All Around Bling-bling : The Art of Humanity in Civilization’s Cultural Surplus

The structures of the global societies in which we live today are quite obviously the outcome of the dangerous and deliberate coexistence of constantly advancing state-of-the-art technologies and old, even archaic models of governance and society. One need not refer to statistics released by international organizations to affirm that, generally speaking, in democracies of the neoliberal era, disparities between populations, with respect to wealth, access to health services and information, life expectancy and quality of life, have long-since reached levels that have, as Mike Davis keenly observed, exhausted our “capacity for indignation.”1 1  - Mike Davis and Daniel B. Monk, eds., Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism (New York: New Press, 2007). Because humanity has adopted a monoculture with its civilization of mass production,2 2  - Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques (Paris: Pocket, 1984), 37. and because the latter can scarcely meet the real needs or ensure the facilities3 3  - The organization of facilities lay at the heart of Buckminster Fuller’s “World Game” system: “make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone.” The idea has been taken up by many followers of various different societal models — including John Cage, who frequently referred to it in his conversations. of the humanity it represents, we are living in a ­surplus of cultural signs — luxury trash — that constitute our societies’ very ­identity. Bling-bling is the human condition in the twenty-first century when humanity’s own needs are expressed through representations of its symbolic desires. The craving for utopian fantasies codified by commercial and promotional imperatives annihilates identities and personalities, which fade into the everlastingly “large promise”4 4  - Raymond Williams, “Advertising: the Magic System,” Advertising & Society Review, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Project Muse, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). of a bright and glittery global all-round. To take up a leitmotif in thinking at the end of the last century, humanity’s alienation is complete when it envisions its own destruction as an aesthetic experience.

Early this year, Parisian Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont presented the recent works of the artist duo Pierre et Gilles, a new series of large-scale painted photographs.⁵ 5 - Pierre et Gilles, “Wonderful Town,” exhibition presented at Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont, Paris, 27 November – 23 January 2010. Their “Wonderful Town” exhibit offers a dreamlike trajectory in which characters and moods at the confluence of the sublime and the terrifying are set against a postindustrial decor — schizophrenic and apocalyptic cityscapes,⁶ 6 - See Courrier international, No. 998-999 (December 17-31, 2009): issue devoted to prophesies, apocalypses, and the end of the world. office and residential buildings, abandoned factories and ranged construction cranes. The oases of dream and fantasy, nests of imagination and sublime kitsch, sparkle on the dull backdrop of the civilized world’s arid debris like colourful sequins and garlands ­fluttering in a cloud of smoke. In this spectacular image, an image created from the extreme, even saturated accumulation of capital (the image in which Modern Times has placed its trust),⁷ 7 - “Spectacle is capital to such a degree of saturation that it becomes an image” (“Le spectacle est le capital à un tel degré d’accumulation qu’il devient image.”), Guy Debord, La Société du Spectacle (Paris: Gallimard-Folio, 1992), 32. the only means of escape is a hopeful dream that can match any deep religious faith or its ecstatic and sacred mise-en-scène. Bling-bling is a hard version of the spectacular image, its transformation into an icon. Art is here the imperturbable extension of Creation, in all its metaphysical and spiritual dimensions: more than ever, the contemporary art gallery exudes a presence, “possessed by other spaces where conventions are preserved through the repetition of a closed system of values… some of the sanctity of the Church.”⁸ 8 -  Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 14. As closed and redundant a system as that proposed by Boris Archour, who stood in front of luxury boutiques in Paris wearing a vest on which he had sewn the phrase: “Les femmes riches sont belles” (“rich women are beautiful,” Les femmes riches sont belles, 1996).