Dear Ms. Klefstad,
Thank you for this thoughtful critique. We often consider questions like this. We have never managed to state the problem as clearly as you do. This requires reflection. I’ve passed this on to all the others.
Sincerely,
Secret Fluxus
From: Ann Klefstad Subject: Re: FLUXLIST: Kitsch Date: Fri, 02 Jul 2004 10:25:40 -0700
My understanding of the nature of kitsch is that it’s the commodified sublime. It comes out of an era that sought the sublime in art – something that likely is impossible, at least in terms of the Kantian sublime, that experience that sort of strips the gears of perception, you know. But seemingly representations of landscapes personifying the sublime were accepted as sublime artworks (and this was true of poems, paintings, music).
Kitsch appears to be the response to the desire for the sublime. The sublime, in an industrial landscape or a commodified life, is a sort of negative space, a perpetually deferred longed-for experience that people attempt to fill by means of acquisition. Artifacts of wish-fulfillment – that is, representations of absent or impossible situations that promise sublimity but cannot deliver it – are acquired and quickly “used up,” they become useless. And so more must be purchased. Kitsch/Sublime becomes a kind of engine of consumption, the way a commodified culture paves its road toward the desired consummation with the sublime, a road made of discarded dreck, more of which is always needed.
In terms of this notion of kitsch, secret fluxus performances are only kitsch in that they are place-holders for an experience that is arising directly out of life and the dictates of current culture/history, an experience of invention. The place-holder is the revived performance, that does have a air of nostalgia about it.
I think what’s being discussed here is the oddity of the preservation of ephemera, and perhaps the point is that truly fluxus acts are not the revivification of old (now culturally out-of-place or anachronistic) performances, but the creation of new ones that have authentic immediacy. Of course this criticism could apply to other performances; it’s just much more pointed with regard to fluxus because fluxus always had as a subtext that sort of taoist regard for appropriate immediacy, act as response to context or current state of affairs.
So in some sense, preserved, salted-down performances, as a primary activity instead of an occasional apposite homage, could be seen in some sense as kitschy, as place-holding entities that are empty and thus that need to be endlessly repeated.
AK
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