Art, Design, Iconoclasm, and Politics: The Obama “Socialist Joker” Poster

Controversy: The poster, which depicts President Barack Obama as Batman villain The Joker has divided U.S. opinionLet me start by saying that this poster makes me mad. I hate the way ‘socialism’ has been turned into an epithet, and I hate the way that epithet gets used against a fairly market-oriented politician like President Obama to keep him from straying too far into egalitarian policies. Also, I see this image of the first black President in white-faced makeup, and I feel attacked. I voted for Obama, I think he’s doing a pretty good job, and I’ve invested a great deal of my own hopes for the future in his success. This image feels like an assault on all that.

Philip Kennicott at the Washington Post gives voice to my feelings:

By using the “urban” makeup of the Heath Ledger Joker, instead of the urbane makeup of the Jack Nicholson character, the poster connects Obama to something many of his detractors fear but can’t openly discuss. He is black and he is identified with the inner city, a source of political instability in the 1960s and ’70s, and a lingering bogeyman in political consciousness despite falling crime rates.[…]

Urban blacks — the thinking goes — don’t just live in dangerous neighborhoods, they carry that danger with them like a virus.[…]

Superimpose that idea, through the Joker’s makeup, onto Obama’s face, and you have subtly coded, highly effective racial and political argument. Forget socialism, this poster is another attempt to accomplish an association between Obama and the unpredictable, seeming danger of urban life.

Kennicott interprets this poster as an argument: he identifies all the feelings it inspires in my gut and asserts that they were deliberately placed there by the artist, who wants to oppose the President’s policies and perhaps especially his party in the next election. This poster, Kennicott hints, is another image from the opposition party’s ‘dirty tricks’ book. It’s dog whistle politics: a “subtly coded, highly effective racial and political argument.”

Kennicott is wrong. Though no one knows for sure, I don’t think this image is even really a political image. It wrenches at my gut every time I see it, and it’s clearly about politics, but it’s not political. In my view, it’s what’s sometimes called “culture jamming.” In order to understand why this interpretation is most likely, I’m going to show you some more pictures.

First, a little history. Heath Ledger’s Joker character has been used widely on politicans. Obama may actually have been the last of the 2008 candidates to receive the “Joker” effect:

Bush-the-Joker002-copy[1].jpg

So it was a popular trope in 2008. In fact, it seems to have begun with the center image, drawn by Drew Friedman for Vanity Fair. In my opinion, there’s something simplistic and poorly thought out about depicting your political enemies in this way, but it’s not particularly hurtful. So why does it bother me so much more that Obama’s image was given the “Joker treatment”? Is it because he’s a black man being put in whiteface? Is it just because I like him better than these other politicians? Maybe it has more to do with the word ‘socialist’ underneath? It must be “socialism,” because this image isn’t actually new. Obama was depicted this way, sans “socialism,” on January 18th by a Flickr contributor known only as khateeb88. The artist even wrote underneath, “Not indicative of my political views.”

Napoleon Bonaparte on a Motorcycle (Photoshop) by khateeb88.

He (she?) was just messing around with photoshop. From the rest of her Flickr feed it appears that “khateeb88” is a student in Chicago. Apparently “khateeb88” enjoys manipulating famous images in order to produce humorous or surreal results. Here’s Napoleon Bonaparte on a motorcycle, by the same artist. The rest of the collection is in the same vein: a Guitar Hero spoof advertisement for Quran Hero suggestst that the student is Muslim, as do many photographs of Egyptian landscapes and architecture. A complaint about Rahm Emmanuel confirms that “khateeb88” is not a typical conservative:

President-elect Obama has appointed Rahm Emanuel as his Chief of Staff.

EPIC FAIL.

Emanuel is a fervent anti-Islam voice in Washington. A Zionist, he takes a hard line stance against the Palestinian cause, and shows a clear anti-Muslim racism.

Besides that, he is the embodiment of “political partisanship” that Obama was supposedly going to change!

I guess we can only blame ourselves. He said “change” we just never bothered asking if he meant good change or bad. Looks like things are not going to get any better or different in Washington.

Change we shouldn’t have believed in.

Note: I am neither Democrat nor Republican, Conservative nor Liberal, didn’t support Obama or McCain.

I just call it like I see it.

Obama the Joker by khateeb88.

