay Fascinating Fascism:

‘In contrast to the asexual chasteness of official communist art, Nazi art is both prurient and idealizing. A utopian aesthetics (physical perfection; identity as a biological given) implies an ideal eroticism: sexuality converted into the magnetism of leaders and the joy of followers. The fascist ideal is to transform sexual energy into a ‘spiritual’ force, for the benefit of the community’.³

Sublimation clearly plays a role in the drive behind the Nazi ideal, where sexuality is negated to make way for a stylistic purity, with a ‘spiritual force’ as its libidinal supplementation. For performers such as Bowie who weaponised sexuality in their art as a catalyst for reaching creative heights, a style which seeks to reign in sexual energy, to sublimate it into a new channel of expression, would likely appeal to an artist looking to move beyond their predefined formula.

London, 1976. A picture taken outside London Victoria Station with an outstretched arm resembling a Roman salute and various comments afterwards to the press concerning the lack of strong leadership in Britain landed David Bowie in the same quarry as Lars von Trier post-Cannes. This again begs the question, was he exercising his artistic license or were these the inner workings of a true proto fascist?

It was less than a year later that Bowie completely disavowed his previous statements. ‘I\’m Pierrot. I\’m Everyman. What I\’m doing is theatre, and only theatre’’. To most, this settled the controversy. Bowie went on with his career largely unscathed, the critics (himself included) dismissed this persona as the ramblings of a paranoid drug addict at the end of his tether. The spirit of fascism, however, continues to reveal itself through the conduits of today’s controversialists.

In a recent interview for a small Russian YouTube channel, Lars von Trier spoke at length about his career and recent foray into sobriety. Here he is largely a shadow of his former self, and the crowned hellraiser of Danish cinema is now a fuzzy old man living in a cabin on the outskirts of Denmark. The cessation of intoxicants and a Parkinson\’s diagnosis have made von Trier more contemplative, and against a peaceful backdrop he discusses trials and tribulations, old scores unsettled and the state of cinema. On provocation, he mentions:

‘I still believe in this thing called provocation, when I was young it was very popular, and it was considered a political statement’.

Politics may have confused matters, and delineating between political messaging and revelling in watching the world burn is a task left to the audience, as it always has been.

After seemingly definitive cancellations and career-ruining stunts, artists like Morrissey continue to sell out large concert halls, Kanye West (or Ye) continue to chart on the Billboard 100 and Gainsbourg is still considered a French saint, despite lyrics that have curdled over time like unpasteurized milk.

As sour a taste these artists may leave on our palate from time to time, and whatever trouble they seem to have found themselves in, we seem to always embrace these overgrown teenagers with open arms after every strop, after every devastating catastrophe.

Stellan Skarsgaard, frequent collaborator of Lars von Trier, said of this friend following Cannes ‘By the press … he trusted them and he makes a bad joke. Everybody knows he\’s not a Nazi’.

Destructive, volatile, messy; how else would we want our enfant terribles to be? Perhaps, like real children, we cling on to the small hope that they will mature and see the error of their infantile ways. We may be asking for too much.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY:

1. Wilde, O., 2003. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. London: HarperCollins.
2. Sontag, S., 1975. Fascinating Fascism. The New York Review of Books, 6 February.
3. Williamson, H., 1992. Intellectuals and British Fascism: Study of Henry Williamson. London: Janus Publishing.

About the Author

Sebastián F. Leeming is a writer and cultural critic whose work delves into the complexities of art, politics, and societal norms. With a keen interest in the intersections of ideology and artistic expression, Leeming has contributed to various publications, offering nuanced perspectives on contemporary cultural issues.