TRUMP: THE FIRST YEAR. HOW HAVE ARTISTS RESPONDED TO THE US PRESIDENT’S FIRST 12 MONTHS IN OFFICE?

ANNY SHAW, with additional reporting by JAMES H. MILLER, GABRIELLA ANGELETI and IVY OLESEN

Donald Trump Matthew Cavanaugh/Getty Images

It has been one year since Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 45th president of the United States. In that time, he has presided over a profound degeneration in public life, actively discouraging trust in institutions and belief in the concept of truth, and inciting hatred and division. The art world, a predominantly liberal collective, has reacted with indignation to this degradation of democracy in the US. Many artists profess themselves to be “shocked” and “disgusted” by the new political reality. But beyond these individual expressions of outrage, how has Trump affected the art they are making?

Some say that they have been “paralysed” since Trump took office, finding it hard to work at all. In the past year, Brooklyn-based Fred Tomaselli has “consumed record amounts of news through print, radio, internet, TV, late-night comedy and beyond. It’s a sickness and it’s making me less productive. Trump is the parasite that won’t stop sucking on my brain stem,” he says. Tomaselli first started incorporating pages from the New York Times in his art more than a decade ago, but this source material now has renewed relevance, he says, as the press is “the only institution still holding Trump and his collaborators accountable for their lies”.

Trump is the parasite that won't stop sucking on my brain stem

Many artists say that they now feel impelled to make work that expresses their sense of dread. “I feel as though we must, as individuals, state our dismay before the fascist wave overwhelms us,” the Los Angeles-based artist Jim Shaw says. A series of his black-and-white caricatures of Trump, which depict the president in grossly distorted poses, are on display at Metro Pictures in New York (until 9 January), alongside “Neo- Abstract Expressionist” paintings that show the commander-in-chief “smeared in and out of recognisability”. The work is vicious and very, very funny. “I have no illusions that the power of ridicule in the halls of the coastal elites will have any real-world impact, but it seems that it’s the least I can do,” Shaw says, adding that beyond art-making, those who oppose the president need to ask themselves difficult questions. “Trump is a symptom” who represents a “problem of the culture as a whole”, he says. “All of us progressives will need to do a lot of soul-searching as to how we got to this horrifying juncture, and so quickly.”…………………………..

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