Art and Kitsch in "Severance"
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| Miss Huang (Sarah Bock) with painting of Kier Pardons His Betrayers |
The premise of Severance is that the central characters have consented to a brain implant that splits their work and home lives. At the office they have no memory of their home life, and vice-versa. During the workday Lumon's severed employees, the "innies," occupy a claustrophobic underground floor and cannot remember their pre-severance life. An innie's life is an endless succession of workdays stitched together, with no vacations, sleep, weather, or seasons.
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| Mark S. (Adam Scott) with Kier Taming the Four Tempers |
Severance production designer Jeremy Hindle modeled the look of Lumon's offices on Bell Labs, the industrial think tank designed by Eero Saarinen. Before Silicon Valley was a thing, Bell Labs' scientists invented the digital age.
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| Eero Saarinen's Bell Labs, 1962. Photo: Bell Labs |
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| Kier Taming the Four Tempers |
Nothing at Bell Labs' suburban New Jersey headquarters corresponded to the paintings in Severance. The pictures appropriate styles from Caravaggism to Neoclassicism to Romanticism. One of the first artworks we see finds Kier Eagan in classical costume, thrashing four allegoric figures. The action resembles a Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple, and the composition recalls Rembrandt's The Blinding of Sampson. But the overall sensibility is more Benjamin West: at once overwrought and stultifying.
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| The Youthful Convalescence of Kier |
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| Kier Invites You to Drink of His Water |
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| Frederic Edwin Church, Aurora Borealis, 1865. Smithsonian American Art Museum |
A couple of real pictures appear briefly in Severance. Frederic Edwin Church's Aurora Borealis, a Hudson River School masterpiece, is shown stacked behind another painting in a cart at the Optics and Design department.
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| Lumon Legacy of Joy |
The Perpetuity Wing is Lumon's corporate museum. It includes a period room of Kier Eagan's home, a wax museum of Lumon's CEOs, and the Lumon Legacy of Joy, a rotating display of B&W smiles of people who have allegedly benefited from the company's products. Legacy bears a strong resemblance to Lorna Simpson's 15 Mouths and, more loosely, to Christian Boltanski's installations of Holocaust survivor photos.
So there's a lot of art in Severance. What does it mean? By one theory, the show is a premonition of AI and human obsolescence. Lumon Industries is already a dead mall of empty offices. The Macrodata Refinement department's 4 (or 3) workers occupy a space that must have been intended for dozens of cubicles. The department's work, of sorting numbers based on emotions, is apparently one of the few tasks not yet outsourced to algorithms. Even Lumon's paintings look like they were generated by soulless AI.
Another theory sees Severance as a vision of American fascism. The twist is freedom of choice. For reasons that made sense at the time, each of Lumon's severed employees elected to have the procedure. They discover that elections have consequences.
There is a way of reconciling these theories and the paintings themselves. It is the concept of kitsch, as articulated by critic Clement Greenberg in 1939. Lumon's paintings are just that: They activate a cultural memory of a certain type of "bad" 20th-century art. According to Greenberg, kitsch is the opposite of true art, yet it must imitate serious art to achieve its goals.
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| Arnold Friberg, Abinadi Before King Noah, 1952-1955. (c) by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. |
One comparative for Lumon's paintings is the art of Arnold Friberg (1913-2010). Who? Well, if you're ever cracked open the Book of Mormon, you've probably seen color reproductions of Friberg's work. The artist's history paintings of Mormon scripture were so popular that they became an essential part of the canon. At about the same time that Friberg was creating the Mormon cycle, he also worked for Cecil B. DeMille, creating concept paintings for The Ten Commandments (1956). DeMille liked the unfashionable narrative art of John Martin and Lawrence Alma-Tadema, clear points of departure for Friberg.
