1. <\/strong>When someone dies, it\u2019s a field day for those who want to learn how to celebrate the most fundamental difference: the difference between life and death. The latter can be as glamorous as the former. Sad in content, funerals are celebratory in form\u2014kitschy and \u201ceducational\u201d as far as the semiology of mass spectacles is concerned. They are distinguished from other events by the way in which they relate to surplus \u00adsymbolization. The reality principle<\/em> loses its dominance while the pleasure principle \u00ad<\/em>conversely gains more weight as we mournfully celebrate our ability to find refuge in melancholia, much like Marcel Proust and Walter Benjamin. While looking at Marcel Broodthaers\u2019s Neuf pots<\/em> (1966) alternative titles come to mind\u2014such as \u201cdental nudity,\u201d \u201ctooth striptease,\u201d etc. In the United States (and in many countries), the smile is a social code, an essential attribute of buying and selling: a smile is expected from sellers of corporate stocks, from sellers of politics and sellers of love. But what is a smile if not an exposure of our bone structure, or, more \u00adparticularly, of our skull, of which teeth are a part? I am referring to the partial \u00addisplay of the skeleton\u2014partial because a complete exhibition is postponed until we die. Despite being a manifestation of the dead in the living, a smile is nonetheless considered to be a sign of good manners and a cheerful mood. Yet the sight of human bones dug up from grave delights no one. The same is true of open<\/em> bone fractures, which cannot be viewed without a shudder. Apparently, the joy we feel at the sight of an open<\/em> (smiling) mouth as well as our readiness to smile are nothing less than a \u00adcelebration of death. Death, \u201cexemplified\u201d by two glamorous \u00adskeletons which one could dub \u201cnaked eternity,\u201d is featured in Damien Hirst\u2019s End Game<\/em> (2004).<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
While Sherrie Levine\u2019s Skull<\/em> (2001) is rife with similar interpretations, it also yields to an analogy with King Midas, doomed to turn everything he touched (including his skull) into gold. But is it not the same touch\u2014the touch of Goldfinger\u2014that turns \u201cautonomous\u201d art into a product of the culture industry? And doesn\u2019t this gilded skull metaphor bear traces of what psychoanalysts call \u201canal eroticism\u201d or \u201cthe anal stage\u201d (which is comparable to the primary accumulation stage in economics)? Detectable in early childhood, the infant\u2019s passion to retain faeces in order to receive greater pleasure at the moment of defecation turns, in the adult whose anal eroticism is displaced into the unconscious, into the passion to retain and accumulate gold (money), which resembles faeces.1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - In this context, Lenin\u2019s promise of a golden toilet on which everyone was going to sit in the future confirms the anal nature of a number of social utopias. <\/span> That is how some people become bankers and coin collectors. Intellectuals are knowledge collectors; instead of collecting precious metals, they collect precious thoughts. For them, anal pleasures are extended to names and titles printed on the cover of books. This twist of the Symbolic function partially explains why we constantly make references to \u201cparadigmatic individuals,\u201d thereby eroticizing and fetishizing them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The fascination with the skull and other parts of the \u201c\u00adeschatologically stripped\u201d body reveals itself in Joel-Peter Witkin\u2019s photograph Portrait as a Vanit\u00e9, New Mexico <\/em>(1994); in Tony Oursler\u2019s 1988 videotapes (Still Life<\/em>); and in Francesco Clemente\u2019s painting Self-Portrait with Skull<\/em> (2002). In connection with this, one recalls Herbert Bayer\u2019s photomontage Self-portrait<\/em> (1932) in which the artist is depicted with his arm chopped off. He stands in front of a mirror while holding a thick slice of the amputated limb in his other hand. In retrospect, Bayer\u2019s montage may well be read as an allegory: a naked young man staring at himself in anticipation of yet another rupture\u2014the one which, six years later, will split the body<\/em> of his work in two parts, German and American.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. <\/strong>Today\u2019s political spectacle is fuelled by the imperial ambitions of power brokers whose dream is to monitor the whole world from atop of an oil rig. The latter is the twenty-first century\u2019s Mount Olympus\u2014the theatrical lodge from which politicians and corporate executives enjoy watching battle scenes, executions and other horrors they inflict upon people\u2019s lives. Bordering on this theme, Sadam Hussein\u2019s execution (the murder of the murderer) has exposed not only the shocking \u00adtheatricality of score settling, but also the ways in which our \u201cinnocent\u201d addiction to oil plays into it. Irrespective of time span, death converts organic life into hydrocarbons. Death\u2019s \u201cexhibitability\u201d (Golgotha, mass funerals, laying in state, public executions, etc.) is a well-known phenomenon; its oil-\u00adrelated nature does not discriminate between predators and prey, thereby \u00adturning all of us into connected vessels linked by oil hosepipes\u2014whether symbolic or real. Death by hanging evokes Lenin\u2019s portrayal of