Painter Lawrence Gipe knows propaganda when he sees it.
For years, the UA painting professor has studied “totalitarian images” generated in Nazi Germany and in Soviet Russia—government-approved photos of robust Aryan youths or of the myth-drenched Russian forests.
So when Rosemont Copper flooded Tucson last fall with an expensive color brochure extolling open-pit mining in Southern Arizona, Gipe’s “propaganda radar went off,” he says.
The cover had a picture of wholesome young girl standing in an idyllic landscape. Behind her, unmolested coppery mountains glowed in the Arizona sun, and the girl raised her head up to look at the pure blue sky, her old-fashioned blonde braids curling around her neck.
“For me, she’s a Hitler youth,” Gipe says. “I have images of Hitler-youth propaganda. I’ve been studying these visual references for years. My alarms went off.”
Gipe made a last-minute painting of the girl, “re-contextualizing” the original photo in oils on panel, and hurried it over to the Tucson Museum of Art for his solo show, Approved Images. He had a perfect place for the painted “Rosemont Copper Girl, 2011.” He hung her in the middle of a wall of paintings that re-create Nazi government photographs, all of them drawn from his personal archive of thousands of old photos.
One painting depicts a happy couple basking in the benevolence of National Socialism in the 1930s. (The original German title was Sturme des Lebens, or “Storm of Love.”) Another is a bizarre picture of a Seminole Indian woman in Florida, photographed in 1938 for a German how-to photography journal.
Gipe is not claiming that Rosemont hopes to re-create Nazi Germany in the Arizona borderlands. Not at all. But through the painting, he is saying that propaganda, whether in the hands of a corporation or a totalitarian government, uses patriotic, family-friendly images to obscure the truth of the dirty work they’re actually doing.
“The propaganda industry is about getting people to believe things that aren’t true,” he says.
The lovey-dovey German couple is the polar opposite of the Jewish families being kicked out of schools and jobs in the 1930s. (The camps would come later.) The exotic brown-skinned Seminole woman belies the Aryan obsession with racial “purity.” And that idyllic Southern Arizona landscape in the Rosemont brochure? It will be bulldozed, butchered, banged up and obliterated.
Curiously, the young girl in the picture holds a solar panel in her hands. The message, as Gipe reads it, is, “Hey hippies, if you want solar panels, you have to dig deep open-pit mines.”
In his art, Gipe has worked the propaganda minefield for some 25 years.
“The main idea is to use an image that’s ideologically tainted, that comes from artists who were working for the government or were government-approved,” Gipe explains in the TMA gallery. By re-imagining familiar propaganda images as paintings—and making them much larger than the original photos—”I try to re-examine them,” forcing old images into viewers’ consciousness in new ways, and not-so-incidentally playing with the tension between photography and painting.
People tend to see photos as truth, Gipe says, even though they’re manipulated as much as or more than other art forms. “If I paint an ‘approved’ photo, it’s no longer approved. That’s my game.”
Raised in the country outside of Baltimore and trained at Virginia Commonwealth and at Otis/Parsons School of Design in Los Angeles, Gipe was the son of a father who was a big-time fan of old film noir movies. Young Gipe not only loved the films’ black-and-white aesthetic; he loved the metaphorical black-and-whiteness of their themes, the simple heroism of the good guys, the unambiguous evil of the bad.
A childhood immersed in this imagery “affected me profoundly,” he told TMA curator Julie Sasse in an interview published in an exhibition brochure.
But Gipe was enough of an aesthetic rebel to want to bring the movie stills—and government photos—back around to painting. Born in 1962, he went to school at a time when everyone wanted to do new media. “My instructors said painting was dead. It was a rebellion to drop paint on canvas.”
His paintings may be about ugly subjects, but they’re beautiful. A trio of industrial paintings picturing post-war England are among the most alluring I’ve seen in Tucson in a long time. Gray, moody and atmospheric, they’re filled with softly painted smokestacks and bridges and slanting slate roofs. Misty skies merge with colorless rivers that only palely reflect the light.
They’re inspired by British government photos from the 1940s through the 1960s, meant to show the nation picking itself up by its bootstraps, but they hearken back to the 19th century. That’s deliberate, Gipe says.
