To reiterate, this section of the essay is concerned with how anti-fascist artworks from the past are meaningful to a casual observer from the 21st Century. And my first choice is, Who Reads Fake News Becomes Blind and Deaf. Away with the Stupid Bandages!.
Rather than thinking of meaning as a fixed set of statements encoded by various visual elements, let’s think rather, of meaning making as a fluid and dynamic process that takes place over time—even if it is but fractions of a second. A process which is guided by attention and by the relevance of the meaning, as it emerges, to the existing knowledge and interests of the viewer. I could simply say that what this artwork means to me is that, ‘for their readers, newspapers obscure many facts about the world while at the same time permitting only partial truths and outright lies’. But the artwork is of course so much more than what we might call this headline meaning. And the richness, the subtleties, and the inferences derived from this image, I am arguing here, is yes, dependent on the visual prompts that Heartfield provides but is crucially the product of our own processes of meaning making of which we are barely consciously aware. Furthermore, this meaning making is not like a manufacturing process where different elements are combined until one shiny new, self-contained, unchanging, finished object is completed; it is more like the connections made in the operation of an electric circuit for a light. The light bulb is the thing that we might attend to but this depends on all the wiring and electrical connections hidden from view. And the light that emanates is always provisional; if the current reduces the light dims, and if the wiring is changed maybe a different bulb illuminates, or multiple bulbs, some brighter, some dimmer. The point is that the connections that we make in arriving at a meaning remain and need to be maintained once the meaning that emerges becomes reasonably stable. And, if momentarily lost, these connections can be re-activated as we contemplate an artwork and the different meanings that emerge from it. This web of connections, associations, emotions, inferences, imaginings that underpin this headline meaning provide an aura of depth, richness, and feeling.
In an attempt to account for this web of connections it seems sensible therefore, to work through the kinds of processes that might have led to the formation of meaning that emerges from an artwork like Who Reads Fake News… Furthermore, by interrogating the process through which meanings emerge we might be able to analyse, at every stage, whether the prompts provided lead to conceptual framings and inferences which are reasonable and fair. At the risk of a metaphor overload this is a little like working through the layers of an onion—or cabbage (especially since the accompanying text in the artwork refers to a cabbage head). And the brain has cortical layers which gives this metaphor some resonance. Although I do not mean to suggest that the order in which I address these meanings correspond to the pathway through these cortical layers and to different areas of the brain.
Perhaps the very first impression that Who Reads Fake News… evokes is one of atmosphere1; there is a quality that does not only come from an understanding of the subject depicted, but from our first impression of the image as a whole. It is quite dark, and monochromatic, and this generates an emotional response in that it feels quite sombre and threatening. Note that these are, to begin with at least, felt qualities, rather than just qualities, because these felt qualities are more like instinctual first impressions which may well be misconceived. Moreover, it is difficult to pin down exactly why these qualities are felt, although it seems like a response to the image as a whole rather than based on a more exhaustive analysis of the different parts of which it is made. I imagine that these, almost instantaneous, impressions where very useful to our evolutionary ancestors; when it might well be advantageous to come to a quick sense of whether that dark area beneath the trees is safe or threatening, for example?
Another swift realisation is that this is not a contemporary design but one from history, and that this historical image is authentic—in that it is not, for example, an AI version of an invented artwork from the 20th Century. Yet at the same time it also feels inauthentic—in that it registers as being contrived by the maker of the image. Here, the wrapping of the newspapers around the head of the victim is made-up, it seems unlikely that there is a real person who has newspapers wrapped around their head—unless this was arranged expressly for the making of the image.
From the dark and sombre atmosphere evoked by the artwork, we can make associations to the dark and sombre times to which it belongs. Looking back from the vantage point of the 21st century this sombre atmosphere seems justified, knowing as we do about the millions that were to die in WW2. But it is worth reflecting that in 1930, at the time at which it was made, the very newspapers depicted in the artwork were presumably presenting a very different and more positive impression with regard to the contemporary context.
Moving on from these impressions about the image as a whole, there is then the question of what objects are depicted within it. There are of course newspapers and a person. And we could simply think that the image depicts an individual person, but it seems clear, as we work on the possible meanings that the image can evoke, that we can think of the individual depicted standing (metonymically) for all readers of newspapers, or at least, the readers of the newspapers presented. Similarly, the newspapers featured seem not to be just those particular issues of the papers, or even all the issues of the two titles shown, but of all newspapers of a certain kind (presumably those supporting national socialism). Consequently, we might start in our meaning-making process, by provisionally speculating that the image relates to all readers of such newspapers and all newspapers of this kind. Then, once a reasonably stable set of meanings for the artwork emerge we might—retrospectively return to these provisional speculations with more confidence. So long, that is, that our assumptions about all readers and all newspapers concur with the stable meanings that have subsequently emerged.
The meaning potential of the artwork, involves more than just working out what objects are depicted but also how the objects are arranged, rendered, framed, and so forth. The question of how the objects in the image are arranged and depicted provide cues for not only reasoning about what the relations are between the objects, but also, how this depiction and arrangement compares with those in other images that we are familiar with. In terms of composition the artwork is a conventional portrait2, with the subject centred in the frame in front of a nondescript background. But there is a clash, in that the subject’s features—usually the important element in a portrait—are completely obscured by newspapers. This clash is very evocative of surrealism; the work of Magritte for example (see The Lovers or The Son of Man). The effect, in relation to Who Reads Fake News, is anxiety inducing—it is strange and does not feel like a pleasant experience for the man—but it also provides a prompt for further reflection and reasoning. Why is this man’s head shrouded in newspapers? And what is this experience like?
