""In the show [Ark], Trump washes up, too. Like Reagan, she says, “he’s got this storytelling thing that’s like a comic book – the bad guys and the good guys”. But unlike Reagan, Trump doesn’t try to hide his evil beneath a slick veneer of optimism. “It’s verging on violence, so a lot of my motivation is fear. And I hate to admit that. Why does it always turn into hate speech? Why not love speech? What’s that tendency?” In person, Anderson is as quizzical as her records might suggest. Poised but you wouldn’t say polished. Her hands move a lot. “Are we so horrible and dark in our hearts that Trump is showing us who we really are? What grabs our attention is not sunny stories, it’s the dark stuff. The weird stuff. Sex and violence. All those things that say…” And then, on the couch, she lowers her voice into a carnival barker, a smug preacher, a man with a microphone: “Come over here. Let me show you something.” Her voice remodulates. She’s made her own body into a machine for doing this. “That feels very… American.”
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"“When I see the faces and people at Trump rallies, I see this expression of glee on their faces,” Anderson says. “I recognise it because he’s saying, ‘Guess what? You’re free. Things are so messed up, but you are free.’ It’s completely rock ’n’ roll. I recognise that from being a young revolutionary; like, right on, this is broken and we’re going to break it even further.” Anderson cut her teeth in the civil and sexual rights movements of the 1960s; in 1989, she released Beautiful Red Dress, the catchiest song about menstruation and the gender wage gap to ever hit American airwaves. In 2021, she signed an open letter calling for the end of apartheid in Israel and lost a visiting professorship at a university in Essen, Germany, because of it. So she’s seen nihilism before.
“My life was built around fear, in many ways,” she says. “I was born in 1947 in Chicago, the same city and month that the Doomsday Clock was set in motion.” Its hands are set by the scientists who originally developed the atomic bomb. At the moment, it’s 90 seconds to midnight. In some ways, we’re all out of time.
Trump, then, is a storyteller on themes of horror and redemption through violence. “What’s the story that you live by?” Anderson asks. “Mine is that I’m an artist.” She pauses. “I wanted to make art to try to figure out what makes us so cold.” Just as her work refutes the bounds of time, it also refuses the bounty of that glee which Trump and his ilk feed off so ravenously. Anderson’s work counters those tired old tales with new stories – 52 of them fit into her ARK.
“Trump embodies the worst thing about branding and turning ourselves into saleable items. You know, what have you got for sale? What are you worth? That’s soul killing. It’s a cold question”"
Read the entire interview here:
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