"FEDERICO SOLMI’S MARCH oF FOLLY"
by Eleanor Heartney
2020
“The trappings and impact of power deceive us, endowing the possessors with a quality larger than life. Shorn of his tremendous curled peruke, high heels and ermine, the Sun King was a man subject to misjudgment, error and impulse – like you and me.”
Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly
Today questions about the nature of history are threatening to tear the polity apart. Angry dissenters unceremoniously topple statues of once revered figures, from Robert E. Lee and Christopher Columbus to Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. Once settled “truths” are thrown into question. One side sees the Founding Fathers as the brilliant architects of a brilliant Constitution while another regards them as hypocritical slaveholders whose allegiance to the notion that “all men are created equal” did not extend to their own property. Debate rages over whether the second Monday in October should be celebrated as Columbus Day or Indigenous People’s Day. Historians argue about whether the country was born in 1776 with the signing of the Declaration of Independence or in 1619 when the first African slaves were brought to our shores.
Is history a record of the triumphs of the winners? Is it a mirror of contemporary passions gussied up with period costumes? Is it an instrument of societal self-flattery? Is it a weapon to be hurled against one’s adversaries? Or is it, in Barbara Tuchman’s memorable phrase, just an unending “March of Folly” perpetrated by individuals and groups who ought to have known better but didn’t?
Our difficulties in resolving these questions stem from the slippery nature of history itself. History, at least as it is invoked in our political discourse, often appears as little more than a collection of myths about who we want to think we are. History, in the more factual sense, reveals less edifying aspects of the story invoked in Fourth of July celebrations. Often it is difficult to reconcile the two. George Washington, the Father of our Country, was a known among Native Americans as The Town Destroyer. Forty-one of the original fifty-six signatories of the Declaration of Independence owned slaves. American Exceptionalism is an ideology that has blinded us to the consequences of expansionism, economic exploitation, and destruction of the environment.
These contradictions could form the basis of a dark account of betrayed ideals and lost illusions. Or they could inspire satire and comedy. Federico Solmi has chosen the second path, using humor and absurdity to illuminate the human frailties that have produced this March of Folly. Inspired by his status as an Italian immigrant to the United States, he has taken a deep dive into the checkered histories of his adopted country and of the larger world. This has yielded a series of still and kinetic works that combine drawing and painting with the visual techniques of video games, 3D animation and virtual reality to bridge the gap between the history we think we know and a fantasy world where humankind’s worst impulses are on full display.
Solmi’s works focus on characters consumed by lust, power and greed. His scenarios are full of excess and take place in such spectacular settings as tickertape parades, military drills, red carpet galas, Papal ceremonies and carnivals. In some works he presents figures several removes from reality. His characters include, for instance, an enthusiastically deceitful Bernie Madoff-type banker named Dick Richman, a future Pope whose sexual obsessions land him in hell, and a 21st century Chinese dictator who takes over the world and brings on Armageddon. Other works offer lurching, maniacally grinning cartoon versions of actual historical figures. These run the gamut from Pharaoh Ramesses II to Donald Trump. Some recent works present assemblies of iconic individuals who have crossed time and space to preen, party and wallow in fame together.
Solmi’s recurring themes are the corrupting effects of the quest for power and the disastrous consequences of the mass media’s ability to manipulate popular sentiment through appeals to our worst instincts. His works spare no one. Infamous historical tyrants and despots like Genghis Khan and Benito Mussolini, more ambiguous figures like Napoleon Bonaparte and Montezuma and generally lauded heroes like George Washington and Socrates join in raucous spectacles of debauchery, greed, and megalomania. Nor does he absolve us, his audience. The sound of roaring crowds accompanying his videos also indict a populace immersed in celebrity worship and consumed with politics as entertainment.
