Historical Fabric: Didactics and Drive in Brooks Turner’s Tapestries

by William Hernandez Luege

“I am not a prisoner of history. I should not seek there the meaning of my destiny.”

-Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

We all seem to believe Karl Marx in his essay “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” when he writes that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. He was writing in response to Napoleon III taking the title of “Emperor of the French.” A dangerously far cry from his uncle, the Napoleon, Marx could not help but note the “grotesque mediocrity” of this new authoritarian regime, and in the essay sought to explain the underlying conditions that allowed for this absurdity. It appears history was to repeat yet again, when over a century later, the art historian Hal Foster would follow up on Marx’s observation with a question: “What comes after farce?” Foster was writing in response to a contemporary grotesque mediocrity, one which ushered the “post-truth” era. Foster, in turn, examines our contemporary debacle through the lens of history, albeit an aesthetic and art historical one. Serpentining through a wide array of art from the last century, he explores how artists equip this now flexible relationship with the truth as a means to combat our own historical farce.1 This frustration against mediocrity, the feeling that world events are not as serious as their implication, misunderstands our relationship to the past.

Brooks Turner’s art is also about history, specifically Minnesota history. His vantage point, however, is not the same as that of the typical historian, ping-ponging through material events to unlock the secret of the present. Instead, his tapestries have the aim of teaching. They are aesthetic objects, yes, but equally so they are pedagogical ones. In Turner’s work, I see a question being posed that most artists and art historians seldom ask: What is history for? Many artists and art historians understandably see history as a force, a wave that sweeps us along until it moves on without us. I would argue that Turner’s work enacts a different, more Nietzschean approach, that utilizes history as an aesthetic tool for contemporary life.2 The primary way in which Turner presents this perspective is through a formal approach that expresses the complicated relationships we have with facticity, history, and dramaturgy. To begin, one can consider the choice to present his research as a tapestry. Within the western canon, tapestry has long held a strong connection with what we might now call “historical events”— battles, coronations, and other moments in ruling class life. It also served the opposite function, centering mythical and religious narration, and offering moral and spiritual guidance through allegory. When looking at works like A Convergence (2022), the choice of medium places the working class narrative of the Union Defense Guard of Teamster Local 574 at equal importance to the Norman Conquest of England, depicted in the monumentally scaled Bayeaux Tapestry (c. 1075). Brooks Turner work is not only in conversation with the legacy of tapestry as a medium, but with the very idea of what is commendable within history.

The story of A Convergence is told through the central image. Across a Minnesotan river basin, dotted with lakes and bisected with a railroad, loom rivaling events and figures. Massive square images cast shadows over the landscape. Fascism, in the form of William Dudley Pelley, leader of the far right, Christian nationalist group the Silver Legion of America, enters the picture plane in the far right corner. The train moves the eye further down toward the conflict he sows and the resistance he faced. A close look reveals the train leaving Dudley behind, an aspirational gesture toward one day not needing to remember him at all. Framing this story, literally, is another story. This frame tells the tale of union leaders as well as the origins of the Union Defense Guard, members of which met with Leon Trotsky in the home of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. The work does not aim to articulate the precise sequence of events so much as give a visual impression of the interconnectedness of Minnesota to the wider world of this time. This balance between abstracted narrative and facticity of image is pushed to its limit in The Battle of Deputies Run, 1934 (2023). Focused more specifically on a singular event from the 1934 Teamster Strike, Turner depicts a police officer aiming a gun at a group of strikers, while the other panel of the diptych shows the conflict en media res. Across both panels, potential and actual violence are collapsed into a single image of the event, set amidst a foreboding, forested background. While the underlying conflict and the sources of the images are indeed factual, the setting forsakes historical accuracy in favor of the viewer’s aesthetic response by heightening the visual drama. This nebulous yet forceful approach to truth is reminiscent of Nietzsche’s task for the cultural historian: “that we know how to forget at the right time just as well as we remember at the right time.”3 For Nietzsche, engagement with history was healthiest when it was utilized for action in the present moment. In Turner’s work, art and history both are made to be inspirations for the present, often at the expense of the minutia of the past.

History turns explicitly mythical in two of Turner’s works, which pull directly from the Unicorn Tapestries. Made in the late 15th century, the Unicorn Tapestries, as the name suggests, depict the hunting and capture of a unicorn by a noble court. In Pledge to a Martyr and Voters in Revolt (both 2023) the subjects of historical events replace the unicorn in the composition, turning them into narrative. As for the original, the meaning is itself the subject of debate among art historians. The leading narrative, circulated on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website, is that the tapestries were likely made to commemorate a marriage. The plants surrounding the tamed unicorn are known to be symbols of fertility and marriage in Medieval iconography.4 In Turner’s images, these flowers are complicated by the context of the central figures, serving both as funerary flowers for the death of Henry Ness, a picketer killed by police, while still keeping the generative connotations once held centuries ago. In Voters in Revolt, Turner collapses history further by overlaying the outlines of an altercation between strikers and police, superimposing the potential violence as equal with the peaceful demonstration in honor of Ness’ life. Again, both the aesthetic and historical principles on which Turner draws are made subservient to “a higher force:” namely, the visual and narrative impact. By turning these events mythical, he simultaneously makes them contemporary. The tapestries function less as documents for pure information, than as memories with which recall our own need for solidarity and protest.

