Chapter 43
Nations are just brands with armies. They feel the need to advertise themselves just as much as unarmed consumer brands do, from Honda to Home Depot, and from Microsoft to McDonald’s. Moreover, nations projecting their power at world’s fairs is as old as world’s fairs themselves. Britain was supremely confident that the 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations would provide self-evident proof that it was the apex of world culture. Three-quarters of a century later, the British Empire Exhibition from 1924 to 1925 at Wembley in north London attracted 25 million people to enjoy a tea-and-crumpet display on the “British endeavor” in India. “Everywhere the story is of progress,” read the Official Guide, “of the gradual overcoming of difficulties, of a victorious fight against ignorance, famine, flood and pestilence.”
But the imperial scope of the British Empire Exhibition was insignificant next to the naked aggression of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany at the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Modern where the countries’ pavilions were set apart from each other as if ready to cross swords. Between them loomed the Eiffel Tower, a referee of wrought iron.
If built today, the Soviet Union’s monumental, marble-clad pavilion would have a price tag well north of $60 million. A model of elaborate exposition exhibits, its crowning touch was the iconic six-story-high sculpture of a worker and peasant woman clasping a hammer and a sickle.
Designed by Vera Mukhina, the 65-ton, stainless-steel art piece became a “greatest hits” of socialism-realist art and was also one of the world’s first welded sculptures. Its placement on top of the pavilion was no mere attention-grabbing behavior but was in part a reference to Jean-Jacques Lequeu, a famed “paper architect” of France’s revolutionary era, whose fanciful works (e.g., a cow-shaped barn) were never produced.
The giant statue was diminutive in ambition compared to what the pavilion held inside. There, as Arthur Chandler wrote in World’s Fair magazine, “a map of Mother Russia made of gold studded with rubies, topazes, and other precious stones” hung on a wall near a sixteen-foot-high gypsum mock-up of the proposed Palace of Soviets that would run 1,362 feet tall, and whose main hall would comfortably fit 21,000 seats. Sergey Merkurov’s statue of Lenin resembled Rodin’s “Thinker” yelling “Get off my lawn!” Positioned on a colossal pedestal was a Ford limousine manufactured by the Russian GAZ brand, flanked by Suprematist sculptures, almost looking like a still from a Russian science-fiction film.
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Equal parts oppressive and impressive, the Soviet edifice was devised by Stalin’s preferred (i.e., not-yet-purged) architect, Boris Iofan, and stood opposite the German pavilion: Goliath vs. Goliath. Designed by Third Reich starchitect Albert Speer, the German pavilion was the expo’s tallest at about 207 feet, crowned by the thirty-foot-high Nazi trademark eagle and swastika. Down below, in front of the pavilion, stood Josef Thorak’s statue “Comradeship,” which depicted two twenty-two-foot-high nude Tom of Finland ubermensch, hip to hip and holding hands, suggesting they stood united against the mongrel, miscegenated hordes of Russia.
This oversized Reifenstahl-esque homoerotic kitsch was a deliberate but spurious counterpoint to the type of art displayed in another German exhibition that same year.
The Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) show in Munich comprised about 650 works (e.g., paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints) by 112 artists, chosen from a pool of about 5,300 works (others say the number exceeded 15,000) confiscated from 101 museums. Works by Max Beckmann, Marc Chagall, Otto Dix, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, et al, were accompanied by a convoy of slogans such as “Crazy at any price” and “The ideal—cretin and whore,” for the edification of more than two million visitors to the exhibition.
At first, Hitler wanted to withdraw from the 1937 Paris expo (the last that would be held in the City of Light), but Speer seduced him, in the timeless way of all artists and their patrons, by enticing Hitler with his blueprint for the German pavilion, a drawing of Hitler’s ambitions and grandiosity distilled in a physical expression of the Führer’s beloved Wagnerian operas.
While in Paris, Speer had somehow stolen a look at the plans for the Soviet pavilion, which allowed him to stretch the boundaries of the dictator school of architecture. To counter the Soviet’s fireplug-squatness, Speer created a vertical frame, straight as a sequoia. Inside this pillar of 10,000 tons of steel and pink Bavarian granite were swastikas of stained glass and mosaic tiles. Gigantic oil paintings lined the swastika-wallpapered walls flanking a futuristic swastika-branded 16-cylinder Mercedes-Benz racing car, chemical products, children’s toys, and a glass display case lined with swastika-patterned silk, all under the umbrella of light provided by baroque chandeliers. Besides the car and the giant hotel-motel art (roughly half of which showed only people-less ships, factories, and highways), there was a giant zeppelin diesel engine and a crude alpha version of a video-telephone. At night, the German pavilion was lit from underneath and from within its pillars, via a lighting system designed by Zeiss Ikon. The illumination created the effect of a photo negative, inadvertently revealing the darkness inherent.
The clash of Germany and Russia at the 1937 fair was as epic as the brawl between Achilles and Hector at Troy. It may have set the Platonic ideal for such contretemps—but it wasn’t the last. Countries still exploit the world’s fairs as a venue to shout their progressiveness or distinctiveness not for terror but trade. Constructed of glimmering gold-colored steel, the United Arab Emirates pavilion at Expo 2010 in Shanghai was rounded and curved to imitate the way scorching desert winds sculpt sand dunes in its seven states. And like those dunes that inspired its design, the pavilion’s northern side was rough and textured while the southern side was soft and smooth. But its most savvy component was a constantly looping video greeting visitors outside the pavilion. On it, a then-twelve-year-old princess from the UAE welcomed visitors in the Chinese language, informing them she’d been learning their tongue since she was three years old. The girl appealed to the millions of children who saw her, a literal princess of fairy tale wealth; the respect displayed in her speaking Chinese appealed to Chinese adults, implying that the UAE understood very well where a massive future market for its oil will be.
Like the world’s fairs of 1893 for Chicago and 1939 for New York, Expo 2010 was a stage for China and Shanghai to announce their presence to the world. It bulldozed a site of more than 1,200 acres, forcibly relocating the 55,000 people there, spending as much as $90 billion on the fair and improving the city’s infrastructure. China’s pavilion, nicknamed “The Crown of the East,” resembled the headgear of ancient emperors with upper sections larger than the ones below it. Costing $220 million and soaring 200 feet high, it was the most expensive and tallest pavilion ever at a world’s fair. Its 15,800 square feet of exhibit space included a digitized replica of Zhang Zeduan’s celebrated painting, “Along the River During the Qingming Festival,” painted almost 1,000 years ago. Called “China’s Mona Lisa,” it wasn’t a cheesetastic recreation that looks like bad CGI in an even worse Syfy channel movie, but a work of technology that started as art and ended up as magic. Nearly 420 feet long, and about 20 feet high, it depicted 1,068 people at work and play, such as shopkeepers using the abacus and even fish swimming in the river. The China pavilion was more than three times the size of any of its province’s or Special Autonomous Regions’ pavilions, but that didn’t stop Macau from almost stealing the show. Made in the shape of a rabbit lantern—based on the myth of a rabbit that guards the door to heaven—the gambling paradise’s pavilion was the unofficial winner for the most politically astute structure of Expo 2010. Topping off at 19.99 meters, the building’s height was a nod and a wink to 1999, the year Macau was reabsorbed back into the mainland China—which was, not coincidentally, the Year of the Rabbit. Even better, visitors could glimpse the China pavilion directly through the building’s transparent-glass exterior, right where the rabbit’s heart would be, proving to the mainland that Macau always has China in its heart.