As country descends into political madness, Kansas’ Mike Hartung captures the gory details

“I’ve always bristled at the fact that art needed to be uplifting,” painter Mike Hartung says in the opening of “Hartung — Not for Sale,” a 2022 short film about the artist by Patrick Troll.

If you, too, are looking for something other than uplift — if, say, grim laughter in the face of impending doom is more your style — then Hartung’s recent exhibition, “Villainy, Beyond the Pale: The Political Landscape of 2023,” at the Smoky Valley Art and Folklife Center in Lindsborg would have been the place for you. A video walkthrough of the exhibition is available on the center’s Facebook page.

Hartung’s unusual story might be familiar to Kansas Reflector readers. For decades, from the 1970s through the early 2000s, on evenings and weekends, he painted evocative representations of imaginary but believable everyday people, most likely Kansans. Some were lyrical — magic realist scenes of small-town life.

Many captured moments of quiet desperation, loneliness, illness, distress, and occasional debauchery and madness. Always layered over the darkness was the transcendent beauty one associates with cinematography. Hartung talks about the formative influence that movies had on him, and his earlier works often feel like film stills in which simple moments acquire existential gravitas.

These were largely the works represented in three parallel exhibitions of Hartung’s work held in 2017 in Lindsborg, Salina and Hays, which introduced his art to a viewing public for the first time.

For about a decade, starting in 2004, Hartung stopped painting. The work he has produced after that hiatus is both an extension of his earlier sensibility and a departure.

Since around 2015, coinciding with the advent of Trumpism, Hartung’s work increasingly screams “j’accuse” at the individuals and forces he sees as responsible for the ideological extremism, corruption, and disappearance of shared baselines for common good, decency, and civility that characterize highly polarized American politics today.

“Media Militiaman” is a good example of both the continuities and discontinuities. The work was inspired by two separate April 2023 news stories in which older white men shot unarmed youths who accidentally found themselves at wrong addresses. For Hartung, the imagined paranoid shooter — equal parts terrifying and pitiful — becomes his protagonist.

Yet there’s a crucial detail here that didn’t exist in his earlier work. Painted in saturated color in the background is a TV with a Fox News pundit siccing his audience: “So does a white native born patriot cower or does he fight?”

Fox News is a frequent reference in Hartung’s work, one of the more obvious ones in an oeuvre inspired by avid news consumption and characterized by erudite and surprising juxtapositions of facts and ideas. Whatever you think of Hartung’s politics, you have to admire his visual inventiveness.

Consider the show’s first picture: a “postcard” from sunny Florida, it encapsulates in one fell swoop Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ war on Disney, attempts to scrub school curricula and the influence in the state of elderly conservative white voters, all captured in a vertiginous vision revolving around DeSantis’ dismembered head acting as a wrecking ball. That’s an engaging way to pack in a lot of information about the culture wars per square inch.

Then there’s “PSC Express,” which comments on the appointment of former congressman and anti-abortion activist Tim Huelskamp to run the state-supported pregnancy “service” centers. The artist’s allusion to the infamous entryway to Auschwitz on which “Arbeit Macht Frei” has been replaced with “Value Them Both” is a visually efficient way to indict hypocrisy.

In Troll’s film, Hartung describes himself as a storyteller, “a writer who only has a paintbrush for his vocabulary.” The wildness of the stories he references and invents is another hallmark of his work. To engage with Hartung’s paintings is to learn some of the more bizarre chapters of our country’s and state’s history.

Consider the epically titled “Behind and Between the Two-Way Mirrors, Doc Brinkley Monitors the Donor and Recipients of His New Goat Giz Treatments to Promote Political and Mental Virility. The Three Patients Are 3 Wasted and Used Koch Whores Off the Streets of Kansas and Washington.” The painting features surprisingly sensitive, albeit satirical, portraits of current U.S. Reps. Ron Estes and Tracey Mann, along with U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall,  receiving imagined treatments from “Doc” Brinkley, a real historical figure and notorious quack.

