Last Updated on 10/09/2024 by Arun jain
This is an installment of Visual Studies, a series that explores how images move and shape culture.
On July 13, in a “fight or flight” moment, Donald Trump showed himself to be an Olympian performer, making a powerful impression by throwing his fist in the air immediately after an attempt on his life. An iconic image was born immediately.
Watching Mr. Trump co-opt this posture of protest, I couldn’t help but think about the broader history of the political gesture. While doing research for a video installation about political rhetoric, I discovered that until George HW Bush’s inauguration in 1989, televised presidential speeches rarely featured dramatic hand movements. How did our politicians find polished rhetorical gestures from minimal movements, to posing as activists?
Mr. Trump’s raised fist is the latest chapter in the saga of the political gesture. A clenched fist, the signal to start a “people’s fight”, asserts that one is victimized by the powers that be.
In America, the gesture is almost synonymous with the Black Panthers, whose fists stood against racial injustice and white supremacy. Often accompanied by the cry, “Power to the people”, it was a call to arms by the oppressed, an expression of rebellion and defiance.
Black American athletes Tommy Smith and John Carlos attracted renewed global attention when they raised their arms during the medal ceremony at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City.
A similar symbolic fist has been deployed by the Black Lives Matter movement.
But the raised fist of resistance and rebellion has a long history. One of the earliest examples can be found in Honoré Daumier’s mid-19th century painting “The Rising,” which depicts the passion of French revolutionaries.
We can trace its rise through the proto-Soviet rebels depicted in Sergei Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin” …
… for communists and anti-fascists throughout Europe during the 1920s and 30s, whose raised fists were in sharp contrast to the open-palmed salute used by Nazis and other fascists.
Labor unions, like the industrial workers of the world, rallied in solidarity around the fist …
… and both women’s movements and pride activists have also raised their fists in protest.
July 13 was far from the first time Mr. Trump raised his fist; He used it frequently during his first presidential campaign. Appropriation is part and parcel of his brand of right-wing democracy – with it, he claims kinship with the working class despite being born and living in tremendous wealth.
In this, Mr. Trump followed the New Right movement of the 1970s, led by Washington insiders, who cast themselves as outside agitators to appeal to working-class white Americans. Mr. Trump’s inauguration day punch line was the claim that he was an underdog who had conquered the system. But the president is nothing if not the embodiment of the power of the system.
On January 6, 2021, when Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri raised his fist in solidarity with Trump supporters outside the Capitol, it was clear that the raised fist had been torn from its roots. It has become a floating signifier – a play suitable for use on both the left and the right in America. But when did rhetorical gestures enter the visual vocabulary of contemporary politicians in the first place?
For 14 years, my multimedia performance and video art has focused on how performing arts techniques are used by politicians and business executives to enhance the effectiveness of their words and gestures.
In 2012, while developing “The Digital Face,” I scored recordings of presidents giving official addresses and speeches, from George HW Bush’s 1990 State of the Union address to Barack Obama’s 2012 State of the Union address and video installation. I made a surprising discovery: Before 1990, gestures were often absent from major official state speeches.
Instead, I found, it was common for politicians to use their hands clearly in debates but not in broadcast speeches. Like early newscasters, politicians once again depended on paper scripts and perhaps did not want to draw attention to the fact that they were reading their lines.
Even Ronald Reagan, the nation’s first Hollywood president, rarely moved his hands during speeches. Even after teleprompters began to be used in the mid-20th century, static hands and close-up camera framing were conventions of formal speeches by Mr. Reagan and his predecessors.
It took decades for politicians to fully utilize the teleprompter to facilitate more natural performances. Mr. Bush, in his 1990 State of the Union speech, was the first president I met to actively gesture in a televised address. After Mr. Reagan, many saw him as depressed and uninspired, so he used his hand to influence and persuade. His successors generally avoided the occasional pauses taken during broadcast speeches to sip water or scratch their noses, but they adopted his use of gestures.
When I watched President Obama’s 2012 State of the Union address, I was struck by the orderly and meticulous structure of his hand movements. By contrast, Mr. Trump enjoys being unscripted and unpolished, in keeping with his reality TV training. Along with his inflammatory and bombastic television persona, he has developed an improvisational instinct that makes him a formidable performer.
As a bloodied Mr. Trump raised his fist in the face of death, I thought (echoing Karl Marx): History repeats itself, first as a tragedy, second as a farce. But it’s no longer easy to tell which fists are tragic and which are ridiculous. Who does not control the symbols of resistance?
It seems that anyone, no matter that person’s power and privilege, can identify as a revolutionary these days. But I believe we still have to distinguish between authentic and proper performances, those who work in solidarity with the people, and those who only pretend.
Liz Magic Lesser is a visual artist and faculty member at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Credits from top: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images; Stephen Shames/Steve Kasher Gallery; Bateman/Getty Images; Spencer Platt/Getty Images; The ART Collection/Alamy; Mosfilm; Gamma-Keystone/Getty Images; Files Planet News/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Hulton Archive/Getty Images; Bromberger Hoover Photography/Getty Images; Damon Winter/The New York Times; By Francis Chung/POLITICO, Associated Press; University of Virginia Miller Center
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