Once in a Lifetime

2017
Newsprint, acrylic ink
50cm x 65cm

Studio painting and screenprinting work, produced as part of Turps Correspondance.

Sidney Blumenthal’s A Short History of the Trump Family (LRB, Vol 39, No. 4, Feb 2017) charts the rise of Donald Trump and his shady dealings in the city he has sought to conquer. Blumenthal notes the gangster mentality ‘Trump’s business has always operated organisationally like a prototypical Mafia…. like the post-communist mafia states…. both run like a family by a patriarch who distributes money, power and favours’, that he has now brought to the White House. Blumenthal also notes the attraction to authoritarianism, on Tianamen Square in Playboy, Trump is quoted: ‘…they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with the power of strength’.

Blumenthal makes parallels with earlier mafia states and fascistic gangsters, similarly Hal Foster, in Pere Trump (October, 159, Winter 2017), looks for parallels in earlier experiences of the rise of authoritarianism and proto-fascism, turning to literature. Pere Trump is inspired by Alfred Jarry’s Pere Ubu/Ubu Roi (1896), and perhaps the later Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941). Pere Trump, like the character Pere Ubu before him, is both the embodiment of authority, and its transgressor in one. The gangster king is the awful, tyrannous, ‘primal father’.

“The leader of the group,” Freud concludes, “is still the dreaded primal father; the group still wishes to be governed by unrestricted force; it has an extreme passion for authority.”

And there are echoes of this archetype in the more recent journalistic work of Misha Glenny’s McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld (2008), and Masha Gessen’s The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (2012) which uncover and chart and characterise the rise of the Mafia and its infiltration of the state, in the current era.

Returning to Blumenthal’s history, he locates the action in New York city, focusing on 1970-90’s, a backdrop pumping with money, sex and art, that is already either indulging in or theorising the emergence of its hyper-capitalistic state, with Foster’s ‘authority and transgressor’, the ravenous, unfixed, psychotic unconscious will, the arch hyper-capitalist.

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