In a world called catastrophe

mills:

Mao, Roy Lichtenstein (1971)

I am partly persuaded that postmodern ‘playfulness’ is a very good thing, that by desacralizing images, words, and concepts we can more exhaustively interrogate them, sorting out what matters and why and developing our understanding of the world. This has been my first -but not only- line of defense on behalf of works of art that violate whatever boundaries of taste, sensitivity, or custom, and I extend the defense to utterances among friends (as do most of us, I think).

But it is always arresting to remember that some images have correspondences in the world of human experience that seem beyond “play.” I wrote previously of the associations one cannot avoid between the wonderful work by the amazing Cursive Buildings below and September 11th, associations which first forced their way into my awareness when rewatching Brazil after the attacks:

The image of Mao above, and those many Maos fashioned by Warhol below, reminds me of this. Mao was as evil as any human being has ever been, as evil as any can be; that he was ostensibly driven by ideology to pursue, acquire, and deploy maximum individuated power in no way absolves him. Several tens of millions of people died because of Mao, many at his direct instruction; many were tortured to death.

In some senses we are all their kin, but of course those victims must have living relatives, too. One wonders how they feel about images like the Warhol below: do they find them an interesting reclamation of signifier and symbol, or a kaleidoscopic horror? How would you imagine it if the face were Hitler’s, or Pol Pot’s?

And indeed, how do you feel about the Dead Kennedys’ song “Holiday in Cambodia”? Or about this Stalin / Colonel Sanders KFC / KGB brand mashup? Is it as funny when one thinks of the weeping, begging sisters and brothers marched through the Lubyanka to be shot in the back of the head in the middle of the night?

The older one gets -the more one knows about the lives of others- the greater the number of images, symbols, narratives, histories, and jokes one can no longer take lightly. One knows someone who lost a child; the “dead baby” meme loses its luster in light of her tears. One knows of a city that washed away and someone whose life was wrecked: you change the station if “When the Levee Breaks” comes on. And so on.

It doesn’t mean terribly much about the things in themselves, as philosophers say, but it means something about the things in oneself, the widening sense one has of the seriousness of history, the importance of history, the fragility of life. And year by year, I worry “play” gets harder.

(None of which is to say I can’t take a joke; I still laugh at many of these things, but now with some slight concern that wasn’t always there).