So that’s not really so bad, is it? In context, as a playful image manipulation, the altered photograph seems to be just another in a series. Perhaps tinged with some disappointment, as is indicated by the past tense of the artist’s “Change we shouldn’t have believe in.” The artist’s intentions are readily apparent from context, and there’s neither a strong racial nor political motivation, or at least not the one that Kennicott observed. Since it’s a lone undergraduate, not a vast right-wing conspiracy, there’s nothing important to see here, just move along folks….

But of course, that’s not the end of the story, because at some point, someone started making posters of that artist’s image, without his/her permission, and adding the word ‘Socialism’ underneath. So maybe that’s the real harm, here: that a found image was put to a purpose in combination with a popularly misused word. The image is threatening, in just the way Kennicott explains (“urban” rather than “urbane”) while the word hammers home the negative association for a select group of fervent anti-socialists. Originally just a joke, in this new context, perhaps the image really does signal racism and opposition to the president’s policies. Except… it really doesn’t.

Come on, work with me here. What’s the message? Let’s see: “the first black President in white face is an anarchist socialist.” Can you think of any message more self-contradictory? It just doesn’t make sense: all the offensive things cancel each other out.  If I tell you that “green ideas sleep furiously,” am I arguing in favor of green ideas or against them? Surreal nonsense doesn’t become political merely because it makes me mad: in fact, surrealist producers of nonsense love to take advantage of our deeply felt loyalties and fears to order to achieve their goals of sabotaging the reign of logic.

And who would want to be associated with such a nonsense message? Who wants to defend it? Well, people like Kennicott believe that it’s more of a rallying cry for racists, a dog whistle to be heard by those who are listening: “Obama is evil. He will destroy our cities with his violence.” The only message here, Kennicott suggests, is something like “bad man” + “bad idea.” Precisely because it works on an emotional level, it serves both as an attack and a source of solidarity for the nascent opposition: an attack on health care reform, or the bailout, or the stimulus bill.

That’s sort of what folks at my favorite community weblog, Metafilter, seem to think. Pater Aletheias writes:

Heath Ledger turned in a brilliant performance in that role–it’s no wonder that his version of the Joker make-up has become iconic. And of all the incredible moments in the Dark Knight, none was so bone-chilling as the Joker’s attempt to destroy the country by forcing Congress to pass a single-payer health care plan. I went to a late show on opening day, and it was more than a week before I could sleep well again. I just kept thinking, “Dear God! What if some madman really did end medical bankruptcies in the U.S?” The twisted genius of it is gut-wrenching.

I thought this was brilliant, and so did a lot of others. It’s sassy and funny and angry but on-point. But it assumes that the art has a particular purpose. Horace Rumpole chimed in with another great one-liner, again on the same premise:

I wouldn’t mind seeing Obama show Glenn Beck how to make a pencil disappear.

Ha! Wonderful: “Why so serious?”  Normally, I can’t imagine Obama even raising his voice in anger, but for a moment there you can see the whole scene play out… I’m sad to say that it satisfies something primal and angry in my soul, to have my scholarly President transform into a deft action hero. (I used to love Harrison Ford in Airforce One for much the same reason: “Get off my plane!” Come on, you’d all vote for Harrison Ford.)

So, powerful as the image is, it doesn’t actually defend itself very well against witty comebacks. It’s too simple and obvious to be truly offensive, and it’s too dangerous to be adopted as an explicit rallying point for those who oppose Obama. I’m left feeling more supportive of the President and sort of chortling at the guys who thought that “bad man” + “bad idea” was a good enough message to campaign on.

But, as I wrote above, I soon began to realize that something else was going on, something apolitical.

Purely on the level of images, the Obama/Joker connection is a classic mashup: two images that don’t quite fit each other but that both stand out enough to survive the “mashing” or “jamming.”  The same thing goes for ‘socialism.’ No one who knows what that word means really thinks that Obama is a socialist. It is used it only with bile, as an epthet, the way ‘liberal’ is sometimes used, as if the speaker is disgusted to have the word in her mouth and wants to spit it out. People keep using the word in this obviously irrelevant way because of its iconic qualities. It’s a totem or a fetish, a curse to cast upon enemies. When words and images lose their meaning like this, we stop being able to really talk to each other about matters of national concern.

