On the occasion of The Block’s presentation of The Great Farce, exhibition curator Janet Dees, sat down with artist Federico Solmi to discuss the creation and context of his work.

What inspired you to make The Great Farce?

I started working on this piece in 2016. When I came to America from Italy in 1999, I wanted to know more about this country, how this country became a great power, the greatest democracy. I started to dig into its history as a way of feeling comfortable here, in the place where I would spend the most important years of my life. I read several books suggested by mentors and friends. I went to a lot of museums, I visited libraries, and I researched deeply how American artists such as Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence, and Robert Colescott dealt with the delicate theme of history.

I read a book by James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (1995), which introduced me to the concept of the “Disneyfication” of history. Through comparing twelve different American history textbooks, Loewen arugued that students were told a Eurocentric view of history with many omissions. I was captured by the idea that a narrative could transform a mediocre historical figure into a hero. I learned how many American history textbooks at the time Loewen was writing in the 1990s systematically denied and diminished minoritity perspectives.

I was also influenced by several other books I read over the course of 2016–17, including Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980); Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776); The American Revolution by Gordon Wood (1982); The War that Forged A Nation (2015) by James McPherson; Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of A Continent (1973) by Eduardo Galeano; Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988) by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman; Understanding Power: The Essential Chomsky (2002) as well as Don Quixote (1605/1615) by Miguel de Cervantes.

I decided to mix historical material with different figures—great heroes that are sometimes villains. I did a comparison with the creation of celebrities in contemporary society. There is a sense of spectacle, a mix of the circus and capitalism. Reality becomes like an amusement park—psychedelic and artificial. I thought that the best way to narrate history was through a contemporary lens—to create a sort of reenactment of history as surreal and absurd, where there is no distinction between truth and myth.

I wanted to created an artwork that disrupted the traditional way in which American history had been narrated. With The Great Farce my goal was to subvert those official narrative accounts of history. I simply wanted to remove the sugar-coated idea of American history and expose—through the use of satire and grotesque imagery—some of the cruelty, violence, injustice, and abuse that occurred to create this nation.

The Great Farce includes a cast of characters referencing different geographies and moments in history. What informed your decisions about which characters would populate this world?

Larry Ossei-Mensah wrote an essay in which he talks about this aspect of my work. He states: “The subjects featured in Solmi’s work are placed within a time continuum of leaders who have been deified despite their historic atrocities, lack of empathy, and fallibility. It is this fallibility—along with the hypocrisy and dubious legacies that society, historians, and journalist tend to overlook—that Solmi focuses on in his work as he takes the innocuous and magnifies it to monumental proportions . . . . By collapsing time and geography in his works, Solmi powerfully underscores the ways in which state power, colonialism, and imperialism have a symbiotic relationship to capitalist ambitions.”[i]

Unfortunately, humanity is cursed—not by the idea of achieving great goals but the idea of achieving great riches and achieving this through wars and the acquisition of more territory. This is the only way that I can explain the fact that I put Napoleon next to George Washington. There’s definitely a pattern. I saw the need to address and attack this recurrent pattern through my art, with what I’m capable of doing. By satirizing and transforming these people into clownish puppet-like representations, you diminish their importance.

I did specific research into the idea of the “founding fathers.” I looked at the figures of Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and James Monroe, and how they were represented in paintings by artists such as John Trumbull, Charles Wilson Peale, Gilbert Stuart, and John Singleton Copley. I simply wanted to challenge the myth of the benevolent images of the founding fathers. They were always portrayed beautifully and aristocratically, but unfortunately some of them were slave owners. I also referenced portrayals in popular culture items like coloring books, children’s toys, films, and video games. These are still vehicles that can disseminate stereotypical depictions of Indigenous peoples and whitewash history.

Over the years you have developed an artistic style that is unique while at the same time being in dialogue with many art historical traditions and technological developments. What influences informed the aesthetic of The Great Farce?

I have always been fascinated by artists with a unique vision and aesthetic. Not only visual artists but also writers, filmmakers, and poets. There is a long legacy of artists who have used satire as a weapon to critique society and conventional morality: Francisco Goya, James Ensor, Honoré Daumier, George Grosz, Marcel Duchamp, Jonathan Swift, George Orwell, David Foster Wallace, Aldous Huxley, Federico Fellini, and Stanley Kubrick. The artists I have always admired were disruptors, anarchists, and rebels who never accepted limitations imposed by fashion or society.

I became interested in history painting after creating a series of narrative video paintings depicting some of the most contradictory events in American history such as the “discovery “of America by Christopher Columbus, which was also a myth I inherited as an Italian. One important reference for me was the book Plains Indian Drawings 1865–1935: Pages from A Visual History (1996) by Janet Berlo. I was also influenced by the work of several African American artists, including Robert Colescott, Kerry James Marshall, and Jacob Lawrence, who were re-interpreting history painting. Robert Colescott’s bold interpretation of American history painting opened the road for many artists to express harsh criticism toward Eurocentric accounts of American history. Jacob Lawrence was so interesting to me because instead of creating a grandiose history painting, he created a series of storyboards, combining images and text. As a young artist I wanted to tell stories. Lawrence was one of first artists I looked to in the beginning, and there actually is a series of storyboards for The Great Farce.

German Expressionism in film was another big influence. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and the film The Man Who Laughs (1928) were particularly strong influences, as well as the movies of Fritz Lang, like Metropolis (1927). These filmmakers understood that by distorting the perspective in the landscape and by disturbing the physiognomy of the characters you would elicit an alarming reaction in the viewer. Behind this distortion was the idea that by disturbing a viewer—yes, you may have a viewer who is sometimes shocked—the viewer may also go home and ask questions of himself. Whereas if you go to see a beautiful comedy or a love story, you go home and you feel pleased and you don’t question anything.

What impact do you hope the work will have?

The first question I asked myself in making this work is, “What is history?” In the book A World Restored (1957)Henry Kissinger states that history is the memory of states. On the contrary, Howard Zinn believed that history is the memory of the people. In A Peoples’ History of the United States (1980) Zinn stated that he “prefer[red] to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves . . . ”[ii] I understand that narrating history can be complicated because there are different points of view. You have someone like Kissinger, who was an admired statesman, saying that history is the memory of the state. I challenge that.

The Great Farce is a tragic-comic account of history in which I metaphorically explore the open wounds of United States history since its conception to the present day. It is a parody of the political arena in the United States in which reality has become a theatrical stage, a spectacle, of conflicting events where there is no more distinction between fact and fiction.

I’m trying to seduce the audience with my point of view through beautiful images. Some of the images could be interpreted as absurd or shocking or too strong. By seducing the viewer I hope that this will trigger something in them. They may admire the work or hate the work. The idea is that by shaking people up, they may be more receptive to thinking critically about history and about the world that surrounds us.

[i] Larry Ossei-Mensah, “The Good Samaritans,” in Federico Solmi: The Grand Masquerade, ed. Michael Schuetz, (Charleston, IL: Tarble Arts Center, Eastern Illinois University, 2019), 39, 41.

[ii] Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492–Present, 35th-anniversary ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 10.