“I’m painting in an impressionist style, to send it back to 1868,” Gipe says of “Manchester, 1968,” a 2009 painting drawn from a 1968 photo of factories along a river. “I’m collapsing time, back to the beginning of industrialization.”
Paintings once romanticized the new factories that were taking over the landscape and regimenting workers’ lives. Gipe’s melancholy paintings conjure up a century and a half of industrialization and its discontents, turning the plucky optimism of postwar England—and the early industrial age—into a world-weary pessimism. No nation yet has been saved by the machine.
Gipe himself uses mechanization to create the paintings. Like the old-time painters of the Renaissance, he projects the image onto his canvas in the early stages, drawing and painting the lines of the tiny photographs he’s planning to transform. “Then I do washes, then white and black, adding vegetation, shadows.” A painting of a Russian birch forest—an image crucial to government power from the czars to the Communist commissars, Gipe says—turns ultimately into a pattern painting on the trees.
A painting of a grim apartment block in Warsaw—the first one built there by the Soviets—is “my Pollock painting,” he says. Its all-over grid of right-angled balconies and windows, systematically painted white, gray and black, is “non-hierarchical. It’s formally like a drip painting.”
“Kunsthalle, 1937” depicts the galleries of a 1937 art show put together by the Nazis. Hitler famously staged a show of “degenerate art,” to demonstrate the savagery of expressionism, fauvism, cubism and the like. A few blocks away, the Führer put on the first Great German Art Exhibition of approved art.
“Images of this show don’t come up too often,” Gipe says. “I found a small postcard photo in the late ’80s.”
Gipe’s painting of the Great German Art Exhibition, based on that rare postcard, is a sideways view into the galleries, with each room filled with conventional imagery. “Freshly minted kitsch,” Gipe calls it.
Rembrandt knock-offs and German forest paintings frame a sculpture room where a stag stands near a 3-D ballerina. A couple of sculptural nudes are a surprise, but the statues of both a man and a woman stare forward stolidly, stripped not only of clothes, but of life.
Gipe says he wonders “how artists fit into the template of approved art. Were some unwilling? On a personal level, what would I have done? I think about their dilemma and how lucky we are not to have that dilemma. Censorship is a horrible thing.”
The U.S. is a free country, he notes, and “artists can do wacky stuff.”
They have the freedom to work for a mining company, spreading its propaganda, or they can attack its deceptions in a painting. Their choice.
This article appears in May 26 – Jun 1, 2011.
I also know propaganda when I see. And this article is nothing but pure propaganda designed to demonize Rosemont Copper and its supporters.
Rosemont Copper’s opponents complaints about Rosemont Copper’s public relations campaign are amazing considering all of the misleading and false information they have been flooding our community with over the last five years, their demonization of Rosemont Copper and its supporters and their efforts to silence Rosemont’s supporters.
I for one am thankful that Rosemont Copper has been able to successfully counter these efforts through their site tours program, public meetings and a well run PR campaign, which has gotten their message out to the public.
University academics have almost a blank check when applying colorful propaganda to promote their views in the classroom so let’s put this art professor into proper context.
Rosemont’s ads are forward looking and link themselves to “green energy” such as solar and wind technology. A crusty old guy holding the solar panel outside a nursing home would have indeed been less appealing than the young girl…but once again they are linking themselves to the future.
Did y’all forget that behind every bit of “green technology” is very large quantities of high-purity copper that needs first to be discovered, tested for continuity/grade by expensive drilling and other metallurgical/mining/economic studies, permitted/approved, and ultimately excavated from an open or underground mine in a “scenic santa ritas” mountain range somewhere, then processed, and shipped to the manufacturing entities that need it.
Get over the advertising images…everyone in private and public companies uses favorable PR to promote and protect their brand. For once we don’t have blatent sex trying to sell something.
Chris, I also know propaganda when I see it and your comment is just that. Exactly what false and misleading information from Rosemont opponents are you referring to?
