A Childs Machiavelli: Your Old Pals On The Bottom
A CHILD’S MACHIAVELLI was initially written and illustrated by Claudia Hart in 1995. It was inspired by Niccolò Machiavelli’s Renaissance treatise, THE PRINCE, the first book of political philosophy. Hart’s version began as a series of oil paintings and a small catalog, produced by the Realismus Studio at the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, Berlin.
Hart’s approach was typical of the 1990s art world. Mimicking the visuals of a picture book, she appropriated 1920s children’s illustrations known for their sugary sweetness. The irony and twisted humor of A CHILD’S MACHIAVELLI are derived from its combination of opposites: the saccharine speech of kid’s books and the unvarnished reality of American politics. The book went out of print in 2000 but continues to be traded on the second-hand book market.
In 2019, A CHILD’S MACHIAVELLI was reissued as a more contemporary book. At that time, Hart discovered among her files a series of Flash animations created for an ebook, the early 21st-century digital format that had long since disappeared, initiated by the production company Flicker Labs in 2010.
Flicker Labs used her original gouache paintings from 1995 to begin a series of Flash animations. Adobe, which created Flash, stopped supporting it in 2011, instead focusing more on HTML. Flicker Labs shut down. In 2020, Adobe reissued Flash as part of a new software called Animate. In 2022, at the height of the crypto bubble, she realized her old Flash animations could now be opened, so she transformed her technological castaways into NFTs. The animations were narrated by Hart using vocal recordings made in 2010, including sound effects and background music. With that last transformation, she ultimately produced animations that are brutal but true insights, standing as reminders that while technologies may come and go, human frailties remain the same.
On A CHILD’S MACHIAVELLI in the context of memes, Hart says: "The other day, a little bird told me that my 30-year-old Machiavelli aphorisms were proto-memes.
If I were to believe this, I would have to accept the fact that I was unknowingly, in those days, some kind of meme pioneer. So not just a digital art one, but now also a meme one.
I can’t seem to shake what, to me, is this strangely awkward category, so I will just have to accept it. But I reject the idea of being proto, meaning a precursor. I actually think that the original version (THE PRINCE written by Niccolò Machiavelli in 1513) was the actual proto-meme; it is still being interpreted, shared, commented on, and adapted to the current zeitgeist, even now and by me.
My own interpretation of THE PRINCE was a small book that, at first glance, seemed to be for children. Apparently, I was teaching kids some VERY bad manners. But my real audience was adults. My intention with A CHILD’S MACHIAVELLI was to translate Niccolò’s aphorisms into the vernacular of our time. My humorous versions were just early examples of memes to come. And to prove it, here’s a bit of serendipity: my Machiavelli interpretations were born in Berlin in 1994, at the same moment that Netscape Navigator went viral (but in California!). Meaning that A CHILD’S MACHIAVELLI was born at the same moment that the Internet became a meme. The Internet is, of course, the meme of memes.
Now, getting back to that little bird. In English, the expression "a little bird told me" means that a little tweety-bird gossip (who must remain nameless) told me something or other. I think this is why Twitter uses a bird as its logo and why a post on Twitter is called a tweet. My Machiavellis do have certain qualities very related to those of that bird. The kiddie-drawing part of my hand-drawn-meets-Flash animations is the stylistic equivalent of a little bird. Like a little bird, my drawings are quite cute and sweet. To expand on this, I painted them in pastel colors to further sweeten their sugary, naive drawing style, and express the brutal honesty of the accompanying power-political aphorisms. So in my A CHILD’S MACHIAVELLI animations, two opposites collide. Little-bird tweety sweetness and Machiavellian hardcore truth mix together: the childishly cute is combined with the reality of the adult world to form one single satirical creation.
A meme combines humor with a cultural, social, or political expression. The most powerful memes will always rise to the top and then eternally return. Sounds like THE PRINCE by Niccolò Machiavelli, right? What I did with A CHILD’S MACHIAVELLI was to add a little spice and give power to all things Machiavellian: the will to power and the dynamics of personal relationships. From the past, to the present, and into the future.
Please enjoy."
– Claudia Hart, July 2023
Verisart Certified: https://verisart.com/works/ebe206d0-a3a6-45dd-9e1a-f317449aba1f