Here’s the thing that even his supporters must admit about Obama. His image and his name have become iconic. Think about the famous Shepard Fairey poster. When you look at our current president, you’re always seeing him, a little, through the lens that this image created. It’s a great, iconic image, and it says that Obama will unite red states and blue states because he’s a little of both: he’s half-black and half-white, half-conservative Harvard Law School elite and half-radical Chicago populist. It hints at a post-racial, post-partisan world… and so it also lies, a little, because we can’t and shouldn’t hope for that. It’s an extremely popular, effective image, that tells a story or conveys a message by layering the message thickly, because ultimately it’s really just saying: “Vote for Obama.” It’s at least as effective as the images of Heath Ledger in the Joker’s makeup that have also become iconic. Those images are popular because his makeup not really a clown’s makeup: it’s a death mask of some sort, and making Ledger look corpse-like, because that’s appropriate given the mood of the movie. Obviously, it seems grotesque and prophetic because Ledger died of an overdose or of sucide so young and tragically. With all that popularity and overdetermined meaning, Heath Ledger’s Joker makeup has basically become a cliché.

Another way to look at the Shepard Fairey print is that it looks an awful lot like traditional Russian Orthodox icons, those magically-imbued pictures of saints that Orthodox Christians worshiped almost as if they were real manifestations of the divine. What I’m trying to suggest is that Obama’s image has become a bit too beatific, a bit too saintly. Even for those of us who agree with his policies, his image needs to be brought down a peg. In this, I see the pranksters putting up the “Socialist Joker” images as traditional Iconoclasts. We all benefit from efforts to de-sacrilize Obama’s image, even Obama! There’s a reason they wait to canonize you until after you’re dead: no one living can really live up to the fantasy.

By defacing the iconic image of the President with this iconically evil makeup, and then juxtaposing that maship with the iconic curse word “socialism,” the distributors of the poster are aiming at a kind of semantic overload. Just as graven images allegedly impede our access to God, the icon of Obama intervenes between citizens and genuine political engagement, and these new iconoclasts seem to be working to desacrilize the image, to render it inert. Like all iconoclasts, they’re efforts appear to those who worship images to be destructive… but their intentions are simply counter-cultural. Iconoclasts remind us we live in the real world, not an ideal one. In this case, they seem to be saying that race and partisanship didn’t disappear when Obama took office. I suspect that it’s most offensive to those who still experience the world primarily imagistically: journalists, for instance, and cultural commentators. Perhaps that’s why it irritates me so much, typing away and hoping that words and ideas will have effects.

Some of our anxieties, like those of expressed so well by Kennicott in the Washington Post, sound an awful lot like magical thinking, as if drawing on a picture of the President might actually harm him! That’s more politics as voodoo:  “I have pricked my homunculous with this pin, and you will soon bleed!” But if there’s one thing that this President “stands for” it’s the hope that we can all agree to live in the “reality-based” community.

In another way, the poster campaign serves as a parody of Obama’s critics, like a hyperbolically offensive New Yorker cover from last year. For those who really thought that the Illinois Senator was some sort of crypto-terrorist, the cover seemed like liberal elites were jokingly thumbing their noses at the risks and dangers. To the rest of us, it seemed like a great send-up of unfounded fears. The “Socialist Joker” Obama is so full of negative stereotypes that it seems to do this, too: the more I dwell on my reaction, the more embarrassed I am to have been so easily and cheaply manipulated.

This kind of radicalization of the minority party is ideal for Democrats. Consider moments of surreal crazy, like when recent a Vice-Presidential candidate makes comments about Obama’s “death panel” condemning her children to death (that’s insurance companies, for whom Down’s Syndrome is a ‘pre-existeing condition’!) These kinds of zealous fantasies allow the majority party to depict their anonymous foes as racist and unreasonable. In my opinion, commentators who have tied the tea party movement and the current health care town hall protesters to the Birthers and the distributors of this poster overstate the case a bit. We’ve seen majority parties do this before, when Republicans worked diligently to associate the anti-war protesters with the 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Frankly, I don’t think it’s ever a good idea to attribute such base motivations to your political opponents unless there’s unavoidable and unignorable proof: the principle of charity is doubly necessary when we disagree on so many fundamental issues. Instead, we should embrace the opposition as a helpful corrective to narrowmindedness, and test our ideas with reasonable disagreement in mind. That seems much more likely to lead to the best policies than does purely cultural partisanship.

Anyway, using it in a partisan way would backfire. Republicans can’t rally behind this image precisely because, at best, it doesn’t make any sense. It raises too many questions about what exactly socialism is, about how it’s related to the Joker’s nihilism and anarchic violence, and about how any of this is related to Medicare or health care reform. Bush as the Joker was a coherent enough image, though remarkably uncreative, but not Obama, and Republicans know it. Worse, if they do start rallying behind it, the poster’s racial overtones threaten to decenter and discombobulate their hoped for unity! For Republicans, it’s a Catch-22: no help at all.

