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Get Down with the Simulacra Jeremy Williams seeks a bi-browed shelter from the ennui of hyper-reality. By Jeremy Williams When the great sophists in the sky compile a list of the most controversial philosophers of the modern age, Jean Baudrillard, France's media-obsessed, King of post-modernism, will surely be near its top. Few other philosophers' response to September 11th could prompt the no lesser authority than the New York Times to dub them "cerebral and cold-blooded" or a "demonic genius", but then again few people's reaction to the Twin Towers attack was to claim that its innocent victims were suffering from "ennui at boring modern architecture". In a career spanning four decades and a whole host of slightly preposterously titled texts such as Requiem For the Media and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, few other figures share Baudrillard's ability to delight, enrage and confuse in equal measure. Aside from the general atmosphere of big-balled audaciousness which runs throughout his work (a favourite technique is to take a seemingly irrefutable fact and then "disprove" it through bizarre definitions and random assertions), omnipresent in his writings is a critique of contemporary society which is radical and unique. Baudrillard's dictum is that society has become a meaningless simulacra. In a world where meaning is regarded as worthless, the real has been replaced by a voyeuristic pornography of the hyper-real. For the philosopher, the hyper-real is so dominant, reality simply no longer exists. To an intellectual generation whose defining moment will probably be the "war" in Iraq, the appeal of a thinker bold enough to demonstrate the impossibility of such a conflict being "real" is understandable. Baudrillard's radical view of the world has yet to produce the defining artistic response that often accompanies intellectual breakthroughs (Stravinksy's Rite of Spring and the birth modernism for example). Whether this is testament to his future legacy as a figure of post-modernist fun rather than a serious interpreter of the modern condition is debatable, but aside from the watered down tip-of-the-hat to him in the Wachowski brothers' disastrous Matrix trilogy (the name-dropping references and his perceived bastardization of a life's work of philosophical enquiry reportedly made him furious), there has yet to be a single defining work of art for the "age of Baudrillard". There do exist however two artists who, by nature of their subversion of the hyper-real ennui, may be looked back on in future years as ambassadors of the Baudrillanian zeitgeist, whether they are even aware of his existence or not. The sculptor Gavin Turk stormed onto the international arts stage in 1991 when he was denied the degree he was studying for by Royal College of Art after his sole submission was an empty room adorned with an English Heritage plaque bearing the legend Borough of Kensington, Gavin Turk, Sculptor, Worked Here 1989-1991. Throughout the 1990s he continued to court controversy, turning up to the premiere of Charles Saatchi's Sensation exhibition dressed as a tramp, creating a large advert for a fake edition of the proletarian celebrity magazine Hello! with himself and his family on the cover, and spending several weeks pretending to be Che Guevara. http://iloverichardcheese.com # # # # # Jeremy Williams is a musician and cultural commentator who lives and works in London. He recently appeared as a tramp in a television adaptation of Lorna Goodison's epic poem 'A Hymn'. |
Turk can be seen as a figure able to expose and confront Baudrillard's "hyper-reality" through his subversion of cultural norms in order to confront us with what we are; a tactic best demonstrated by one of his most recent exhibits. At first glance Pile, until recently displayed at London's White Cube gallery, appears to be little more than another in the series of 'found object' pieces so beloved of a significant clique of the British art establishment throughout the 1990s. The observer is confronted by what appears to be a selection of filled black bin bags piled on the floor of the gallery. They are of differing shapes and sizes, but the implication is that they all contain rubbish, worthless detritus to be disposed of. A closer inspection reveals the bin bags not to be found objects at all, but actually to be enormously intricate bronze casts, painted in black to look just like items of rubbish. Turk takes the popular media-propagated maxim that 'modern art is rubbish' to its logical extreme, using his immense sculptors talent to create the simulacra of something worthless, elevated to high art. The act of public subversion pushes the boundaries of the hyper-real, allowing us to fully confront the absence of meaning at the heart of modern existence. Another artist who exposes the hyper-real through elevating universally accepted banality to a higher status is the performance artist Richard Cheese. Cheese, together with his band Lounge Against the Machine, performs immaculate 'cover versions' of popular contemporary songs in the form of a lounge jazz Vegas cocktail ensemble. Lines such as "suffocation, no breathing / don't give a fuck if I cut my arm bleeding" from a song by the American 'nu-metal' ensemble Papa Roach are sung with a near-operatic Sinatrean lustre, while po-faced anthems like Nirvana's 'Rape Me' are delivered as a lilting bossanova. The experience of witnessing these anthems of meaninglessness, taken as gospel by America's youth being 'sent up' by immensely talented musicians in the style of Frank, Dean or Sammy has the advantage of both being a profound critique of the culture of the unreal, as well as being very, very funny. Ultimately, artists such as Turk and Cheese are probably not even aware of the existence of the French philosopher still widely regarded to be bonkers. However, although the combination of Baudrillard's words with the artists' actions have yet to spearhead a coherent movement in the style of modernism or the Enlightenment, together they can be helpful in explaining the post-millennial Western malaise (despite Baudrillard’s claim that the millennium would not occur) in much the same way as a copy of Revolver and a Foucault primer are useful in contextualizing the 'revolution in the head' of the 1960s. To misquote Richard Cheese quoting another popular band, artists of the post-modern calibre of himself and Turk help us to shelter from Baudrillard's hyper-real ennui, through "getting down" with the simulacra. # # # # # |
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