This is an installment of Visual Studies, a series that explores how images move through and shape culture.
On July 13, in a “fight or flight” moment, Donald Trump demonstrated himself to be an Olympian performer, making a potent impression by thrusting his fist into the air immediately after an attempt on his life. An iconic image was instantly born.
Watching Mr. Trump co-opt this posture of protest, I couldn’t help thinking about the broader history of political gestures. While doing research for a video installation about political rhetoric, I discovered that there were hardly any dramatic hand movements in televised presidential speeches until George H.W. Bush was inaugurated in 1989. How did our politicians find their way from minimal movement, to polished oratorical gestures, to posing as activists?
Mr. Trump’s raised fist is the latest chapter in the story of a political gesture. Clenching the fist, a signal performed to initiate the “people’s fight,” asserts that one has been victimized by the powers that be.
In America, the gesture is almost synonymous with the Black Panthers, whose raised 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.
The Black American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos brought the fist to renewed global attention when they raised their gloved hands during a medal ceremony at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City.
The same emblematic fist is deployed by the Black Lives Matter movement.
But the raised fist of resistance and rebellion has a long history. One of the earliest examples is found in Honoré Daumier’s mid-19th-century painting “The Uprising,” which depicts the passion of French revolutionaries.
We can trace its rise through the proto-Soviet insurgents pictured in Sergei Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin” …
… to Communists and anti-fascists across Europe during the 1920s and ’30s, whose raised fists were a sharp contrast to the open-palmed salutes 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 deployed the fist in protest.
July 13 was far from the first time Mr. Trump performed the raised fist; he used it frequently during his first presidential campaign. The appropriation is of a piece with his brand of right-wing populism — with it, he professes kinship with the working class despite being born to, and living in, tremendous wealth.
In this, Mr. Trump followed the 1970s New Right Movement, a group led by Washington insiders who portrayed themselves as outside agitators in order to appeal to working-class white Americans. Mr. Trump’s Inauguration Day fist was a claim that he was an underdog who had triumphed over the system. But the president is nothing if not the embodiment of the power of the system.
On Jan. 6, 2021, when Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, raised a fist in solidarity with Trump supporters outside the Capitol, it was clear that the raised fist had been severed from its roots. It has become a floating signifier — fair game for use on both the left and right in America. But when did oratorical 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 maximize the efficiency of their words and gestures.
In 2012, while developing “The Digital Face,” a performance and video installation that juxtaposed gestures from George H.W. Bush’s State of the Union address in 1990 with Barack Obama’s in 2012, I scoured recordings of presidents delivering official addresses and speeches. I made a surprising discovery: Before 1990, gestures were very often absent from major official state speeches.
Instead, I found, it was common for politicians to use their hands expressively in debates but not in broadcast speeches. Like early newscasters, politicians were once more dependent on paper scripts and probably did not want to call attention to the fact that they were reading their lines.
Even Ronald Reagan, the country’s first Hollywood president, rarely moved his hands during speeches. Static hands and close-up camera framing were the conventions of the formal speeches by Mr. Reagan and his predecessors, even after they began using teleprompters in the middle of the 20th century.
It took decades for politicians to make full use of teleprompters to facilitate more naturalistic performances. Mr. Bush, in his 1990 State of the Union speech, was the first president I found to actively gesticulate in a televised address. Many saw him as lackluster and uninspiring after Mr. Reagan, so he used his hands to impress and persuade. His successors would generally avoid the casual pauses he took to sip water or scratch his nose during broadcast speeches, but they adopted his use of gesture.
When I saw President Obama’s 2012 State of the Union address, I was struck by the poised and meticulous composition of his hand movements. By contrast, Mr. Trump seems to revel in being unscripted and unpolished, in keeping with his reality TV training. To accompany his inflammatory and bombastic televised persona, he has cultivated improvisational instincts that make him a formidable performer.
When a blood-spattered Mr. Trump managed to raise 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 farcical. Who gets to wield the symbols of resistance?
It appears that anyone, no matter that person’s power and privilege, can raise a clenched fist and identify as a revolutionary these days. But I believe we must still distinguish between authentic and appropriated performances, between those who work in solidarity with the people and those only who pretend to.
Liz Magic Laser is a visual artist and faculty member of the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Credits from top: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images; Stephen Shames/Steve Kasher Gallery; Bettmann/Getty Images; Spencer Platt/Getty Images; 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; Francis Chung/Politico, via Associated Press; University of Virginia Miller Center
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