This show presents a selection of recent works. Shown here for the first time is The Bathhouse, a five channel video installation that offers an immersive introduction to Solmi’s dystopian universe. The setting, an elegant villa connected to a Roman Bathhouse, conjures the decadent lifestyles of the aristocracy in the late Roman Empire. The opening scene is inspired by the operatic performances of Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini. An orchestra, its musicians outfitted in Roman togas, produces swelling music for an audience of history’s most famous and infamous characters. Empress Hagios Theodora, Hernan Cortes, Benjamin Franklin and others march down a red carpet wearing sunglasses like modern day film stars. Classically clad servers ply them with drink and food. As they become increasingly inebriated, some guests slosh about in the crystal blue waters of the bath. Conquistadors, Revolutionary War heroes, Renaissance cardinals and Native American chieftains splash about. Other guests dance orgiastically around a platter bearing a giant boar stuffed with apples. The great heroes of history gorge themselves, collapse in drunken stupors and otherwise abandon all inhibitions as scantily clad rope dancers in butterfly costumes float above the scene.
With its fantastically opulent setting and unrestrained hedonism, The Bathhouse emphasizes leaders’ insularity, self-indulgence and insouciance in a world otherwise dominated by yawning inequality. In a similar vein, The Indulgent Fathers is a video painting that shows the Founding Fathers abandoning the straight-laced deportment familiar from high school history books. Instead they careen like drunken sailors in pleasure boats outfitted with bands and lavish banquets. While this work points to the dangers of an uncritical Patriotism, The Great Debauchery evokes the unholy alliance of militarism and jingoism. This monumental painting sets George Washington, Christopher Columbus, Benito Mussolini, Napoleon, and Hernan Cortez prancing on horseback at the head of a military parade before a backdrop of rippling American flags. Several paintings present famous historical figures as celebrities preening for Fox News. The Mastermind is quasi-history textbook in which the conventional story of America’s discovery and settlement becomes an account of the ruthless theft of the land from its original inhabitants. The exhibition also creates a Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality experience, that combines old and new technology. When viewers look through what appears to be a 19th century camera, they are immersed in sounds and colors as the characters in The Great Debauchery come to life.
Solmi’s themes are well suited to the conventions of his pop culture sources. We, as omniscient viewers, seem to weave in and out of grandiose settings as if careening through virtual space via a joystick. The flashy graphics, cartoonish avatars and deliberately awkward gestures produce characters who are puppet-like mannequins enslaved to their basest desires. Meanwhile the videos are presented as repetitive loops that evoke their protagonists’ unbreakable patterns of bad behavior.
But Solmi also draws on the much older tradition of history painting – that now largely discarded genre that dominated the Parisian Salons of the 18th and 19th century. History paintings presented dramatic tableaux depicting stories from classical history, mythology or the Bible and were often meant to be read as allegories for contemporary concerns. In some cases they took up contemporary events directly, romanticizing military adventures or heroicizing political figures and events. Often they constituted a form of political propaganda.
Solmi updates this concept using 21st century technology to transform sermonizing history lessons into farce. The Bathhouse, for instance carries a whiff of the wanton dissolution portrayed in The Romans in their Decadence, Thomas Couture’s 1847 allegorical indictment of France’s post-revolutionary July Monarchy. The Indulgent Fathers grafts Théodore Gericault’s 1818 The Raft of the Medusa onto Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 Washington Crossing the Delaware, creating a comic spectacle in which melodrama and hero-worship devolve into an ignominious charade. In playing fast and loose with the history painting tradition, Solmi joins a handful of other contemporary artists, among them Peter Saul, Robert Colescott and Kent Monkman, who also employ satire and outrageous stereotypes to present counter versions of beloved historical myths.
The melee of our recent Presidential campaign suggests that reality has caught up with Solmi. In the light of the swirling morass of “fake news”, social media disinformation and embrace of the cult of personality, his satirical scenarios seem less and less outrageous. Fact and fiction have never seemed so indistinguishable. But if these works reflect our moment, they also raise an important question. What does it mean to be an American? Solmi’s work suggests a nuanced answer. His unheroic heroes have feet of clay. They are indeed like us in all their failings. He refuses to deny the follies of our precursors and to whitewash the darker aspects of our history. Such, one senses, would be a disservice to the nation’s aspirational ideals. Instead, Solmi suggests that we can’t move forward toward genuine liberty, equality, and democracy until we acknowledge how much these lofty ideas have been sabotaged by greed, fear and desire. In the end, to be American, in Solmi’s universe, is to strive to do better.