By Jo Howell
Introduction: Jo Howell and Art in the Age of Crisis
Jo Howell is an artist whose practice sits at the intersection of politics, protest, and visual culture. Working primarily with collage, assemblage, and cyanotype photography, Howell interrogates power, propaganda, and the emotional toll of living inside what often feels like a permanently destabilised world. Her work draws from newspapers, political leaflets, and mass media—materials designed to persuade, distract, or control—and reassembles them into images that expose the mechanics of manipulation beneath. For Howell, art is not a retreat from reality but a way of staring directly into it, asking how we survive psychologically, creatively, and ethically in times of relentless political upheaval.
This essay reflects on demagoguery, exhaustion, and the limits of resistance, viewed through the lens of lived experience and artistic response.
The First Trumpian Shock
The first incarnation of the Trumpian era was absolutely mortifying on every conceivable level. From the moment he descended that golden escalator and took to the campaign trail, many of us—certainly far beyond the borders of the United States—found ourselves unwilling spectators to one of the most farcical and terrifying performances of modern demagoguery.
Beneath the yellowed hair and the orange tide line stood an egocentric megalomaniac, fuelled by grievance, spectacle, and an unrelenting hunger for attention. This was not merely bad politics; it was theatre designed to provoke, divide, and dominate. Lies were not mistakes but tactics. Cruelty was reframed as strength. Ignorance became a badge of authenticity.
Like many others, I hoped this moment would pass. That it was the result of a specific cultural fever, a brief bout of American madness that would burn itself out. A flash in the pan of history.
The world, however, has not been so lucky.
A World Already on Fire
Here we are, as a species, standing at the edge of multiple abysses. Climate collapse accelerates. Artificial intelligence raises existential questions we are barely equipped to ask, let alone answer. Economic inequality hardens into something structural and inescapable. And into this volatile mix, we casually feather our bed with a fresh dose of American imperial fantasy and authoritarian nostalgia.
We have not dismantled the machinery that produced this moment; we have polished it. We have encouraged it, normalised it, and in many cases profited from it. The result is a nest of vipers, each feeding on the next outrage, the next war, the next manufactured emergency.
Watching the news has become a form of ritualised dread. Another conflict ignites. Another government falls. Another population is displaced. Each headline competes for attention in a marketplace of despair.
Destabilised and isolated, many of us watch with wide, terror-filled eyes as the world appears to burn in real time.
2016: Brexshit, Banners, and Brief Hope
In 2016—the year of Brexshit, the year of “grab them by the pussy”—Trump came to visit the UK. There were protests. Real ones. Loud ones. Joyfully creative ones.
We made banners. We made posters. We made art. Collectively, we gathered to express a very British distaste for what he represented. There was energy then, a sense that satire, humour, and mass participation could puncture the ego of power. The now-infamous inflatable baby balloon bobbed above the streets, ridiculous and defiant.
Responding to hate with sardonic humour felt effective, even hopeful. It felt like resistance still had momentum.
A decade later, that energy has largely dissipated. Not because the stakes are lower—but because they are crushingly higher.
Exhaustion as a Political Condition
Now we are tired. Bone-deep tired. Mentally exhausted by the sheer volume of catastrophe, contradiction, and noise. Authoritarian rhetoric no longer shocks; it drones. Each new outrage barely has time to land before it is replaced by another.
The threats escalate in language if not always in action: reckless talk of military force, casual references to regime change, imperial posturing dressed up as strength. Old wounds—Iran, the Middle East, Eastern Europe—are prodded and reopened in speeches and soundbites. Greenland is spoken of as if it were a real estate opportunity. Gaza is reduced, in rhetoric, to a beachfront fantasy once its people are erased.
Up is down. Black is white. Evil is reframed as necessity. Good is dismissed as weakness.
Man. Woman. TV. Camera.
The repetition itself becomes numbing, and that numbness is dangerous.
Violence, Power, and the Lie of Control
The language of force saturates everything. Policing becomes militarised spectacle. Protest is reframed as threat. When violence occurs, it is endlessly debated, distorted, and denied. The powerful gaslight the public with straight faces, insisting that what we saw did not happen, or that it was justified, or that there was no alternative.
Internationally, alliances warp. Aggression is rewarded with flattery. Autocrats find common cause. Red carpets are rolled out where there should be accountability. The message is clear: power recognises power, and morality is optional.
Nothing feels stable. Nothing feels anchored. Truth itself becomes provisional.
Collage in the Age of Global Bullshit
My own work during the Brexit years emerged from this chaos. I began collating propaganda, political leaflets, newspapers, and magazines—materials saturated with persuasion and fear—and recombining them into new collage works. By cutting, layering, and disrupting these sources, I tried to expose their absurdities and violence.
Ten years later, the raw material has multiplied beyond measure. We are drowning in global bullshit. Information no longer flows; it floods. The line between reality and performance has been so thoroughly eroded that even recognising manipulation requires constant vigilance.
I can write. I can lament. I can make images that scream back at the void. But the question nags relentlessly: what can we actually do to change the trajectory of this runaway train?
Spectacle, Martyrdom, and Myth
Even attempts on Trump’s life—real, alleged, or mythologised—are instantly absorbed into the spectacle. In a country saturated with guns and violence, each incident becomes another opportunity to spin narrative, invoke divine protection, and deepen the cult of personality.
“It was God’s work,” he says, and millions nod along.
The demagogue thrives not despite chaos but because of it. Disorder feeds the fantasy that only he can restore order, even as he profits from the destruction.
What Remains for Artists?
So where does that leave artists, writers, and makers?
We are not saviours. We do not command armies or markets. But we do shape meaning. We slow things down. We reframe. We refuse the neat narratives offered to us by power.
Art cannot stop bombs. It cannot reverse climate collapse. But it can document, resist erasure, and preserve dissent. It can hold space for grief and rage when official channels offer only denial.
Perhaps that is enough. Perhaps it has to be.
Smighty Smighty Almighty
I don’t offer solutions here. Only witness. Only refusal.
If demagoguery depends on obedience, exhaustion, and silence, then making, speaking, and assembling meaning from the wreckage remains an act of defiance.
Well I say: smighty smightly all mighty.
Ha way.