Brinkley found fame and fortune during the early 20th century transplanting goat testicles into humans as a supposed medical treatment. He also ran twice for governor of Kansas and nearly succeeded. Hartung’s elaborate conceit becomes a vivid reminder, based in local historical precedent, that we should question whether those who enter politics are qualified or have the public’s best interests at heart.

Hartung’s self-appointed role as an artist appears to be witnessing and documenting what in his paintings feels pretty close to the end times. His background as a cartoonist (he drew for four years as an undergrad at Emporia State University) shines through, and there are important art historical precedents to which one can connect his work: Hieronymus Bosch, William Hogarth, Honoré Daumier, George Grosz and Francis Bacon come to mind.

Looking at the hallucinatory, dreamlike logic of Hartung’s works, I also felt a strong kinship with Francisco Goya, particularly the title of a print he made in 1799, also as political commentary: “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.” Indeed, while highlighting individual failings of moral character is his strongest suit, as a group, Hartung’s works hint at systemic failures, as well. Walking away from a Hartung show, one has to wonder in what ways U.S. representative democracy has failed us if the monsters with familiar faces we find in Hartung’s paintings are the ones running the political process on our behalf.

For me, these were important thoughts to consider right now.

Since 2024 started, I’ve begun dreading the upcoming election. The temptation to avoid thinking about politics is great as I vacillate between the helplessness of despair and complacency. I’m not someone who is generally indifferent to politics. I’ve voted in every municipal, state, and federal election I could since becoming a naturalized citizen. I lecture strangers and friends on the importance of participation in democracy. I’ve door-knocked, phone-banked, gone to protests and rallies.

My problem is that (being originally from Russia), I suffer from an irrepressible faith that the U.S., despite centuries of failures to live up to its founding ideals, will always remain committed to at least trying to fulfill the promise of democratic governance in a pluralistic society. What I appreciate about Hartung’s work is that it asks bluntly: What if it doesn’t?

With its bathos, grotesque figuration, and ability to put disgust into memorable visual form, Hartung’s art reinforces a sense of urgency about the stakes of the present moment. His images are darker, funnier, and harder to tune out than the incessant drone of the 24-hour news cycle.

An equally important part of Hartung’s story is that he does not just create apocalyptic art. He’s a living example of commitment to doing concrete things to make one’s community better. In 2021, after years of efforts to establish an art center in Lindsborg, Hartung used his own money and credit to buy the $100,000 building that now serves as the permanent home of the Smoky Valley Arts and Folklife Center, which opened with an exhibit of his work in early 2022. While Hartung benefits from the existence of the center, so do many others served by this multipurpose exhibition, teaching, and event space.

In 2023, the value of the center to its community was confirmed when it raised $80,000 to officially transfer the deed from Hartung to the 501(c)3. According to Marsha Howe, a member of the center’s board and longtime advocate of this institution, this now allows the organization to apply for grants to tackle the building’s accessibility issues.

The success of the Smoky Valley Arts and Folklife Center, which wouldn’t have been possible without Mike Hartung, is especially noteworthy against the background of the low level of support for the arts in Kansas. In fiscal year 2023, the state ranked 48th in the nation in per capita state appropriations for the arts. In fiscal year 2024, even after doubling the state allocation, Kansas will spend a paltry 34 cents per capita on the arts.

Talking to Howe also confirmed my own sense that the story of Hartung’s creative endeavors in his community is an example — a rare one to make it into the news — that it can be possible for people to disagree about politics and still care for each other.

“I’m blown away by people that tolerate Hartung,” Howe says. “People look after him in this community — if he’s supposed to be somewhere and he doesn’t show up, I get phone calls.”

The small “shrine” to the artist in the White Peacock coffee shop on Main Street is also a moving tribute. Being tolerated might seem like a low bar to clear, but in the present social climate, it strikes me as positively aspirational. That a community with a population of 3,500, where plenty of people do not agree with Hartung’s views, can embrace the value of his vividly painted opinions strikes me as an example of toleration worth emulating far beyond central Kansas.

Ksenya Gurshtein is a curator, art historian and writer living in Wichita. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.