Something endlessly rejuvenating about good old fashioned visual polemics (as the one above by Martin Rowson of The Guardian) in which capitalists look like pigs in top hats. (And no, Nina, not the good pannaging porcine comrades.) We know it may not be the case anymore, in this era torn between ostentatious new money and the "humanitarian ethics" of some of the rich. But still... How about a little nastiness back into the game? A little piss, vinegar, expressionist ink stains, and disgust always helps our cause, helps still the turbid waters enough to see the bloated enemies reflected therein.
Piss and vinegar
Something endlessly rejuvenating about good old fashioned visual polemics (as the one above by Martin Rowson of The Guardian) in which capitalists look like pigs in top hats. (And no, Nina, not the good pannaging porcine comrades.) We know it may not be the case anymore, in this era torn between ostentatious new money and the "humanitarian ethics" of some of the rich. But still... How about a little nastiness back into the game? A little piss, vinegar, expressionist ink stains, and disgust always helps our cause, helps still the turbid waters enough to see the bloated enemies reflected therein.
Evan, I definitely agree with the spirit of the posting, but I wonder if we need a new aesthetics of disgust, one more directly linked to the contemporary situation? To be sure, I'm not sure what that would be... but I think it would be worth thinking through.... robert wood
ReplyDeleteSo maybe back to a sort of neo-70's then with technology?
ReplyDeleteLess Garfield, more Hartfield is a motto I could get behind.
ReplyDeleteGiovanni: amen to that. Though there is a certain proper disgust to the fusion of the two.
ReplyDeleteRobert:
ReplyDeleteindeed, we'd have to consider to what an aesthetics of disgust linked to the present would look like. And then what its political orientation might be...
That said, your second comment seems right in a way. It's telling that Hollywood has, to my initial surprise, not stopped mining 70's horror films for remakes, going pretty deep in: a 3D remake of Piranha (1987) is on the menu. And of course, one could say that the 70's represented the last gasp before the closing-off of possibilities under neoliberalism. But as always, it's too easy to say that we're in a moment that thinks itself as another 70's.
Of interest for me in particular would be the value of an aesthetics of disgust - insofar as it is bound to a tone and direction antagonism, not disgust as its own end - that seemingly has not been updated, one that perhaps sketches lines not just of capitalist development's progress narrative but more Tronti-like, a continual history of antagonism from below, a lineage of seeing enemies and drawing them as such.
Sorry, the second comment regarding the 70's was from eag. Forget to differentiate in my response.
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