Circus of the Spectacle Project Statement
Guy Debord, in Society of the Spectacle, points out that mediated representation has replaced our authentic, embodied experience of human existence. The spectacle, in Debord’s construction, is more than just the accumulation of images, memes, tropes, social media, and advertising: Our social relationships are now entirely mediated. We understand our lives by how they relate to our consumption as created by the hegemon of capitalistic culture.
We only know ourselves as consumers.
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American circuses excelled in promotional advertising. Teams of bill-posters (people who pasted posters on any available surface) would arrive in a town to cover buildings and walls with enormous, dynamic posters printed in primary colors. These posters were often printed in multiple sheets, since no printing presses were capable of producing such large images. The typographic language of these posters was intended to excite and provoke, and the text was often hyperbolic to an extreme.
I visited the Circus Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin in the summer of 2025 and I was fascinated by the large collection of circus posters. I was inspired by the rise of our current American Fascism to design a book that functioned as a poster and as a book, but which used the circus as an extended metaphor for writing about the absurdly corrupt politics of America. In American circuses, the ringmaster introduces the various acts and serves as guide to the acts for the audience. In my book, the ringmaster introduces and contextualizes acts that are all satirical reflections of the deeply corrupt nature of all the present branches of the government.
In the same way that clowns are more sad than funny, this apparently cheerful-looking book is just the tears of an old clown, shed for the wreck of his country.
