Josefina Tommasi. A truck advertising the Che soft drink in Vallegrande, Bolivia.
via NYTimes:
Not just in the hearts of revolutionaries, Marxist insurgents and
rebellious teenagers, but on T-shirts, watches, sneakers, key chains,
cigarette lighters, coffee mugs, wallets, backpacks, mouse pads, beach
towels and condoms. He’s not only been used by politicians like the
Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez,
to promote their own agendas, but he’s also been employed by merchants
to sell air fresheners in Peru, snowboards in Switzerland and wine in
Italy.
The supermodel Gisele Bündchen pranced down a runway in
a Che bikini. A men’s wear company brought out a Che action figure,
complete with fatigues, a beret, a gun and a cigar. And an Australian
company produced a “cherry Guevara” ice cream line, describing the
eating experience like this: “The revolutionary struggle of the
cherries was squashed as they were trapped between two layers of
chocolate. May their memory live on in your mouth!”
As Michael
Casey, the Buenos Aires bureau chief for Dow Jones Newswires, observes
in his fascinating new book, “Che’s Afterlife,” the image of Ernesto Guevara
most frequently used by politicians, demonstrators and merchants alike
is based on the famous 1960 picture of the guerrilla leader taken by
the Cuban photographer Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez, known as Korda. It’s the
familiar, ubiquitous close-up, often rendered in high-contrast blacks
and whites, which features the handsome 31-year-old Argentine-born
revolutionary looking off into the distance as if he had his eyes on
the future, his gaze — described, variously, as pensive, determined,
defiant, meditative or implacable — as difficult, in Mr. Casey’s words,
“to put a finger on” as the Mona Lisa’s smile.
In this bracing
and keenly observed book, Mr. Casey traces how Korda’s photograph
became one of the most widely disseminated images in the world, how Che
went from being a symbol of resistance to the capitalist system to one
of the most marketable and marketed brands around the globe, how the
guerrilla fighter became a logo as recognizable as the Nike swoosh or
McDonald’s golden arches.
Although newspaper and magazine
articles have traversed this ground before, none have done so with the
thoroughness and globe-trotting ardor of “Che’s Afterlife.” Mr. Casey
has written a book that is not only a cultural history of an image, but
also a sociopolitical study of the mechanisms of fame. It is a book
about how ideas travel and mutate in this age of globalization, how
concepts of political ideology have increasingly come to be trumped by
notions of commerce and cool and chic, and how the historical Che
Guevara gave way, post-mortem, to a host of other Ches: St. Che, said
to possess the ability to perform miracles; Chesucristo, a Christ-like
figure revered for his ideals, not his advocacy of violence; an
entrepreneurial Che, promoting the lesson “that individuals should
honestly strive to produce their utmost for the good of all”; and the
Rock ’n’ Roll Che, more representative of youthful
anti-authoritarianism than of any political dogma.
Korda’s famous
photograph of Che was taken in 1960, at a state funeral for victims
killed by an explosion aboard a freighter docked in Havana’s harbor. By
radically cropping the shot, snipping out a palm tree and the profile
of another man, Korda gave the portrait an ageless quality, divorced
from the specifics of time and place.
This abstract element
would be emphasized further in paintings and silk-screen variations on
the picture (like those done in the style of Andy Warhol’s
Marilyn and Mao), which, Mr. Casey notes, stripped the image of its
historical and political roots and created a more mainstream,
accessible Che.
Korda, who died in 2001, Mr. Casey writes,
would not be able to collect royalties on his wildly ubiquitous image
until 1997, when the Castro government signed the Berne Convention for
the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, an international
copyright treaty.
Although Korda’s original photograph was not widely distributed for years, Mr. Casey says, Fidel Castro
began using the image as a branding symbol for Cuba in 1967, months
before Che’s death. It was a clever marketing plan on Mr. Castro’s
part: Che’s denunciations of the Soviet Union made him popular among
“thinkers and artists of the Western European left, many of whom had
lost faith in the Soviet Union,” while his condemnation of imperialism
“sat well with young radical students in the United States and Europe,
who were impatient for societal change and for whom the very word
revolution was inspiring.”
