THE SPECTACULAR STATEFASCISM AND THE MODERN IMAGINATIONTHE SPECTACULAR STATE1 February - 24 March 1995@ GALLERY, ARTIST RUN CENTRE, FIRST STREET STUDIO, FOTO*BASE GALLERY, GALLERY SANSAIR, IRIS GALLERY, MONTGOMERY FINE ARTS, PACIFIC CINEMATHEQUE PACIFIQUE, PITT GALLERY, SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY, TECK GALLERY, VANCOUVER HOLOCAUST SOCIETY CENTRE, VIDEO IN, AND WEB SITE, Vancouver, B.C., CanadaIn his allegorical narrative "The Grand Inquisitor" from The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky warns prophetically against the rise of authoritarian ideologies and regimes. Set against the backdrop of the Spanish Inquisition, the confrontation unfolds between the Cardinal -- The Grand Inquisitor -- and Christ, his prisoner. Speaking out against fifteen hundred years of human suffering bought at the price of freedom to choose between good and evil, the Inquisitor taunts Christ to bear the burden of this suffering. Humanity would rather submit its will to authority -- one that would ultimately set a destructive course, than have its freedom. Says the Inquisitor, "We have taken the sword of Caesar, and in taking it, of course, have rejected Thee and followed him. Oh, ages are yet to come of the confusion of free thought, of their science and cannibalism. For having begun to build their tower of Babel without us, they will end, of course, with cannibalism."Marking the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Holocaust, the Basic Research Division of Basic Inquiry presented a two-month long public forum, The Spectacular State - Fascism and the Modern Imagination, in Vancouver, B.C. The forum had been planned for nearly two years. Ambitious in scope and depth, The Spectacular State sought to contextualize the current social and political climate of rightist developments across the globe in light of European fascist movements in the Thirties. Echoeing the warnings from Dostoevsky's "The Grand Inquisitor," the forum attempted to induce reflection upon existing socio-political conditions, and past lessons from history.Comprising a series of roundtables, panel discussions, and lectures The Spectacular State also incorporated film and video screenings, a cabaret, art exhibitions, and encouraged interactive participation through a World Wide Web "site" on the Internet. Considering the labyrinthine scale of information to process, and my inability to attend most of the events, I opted to chart the forum's progress via a remote platform and eavesdrop through the World Wide Web. In the weeks that followed since February, I have accessed a substantial wealth of material from the Internet, especially through the "link" sites available on The Spectacular State's Home Page.The relevance of this forum is far reaching. "Why Look at Fascism Now?" from the program's opening statement addresses not only a need to recount the origins of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, but how parallels can be found in the contemporary fractitious political landscape. As author Saul Friedlander observes in his analysis, "Reflections on Nazism," the terror invoked by Nazism precipitated from a shifting dichotomy between chaos and harmony. He writes: "Submission nourishes fury, fury clears its conscience in the submission. To these opposing needs, Nazism -- in the constant duality of its representations -- offers an outlet; in fact, Nazism found itself to be the expression of these opposing needs."On a recent visit to Vancouver in March, I attended The Spectacular State closing party at the @ Gallery. Mark Grady's piece, The Great Schism, featured in the @ Gallery, suggests the tension of this conflicting duality. The image is a computer-generated scan of the fractured remains of a German flak-tower, or anti-aircraft gun platform tower, in Berlin. After the war in 1947, when the Allies worked to demilitarize Berlin, the Soviets tried to remove this flak-tower in their sector of the city. When they blew out the structure's foundation, it divided in half. Grady comments that the image metaphorically represents the schism that divided Germany from Europe, and the ostensible paganism of the Nazis from Christianity.Other works featured in the @ Gallery space comment on other aspects of this polarity. A large triptych entitled Ordnung Hilft Haushalten ("Order helps keep a good house") by Ingrid Mayrhofer, expresses the antagonism between order and violence. The three panels, too large for the low-ceiling intimacy of the salon-like setting of the gallery, contain computer-generated text and image-scans from news articles and photographs. Central to the piece, the German proverb evidences an obsessiveness for order, and conncect ethnocentric myths of German superiority with xenophobic violence. The first panel contains a passage from an article about the recent anti-Turkish immigrant backlash in Germany, while the opposing third panel presents a detail from an article about rising violent crime -- a by-product of an unstable economy -- in Sao Paolo, Brazil. The subtext offered in the piece is rooted in a post-Marxist critique of capitalism; industrialized nations achieve economic security and progress at the expense of people from the developing world -- at home and abroad.If both these works express the antagonistic prejudices of Germany, in either wartime or postwar guises, Maedchen in Uniform and Night and Fog, two films screened during The Spectacular State's film and video program, reveal the darkness contained therein. Maedchen in Uniform, a 1931 German film by Leontine Sagan screened at Simon Fraser University, Harbour Centre, is an eerie premonition of the spectre of authoritarianism at the end of Weimar Germany. Adapted from the stage, this classic lesbian love story unfolds with a young girl's budding romance with her compassionate teacher in a boarding school for girls. When the girl's affection becomes public, the fear of scandal it might bring to the school's reputation incurs the wrath of the school headmistress, who runs the school with an iron fist. From the harsh shadowy and angular interior shots, which set a disturbing tone, to the girls' striped uniforms, evocative of the uniformed attire the Jews wore in concentration camps, the film prefigures the shape of things to come.Alain Resnais' short film Night and Fog, presented at the Pacific Cinematheque Pacifique, explores the mechanics of the Holocaust and the memory of it ten years later. Made in 1955, Resnais takes on the daunting task to sift through the process of Hitler's Final Solution. Curiously absent is any reference to the extermination of Jews in particular; Resnais' reflective film combines old film clips of Jews and others, transported by rail to their horrible destinies at various concentration camps, with contemporary footage of Auschwitz-Birkenau. As these images of the deportation of Jews roll across the screen, the film takes for its title a passage from Resnais' somber eulogy: "...Death makes his first pick...chooses again in the night and fog...." Resnais threads the visual contrast together in his narration, commenting on the grim serenity at Auschwitz-Birkenau in the fifties, and the memories unveiled behind the camp's walls. Finally, by film's end, he inveighs against "those who pretend this all happened at a certain time and in a certain place...those who refuse to look around them, deaf to the endless cry."In its examination of contemporary developments, The Spectacular State also identifies several existing trends splintered from the sources of fascism. These include revisionist history, racist and anti-immigrant violence, xenophobia, homophobia, eugenics, militarism, nationalism, and religious fundamentalism. Many of these issues were subjects explored in panel discussions, lectures, and in the art exhibitions. They were also points of discussion taken up between individuals posting messages on the forum's Web-site. The forum's structure was set up to allow as much individual participation as possible (many of the events offered free admission); I found it to be an engaging and creative model for testing the value of democracy.But despite all of this, I began to think of the allegorical narrative from Dostoevsky's "The Grand Inquisitor" and Alain Resnais' closing comments from Night and Fog. As I walked through central Vancouver late on a March afternoon, I noticed a small group of Kurdish residents protesting vocally on steps outside the Vancouver Art Gallery. Their protest against the Turkish government's attacks on civilian Kurds in an effort to crush the Kurdish separatist movement in southeastern Turkey seemed lost on the shoppers walking by along Robson Street. If anyone bothered to listen, the events organized for The Spectacular State, like this small sidewalk protest, were efforts made to overcome "the endless cry" that echoed from the Holocaust.../img/great_schism.jpg../img/maedchen-uniform.jpg../img/nacht.jpg> "The Great Schism" by artist Mark Grady; scenes from "Maedchen in Uniform" (1931) and "Nuit et brouillard" (1955).