Is Michelangelo’s David the new Pepe the Frog?
For months, posters featuring heroic black-and-white close-ups of classical sculptures, including the David, have been popping up on college campuses across the country. They could be mistaken for advertisements for an art history course – if the images were not accompanied by slogans such as “Serve your people” and “Protect your heritage”.
Then there’s also the name of the group written at the bottom: “Identity Evropa”, a crypto-fascist and white supremacist organization.
In February, the posters appeared outside the offices of Valerie Grim, a professor of African American studies at Indiana University in Bloomington, deserving a mention in the New York Times as evidence of a growing presence of white nationalist groups on college campuses.
Schools across the country have been targeted by Identity Evropa, from Kurtztown, Pennsylvania, Rapid City, South DakotaAnd Hastings-on-Hudson, New York At University of Washington in Seattle, the University of Chicagoand many more.
Last week, in an alarming incident, a a fight broke out in the galleries at the Minneapolis Institute of Art between anti-fascist organizers and a group supposed to organize a meeting on “white culture” at the museum. Identity Evropa was part of the groups alleged be involved – although, to my knowledge, this has not yet been confirmed.
What do we think of this disturbing new symbolism?
Founded last year, Identity Evropa is a relatively new group, buoyed by the waves of nativism and racism that accompanied Donald Trump’s candidacy. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a hate watchdog, listed the group’s founder, Nathan Damigo, as one of three pillars of the alt-right’s new campaign to attract young people, alongside Milo Yiannopoulos, the now-disgraced provocateur and Breitbart editor-in-chief, and Richard Spencer, who coined the term “alt-right.” himself.
The SPLC describes Identity Evropa as a “reinvention of the now-defunct National Youth Front, the youth wing of the white nationalist American Freedom Party.” The group is aimed at alienated young white men seeking a sense of identity and purpose: “We are the future,” declares Identity Evropa’s homepage, displaying the assertion in a photograph archive of a sunset; “Join us,” he urges elsewhere, in a photo of Damigo and his cohorts. “Be part of something bigger than yourself.”
Detail of the screenshot of the Identity Evropa site.
I suppose Identity Evropa is somewhat unique among a new wave of far-right organizations trying to organize in the meat world rather than the online space. #ProjectSiege, the group’s current campus poster campaign, is the main representation of this push so far.
In the current tense climate, the posters have caused considerable concern, although it is worth mentioning that, according to Damigo own entry to CNN, the group remains very small, with a few dozen members at most across the country. Indeed, when you actually look at the posters, their design – white-on-white text, slightly squashed images – bespeaks amateurism rather than massive sophistication.
However, two things should be noted about their particular use of European art.
Richard Spencer was infamous at a conference last year, declaring “Hail Trump!” Let’s salute our people! Hail victory! (the latter literally being the English translation of “Sieg Heil”, the Nazi salute). Members of Identity Evropa were present at this gathering, blogging about their experience: “We, without a doubt, “made it.”
Nevertheless, this new generation of white power activists presents themselves as “identitarians”. curbing the label “white supremacist”. They consciously sought to distinguish themselves from old-school neo-Nazi imagery in an effort to capitalize on the Trump moment and mainstream their movement on campuses.
In this context, it is difficult to say whether Identity Evropa’s invocation of classical art is a clever attempt to exacerbate hatred or an unforced error. Because ancient symbolism is Fascist Aesthetics 101, as any student of modern art knows.
Mussolini, the one who invented the term “fascism” considered the Roman Empire as a symbol of Italian greatness. Hitler called the most extravagant art of his time – Expressionism, Dadaism and the rest – “degenerate.” But he love classic sculpture!
Hitler with a statue of a discus thrower. Photo by Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images.
“Without the classical tradition, the Nazi visual ideology would have been quite different,” Rolf Michael Schneider of the Ludwig Maximilian University. told the BBC a few years ago. “The perfect Aryan body, the white color (of marble), the ideal handsome white male: to put it very bluntly, it has become a kind of image of Herrenrasse or “master race” – that’s what the Nazis called themselves and the Germans.