As for Rosemont propaganda—how about the claim that the mine tours are in the top ten AZ tourist attractions (no mention of the Grand Canyon!) How about the U-tube video of Sturgis and Ryan driving down #83 showing folks where the mine would be visible–arriving at the intersection of 83/82 then stating that “you can’t see the mine from there, you will only be able to see it from the 3 mile section of highway as you pass the mine. ” That’s hogwash, it would be visible from most of the Sonoita area including Rain Valley to the east! How about the claim that Rosemont will produce 10% of US copper needs–while most of the copper would go to Asian smelters to be refined. Truthful? Not exactly. How about the free dinners and bus transportation to the first scoping meeting, for those unemployed people to submit positive comments to the Forest Service when they thought they would be applying for jobs at the mine? Was that propaganda? And how are opponents trying to silence proponents? I think it’s the other way around. Rosemont Copper is trying to silence public opinion with their “community support” money, using the names of the recipient organizations to reflect support for the mine. (if the name of your organization appears on that list would you speak negatively about Rosemont Copper?) And Rosemont Copper has solicited people to comment to news articles (are they also paid?) How many Chambers of Commerce have they joined (welcome or not) so that they can be the bully in the room and silence opposition there as well?
Professor Gipe is exposing Rosemont Copper for WHO they are and I salute him!
Great article. Love the Copper Girl. congratulations.
That isn’t a bad painting, but the article is wrong. Not all propaganda is wrong, or evil, or bad. Propaganda is simply choosing to express one side of an argument. The Rosemont detractors have a voice, and so does Rosemont. The United States during WWII also created propaganda, and continues to do so. By the author’s definition, all advertising is propaganda. I’ll give this one a big yawn.
Webster’s definition of propaganda—-any systematic, widespread dissemination or promotion of particular ideas, doctrines, practices,etc. to further one’s own cause or to damage an opposing one.
Kudos to Rosemont Mines, for putting up with this CR@%%^, Hang in there. This is one of the reasons that this town is not growing. Everytime we get in a new company to develope their base operations here, here comes the Old Tucson Polititions, that do not want any changes. It is time for new blood in the political areana with new views. I travel alot and in my travels, Tucson Arizona seems to be one of the laughing stock citys of this country. We are famous, but for what!!!!
WOW Really? I always thought art was in the eye of the beholder. I see a company that is willing to invest in the community and use renewable energy. Not rape the land and leave it scared for generations to come. I really hate the way so many people want to turn something like this into political BS. Shame on you UofA!
az lightfighter—time to remove your rose colored glasses. What you “see” is not reality. Rosemont has a few solar panels for “show and tell.” The power to operate the mine would come from new transmission lines coming from the west side over the mountains to the mine. Nine million gallons of diesel fuel will be burned each year to support the operation. Twenty thousand tons of ammonium nitrate will be exploded each year. The land will not be scarred for generations to come? Exactly what do you think a square mile wide 2900 ft deep pit will do to the land and how about the 3500 acres of waste rock and tailings–ALL on Public Land? I doubt that you have seen the Rosemont artist’s rendition of AFTER conservation. The entire area will be forever ugly or scarred which ever you prefer. Rosemont Copper only invests in the community now for PR and image purposes. As for “political BS” Rosemont Copper certainly supports any politician who will take their campaign contributions.
Yes. Let’s demonize Rosemont for wanting to raise the environmental standard of mining operations. Let’s demonize them for wanting to invest Billions of dollars into our economy, add hundreds of full time well paying jobs, and create additional jobs through suppliers/contractors in an down economy with over 8.5% unemployment. Associating Rosemont’s advertiving with Nazi propaganda is just a ploy to try to stop the mine. Read your Arizona history. This State was built on mining. Yeah, old mines have been pretty bad to the environment, so lets raise the standard and expect all mines to meet the standards that Rosemont is suggesting.
The writer has drawn parallels between different subject matter. The subject matter must meet certain requirements of similarity to evidence the parallel drawn. The Nazi did horrific things to people and to try and attach these heinous acts to Rosemont Copper is slanderous and ridiculous, to say the least. To draw a parallel between propaganda the Nazi used to convey an image and of a young girl utilizing alternative energy is about as bizarre as a University of Arizona professor plagiarizing the same photo and repainting it to meet his Nazi standards for propaganda. Humanities such as painting are subjective and hope to convey a unique way the artist presents a subject, this is the painter or photographers gift to society. It can lead to a better understanding of the subject matter, as seen in a unique way. A painter or a writer can change a subject into another outlook, good or evil. When I see this picture, I see an intelligent looking and dignified young girl holding an integral and world saving solution to her future – an alternative energy source. Alternative energy will require more copper to make, approximately 35% more copper in many applications.