After Che was killed in Bolivia in
October 1967 at 39, at the end of a disastrous guerrilla campaign, his
fame and popularity — as a martyr now — spread even more rapidly around
the world: red and black posters based on Korda’s photograph became
symbols of the resistance movement during the 1968 student protests in
Paris, and they surfaced, too, in America, where the revolutionary was
embraced by both the Black Power movement and by hippies and antiwar
activists.
In its May 17, 1968, issue, Time
magazine observed that the Che legend had given “rise to a cult of
almost religious hero worship among radical intellectuals, workers and
students”: there were “Guevara-style beards” and berets in Italy, the
magazine reported, and “handkerchiefs, sweatshirts and blouses
decorated with his shaggy countenance” in “half a dozen countries” —
all making for “a new source of profits for composers, poster makers
and book publishers.” It was an article that could have easily run some
four decades later, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Che’s
death.
Clearly, it’s not what Che Guevara had in mind when he
declared that “the revolutionary idea should be diffused by means of
appropriate media to the greatest depth possible,” but in becoming one
of the world’s most iconic brand names, Che has achieved an immortality
that even exceeds the predictions of the stranger he meets at the end
of his “Motorcycle Diaries,” who tells him “the spirit of the beehive
speaks through your mouth and motivates your actions.”
Though
anti-Castro Cubans continue to denounce him as a murderer with a cold
capacity for violence, Che is embraced in Latin America and the Middle
East and by antiglobalization protestors as “a die-hard foe of yanqui
imperialism”; in Hong Kong as a symbol of rebellion against the
authoritarianism of the Beijing government; and in the United States by
immigrant activists, demanding “the right to inclusion, to be
considered part of the American Dream.”
For many, Che has
become a generic symbol of the underdog, the idealist, the iconoclast,
the man willing to die for a cause. He has become, as Mr. Casey writes,
“the quintessential postmodern icon” signifying “anything to anyone and
everything to everyone.”
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I don’t envy those who have to redesign the website for a museum – balancing institutional structure and needs with the requirement that it reflect the appropriate aesthetic. Moreover, the process of transitioning a sensibility to the web in itself requires decisions about what the organization represents – a staid, classical collection would justifiably be nervous about embracing an open engagement of the general public.
The Metropolitan Museum, for example, probably won’t be holding a contest on YouTube any time soon. Its website, which looks like it was created by a medium sized corporation in 2002, is staid, muted, and tucked behind a splash screen. The Museum of Modern Art’s website, by contrast, is, well, modern, with a palette and structure that would bore Mies van der Rohe. It’s the Obama of websites – so cool, it’s dull.
Late last night, the Whitney Museum of American Art, known for its modern and contemporary exhibitions and its Biennial, unveiled the latest example from this world. It’s a great improvement over what was there yesterday, though that’s a low hurdle to conquer. Yesterday, the site was a card catalog. Today, it’s a website.
What establishes the Whitney’s new site as a success is not the aesthetic revamping with which, frankly, I’m not impressed. Various elements are laid in a casual grid, anchored by the logo, nice and big, at the top. The navigation is awkward, with elements jumping to the head of the line to show additional options once clicked. The background is either black or white, in order to accommodate a conceptually interesting feature in which it changes when the sun in New York rises or sets. (That would be at 4:41 this afternoon or 6:40 tomorrow morning for those wanting to witness it.) As I said – conceptually interesting. In practice, though, it tends to make the site feel a bit flat, and perusing the collection is negatively impacted by the black background. (White borders would do wonders.)
That’s particularly a shame, because said perusal and its accompanying tools are the real hook to the site. The collection itself is easy to navigate and well indexed. Every page, one notices, has at the bottom a small dot which, when clicked, adds an item to your “custom collection” (assuming you take advantage of the free registration, which you ought to do). This is not unique – the afore-mentioned MoMA site has a similar function – but the Whitney takes it further. When, above, I said every page, I meant every page. In addition to works of art, you can add artists, site elements, upcoming exhibits, even the contact page. Collections are an opportunity to interact with more than the art – you can in essence create your own museum website.
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