Smile! It’s The Apocalypse.
Back To Black
A human skull faces its reflection in a mirror. Plastered unevenly with white paint as if covered in decomposing flesh, it appears almost human but not quite. Death regarding death, the narcissistic gaze of one meets the other, fascinated above all things by its own face - “Dancing With My Unexploded Self How Crisply We Perceive The Dark Of The Universe And The Darker Of Our Hearts” - Terence Koh
Whether unable to help herself or in thrall to her self-mythologies or a combination of the two, there’s no mistaking the story behing the blood-stained ballet shoes, rotting teeth, slash-marked arms and pinned, staring eyes of Amy Winehouse. Which is that in every sense of the title of her best-selling album, she has gone back to black.
Nor is Winehouse the only tortured female artist slowly killing herself in public. From Britney’s sub-masochistic head shave in the window of an LA salon to Lindsay’s roller coaster ride from one stint in rehab to another amid charges of cocaine addiction and pap shots of her crotch, 2007 has been a classic year for the young, famous and painfully nihilistic.
That’s not to say that Lohan et al don’t share a well-rehearsed legacy which can be traced back to Louise Brookes via Judy Garland. But what’s different about this generation of beautiful fuck-ups and the “darker of their hearts” is that when Lindsay talks about how she feels lost the moment she finds herself without the twin distractions of work and other people or about how compulsively she falls in love (and what that by implication gives away about how pathologically desperate she is in turn to be loved) she could be speaking for any number of the rest of us.
In other words, what these fatalistic starlets magnify is the dark heart of a generation which can be seen to play itself out in the following: the increase in random and meaningless acts of violence; the use of cocaine as the drug of choice for a generation; the vague yet pervasive existential anonmie which hangs in the air like a fog; the break down of relationships; depression; anxiety; panic-attacks; self-absorption; self-harm; looking in the mirror and not recognising the person returning your stare…the list is endless.
Black then is back. And the motif is a recurring one. There’s the black uniform belonging to a generation of emo kids, who growing their hair long and painting their eyes black, grieve en masse for everything they ever lost/never had. There’s the black metal renaissance pioneered by the pseudo-religious cult of Sunn o))), more of which later. And there’s the new shades of decadence to which black has been taken on the catwalk as seen in the shiny, shiny leather and all-in-one gimp frocks of Alexander McQueen, the fetishist imaginings of Raf Simons and the ramped-up-to-eleven Venus-In-Furs asethetic of Gareth Pugh. Studded quite literally with references to punk, the parallels between nihilism ‘07 and that of ‘77 are hard to miss. But where old punk embraced the dirty, gritty, lo-fi, low-budget and cut up, the new punk is partying while Rome burns in animal print and expensive scent. And that’s just to begin.
The Big Hole At The Centre Of Everything
A smashed up shiny black bass bin lies scattered on a shiny black mirror. The herat of the musical equipment having been ripped out, it points not only to some violent act of rock&roll excess but to some deeper all embracing violence within us all. “Black Hole” - Banks Violette
One if the greatest triumphs of the late twentieth century and early twenty first has been the erosion of tradition and the creation of unlimited freedom in its place. No longer tied down by institutions we go our own way. Not reliant on the existence of God, any truth counts so long as we’re true to ourselves. Endlessly revising our past in the project of becomin, we seek instant karma in the immediacy of the present. With no past we make our own luck. With no future we live for today.
But if freedom is the greatest triumph, it also prsents the greatest paradox. We might now be able to become whoever we want to be but nowhere has society so dramatically failed to answer the question “Why are we here?” more than modern consumerism. It’s this paradox which mirrors the relationship between the new punk and new rave. Dionysus to new rave’s shiny Apollo, where the new rave vision is an anything-goes optimism inspired by a brave new world of endless possibility, so the new punk is the existential flipside to the same coin. It understands that if anything and therefore everything is as true as not, then truth itself is self-defeating. Equally, it gets the feeling that living in the moment might create just as many anxieties as it seeks to overcome. As the Romantic thinker Schopenhauer observed:
“You could believe that the greatest wisdom consists in enjoying the present because the present is all that is real and everything else is merely imaginary. But you could just as well call this mode of life the greatest folly; for that which in a moment ceases to exist, which vanishes as incompletely as a dream cannot be worthy of any serious effort.”
As truth, meaning and certainty fade to a spectrum of greys, the instinct towards nihilism, to give up hope because “what’s the point anyway?” has become one of the primary default settings for a generation hooked on high expectations and low self-esteem. The centre cannot hold because there is no centre. As the social anthropologist Thomas De Zengotita writes; “You in your specialness are authorized to create your own vision and philosophy, to cobble one together out of whatever notions strike your fancy. And the result? Everyone has an opinion, everyone can speculate. So what the heck? Mine could be as good as the next one. To each his own world view.”
