Curatorial notes
Curator: Welcome. We’re looking at a political campaign button, "Portret van Richard Nixon", created around 1960, rendered in a mix of photographic and print media. It's fascinating to consider it outside the context of a collection. Editor: Immediately, the formal properties strike me. The concentric red and white stripes radiating outwards create a powerful visual field, almost hypnotic. And that crisp, central photograph. Curator: Let's talk about the materiality. A button is, by its very nature, a mass-produced object, meant for wide distribution and consumption. It collapses the boundary between art and the everyday. Someone designed it, someone manufactured it. The materials – the metal, the paper, the ink – all sourced and processed to create this…artifact. Editor: Yes, and the limited color palette—red, white, blue, and black—enhances the graphical boldness. Note the contrast between the photographic realism of Nixon's portrait and the almost abstract patterning. Semiotically, the stars flanking "For President" reference ideals that the candidate wished to represent. Curator: Absolutely, it is meant to signal trustworthiness and the "American dream". Consider also the social context – a wearable object that indicates affiliation, manufactured within a political campaign structure. How many hands did this pass through before it became, perhaps, a forgotten relic in a drawer? And its survival allows us now to analyze and think about history. Editor: But we also respond to the visual language independent of the specific socio-historical frame. The tension created through the circle around a portrait provides visual momentum. We, as viewers, respond, through our perceptual faculties to line, color, and shape. Curator: Still, that response is undoubtedly shaped by our contemporary understanding of Nixon. Could you look at this same button with the same detachment if it was of Kennedy, say? That recognition of who is pictured in that portrait absolutely contextualizes your feelings of the overall effect. Editor: A fair point, although, stripping away my subjective opinion about its real world implications and purely considering it as a symbol…The clarity and directness speak to an aspiration for something that it probably was not and has an aesthetic and meaning independent of our views on Nixon. Curator: The making, dissemination, and use – the very life of this object, contributes in equal parts to our aesthetic appreciation of it today. It also represents a specific political landscape. Editor: And the way it is shaped through aesthetic and representational choices ensures we even pause long enough to be able to place it within such complex structures.