by Fraser Hibbitt for the Carl Kruse Blog
It is not a superficial thing to say: there is such a thing as an aesthetic revolt. There is always the pressure to be interested…in a place, in a scene…to agree with this or that mode of life… to buy into a dream of living. Despite all misunderstandings, or rather, in light of all misunderstandings, your life is, to an obtuse degree, aesthetic. Cliches of conversation, of acting, appear Kitsch. The room designed like so many others appears Kitsch. Being understood in certain terms appears Kitsch. In between, the aesthete looks for the genuine, feels deeply disturbed by what is Kitsch, but cannot but remark: where would I be without it?
Kitsch was born from a marketplace that no longer ran on necessity and adventure. We are not in the period of dumbfounded merchants exchanging incomprehensible gestures to each other before their eyes light on each other’s otherworldy materials, laying down the profitable routes of trade and commerce. Kitsch is not from a time of aristocratic luxury, of porcelains and silks from distant lands. No, Kitsch is not of these worlds, it is of a relatively new world: the factory of mass-production.
As the word was initially intended, Kitsch has infiltrated across the board, manufacturing garish, sentimental, and ironic productions in any mode of expression. Kitsch is pointless bad taste. It is commonly defined against art, has even been said to be an enemy and obstacle of art. I did not say ‘creates garish… and ironic works’. ‘create’ and ‘works’ are for the artist, so the language used hints at. Kitsch seems to have a similar problem photography had when theorists furrowed over how it related to art, or whether it was art. There’s no problem today with photography – although it only takes a moment to think that similar debates are ongoing over A.I. and art. Why people keep casting art into the fray to measure with these other complexes is another question. Art is as flexible as you like, always morphing; the prejudice comes from a quality of art: that it is transcendent, that some kind of beauty and eternity attend it. People do not like resemblances to their god. And they do not like their god being used, understandably.
What is it, then, Kitsch? It suffers from a paradox that Borges noted in an essay about Kafka. Kafka, by writing, creates his own precursors, modifying the past, altering our understanding of these precursors. You can hear Kitsch applied all over the place, from the Renaissance Masters to Impressionism, these two styles being bastardised very frequently in Kitsch productions. Here we have Kitsch, originating in the 1880s, in the Munich Ateliers, backdating our understanding of the visual arts, and not only the visual arts. Kitsch feels, after all, empty; an ironic simulacrum without substance. What it is, then, isn’t a great question, a more interesting understanding comes from elsewhere. What is this stuff so widely infiltrated and consumed, the stuff that sits by you calmly and always accepted? Is it not a kind of creature you, for some reason, wish to feed? Feel oddly comforted by?
The ruthless denigration of Kitsch came in the early 20th century. If you are studying the Old Masters, painting in their style, this sentimental, pathos-ridden style, then you are manufacturing Kitsch. If you are composing Romantic melodies, you are composing Kitsch. I say Old Masters, but it could be any tried and tested style… it is like buying a home fully furnished, they say. It does not necessitate the entanglement that an original beauty requires of the observer. It is immediately understood, instantly gratifying (supposedly); there is no distance that one has to travel to obtain understanding. Things changed with Pop art, or things changed after the bomb. If Kitsch was treated as an end-in-itself and analysed that way, then now it was seen as a vehicle for expression. Andy Warhol’s mass-produced prints, Roy Lichtenstein’s cartoons… it seems the commercialised lack of depth triggered a distance that before Kitsch was thought to take away. Something opened. What was it? Irony. Kitsch art always encompassed a knowing-irony, part of its charm, part of its lack of taste, but now the vehicle of irony gives a statement about art consumption and its place in society; its reflection of society. The ‘reflecting your times’ was the new serious-minded art critic’s verbiage that Modernists were fond of. Originality and a kind of disinterested inspiration were/are core artistic principles, along with something called ‘reflecting your times’. These are, as well, very new artistic principles in the history of art, originating in the late 18th and 19th century (see Kant, Hegel, Baudelaire etc.: the nature of the artist, reflecting the times, aesthetic ideals etc. Vs earlier ideas of artists, of all kinds, as kind of draughtsmen).
But irony for irony’s sake is a bottomless pit, as many post-modern thinkers would find out. I suspect many ironic pieces of art do not differ much from earlier manufactured Kitsch: substanceless. Now, I am drawn to a painting: Odd Nerdrum’s Dawn. Nerdrum painted mysterious things. He called his paintings, not art, but Kitsch. Nerdrum thought Kitsch a gateway to a new sincerity in painting, and he believed in older ideals of craftmanship, and was therefore happy to not have his paintings labelled art. He was proud to produce Kitsch. A similar case in literature is Philip K. Dick. Dick used the pulpy Sci-Fi Kitsch narrative to explore identity. Here, the irony, if it can still be called irony, is a facade, a guide to a new world, a new adventure. David Lynch, in film, can also be put in this group. Twin Peaks is the high school mystery turned into a Surreal interplay of good and evil and everything in between, just like Blue Velvet used the coming-of-age narrative to propel a mysterious adventure of love and cruelty.
So, it appears, you can have Kitsch good and Kitsch bad; Kitsch can be used for very profound ends, in art at least. The term is malleable and quintessentially contemporary. In another direction, Milan Kundera, the great Czech novelist, thinks about Kitsch as the absolute denial of shit, that it ‘excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable to human existence’. Sanitizing, simplistic, banal, cheap, etc., worse yet, it is dishonest. Kundera was writing about Communism, about a political idealism forced onto reality; a screen in place to hide the bodies. In the political realm, Kitsch adorns a sinister mask, hiding behind the idealised basic images that all can easily share, intuit, to keep a stranglehold on power. We can easily laugh off, see them for what they were, the stringent ideologies that composed the Cold War; the idealised images politicians evoked to master public consent, but one must also then see the performative Kitsch enacted today, for political Kitsch never ends its shift as an emissary of power.
In Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a painter called Sabina lives out a livelong aesthetic revolt. She travels far from her home in Prague, ending in the United States. Her paintings are emblematic of the fight for authenticity. The teachers at her art school demand a Kitsch like curriculum, idealised life under Communism. She labours to create and what she does create is an intertwining of worlds. One where her forced teaching is shown, but one where underneath the painting you see something else breaking through, some blue flame of creative life. She is misunderstood in the States, too, defined by her life in a Communist state, yet she carries on, nonetheless.
We try to draw the circle around what Kitsch is and are led to the wincing thought that it lives comfortably in the human heart, somewhere in that vague phrase ‘the human condition’. Perhaps, the metaphors that the mind elicits to think and structure what we call ourselves rely on Kitsch as a comfortable alternative to the creatively obscure expansive stuff of reality. We sail through them ever onwards when our last Kitsch-like thought, last Kitsch-like life, no longer suits who we feel to be. Is it any wonder then that we find Kitsch productions on near every street, rustling through our modern history, although we dare not say that was us?
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The Carl Kruse Blog homepage is at https://www.carlkruse.com
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Fraser include Wilhelm Reich and Book Burning, New Sincerity, and Religio Artificio.
Also find Carl Kruse at Fstoppers.