a \u201ctypical\u201d capitalist who, in order to make a profit, supplies his executioners with a rope while knowing it will be used to hang him. Ironically, this low-tech execution is no longer compatible with the American Dream: the United States has long since entered the new age\u2014the era of \u00adhigh-tech death. \u201cNo one has a right to deprive a man of his death,\u201d said Sartre. Perhaps we have taken this statement too literally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. <\/strong>Any text\u2014regardless of its nature\u2014describes the indescribable inasmuch as it refers to some elusive textual entity, a \u201cdeferred object\u201d that escapes description. For example, in Oriental Despotism<\/em> (1957) Karl Wittfogel argues that the development of Egypt, Mesopotamia, China and pre-Columbian societies was stunted because of the need to \u00adirrigate vast territories, a need that ultimately paved the way to \u201chydraulic \u00adeconomies\u201d managed by despotic regimes and bureaucracies deeply \u00adhostile to change. In Imperial China, which is known for its \u00addependence upon rice cultivation, the hierarchy of irrigation \u00adofficials included \u00adimportant poets and artists who\u2014regardless of their \u00adbrilliance\u2014bore the (at least \u00adpartial) responsibility for their country\u2019s socio-cultural and economic stagnation. Engrossed in the metaphysics of time-freeze and inertia, they aestheticized their resistance to change and, in this \u00adcapacity, can be referred to as the precursors of the Moscow Conceptualists<\/em>. According to them<\/em>, the isolation they experienced during Brezhnev\u2019s reign (the \u00adso-called \u201cstagnation epoch\u201d) was a \u201cfertile environment for creative meditation.\u201d Given that \u201ctotal irrigation\u201d was a conceptual project, the notions of a \u201chydraulic economy\u201d and a \u201chydraulic order of life\u201d should have been adopted by Andrei Monastyrsky in his Glossary of <\/em>Terms<\/em>.2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - See: Glossary of the Terms of the Moscow Conceptualist School<\/em>, edited by Andrei Monastyrsky (Moscow: Ad Marginem,1999).<\/span> Even though the Moscow Conceptualists have been repeatedly criticized for their contemptuous reaction to politically engaged art, I am fully aware that to reproach them for equating today-ish-ness<\/em> with newspaper headlines and media junk is nearly as hopeless as to pass judgment on the Chinese terracotta army or on Egyptian mummies for \u00adsafeguarding their culture\u2019s \u201chydraulic\u201d way of thinking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Although in today\u2019s Russia the \u201chydraulic\u201d order of life is not water-related, an oil-irrigated economy3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - In times of war the term \u201chydraulic\u201d can refer to bloodshed, and in times of \u00adfinancial crisis, to the loss of liquidity.<\/span> (closely linked to the state-controlled production and sales of hydrocarbons) is the main source of money for the whole country. In this sense, post-Soviet Russia aptly fits Wittfogel\u2019s \u00addefinition of a \u201chydraulic society.\u201d As for the rest of the world, an \u00adenormous appetite for oil has turned the United States and other Western \u00addemocracies into liquid (read: hydraulic) democracies. Thus, Russia is not the only country that bases its domestic and foreign policies on an \u00adimperial model. In the United States, where the power of corporate capital has reached an imperial state, \u201cdemocracy\u201d is an empty canister set to be filled with oil. It (i.e., democracy) was once a utopian word; now it is a souvenir, a celebratory item. To restore it to the status of a political utopia, which it has lost, one needs to understand that autonomous discursive fields and aesthetic activities no longer exist. Everything, including art, has to be embedded into some system much larger than itself. The \u00adautonomy of art does not in any way preclude its openness to such expansion. Yet there ought to be negative gestures as well\u2014selective bracketing, so to speak. What is remarkable about such negative gestures is that (unlike affirmative, signature-style gestures) they are capable of self-negation\u2014but they negate themselves in the name of utopia, as it were.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. <\/strong>Today artists as well as politicians who darken their palette with oil should extend the notion of a \u201cconstitutive outside\u201d to everything that once gave off fragrance, roared, twittered and sang before being \u00adconverted to hydrocarbons\u2014for instance, animals and birds slaughtered by other animals and birds. For some such a state of affairs is a blessing; for others it is a curse handed down to us as temps perdu<\/em>\u2014as time lost millions of years ago. Such messages are sent not by mail but through \u00adoil-pipes, and no one feels like going to the police when the curse starts to take effect. Curses composted into the energy of humus provide us with agricultural products. Curses extracted from the bowels of the earth create conditions for comfort, warming our homes and allowing us to move in space. One could add to this list those curses obtained from the sale of curses and used to procure new curses, minus those curses spent on conquering new markets for trade and territories rich in oil reserves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n