In 2007, artist Shepard Fairey created a poster of the then US presidential candidate Barack Hussein Obama. It was a simple stencil portrait in red, blue and beige and had the word ‘hope’ printed below in bold letters. Initially, Fairey sold his screen prints on the street and at Obama’s rallies. The poster became popular quickly and the ex-president’s office itself began using and promoting it. Everyone understood that this was a special image. In fact, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC acquired Fairey’s hand-finished collage, even before Obama took his oath of office, claiming it to be a portrait that symbolised a historic campaign.
Fairey made several versions of the poster. Some had the words ‘progress’ or ‘change’ printed on them. But ‘hope’ stuck. That four-letter word, paired with Obama’s upward-looking gaze, managed to capture within it the aspirations of generations of African-Americans. It wasn’t heavy-handed or, possibly, alienating like the word ‘revolution’. Nor did it ring false like the forever out-of-reach promises of progress or equality. It was a simple declaration of an emotion.
Obama’s campaign and victory were sentimental affairs. So was the Nobel Peace Prize bestowed on him so prematurely. Fairey’s poster and its popularity confirm that this was because Obama became a symbol that was greater than the person he was or is. For American politics, he was Janus, the Roman god of beginnings. Janus is depicted as being two-faced; his one face looks at the past and the other towards the future. In the election of 2008, Americans were considering their past as a nation built on slavery and were looking at Obama as the usher of the future.
The hope that Obama inspired was for the new. It stands in stark contrast to Donald Trump’s “Make America great again”, which pedals the idea that there was once a glorious past that Americans now need to go back to. But Trump is not the contemplative backward-looking face of Janus. He is too incoherent to be a symbol of any one thing.
Since Trump took his oath of office last January, every day, all of us around the world struggle to make sense of him. The more he says, the less we understand. The more we seem to be on the brink of disaster, the less Americans find themselves capable of doing anything about it. Trump is as frustrating as the apple in René Magritte’s masterpiece ‘The Son of Man’.
Magritte (1898-1967) was a Belgian surrealist. One of his most famous works is called ‘The Treachery of Images’, in which he painted a pipe and below it the following words in French: “This is not a pipe.” The work draws attention to the fact that what we see is not a pipe but the image of a pipe. ‘The Son of Man’ is an equally well-known work. It depicts a man wearing a bowler hat and an overcoat. We can’t see his face because there’s a round green apple covering it. The apple isn’t dangling from his hat or, at least, we don’t know that it is. The apple is just there. We can’t see what the man’s face looks like and the man probably can’t see anything apart from that apple before his eyes.
Magritte’s explanation for the painting was that it was about what is visible and what is hidden, and the conflict this creates. But whether the figure has chosen to hide behind the apple or the apple was imposed on him, we get the sense that no matter where he turns, the apple will move with him.
Any office, whether of the head of state or that of a clerk, is bigger than the person who occupies it. Sometimes, it’s the other way around. Charismatic figures such as Obama or Fidel Castro are examples of “personalities” who are bigger than the offices they held. Often they disappoint us, but they become the prism through which we filter events. Trump, too, belongs to the cult of personality. But he is blinding like the apple in Magritte’s painting. He makes it difficult for us to think about the impact his policy decisions have because we cannot see beyond or around the person he is.
Magritte painted ‘The Son of Man’ as a self-portrait. In this and many other such works, his face is either hidden or simply not there. If, in Obama, Americans were confronting their racial past and looking with hope towards the future, with Trump, Americans are becoming absentees from their own narrative. Irrespective of the many encouraging acts of resistance, such as lower court judges staying the travel ban, “we the people” have disappeared behind an ubiquitous, ridiculously-placed apple.
Blessy Augustine is an art critic based in New Delhi; @blessyaugust