The following text was written as part of my contribution to ‘Low is the New High’, part of Salon Suisse, the main Swiss contribution to this year’s Venice Biennale, which took the form of a select programme of individual evenings dedicated to discussing key aspects of aesthetics, politics and the legacy of the Enlightenment. My sincere thanks are due to my fellow panellists – Joseph Imord, Jason Pine and moderator Jörg Scheller – and to the staff of the Swiss Consulate for a stimulating and invigorating event. My apologies for not posting this sooner.
LUDWIG, ELVIS, MICHAEL
A Statement
‘You think I run after the strange because I do not know the beautiful,’
Georg Lichtenberg confides in one of his notebooks at the time of the American
Revolution, ‘no, it is because you do not know the beautiful that I seek the
strange.’
Almost a century later John Ruskin confesses to a similar impulse but in slightly
stronger terms: ‘Once I could speak joyfully about beautiful things, thinking
to be understood – now I cannot anymore; for it seems to me that no one regards
them.’
The appreciation of trash has become over time an act of mistrust that
breaks with the imposition of those shared values which are assumed to make trust
possible. Trash consequently presents a way of thinking about beauty without
falling under its spell. Say yes to one work of unique beauty, it argues, and
you also open your arms to a thousand coarse and miserable reproductions as
well.
Kitsch has always enjoyed a comfortable relationship with the age of
mechanical reproduction – that is to say with industrialized processes, customs
and attitudes – while Camp as a form of aesthetic consumption has established
itself through the coolly ironic visions of Pop Art.
Part industrial by-product, part refuge from the very values that have
created it, trash is the consumerist ethic torn inside out. In an age when beauty and truth,
value and desire, poetry and music have all become so compromised and debased by
mainstream corporate culture that we can barely stand to look directly at them
anymore, we prize trash not for what it is but for what it tells us about the
forces that have shaped it. Overcoming irony by ecstatically embracing irony,
trash is the affirmation of beauty to the point of its destruction.
Trash, in other words, is something ground out between progress and
decadence.
‘Wagner is the modern artist
par excellence, the Cagliostro of
modernity,’ Nietzsche observes of his former friend. ‘All that the world
most needs to-day, is combined in the most seductive manner in his art,—the
three great stimulants of exhausted people: brutality, artificiality and innocence (idiocy).
Brutality, artificiality and innocence/idiocy:
these are the very qualities that excite us most when we contemplate trash.
Forget the ‘failed seriousness’ of Camp. The failed solemnity of Wagner evokes
trash in the grandest manner: Kundry is a true trash divinity, flinging her
arms around the neck of an enchanted fool.
If a
work of art betrays us, then the question of its truth or value is without
relevance.
What does it matter if we consider it trash or not?
Trash expresses a wearied acceptance of surfaces and facades. It is the sign of
something being eaten away inside. This inner life is only partially hidden,
while the logic of its decay exerts an obscure but potent influence. It
provokes a bitter form of laughter – the laughter of recognition, not of the
familiar but of something distorted and deranged within us. As such, trash
In a sense we will never be very far away from alchemy in our
investigation of trash aesthetics. Caught somewhere between the instability of prima materia and that of the recycling
plant, trash is matter whose destiny has not yet been established.
Alchemic processes of transformation, together with those ‘hysterical’
practices identified by Sigmund Freud in which discarded objects associated
with a dead king take on a sacred aspect, lead us to trace the connections between
Wagner’s patron, Ludwig II of Bavaria on the one hand and Elvis Presley and
Michael Jackson on the other. All three of them were kings, both actual and
metaphorical, vilified for their excessive behaviour and ‘bad taste’; and all
three of them were the victims of self-inflicted – one might almost say
sacrificial – violence in one aspect or another.
All three of them created powerfully charged personal environments for
themselves. Think of Ludwig’s fairy-tale castles and palaces at Neuschwanstein,
Linderhof and Herrenchiemsse; Elvis Presley’s Graceland mansion and Michael
Jackson’s Neverland pleasure gardens. These personal trash paradises have
become closely associated with their owner’s decline and early death. Derided
and found wanting according to conventional notions of taste, a study of these
individual trash palaces reveals an attitude which is essentially monarchical and
subversive at the same time; their preservation reminds us that trash –
like all things held to be sacred – is both untouchable and immortal.
Ken Hollings
Salon Suisse, Venice
September 2013
Photographs are by roving shutterbug Kitty Keen, our girl in the palazzo.
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