museum of everyday reality or how she got pissy about pinterest

i have what is becoming a love-hate relationship with pinterest. i love that i can use it to find things again, rather than bookmarking 10,000 pages in my browser. i hate that everyone is up in arms over the terms. i love it visually - it just pleases my eye to open the page. i hate when random strangers categorize my boards. i love how it helps me see trends in my own taste and thinking and just generally gives me a big picture, holistic overview of what i want (e.g. with regard to the new kitchen). i hate all of the pretentiousness in the descriptions people write for their pins. here are just a couple from last evening:

~ people referring to salt as "artisan sea salt". what, have they painted little pictures on the salt flakes? (if so, i want to pin that!)

~ a reference to "butter and other primal fats" as ideal to serve on your fiddleheads. now i am as interested in foraging and found food as anyone and intend to learn more and eat a whole lot more of it this year, but really, do we have to be so PRETENTIOUS about it?

and this whole curation movement - pinners as curators. that just strikes me as so, to use the word again...pretentious.  i was rather disgusted by all of this last evening and so i picked up dubravka ugresic's museum of unconditional surrender to take my mind off of it. sometimes, you just pick up exactly the right thing to read at the moment you need to read it.

i opened to a page where dubravka wrote about ilya kabakov, a russian artist who illustrated children's books for status as a "legitimate artist" during the soviet years, but who lives today in new york and is known as "an archaeologist of the everyday," in the tradition of kurt schwitters, robert rauschenberg and others.  he gathers the detritus and everyday bits and pieces of trash, classifies them and makes them into art in order to make sense of reality. dubravka quotes the novel of a forgotten russian avant-garde writer, konstantin vaginov, "classification is one of the most creative activities. essentially, classification shapes the world. without classification there would be no memory. without classification it would be impossible to imagine reality." she characterizes kabakov as a descendent of this russian avant-garde tradition and describes his work, saying "the material of bureaucratized everyday life transposed on to magnified boards obliges the observer/reader to read into it his own meaning." and it hit me that it's what we're doing with pinterest.

this obsessive collecting and classification is quite possibly our attempt to find some kind of pattern, sense and meaning in a world that seems increasingly to have gone mad. of course, that mad world cannot help but impose itself on the classifications all the time in the form of pretentions designed to set us apart from the mundane everyday, and so we work against that which we ourselves construct. we want to find our own outlook of the world, our own conception of beauty, our own visual language with which to express our everyday. beautifully photographed. categorized. labeled. curated. one giant inspiration board in which we ultimately reveal the underlying kitsch of everyday reality. endlessly repinned and replicated.

on language and translation

my ponderings on kitsch and reading murakami have me thinking about language. and its connection to culture. do specific languages express something about their culture? can things be more precisely expressed in certain cultures/languages than in others? what does it do to the meaning behind a word to translate it? can translation at all capture the essense that's there in the original.

a word like kitsch, english has taken wholesale from german, so although without the cultural context, you may not understand it in the same way, the essence must, for the most part, still be there in the word. that is, if meaning adheres itself to words at all, which is probably a debatable question as well.

i'm, of course, reading the murakami in english translation and have a number of times along the way wondered if i'm missing something, not being able to read it in the original japanese. however, even in translation, it seems to me to be full of fresh ways of expressing things, which i have felt must come from the japanese words themselves. the translator, jay rubin, must surely have made word choices based on what he knew of both languages, since that's what the job of translation is all about. this has, for me at least in my reading, resulted in new and interesting ways of looking at things, even in english.

some examples:

"There is a kind of gap between what I think is real and what's really real."

"The best way to think about reality, I had decided, was to get as far away from it as possible..."

"Here in this darkness, with its strange sense of significance, my memories began to take on a power they had never had before. The fragmentary images they called up inside me were mysteriously vivid in every detail, to the point where I felt I could grasp them in my hands."