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| Uncredited artist, Seven-Headed Beast from The Watchtower |
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| Jon McNaughton, The Masterpiece, 2019 |
There's a similar vibe to the work of MAGA artist Jon McNaughton. He produces allegorical paintings of Donald Trump in an illustrational style similar to the Kier Eagan cycle. The Masterpiece, created in the middle of Trump's first term, finds 45 himself as the artist. He is (inexplicably) uncovering an Impressionist-style painting in a cathedral. Photos of Fred and Mary Trump look on.
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| Trump Digital Trading Cards, Series 2, 2023 |
McNaughton was the Giotto of a MAGA school now best known for AI-generated Trump memes and NFTs. Typical is a digital trading card of Trump in Emanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware, a conception that is even more derivative than it may appear. McNaughton did a Trump crossing the Delaware in 2018, and Mad Magazine did one in 2017.
What Lumon Industries has in common with MAGA, the Mormons, and the Jehovah's Witnesses is an evangelical in-group that finds itself competing for attention with more established belief structures with better-funded propaganda. The in-group feels a need to invent a glorious history, and even an art history. To do that they draw on whatever tools and models are at hand, be it AI, the Counter-Reformation, the Hudson River School, or Hollywood.
That promiscuous appropriation of high and low hews to Greenberg's recipe for kitsch. In the 1939 essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" Greenberg wrote:
"To fill the demand of the new market, a new commodity was devised: ersatz culture, kitsch, destined for those who, insensible to the values of genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide. Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insensibility. It is the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same."
Severance's first season aired in 2022, a year in which concerns about American dictators and artistic computers seemed a lot more distant. The series now resonates in new ways. Kitsch has become the face of authoritarianism and AI—in Greenberg's words, "the epitome of all that that is spurious in the life of our times."
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| Irv and Burt (John Turturro and Christopher Walken) ponder The Courtship of Kier and Imogene, an industrial nocturne indebted to Joseph Wright of Derby |
Comments
Second, if in fact Greenberg was wrong about Pop Art and the culture at large, one can no longer leap to the same conclusion that he did, that "kitsch" is synonymous with "all that is spurious in the life of our times."
On the contrary, Pop Art was quite inventive and subversive. So, were the "found objects" that the surrealists turned into art. In their own way, they were a form of kitsch too. Greenberg conveniently forgot that.
As to the art of Lumon and MAGA, it is important to note that all art involves some degree of "appropriation," not just art labeled as "kitsch" or Pop. What then qualifies as "promiscuous" appropriation? Richard Prince's "portrait" of Ivanka or MAGA art? I do not know the answer to that question. What I do know is that Prince's work does not take itself too seriously and it's not a scam. His works holds its value. On the other hand, MAGA art seems to appeal to bros who want to be taken seriously, so much so that it makes them vulnerable to Trump's scams.
> MAGA artist Jon McNaughton.
Unlike pre-Raphaelite artists, whose style always makes me uneasy, McNaughton is technically not as skilled. So he's both aesthetically and mechanically off. I can never easily figure out why certain realist painters (eg, pre-Raphaelites of the1800s) are creatively ham-handed, while various abstract-artsy types have a nature that's easier to identify. Or the cliche of, "even my kid can do that!"
As for fascism, that's evident in one of the world's major trading partners, the People's Republic of China. Or where so many goods at your local store or on Amazon are labeled "Made in China." The PRC has segued from strict-Communist authoritarianism to today's strict-Fascist authoritarianism.
There's Susan Sontag's definition too. Which I think the first post references in describing Prince's work as non-serious or fun.
In my opinion, Sontag's definition has outlasted Greenberg's in part because it better reflects the more troublesome description of ideology/power that was advanced by Foucault. For Foucault, power could affect bodies both positively and negatively.
As to MAGA art, I would argue that it's too simple to be described as "appropriation." As an aesthetic strategy, "appropriation" involves a certain rhetorical stance. See Craig Owens. That stance is not evident in the MAGA Art. Trump crossing the Delaware is not classical or emblematic enough to rise to the level of appropriation as history painting. I know it goes without saying, McNaughton is no J-L David.