Suicide Girls
Today as I worked my way through a rapidly expanding project on contemporary art I thought about how, in an effort to bring back beauty into art discourse, art critics like Dave Hickey rewrote abject art (for example Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs or Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ) as beautiful. It seems that the only way that beauty could be re-introduced was through the register of the traumatic, but in doing so, it nullified the content of the work (even if this content may have been somewhat questionable). After the beauty theorists got through ignoring it, the abject became superfluous and a new wave of banal neo-modernism could follow. Just like piercings on a “suicide girl” make the browsing porn on the site seem “rebellious,” the abject gives the work a superficial layer of hipness and desirability while enhancing pleasure.
It’s interesting to note that the same thing happened to architecture, with decon corresponding to the abject. When Bilbao was completed, instead of being seen as a work of deconstructivist architecture, it would be seen as a project to be understood solely in terms of its beauty and the transformational potential of that beauty on cities.
Clearly, these thoughts need to be elaborated more, but it’s the sort of research I’ve been doing lately and I thought it might be worth sharing.