"Memories and thoughts age, just as people do. But certain thoughts can never age, and certain memories can never fade."

looking at these passages i've selected, i get the feeling that these are ways of expressing thoughts i've often had on reality and memories, but couldn't actually GET to the right words to convey them. the words themselves seem simple and logical. the first one is arguably what Plato was getting at with the allegory of the cave, so it's not really a matter of the thought never having been expressed previously, it's more, for me a question of capturing it more powerfully through linguistic means. because thoughts are so fleeting and elusive, it's difficult to wrestle them into words and sentences.

in all of my travels, i am struck again and again that globalization isn't all it's cracked up to be. although we may all have access to blue jeans, we are not all the same, but i do wonder what it will do to the world that everyone increasingly speaks english? will there be a resulting poverty of meaning and expression as people muddle their own language with english? i definitely hope not.

i guess i shouldn't worry that much. most everyone in denmark speaks english and while there are many loan words--computer, business and the like, there are some things that are just expressed better in danish.

• numse - the very best danish word. it's a cute word for bum.
• skumfiduser - marshmallows.
• -agtig - a great suffix. the closest english equivalent is -ish, but that doesn't do it like -agtig does.
• offentlige - "public," as in public sector, but there's SO much more in the word than there is in the word public in english. it encompasses an entire way of dressing and decorating and behaving and even a certain kind of haircut as well. a very powerful word meaning-wise. and a word that could only have ended up so loaded with meaning in its cultural context.

oh well. who knows, perhaps my musings are all for nothing...maybe in ten years we'll all be speaking chinese or even hindi. imagine what we'll be expressing then!

kitsch on the brain

even before going to munich, i had kitsch on the brain. matei calinescu characterizes kitsch as one of the five faces of modernity. it is the very manifestation of the modern condition--endless replication. it's easy, not demanding anything from the consumer but consumption--no thinking, no processing, no intellectualizing, just enjoyment. and a consumer is indeed required. kitsch requires a receiver of the kitsch in order for it to function.

kitsch takes many forms--from the hundreds of lidded beer steins lining the tourist shops of munich to small plastic replicas of neuschwanstein to posters of the "arbeit macht frei" sign over the gates of dachau concentration camp. it's a way of trying to objectify memory. you don't have to remember the sight of neuschwanstein yourself if you have the little replica at home on the shelf. you preserve the memory of it there in the little hunk of kitsch plastic. a sort of false memory.

national costumes embody kitsch as well. rooted in some sense in some long-forgotten history, people wear them in ignorance of their original purpose. the stories behind the embroidered patterns and the reasons for certain details--like an apron made in some special way--are long since forgotten. they become a cultural artifact disconnected from culture, especially if they're taken home as a souvenir.

yugoslav writer dubravka ugrešič writes about the nationalist kitsch which destroyed her country a number of times in her book of essays--the culture of lies. she suggests that kitsch, whether it's nationalist or socialist, is deeply connected to folklore...to the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. and as such, is an insidious and seductive strategy. kitsch attaches to national symbols--crosses, sculptures, landmarks. of course, this sort of kitsch is much more dangerous than a souvenir of a trip abroad. but, at its base, it's the same cheapening of the real.

kitsch takes something away from the real. a replica of neuschwanstein does not stand in for seeing the real thing. a young girl's room full of monet water lilies posters does not replace seeing a real monet in an art museum. the serbian brotherhood symbol has little or nothing to with actual serbians or brothers. the unending duplication inherent in kitsch cheapens and demeans the real object.

and yet, sometimes i DO embrace the kitsch. my starbucks mugs collected in starbucks around the world are surely a form of kitsch. i have a framed poster of a matisse paper cutout (i could, after all, never afford a real matisse). i love those little russian nesting dolls--matryoshka--and buy them whenever i'm in a country where they are made and sold (ukraine, lithuania--it doesn't have to be russia--proving my point about the diluting factor of kitsch). but shouldn't we be more careful about doing that? shouldn't we be more interested in preserving authenticity?

as i pondered the notion of kitsch while i was in munich, where it seems to be screaming at you from every corner, i at first thought that there wasn't much of it evident in denmark. but, it seems that every country has their own brand of kitsch. in denmark, where everything is sleekly designed, it's just more attractive--but the same duplication is going on...hans wegner chairs in every home (including my own) and for those who can't afford them, ikea has a version that's hard to tell it's not the real thing. which brings me back to my point. kitsch dilutes the real. but, how can we escape it?

pretty bleak musings for a rainy monday...