In addition, this child is a real human being that was used in an appropriate manner, by drawing the twisted and invalid parallel in print and in repainting this child to fit into a Nazi propaganda category has diminished the positive message of our children and alternative energy use. People will sometimes get carried away with their points of view and try to convince others to their point of view – as is this case of this writer and this painter who sees this beautiful and positive representation as part of twisted evil thinking.
Truman W.
What can Rosemont Copper do about the one square mile 2900 ft deep hole in the Santa Ritas that would “raise the environmental standard of mining operations?” The same question for the mountain of waste rock and tailings covering 3500 acres of Public Land. I’ve seen the “after” rendition of the “reclamation” and I see nothing there to suggest a “higher environmental standard.” As for Arizona history, we are reaping the results of that history now with polluted mines seeping toxic fluids, 350,000 acres of tailings piles blowing in the wind throughout the state, boom/bust ghost towns, polluted streams and aquifers—mining is not the most important pillar of the AZ economy today and Tucson is seeking more tech and medical business investment,along with tourism. Spoiling the beautiful landscapes is akin to killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Rosemont jobs would come at great cost to local economies and to the environment and to an area enjoyed by the public on a regular basis, including portions of the Arizona Trail which would be buried by the waste piles! The Rosemont deposit is low quality as evidenced by the ratio of ore to waste rock—1.9 billion tons of waste for 600 million tons of copper- bearing ore over the life of the mine. This mine at Rosemont Junction is a bad idea and I have also heard that stated by former miners! Mine the reserves at other mines in valid mining districts where the environment has already been destroyed!
Jom, if you are so dead-set against mining, I would invite you to stop using any products that are mined, or produced with mined materials. This part of Southern Arizona has been heavily mined for generations because this is where the copper is. Would you rather have it produced in third-world countries with no environmental controls at all, or would you like to see it produced in the USA, where it can help balance our tremendous trade deficit?
The comparison of Rosemont’s PR campaign to Nazi propaganda is a narcissistic, self-serving attempt to sway public opinion. Not only does it cheapen the significance of the Holocaust, but it is also disrespectful of the millions of innocent victims, who suffered and died at the hands of the Nazis during World War II.
Are mining companies not required to operate responsibly if they are mining in a third world country? Are they only responsible if the law requires it? Is there no corporate code of ethics among mining companies?
How would copper mined by an American subsidiary of a Canadian company affect the US trade
deficit?
Jom, I hope you’re trying to be funny.
Tucson should be so lucky to have an opportunity to provide well paying jobs, jobs that offer health care, very good health care benefits, 401K savings plans and posibly a retirement plan. Unemployment rate is high, the presidency is struggling to provide some kind of health care for Americans and there is a big resistence to stop the developement of a previously mined copper ore body. There is something really wrong here. I go along with John 85, those of you who are so dead set on mining in America can quit using the copper by products that get used as a result of mining in Arizona. That’s right, I said it. Turn in your cars, turn off your AC units, and everthing else that uses copper for a more comfortable life style. Put up or shut up. This is an opportunity for many people to draw a nice wage and provide for there familys. Do the right thing, give the people an opportunity to earn a good honest living. It spreads to the families, children, and community. Communities like Ajo, Bisbee, Douglas, Morenci, and now Safford, as well as several in New Mexico have benefited hugely by copper mining in Arizona.
In trying to draw a link between Rosemont Copper’s PR campaign and the Nazi propaganda machine, it is actually Lawrence Gipe, who is actually attempting to make some cheap, self-serving political statement at the expense of the millions, who suffered and died during the Holocaust.
It’s a good thing we live in America, because if we didn’t this article would have never gotten printed nor the picture been hung up. This is Arizona and we are The Copper State. We need our mines, we need Rosemont Copper to keep our state going. So our taxes aren’t raised and we don’t have to cut any more funding from the elderly, our schools, and yes even our forest services. We have another business wanting to bring money to our state , welcome them with opened arms it is for our Copper!
By April of 2009, our company had been forced to send over 100 proud working Arizonans home. They lost their jobs, because our company lost the revenue needed to keep them employed. Those folks were skilled and motivated, but that did not change the reality of the fact that we did not have the work nor did it change the reality that they landed in an environment where jobs were scarce and well paying jobs even more scarce.