At the root of all politicization of history lies memory, and its physical embodiment, the archive. In A Pedagogical Task (2023), Turner presents a five tapestry cycle, which contains not only archival material but a visual language of memory. Where before we might say that Turner strategically “forgets” certain historical details to spur a greater action in the viewer, here we find the task of strategic “remembering.”5 These tapestries depict elements from the Joseph Hansen Papers, the Trotsky Papers and Pathfinder Press at the Hoover Institute, all of which document the relationship between Leon Trotsky and Local 574 as well other photos and texts which directly address the rising tides of fascism at the time. Visually, the tapestries present these materials in a manner reminiscent of cinema. One contains the distorted image of VHS footage as its background, while the others layer text and image as if used in documentary filmmaking, employing negatives and decayed archival photographs. The effect of these choices reminds us of the perceived distance between the present and these documents. The layering and selective quality of the text, which seem to incorporate the artist’s own notes amongst the papers, strategically bring about the act of “remembering.” Revealing like a hand of poker, these five tapestries lay out for the components of Trotsky’s archive worth consideration, and it is our present circumstance of rising fascism which grants it didactic value.6 As viewers, we are enticed to peruse these memories and find what might be useful. So too with art. One can easily find this dynamic in other examples of Turner’s work, along with an intentional equipment of history and aesthetics for the sake of inspiration. By way of conclusion, however, it may be more beneficial to briefly consider the strange place that such didacticism holds in art history.

For critics, there has long been a subversive, yet hard-to-pin-down quality to didactic art. In more Romantic times, Edgar Allan Poe went so far as to call it a heresy.7 Others have since come to its defense: the Mexican Muralists declared that art was solely to aestheticize the revolutionary actions of workers and indigenous peoples. Even Artforum published a defense in 1967, articulating that didactic art began with Cubism and continued on through Andy Warhol.8 Alternatively, didactic art was also a right-wing tool. The total revolution through art that Richard Wagner anticipated was quickly folded into Nazi aims within a century.9 The truth is that art exists in all cultures and times regardless of acts of resistance or oppression. When looking at the tapestries Turner has created, one is tempted to see ghosts of the past. In our present culture, we are taught to feel doomed to cycles of repetition from the alien force that is history. But this is not the case. Fascist and leftist organizing may have served as the warp and weft of Minnesota and even world history, but these very same threads are our real and present choice today. Rather than trying to find a definitive story, a single, universal lesson, art and history both need to be driven toward action. Didactic art, at its best, gives us permission to make bold decisions not for the sake of the past, or the sake of the future, but to do what is right today. Its aim must always be toward Life, and orienting ourselves toward our real needs.

End Notes:

  1. Hal Foster, What Comes After Farce: Art and Criticism at a Time of Debacle (Verso Books, 2020).
  2. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, trans. Ian Johnston (Richer Resources Publications, 2010).
  3. Nietzsche, 4.
  4. “The Story of the Unicorn,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, accessed August 6, 2023, https://www.metmuseum.org/primer/met-cloisters/unicorn-tapestries-story.
  5. Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics 25, no. 2 (1995): 11, https://doi.org/10.2307/465144. Since the 1990s archives are seen not only as a physical embodiment of institutional memory, but also democratizing archives through greater accessibility constitutes a democratic act. Scholars like Mark Wigley have argued that selectively sharing components toward a specific vantage point is equally as political.
  6. Omer Aziz, “Opinion: Why Do so Many Young White Men in America Find Fascism ‘Cool’?,” Los Angeles Times, April 2, 2023, https://www. latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-04-02/trump-qanon-andrew-tate-fascism-mussolini-nazis-white-men.
  7. Sven Spieker and Tom Holert, “The Heresy of Didactic Art,” ARTMargins 11, no. 1–2 (June 1, 2022): 7, https://doi.org/10.1162/artm_e_00312.
  8. Barbara Rose, “The Value of Didactic Art,” Artforum, April 1967, https://www.artforum.com/print/196704/the-value-of-didactic-art-36733.
  9. Gerald Raunig, Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, Semiotext(e) Active Agents Series (Los Angeles : Cambridge, Mass: Semiotext[e] ; Distributed by The MIT Press, 2007) 17.

William Hernández Luege is a Curatorial Associate, Painting and Sculpture, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and was formerly the Curatorial Fellow for Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN. He holds a BA in Art History/Art Management from the University of San Francisco, as well as an MA in the History of Art from Williams College. His research interests are in Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art and the relationship between ideology, political theory, and aesthetics.