When writer Peter York first published Dictator Style in 2005 there was no way he could have predicted this look’s American revival in 2024. And there is a cheekily elegiac tone to his book, as if to say there was a sunsetting of dictatorship culture. After opening with a quote of “In Every Dream Home A Heartache” York points out the then-dominant billionaire taste was “the dressed down wooden beams of new Silicon Valley money.” At the time, no one rich and all-powerful wanted to actually look it. Fast forward a few election cycles.

While the idea of bad/good culture itself is root coded into every capitalist project from colonialism to neoliberalism, any dictator’s sartorial choices can still be a hilarious respite from years of that boot on your neck. Really? You’re wearing that to the show trial?

According to York, you too can get the look with the following rules….

“Have Yourself Everywhere”

“Think Hotel”

“Have Important Oil Paintings”

“Go For Gold”

“Big It Up”

“Think French”

“Involve Brands”

Dictator Style is out of print but can be bought through Abe’s.

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In the small town where I grew up in there was an evangelical church that, at Christmas time, opened a quonset hut full of biblical scenes built out of surplus mannequins with glued-on beards and Party City wigs. For terminally ironic teenagers these thrift store-David LaChappelle scenes were a free entertainment godsend. One year, dressed in our punk and goth finest and stoned on weed, we posed with the figures, rearranging them in questionable tableaus when no one was looking. I think we even signed the guestbook with Manson girl names. Now that I’m far past my hokey teen transgressions I see that we were answering religious kitsch we found genuinely oppressive with our own brand of subcultural kitsch.  

In the end, it’s probably a danger to not take everyone’s kitsch seriously.

That hut is long gone but over the years I’ve kept looking for these places while on road trips and tours and taking photos when I can. The following photos are of derelict Christian parks in Connecticut and California. In their own ways, both places sprang from American anxieties: Holy Land USA wanted to bring a mini-golf-sized holy land to a dying industrial town while Desert Christ Park’s creator built reinforced concrete icons in the Mojave Desert meant to survive a nuclear war. (Though of course they couldn’t even survive bored teenagers.)

HOLY LAND USA (Waterbury, Connecticut)

Created by a Catholic businessman in 1955, Holy Land USA presented plaster and concrete versions of holy land sites and stories cut into a terraced hill. There was also a biblical animal petting zoo.  After the owner's death in the 1980s the park fell into severe disrepair, culminating in being the site of a horrific murder in 2010.

That crime mobilized a group of civic leaders to buy Holy Land. The area has been cleaned up but the exhibits are not restored—I still remember the odd feeling of looking down while getting into shooting position and realizing I was stepping on a piece of a Samaritan’s plaster face.

DESERT CHRIST PARK (Yucca Valley, California)

The statues of Desert Christ Park were created by aviation worker Antone Martin during the early days of the Cold War, from 1945 through the 1950s. Displaying idiosyncratic interpretations of biblical scenes Martin wanted his "nondenominational message of peace" to be able to survive a nuclear war so he sculpted the figures out of bunker material, including steel reinforced concrete.

It fell into disrepair in the ’80s and ’90s. Locals often stole the heads from the Jesus statues before it was reopened in 2004.

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As someone whose close friends since childhood have mostly been women I’ve long benefited from making those bonds outside of the norm. But I’ve also learned where things get complex, and where our shared experiences stop and remain beyond me. I think most acutely of those nonverbal moments of communication that happen between two women. When a shoulder touch or a silent look can convey everything from “Yes you should go for him” to “Trish is upset in the next room and we’re needed. I know she brought it on herself, she always does. I’m not defending her but we should be there for her.”

All in a millisecond glance. (And I hope Trish is okay.)

This shared mind is a good survival skill, but it might also come from a deeper place, where group identity is made by rituals and murmuration. Anna Gaskell’s staged, cinematic photos of girls in various costumes and tableaus capture those rituals, both fairy tale-ish and nightmarish. The images in her 2001 monograph can sometimes seem like a queer subversion of the Lewis Carroll–gaze. Other times they’re as feral as Cronenberg’s brood, revolting against the conformity imposed by puberty and uniforms.1     

Gaskell’s girls are often playing games of some kind and games are how typical children learn and recreate society’s violent sorting. Who’s inside or outside the group? Who has value or not? The artist had to make these images and that compulsion comes through.

Gaskell continues to exhibit, though her recent work is less frenzied compared to this collection, which by my memory was culturally radical even at the time. The early Bush era was a numb haze of monochrome clothes and Muzak electronica. It was far from our current era of kinderhorror, where expressing anxiety and abjection is not just in the open but encouraged as healthy.  

Maybe herein lies the path to Gaskell’s pop culture rediscovery. Just imagine M3GAN or Abigail2 flipping through this monograph and feeling seen by this past.

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