Soccer, Ceramics, Antisemitism, and Semiotics

Giorgos Katidis

Forgiveness. Charles Krafft, 2012

       On March 17th (the 70th anniversary of the deportation of Greek Jews to Auschwitz), Giorgos Katidis, a midfielder for the Greek soccer team AEK Athens, scored a goal. In celebration, he raised his arm in a Nazi salute. He claimed to be unaware of the significance of the gesture. On February 13th, The Stranger's Jen Graves published an article exposing the artist Charles Krafft as a white nationalist with very disturbing views on the history of World War II. This essay will compare these two events and explore their implications for contemporary art production.

The September 1973 cover of the National Lampoon

        I very clearly recall my own first encounter with Nazi iconography. I was about to go into the third grade. On a visit with my grandparents in Greenville, SC, I stayed in my uncle's childhood bedroom. I  rummaged through his old desk, which seemed to have been left untouched since he left home for college. Under some pooka shells (no lie) and a high school yearbook I found the September 1973 issue of the National Lampoon.

        As soon as I touched the tattered but still glossy cover, I was overcome with a frisson of forbidden knowledge. The advertising was geared towards an early 70's student lifestyle that I had been completely unaware of. The comics in the back were frank and jolly in their depiction of sex and drugs, two of the most taboo subjects in my life at the time. The Nazi iconography was included in a parody of LIFE magazine. I didn't really know what Nazis, a parody or LIFE magazine were, but I knew that the symmetrical red-white-and-black designs looked really cool.

My first encounter with the symbols of the Third Reich

          Swastikas and stormtroopers started appearing in my drawings regularly, until I turned in an assignment with a bucket-helmeted Nazi drawn on it to my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Walker. She was not a "nice" teacher, and she made it abundantly clear to me that this was not appropriate. I remember apologizing to her in tears.

He looks pretty clueless here

         Perhaps the AEK midfielder made a similar mistake. However, Greece does have a burgeoning neo-fascist movement, and he did choose a pretty fucked up date for his stunt. He has claimed via Twitter that he was unaware that the salute was connected to fascism. He is twenty years old, so perhaps he is telling the truth. I can tell you from my experience as a community college instructor that many twenty-year-olds refer to the entire course of human history from the discovery of fire to  the break-up of Destiny's Child as "the early 80's", so it is possible.
        An analysis of Katidis' tatoos can perhaps give us a clue to his philosophy. The body art would not look out of place on any young urbanite, although it would perhaps draw snickers from the Bushwick crowd.

           These are not curated boutique tattoos, but the kind of stuff folks come home from Ocean City with. He seems to have some vaguely Christian stuff on his forearms, and some kind of anime or bande dessinee inspired image of people making out on his left bicep. He has two tats written in English that look like the flash was made on Microsoft Word. One says, "Never Give Up" and the other is 50 Cent's motto, "Get Rich or Die Tryin'". There doesn't seem to be any fascist or nationalist symbology. So, probably not a Nazi, just dumb.
            Dumb kid or not, Katidis' pastiche of tattoos and willingness to use a Nazi salute without any political motivation point to a greater truth about the nature of semiotics in contemporary art and society. Katidis appears to have selected his tattoos purely on an aesthetic basis, without any regard to the meanings attached to their symbols. He seems to be unaware of any cognitive dissonance created by a Christian tattoo and one of 50 Cent's acquisitive mantra on the same body, and perhaps there is none. The inclusion of Charles Krafft's work in many prominent public collections seems to be a product of a similar relationship with semiotics.

Anselm Kiefer. Besetzungen (Occupations), 1969.

 

Josef Beuys. Aktion, 1964.

         The photos of Katidis saluting reminded me of Anselm Kiefer's early work Occupations from 1969. In these works, Kiefer (then only 24, not much older than Katidis) used the same stiff-armed salute, posing for photos in European capitals and on rocky seashores. However, he was well aware of the history and meaning of the gesture. The meaning attached to the gesture was in fact the fulcrum of his artistic project. He submitted photographs of his performance for his degree show, and the reaction from faculty and colleagues was similar to the stir caused by Katidis. Kiefer chose the provocative gesture to shock German viewers out of their complacency and denial of the Nazi past, an artistic approach being already being developed by fellow Germans Josef Beuys and Gerhard Richter.

Gerhard Richter. Uncle Rudi, 1965.

Charles Krafft. Hitler-Idaho Teapot, 2003

              One of the best instructors I had in grad school told us that it was important to understand Nazism as an aesthetic movement rather than a political one. Hitler was an artist and voracious collector, so perhaps it makes sense that artists would be required to exorcise him. The work of Charles Krafft seemed to be operating in a similar way, although with the earnestness and risk of Kiefer saluting in drag or Richter's family portraits replaced with an avowedly (before the Stranger article, at least) ironic humorousness which perhaps should have rang alarm bells.
          The point of this essay is not to condemn Katidis, Krafft, or Krafft's collectors on moral grounds, but to examine the separate events for clues to nature of semiotics in contemporary art and society. One of Baudrillard's central theses is that the postmodern condition is defined by the precession of simulacra, that signs have become unmoored from and replaced the reality which they originally represented. The "use-value" has been replaced by the "exchange-value". The iconography of Nazism is no longer tied to the reality of Nazism.
       If this is the case, then both Katidis and Krafft's collectors are merely acquiring signs based on their "exchange-value" instead of making political statements. What is the "exchange-value" of Nazi imagery? According to Baudrillard "it's all capital", but what kind? We could perhaps research the prices of Katidis' tattoos, the value of his professional contract, or the prices Krafft received for his work. This purely material analysis seems incomplete, somehow. Is the real "exchange-value" of a swastika attention and notoriety rather than money? Both Katidis and Krafft have been catapulted from a regional fame to the front pages of the Internet in short order. There is something of Warhol's "fifteen minutes of fame" in these mercurial ascents.
         There has been much talk of the death of irony in the decade since September 11th. However, the death of irony does not necessarily mean a return to earnestness. The ironic use of a sign requires you to fully understand its meaning in order to create the cognitive dissonance required of irony. Is this better or worse than Katidis' blithe ignorance or Krafft's apparently earnest use of Nazi imagery?