Now, we have a company like Rosemont. They have come to our community and over the last two years I have watched their company set a new standard for community investment and corporate responsibility. Although there are many unreasonable voices in the “choir”, the reasonable and informed folks among us know that the position established and held by Rosemont is one of superior planning, environmental stewardship and the helpful “old west spirit” of which I am very personally proud.
For all of the folks who have jobs and are able to pay your own way as well as those folks who are fortunate enough to live off of the good will and charity of our nation, but who oppose the development of the Rosemont project, I ask you to please be willing to learn the real facts about Rosemont, to speak with Mr. Pace and see for yourself his personal willingness to answer your questions and show you some of his other work.
There is an old west saying, “you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth”. But when it comes to protecting our environment, I think we need to depart from that old cowboy’s rule. We need to look at this “horse” very carefully. However, I have looked Rosemont in the “mouth”, and I like what see. I pray for some of our former employees, that they will be afforded an opportunity like Rosemont, to restore their pride and prosperity.
Everyone is entitled to their opinions and this artist is obviously willing to offer his own. But a biased and inflammatory opinion coming from a person who “has his” is just that, an opinion. Don’t be the person who helps to portray “Chicken Little” as the smartest animal in the barnyard. Find out the facts for yourself!
Thanks Margret for bringing my attention to this exhibit. I went yesterday and loved it. Two thumbs up. Seeing the Rosemont Copper girl in context with the other paintings was brilliant. Spot on.
White Stetson…Are you insinuating that those who oppose Rosemont Mine are “living off the good will and charity of our nation?” What a ridiculous and uninformed statement! Is one to conclude that you consider social security— charity? OR do you assume that those opposed to this mine are on welfare and food stamps? What is your point?
As for the unreasonable voices in the “choir,” rest assured that those folks have also been studying Rosemont Copper longer than your two year time frame! Opposition opinions are based on facts most of which are contained in the Mine Plan of Operations. We have “looked at this horse very carefully” also, and we have heard the misinformation straight from the horse’s mouth! We have seen through the corporate image this company tries to project, including the community contributions, all to enhance that image. You have simply elected to drink the Rosemont kool-aid while we have not. We know the negative effects this mine would have on our community— and we recognize propaganda when we see and hear it.
I fully support Rosemont Copper and there mine and belive they have great ideas and will follow through with them to help not only our community but out enviroment.
As a patron with immense positivity about local Art I must, “re-contextualize ” my perception regularly to maintain my enormous clarity of the market…I encourage both local artists and local patrons to do the same…
WOW! Really? I have real difficulty seeing how Rosemont information could possibly be compared to Nazi propaganda. If this was done to lean on the 1st Amendment Rights to be as negative and nasty about an undertaking,the author and the painter dislike, for whatever seemingly unsupportable reason, they have been very successful. I hope they are proud of this very ugly way of voicing their opinion! – Pete I.
Wow! It will be hard to find an uglier way to put down Rosemont! If I knew that both the author of this article and the painter had an open mind, I would recommend that they visit with the staff of the Rosemont Mining Operation – and learn what is being done that will benefit the community, Pima County, the State of Arizona and the U.S.A.! Pete I.
There is no way to completely mitigate every impact that comes about because of our standard of living. A hole in the ground is far less than the thousands of square miles of asphalt pavement in our urban areas. including sqare miles of it in Tucson. How much of this urban desert will ever be remediated and returned to nature? Well I guess if you live in the flooded areas in the south, tornado-ripped areas in the midwest, and tsnami zones in the Pacific, you can count on being returned to nature some day. Thank God we live in Arizona. The mining areas have tons of wildlife including birds, bighorns, mountain lions, reptiles, and raptors. The animals adjust to big equipment and periodic blasting noise. They’re safe from hunting and often have permanent sources of water.
What a horrible story by Tucson Weekly and un-American actions by Gipe. How dare you equate anything in America to the horrors under the German socialist party (NAZI).
It seems the extremists on the left cannot argue an issue on its merit, they must abandon reason and civility and start vicious name calling. However, these comments are all too common by leftists hiding their intentions behind a cloak of environmentalism.
The issue is jobs for American workers in a region badly needing them and can environmental mitigation/reclamation meet local, state, and national environmental standards. We all know they can and will, hence the name calling and appeals to the baseist evil in human emotions.
This is what we should be debating in a civil manner–jobs and environmental protection.