An exciting new project, co-authored with Joanna Demers.
With
Aristotelian teleological convictions, humans in the 21st century
remain bent on believing that human happiness is the ultimate end of all human
activities – especially aesthetic ones.
All such activities generate waste: leftover paint, wrong notes, old
drafts. Indeed, the very act of living
inevitably terminates in the decomposition and decay of all organic and
artificial structures. Yet, while
aesthetic practices and theories emphasize various kinds of productive
potential (e.g. for meaning, growth, beauty) as innately human, they tend to
denigrate or ignore decay as something intrinsically non-human. The notion of decay is frightening because it
signals the messiness and inessentiality of human life. Our paper considers visual, literary, and
musical artists that confront decay, often by inducing decomposition within the
artwork itself. Alongside Bernd and
Hilla Becher’s photographs of industrial architecture, we discuss the
decomposition of abandoned objects in the video work described in Michel
Houellebecq’s The Map and the
Territory. We evaluate W.G. Sebald’s
notion of writing as “natural history,” which emphasizes the reclamation of
ruined landscapes by vegetation. And we
analyze William Basinski’s use of the deterioration of magnetic tape as a
musical process. We speculate on the
consequences and questions, both aesthetic and ethical, that result from
aestheticizing decay - from artistically
affirming reality at its most terrifying.
This paper was presented at the 2012 meeting of the Society of Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA), held in Milwaukee, WI. Read the conference paper here. A longer version is forthcoming.