Of course, much of my analysis depends on the attribution of intentions to the anonymous distributors of this message, and the asusmption that the poster can’t be put to other, more clearly political uses. For this, I can offer only slightly more evidence: all the parodying and destruction happens at the level of the image. There’s no call to violence or performative political work going on here: no racists are emboldened, and no African Americans (least of all the President) are terrorized or threatened.The Joker parody doesn’t change who Obama is or what he’s working towards, and it doesn’t persuade anyone who wasn’t already irrationally frightened of him of a threat. No stereotypes are cemented, no paranoia confirmed. I know from socialist, and you, Mr. President, are no socialist.

Even if it’s not political, of course, it might still be racist. But I don’t think it is. Some artworks only succeed because of their context. This one only succeeds because we live in a country that constantly struggles with racism and that constantly suppresses that struggle. But the same thing could be said for Spike Lee’s Bamboozled. Just because it’s about race and it plays with at my discomfort about racism doesn’t mean it’s actually racist! Given the history of depicting Presidents and Presidential candidates in the Joker’s makeup, I don’t see an unbroken line connected “blackface” minstrelry to this new kind of “whiteface,” Kennicott’s argument notwithstanding. Even on the most angry reading of the original artist’s intentions, the equation of Obama with the Joker was intended to indicate his continuity with the military policies of his predecessor from the perspective of an Egyptian Muslim: it’s not about black people enslavement by white people, but about brown people who have died as a result of our collective belligerence.

To sum up, the “Socialist Joker” poster is not racist propaganda, it’s great art. It’s great art because it changes no one’s mind but it still sticks in your craw. It makes me angry even though there’s no coherent message or argument being made, even though I know that the image, itself, was produced as a sophomoric exercise in photomanipulation rather than a masterwork of voter-manipulation. It says: “I’m going to manipulate you and you’re going to know I’m doing it, but you’re still not going to be able to stop me.”

As I said at the outset, it’s not political even though it’s about politics. After seeing this image, no one will change their mind about Heath Ledger, Barack Obama, or socialism. However, they’ll remember the image. And that’s really why it’s great art: it’s selfish and parasitic and useless. It provokes pointlessly. It refuses to treat serious matters with the reverence they deserve. It loafs and coasts and freerides. It’s interested in nothing other than its own self-propagation.

God, how I hate great art.

UPDATE: This entry has been edited a good deal since it was first published. I moved sentences, expanded and emphasized points, and imported pieces of a comment I wrote in response to a request for clarification, which is still below. Perhaps most importantly, I have added information about the original artist, including the likelihood that he or she is a Muslim art student in Chicago.


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6 responses to “Art, Design, Iconoclasm, and Politics: The Obama “Socialist Joker” Poster”

  1. Dr. J Avatar

    Wow, AnPan. I really like this essay. One of your best, imho.

    I don't even know where to start with a comment.

    I agree with a lot of your gut reactions to the image. It made me angry, too… but it also made me kind of roll my eyes, heave a sigh, and mutter to myself: "Jees. Really? I mean, REALLY?"

    Unlike you, I actually do think a lot of people (though perhaps not the artist him- or herself) ARE trying to use this image as a substitute for an argument and a call for action, and so trying to use this image "politically." Just yesterday, I saw someone on facebook who had posted this image and remarked that he "loves seeing the left squirm now that the "civil disobedience" movement is on the other foot." (This is in reference to the Republicans who are currently going around disrupting the health-care town meetings.) One of his friends commented: "Isn't that the biggest hypocrisy you've ever seen? Comparing protesters to Nazis– really? Let's remember they were "National SOCIALISTS" Now who looks more like a Nazi, Pelosi?"

    Oy vey.

    I'm rambling here, but I guess what I wanted to ask you was whether or not you REALLY think that this image is not "political"? And, if not, I'd like to hear you articulate in more detail why not. I suspect that you're going to point me to your last paragraph above as an answer, but I think that those claims might only apply to how the artist saw the image. (pointless, useless, freeloading, self-propogandizing) But the artist, like the author, is dead now… his or her work is out there in the world and is utterly divorced from the original intent of its creator.

    Now, I think, it's political.

