Ebook: The Trump Effect in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture: Populism, Politics, and Paranoia

The 2021 Capitol Hill Riot marked a watershed moment when the ‘old world’ of factbased systems of representation was briefly overwhelmed by the emerging hyper-individual politics of aestheticized emotion. In The Trump Effect: Populism, Politics and Paranoia in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, Kit Messham-Muir and Uroš Cvoro analyse the aesthetics that have emerged at the core of 21st-century politics, and which erupted at the US Capitol in January 2021. Looking at this event’s aesthetic dimensions through such aspects as QAnon, white resentment and strongman authoritarianism, they examine the world-wide historical trends towards ethno-nationalism and populism that emerged following the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the dawning of the current post-ideological age.
Messham-Muir and Cvoro build on their ground-breaking research into how trauma, emotion and empathy have become well worn tropes in today’s contemporary art about war to highlight the ways in which contemporary art can actively disrupt the underlying drift in society towards white supremacism and ultranationalism. They do so by utilising their outsiders’ perspective on a so-called American phenomenon to reject the ‘American exceptionalism’ idea of Trump as a political aberration, instead seeing ‘The Trump Effect’ as a crystalising of deeper and longer-term philosophical shifts.
The Trump Effect in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture: Populism, Politics, and Paranoia explores the complex, recent and rapidly evolving political, social, cultural, and aesthetic conditions we describe as the ‘Trump Effect.’ While centered on the politics of the United States of America, the Trump Effect is in fact a global phenomenon that precedes the Trump presidency and reaches far beyond the United States. The Trump Effect is characterised by the amplification of American culture war politics within the politics of the ‘peripheries’, such as in Australia and Eastern Europe. It is marked by a widescale upheaval of our established understandings of left and right, a state of post-ideological politics in which the world has witnessed the rapid rise of conspiratorial thinking into the political mainstream. The Trump Effect in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture argues that this has resulted in what we describe as the ‘balkanization’ of American politics, combining strongman authoritarianism, paranoia and corruption of the once-unshakable institutions of liberal democracy. When Donald J. Trump propagated the ‘Stop the Steal’ conspiracy and challenged the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 presidential election, he demonstrated a malign willingness to burn the mechanisms of democracy in an attempt to hold onto power, culminating in the violent insurrection of January 6, 2021. Focusing on the Capitol Hill riot, this book argues that contemporary visual culture is now the battleground where ideological and iconological collisions take place. This book examines the aesthetic dimensions of Trumpism as a manifestation of the post-ideological politics of the twenty-first century, and considers ways in which contemporary art can potentially reconceptualize the Trump Effect and intervene in the global lurch towards white supremacism and ultra-nationalism. The Trump Effect in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture considers the role and aesthetics of conspiracy theory in contemporary politics, questions about race, identity and representation, and a post-trump backlash against university education and critical theory, and seeks radical and creative solutions to the Trump Effect in recent contemporary art, ultimately reframing the January 6 insurrection as a failed work of ‘delegated performance’ art.