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As scientists work to perfect the art of genetic recombination and replication, artists will be involved in their own form of
ars monstrumalis: The creation of monsters
The technological detritus that had given raw material to the great art movements of the 20th century will be replaced by a scattered wreckage of body parts and twisted metal. Artists, once again - for hasn't it always been their task - will be asked to give meaning to this historical landfill, by fashioning fetishes out of our great historical wounds. And while some of their creations might be monstrous, that is not what will define the ars monstrumalis.
It will be marked by a partnership, unwilling but inevitable, between artists and another group of practitioners, just as dedicated and bound to a long tradition of fashioning extraordinary objects out of mundane materials. With Bataille's theory of dépense as their operating system they will develop an art form that does not forge a path through the institutions of redemption but dredges around in the newly built reservoirs of unrecycled sins.
It will be terrorists in partnership with artists that will create this new ars monstrumalis. The monstrum is etymologically that which warns and which reveals, the repulsion and redemption of Bataille's expenditure method. Yet even in this unimaginable but not unlikely (con)joining, it will be the terrorists that reveal the unbearable core of our sins, that rattle the foundation of our very being, while the artists will assume their usual position at the periphery blaring their muted warning.
One could hope that the roles would be reversed, that this strained partnership would reap more fruitful bounty. That together they would create not just another art form in which we see everything but understand nothing.
But 25 years is not enough time to change a system that has never been realized in an entire existence.
Lise Patt
Los Angeles |
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