Next, there is the manner in which the newspapers are wrapped around the head. This does not seem to be an inadvertent gust of wind that has temporarily pinned the newspapers to the man’s face. Instead they seem more like bandages applied to a seriously injured soldier or burn victim, or perhaps for the 21st Century viewer, reminiscent of cinematic depictions of facial occlusions such as in Alien or The Mask. But what again makes this image strange, is the lack of context and activity; the man is not in a hospital bed for example, or in a sci-fi movie, and is not attempting to rip the papers from his mouth and eyes. There is a passive acceptance of the situation which hints at normality, which again is disconcerting.
Having considered the objects represented and the way they are presented we can now turn to what these objects might mean through association. We may now become aware that there are metaphors at work here. Newspapers are bandages seems to be a fairly obvious one. But this alone does not sufficiently capture the entirety of the meanings and emotions the artwork evokes. The focus of the poster is on the experience of the victim whose head is wrapped in newspapers, this is the strange thing that we are trying to understand, not simply that newspapers are like bandages, which when wrapped around the head, limit sensory experience. The meaning that emerges is more than this, it is that a reader’s understanding is restricted by the newspaper that they read by obscuring everything that is not presented by the newspaper. This understanding is an implicature, in that it is more than just finding concepts for the objects represented in Who Reads Fake News…, it is about reasoning with these found concepts to arrive at meanings about what we think is happening in the image. This idea of what is happening in the image—that the reader of the newspaper is having their understanding limited by what the newspapers disseminate—is not straightforward. In reality a paper wrapped around a head in this way would obscure pretty well everything, not only the outside world but probably all of what is presented by the newspaper itself. So we are not just literally interpreting what is happening in the image, we are engaging in reasoning that provides a scenario that has relevance to something—in this case the political climate of the time. And this scenario is strange; we imagine being blindfolded by newspapers while at the same time being able to read the newspapers. A contradiction that may be resolved by the conclusion that it is the ideas in the newspapers, rather than the newspapers themselves, which is the things that are blinding us.
We might try to formulate a metaphor that takes account of this focus, perhaps, the limited perception of a person swathed in bandages is the limited understanding of a person who is informed by newspapers. And this is an example of a deeper conceptual metaphor, seeing is understanding, where seeing in one term of the metaphor is mapped to understanding in the second term of the metaphor.
What are the new meanings that emerge through reasoning rather than through simply recognising the various objects depicted in the artwork? There is the idea that the newspapers—and in today’s world, social media—do not just bring one’s attention to facts, arguments, and ideas, but block us from seeing and hearing the world that exists beyond them, thereby contributing to the formation of echo chambers. Furthermore, we might speculate that newspapers and social media can present us with misinformation and/or disinformation that deceives us into believing things that may well be falsehoods.
But what about the evidential status of the artwork itself? Is it presenting us with facts or opinion? As discussed above, the use of photo-montage and the sense of contrivance evoked by the artwork suggest that this is not intended as a literal depiction of reality—there is not literally a person out there in the world with his head bandaged in newspapers. This is not photographic evidence of an event therefore, yet there is just enough to infer that the artwork alludes to something that is happening contemporaneously, because of the use of the newspapers of the day. This leads to the inference that the image is not real, but though manufactured, perhaps does refer to things that are really happening. It is making a claim about a state of affairs in other words, a state of affairs in which people are isolated from the truth. This is polemical, and in turn leads to the idea that the artwork is produced by someone—someone who has political views either in accord, or opposed, to our own. Consequently, I would argue, the artwork is not deceptive, you may disagree with the inferences that follow from it, but the artwork is openly constructed to suggest an imagined reality, it is not presented as reality.
It is worth repeating that I do not mean to suggest that the casual viewer would consciously and meticulously work through all the stages of this reasoning before coming to conclusions about what this artwork means. There is though, the suggestion that a great deal of this work occurs automatically, in background cognition, within a few moments of engagement. The artwork provides potential for these inferences to be made, but it does not simply deliver these headline meanings to us. And until I took time to reflect on the meanings that came out of this process, I was only dimly aware of some of steps in this thought process. The argument is however, that for us to be able to arrive at these headline meanings described above, we must work through at least some of these stages unconsciously.
By describing this imagined meaning making process in some depth, I have tried to show the complexity involved in the interpretation of Heartfield’s artwork. It makes a claim about the nature of lived experience in the age of mass media, but does so openly, in a way that I would argue opens up debate and questioning. Although part of a greater goal-orientated, agenda driven project, seemingly linked to an ideology, and leveraging fear and anxiety, it is not propaganda therefore, since it openly calls for critical reflection and judgment. As such, Who Reads Fake News… provides useful insights into how we might characterise our experiencing of media in the 21st century. There are still right leaning newspapers of course, but there is also television, and perhaps more concerningly, social media, with its algorithmic, and individually curated content. This does not only have the capacity to disseminate misinformation and disinformation but also to suck out the oxygen from critical discourse through the domination of our attention.
1 More precisely this can be characterised as qualia or felt qualities (see Johnson, 2007, 70)
2 A portrait is a kind of representation, a genre, or cultural frame in other words.