I liked that quicker, shorter title, but it could also read, Dancing, writing, painting, sculpting, making music, and generally just art-ing through fascism.
Back in 1991, I was living in Chicago, attending grad school at DuPaul. My area of expertise was shaping up to be American literature that arose out of the Holocaust. And it just so happened that the Art Institute of Chicago, late that summer, was putting on a giant exhibition called Degenerate Art.
With a quick search, you can read more deeply about all of this, but I’ll give you a quick overview.
Nazis, of whatever time, are not fans of any art but classical art that supports their idea of culture. So you know, nothing imaginative and certainly nothing that promotes anything but hetero normative ideals. Oh… and white supremacy ideals, of course.
Modern art, in particular, which was on the rise at the same time as naziism, was extra targeted.
Eventually, the man himself (a frustrated artist and small man… like so many fascists) gathered all the modern art they could get their hands on and put together a show of over 600 works.
In order to, well, make people feel angry about the art, they did a couple of things. First, they crowded the walls with it, creating a sort of sight chaos.
Second, they let in too many people at once, herding them through tight lines. And third, they cranked up the heat.
When the Art Institute decided to put on this show, they found as many pieces as they could from the original. They didn’t overcrowd the people or turn up the heat, of course, but they did display them more like the original show so we could get an idea of what it was really like.
And to this day, there’s rarely a month that goes by that I don’t think of that exhibit. And now especially, there’s rarely a week.
It can feel like the arts need to take a backseat during times like we’re living through.
But if you look at history, it begs to differ.
If art weren’t fundamentally important to the human soul, would H1tler and his crew have gone to all of this trouble to degrade it?
No. Of course not.
All of the arts have the potential to expand our minds and hearts and to, most importantly, expand our empathy toward those not experiencing life like our own. Art teaches us about our humanity. Art teaches us about the beauty of diversity. Art teaches us that complexity is a gift.
And therein lies the danger.
As one of the sickest humans ever to be quoted just recently said (and I won’t name him), don’t get caught by “the sin of empathy.”
I am familiar with the mind gymnastics that people will go through to make that make sense for themselves, but they are wrong, period. It is an immoral sentiment. They are taking all that is good about Christianity and deforming it in the name of their own fears and their own small hearts and minds.
Art challenges us and it calls out parts of us that need to be worked on. It forces us to face our shadows so that we might fully delight in our joys.
So yes, we must dance through fascism.
And dancing, in particular, is extra important in that it keeps us grounded in these bodies and in this world right here and right now, rather than committing the grave error of thinking that we should be focusing on something that (might/maybe) come after we die.
That’s what it comes down to: fascism is death and art is life.