Milo Yiannopoulos, star of the now fallen alternative right positioned himself as a new-model punk, making much of the novelty of presenting mockery of women and minorities as outrageous performance art. A large part of the new right preferred a inspired by 4chan language of lazy memes and scatological humor.
The Identity Evropa posters swing in the other direction. Essentially, when you see these posters you think, “Wow…these are really going there! »
Yet, do the specific works of art that Identity Evropa implements for the cause have meaning? Let’s see.
Evropa identity poster.
There’s the David, with the slogan “Let’s be great again,” which makes sense, evoking both Trump’s “Make America Great Again” and the Italian Renaissance. (American Renaissance was the name of a white nationalist publicationwhose editor, Jared Taylor, is cited on the Identity Evropa site as a source of inspiration.)
Evropa identity poster.
Then there is the Apollo Belvedere (c. 120-140 AD), now in the Vatican Museumsand a marble statue of young Hercules (69-96 AD), from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, both with a long history of representing a heroic ideal. (By the way, I found the source of the image for the latter, a photo of Joe Josephs from Young Hercules at the Met. posted on Flickr. In an email, Josephs said he was horrified to see his work used for a racist meme.)
Evropa identity poster.
The garlanded head of Julius Caesar is a detail from a work by the classical French sculptor Nicolas Coustou (1658-1733), now at the Louvre. Commissioned for Versailles in 1696, the sculpture was intended as an elegant symbol of “noble authority”, which is how it is implemented here, with the text “Serve your people”. (The historical Julius Caesar, of course, is known for having a populist touch, being the subject of a personality cult, and playing a leading role in the crises that caused the Roman Republic to degenerate into autocracy…)
Evropa identity poster.
However, it is the fifth sculpture here that is the most interesting: an enigmatic figure with raised eyes and the legend “Our destiny is ours”. This sculpture looks familiar… without really being familiar to me.
Evropa identity poster.
After some extensive internet research, I determined that this was a cropped detail from a photo of a funerary sculpture, an angel located in the historic site. Old Cemetery in the small German town of Saarlouis.
Now, maybe this image has some sort of mystical meaning for white “identitarians” I don’t know. But art-historically speaking, it’s not in the same category as the David or the Apollo Belvedere. Given its current use, it may be interesting to note that the old cemetery of Saarlouis is also well known for its Jewish section as for its statuary.
Angel sculpture located in the old cemetery of Saarlouis. Image via Wikipedia.
The same exact source photo of the “sad angel” has been used for various purposes suggesting a “divine European culture” – for example, as the cover of a United Classics edition of Mozart’s Requiem. The best guess is that he is invoked by Identity Evropa, not because of what he actually represents, but simply because he looks evocative of the right thing, which is probably ultimately true of all the other artwork here too.
The United Classics edition of Mozart, which uses the same photo as Identity Evropa.
Which undermines their entire project, when you think about it.
In a chilling video from the National Policy Institute presented on the Identity Evropa website, Richard Spencer outlines his “identity” agenda: “Our ancestors had a very strong sense of their identity. They could say: “I am Roman”, “I am Saxon”, “I am Dane”. Some might say: “I am European”. To be exiled from one’s community would have been a fate worse than death.
A little later, in blood and earth mode, Spencer adds: “Who are we? We are not just white. Blank is a check box on a census form. We are part of the people, the history and the spirit of Europe. This heritage presents itself to us as a gift and a challenge. Because what our ancestors took for granted, we must discover and we must renew it.
A defaced recruitment flyer for Identity Evropa hangs near Trump Tower on July 6, 2016 in Chicago, Illinois. Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images.
Identity Evropa’s posters evoke art as an example of this strong and rooted tradition of European culture, a tradition that it promises its audience can help them “discover and renew.”
But when we look at the sources, the images themselves suggest an awareness of this culture that doesn’t go much further than the visual cliché. Instead, what you find is a hodgepodge; an identity reconstructed in Internet forums, from tourist photos and Google image searches; militant ignorance disguised as tradition.
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