![]() ![]() 3 Must we consider culture a fetish, an inanimate object, a closed system that cannot incorporate “unpleasant things”? Can’t we see the discrepancy between cultural acknowledgment and physical reality? If not, why not? What restrains culture from associating itself with the excretive functions of city life, functions which produce millions of tons of garbage? And yet, the truth of the “bowels” is equal to that of the “head,” and the resulting obscenity is revealing, from the symbolic as well as from the political point of view. Emerging from technological sphincters, refuse is regulated according to vital rhythms of retention and evacuation nevertheless, these municipalities no longer manage properly to free themselves of this refuse. Yet the state of our cities speaks for itself: New York, Mexico City, Hong Kong, New Delhi-filth is predominant in all. In fact, these are repeatedly hidden and sublimated, as if the acknowledgment of their quantity and intensity were unbearable. Society cannot afford to have its self-image tarnished, so instead it tries to “reclean.” This operation is the effort of a functionalist economy based on the circulation of new goods, the diffusion of which can be seriously impeded by the presence of refuse and scum. It should be understood that social, in our system, signifies “toward economic management.” As the carrier of a moral judgment, it must affirm, against any antisocial spirit, a sense of order. Actually, they are a danger to political power, because, if they are elaborated on as models, they would acquire a cultural significance of social anomaly and rebellion: “To reflect on filth allows reflection on the relationship between order and disorder, being and non-being, the formal and the informal, life and death.” 2 This is why art that constructs itself, or is constructed, according to dominant social values doesn’t speak of dirt. In art, imperfection and filth are threatening transgressions. Since art reflects political engagement and social relationships, its ingestion of structure and perfection symbolizes an ideal that seeks to unify, organize and homogenize our larger environment. 1 But to what do these restraints pander? What do they hide or repress? Are they not images, dictations, that have arisen from the needs of an aristocratic and individualistic affirmation of a culture that tries to picture itself outside the conditions of existence? Everything must proceed to the coronation of the clean, the ordered and the beautiful, which Freud defined as the fundamental needs of civilization. ![]() To attain these results, art employs reflective surfaces, geometric figures, simple planes, industrial materials, mirrors, shiny papers, decorated fabrics, philosophic citations, and other entities, which with their brightness and lucidity can dazzle, and even blind, the spectator. To rid oneself of chance, of chaos and filth, is to allow only organization and pleasantness. Consequently, the positive certainty of art has the end result of rebuffing (in the realm of knowledge and therefore in the empyrean of culture too) the pressures and attacks of “disorder.” Thus art defends itself against actions which would disturb the system and its rigidity. Of course, this order tends not to depend on historical, transitory conditions it has an atemporal character, which makes it authoritative. And such a concept reveals itself as both equivocal and idealistic-since it is based on a concept of art where total “order” (organic and hierarchic, natural and moral, social and political) is integrated in a unique vision devoid of empty spaces or margins of doubt. This liberation cannot be carried out, however, unless one conceives of art as a unique discourse. Enclosing itself within the circle of logical and scientific “theory,” art has removed itself from the dominion of the “real,” thereby liberating itself from discussion and criticism, too. At the public level, in fact, the artistic experience has been sustainable only to the extent that the existential fracture manages to be hidden within some larger, reassuring vision: one thinks, for example, of the mediation of minimal and conceptual, which has resulted in robbing art of the incompatibility inherent in existence. IN THE SPAN FROM 1960 to today, art has perpetuated the loyalist position which established it as absolute knowledge and dogma, capable of holding within itself all contradictions-with the result that it has been transformed into ritual, into repetitions of all-comprehensive formulae that furnish a response to every situation. ![]() Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 1929.
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