    (More on Bamboozled later…)

  2. Joshua Avatar
    Joshua

    Well, I think I want to hold to my original distinction: it's about politics but it's not political. I should probably also say that I think it is political as an act of iconoclasm, but so is hagiographic and iconographic art. To be honest, I think we all benefit from efforts to de-sacrilize Obama's image, even Obama! There's a reason they wait to canonize you until after you're dead: no one living can really live up to the fantasy.

    However, I don't think it's partisan or that it serves a partisan purpose. Using it in a partisan way would backfire. Republicans can't rally behind this image precisely because, at best, it doesn't make any sense. It raises too many questions about what exactly socialism is, about how it's related to the Joker's nihilism and anarchic violence, and about how any of this is related to Medicare or health care reform. Bush as the Joker, maybe… but not Obama, and they know it. Worse, if they start rallying behind it, the poster -does- become racist! For Republicans, it's a Catch-22.

    Analogously, I don't think that the 'birth certificate conspiracy theorists' are truly partisan, either. On the left, the same goes for 9/11 conspiracy theorists: politicians, independents, and ordinary folks won't associate with them, so neither party can afford to even hint at dog whistle politics that panders to their beliefs. Both movements are expressions of pre-political fears and paranoias, but, as I see it at least, these emotions are too dangerous to be used.

    Now, I'll change my mind on all this if politicians start using it or start lending credence to the Birther theories. I just don't think that'll happen. (Well, there's one Republican Congressman who's a Birther, though none of the others are willing to associate with him on it.) Republican strategists saw the way the the claims around Obama's terrorist connections backfired for McCain and Palin, and I think they've learned their lesson.

    I also think it's important to be careful when we lump the town hall protesters together with the Birthers together with whoever is putting up these images. There's no reason to believe they're the same people or that they're part of a coherent strategy. As I tried to argue here, there's good reason to believe the opposite.

  3. Joshua Avatar

    Leigh, and anyone else reading: I've edited this entry a good deal since it was first published. I moved sentences, expanded and emphasized points, and imported pieces of the comment above. Perhaps most importantly, I have added information about the original artist, including the likelihood that he or she is a Muslim art student in Chicago.

    Also, I'd really like to hear about Bamboozled!

  4. Dr. J Avatar

    Okay, I think your "it's about politics, but it's not political" formulation is very clever. Maybe too clever!

    About Bamboozled: One of the things that film was about was how we think we can use humor (in this case, the minstrel show) to "prove" that we aren't racist. Remember that, in the film, Delacroix's character actually proposes the creation of Mantan: The New Millenium Minstrel Show because he is SURE that it is SO racist it will cerainly get him fired. But, of course, what happens is that the corporate network and the American public actually embrace the show, tacitly claiming all along that "this can't possibly be racist! it's just a joke!". The tragedy of this collective non-reflection eventually destroys a lot of lives, culminating in the final scene where the Mau Mau's (led by "Big Black Afrika", brilliantly played by Mos Def) transform comedy into tragedy, parody into violence.

    I don't want to back you into a corner here, AnPan, but isn't the message of Bamboozled, at least in part, that we need to be REALLY CAREFUL when we try to say something like: "this is about politics, but it's not political"? When does it become "political"? When someone kills someone? When someone starts a war? When we vote on it?

  5. Joshua Avatar

    Well, I think the corollary to your question is: when does a movie about race, trafficking in racist stereotypes, become racist? I know there are a few people who think that Spike Lee's work actually does rise to the level of racism, but that seems wrong to me. I'm hardly authorized to be the arbiter of racism, but I do think there's a space to depict racism without being racist.

    If that's the case, I don't see why it's not possible to depict politics without being political. This is clearly what the New Yorker cover did, so it seems like a real possibility.

    Reading some of your other comments over at Chris's blog, I think we might have a real disagreement on the extent to which an art work is the "transformative" agent or catalyst in moving from comedy/parody to tragedy/violence. There were racist meth addicts driving around with shotguns and vague plans to kill Obama long before this particular poster began to make the rounds. The question is whether we allow stupidity like that to restrict our political discourse just because they might hear a criticism and "transform" it into rage.

    Also, I wonder what you think about the revelation that the original artist is a Muslim art student from Chicago, who was disgusted with Obama's pro-Israel pick in Rahm Emmanuel? Does that change the calculus for you, at all? (It does for me: I think the original image becomes much more political in light of that, but oddly it's a very different political message than the one we assumed!)

  6. […] This controversy is moving more quickly than I can keep up, unfortunately. […]

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