If freedom is one of the greatest triumphs of our times, then authenticity is one of its greatest obsessions. In a mediated world where the notion of reality has been superceded by various degrees of fake and meaning has been devalued by the relativisation of absolutely everything, for truth we look to fact. No matter that meaning is vague and indeterminate. If existence is validated by fact and fact alone, meaning simply doesn’t matter. We just are. This is the way it is. The why is of no concern, only the what, the when and the how.
Feeding our hunger for the hard and incontrovertible fact, scientism has knocked religion off the top spot. Rejecting the idea of God, Richard Dawkin’s “The God Delusion” (currently number one on Amazon’s best seller list) explores existence with scienctific evidence instead. We can only know what can be proven, he asserts. All else is wishful thinking or conspiracy. Meanwhile humanity, he proposes, is a random accident adrift in a vast and indifferent cosmos instead.
Like Dawkins, Nietzsche too blamed religion for creating false beliefs. But he regarded the ensueing lack of meaning not as a triumph but the single greatest tragedy facing modern humanity. Concerned that a lack of belief in anything was “a sign of the despairing, mortally wearied soul,” he wrote of his bleak vision, “For some time now our whole European culture has been moving towards a catastrophe with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade; violently, headlong like a river that wants to reach the end.”
Nietzsche’s remedy for nihilism was to give value to life by behaving as if existence itself were a work of art. To this end, he developed the notion of the Ubermensch or superman whose “superabundance of will” would over-ride man’s nihilistic instincts and make him “the greatest master of his virtues”. Not quite what Nietzsche had in mind, it’s today’s consumer society - the very thing he prophesised against - which has allowed this. We are all Ubermensch now, all deciding our own identities and determining our fates. And so we wander the earth, masters of our own truths, “dancers with our unexploded selves”, on the one hand doing yoga, on the other cocaine trying to access the divine or oblivion or both at the same time.
How We Learned To Turn Being Damaged Into An Aesthestic.
A naked figure lies face up on a concrete floor. Blade-thin with no visible genitals, the figure’s shadowy enclaves and mounds are both sexual and asexual as if he/she/it were a modern day Tiresisas born to be both male and female. Pale and appearing near to death, fine grains of sand or diamond dust shower onto the figure as if it were in the process of being buried alive. “Feral Kingdom” - Matthew Stone
To mis-quote Syliva Plath; self-destruction is an art, we do it exceptionally well. Understanding ourselves to be damaged/doomed/in a handcart to Hell, what better way to take ownership of it that to turn being fucked up into an asethetic? From the Romantic poets to Wilde’s Dorian Grey and from Sid Vicious to Pete Doherty being pale, interesting and fucked up - as currently espoused by Matthew Stone and Gareth Pugh - has long been mythologised as the shining path to martyr-like immortality.
“Nihilism is beauty,” reads the manifestor of the Centre For Nihilist and Nihilism Studies. “If the value of everything is arbitrary then are we not free to determine these values for ourselves, free of coercion and then go our own course? If the morals and values of the dominant class have no basis other than to reinforce their control and self-interests then aren’t we free to ignore their concerns and instead do what serves us best?”
Like a glorious nuclear sunset, beauty persists through desolation, through emptiness, even through death. What makes beauty so appealing is that while it offers no answer to the question, “why are we here?”, it proproses that we fuck death/global meltdown/the black hole at the centre of consumerism/our own souls by celebrating it instead.
Taking asethetized destruction to new circles of Hell, the performance art of Terence Koh and Wowow!’s Matthew Stone and he installations of Banks Violette are powerful distillations of beauty as depravity and depravity as beauty. Just as punk associates Martha Rosler, COUM Transmissions and Paul McCarthy used installation and performance art to undermine the cultural hegemonies of the late seventies and early eighties, so the new punk uses transgressive imagery to refract sexuality, identity, consumerism, beauty, truth and mortality through the nihilistic prism of decadence and excess.
But while Koh, Stone, Violette and co share a visual language with punk, what sets them apart from their romantic predecessors and the dandy asethetic espoused by Hedi Slimane’s love affair with Pete Doherty, is that it’s not so much to the self-as-God to which their art most appeals as the self-as-His-Satanic-Majesty.
Both commenting on and enshrining what Nietzsche described as “the will to nothingness”, their art is the black art of ritual, orgies and Satanic masses. Violette produces ghostly salt reconstructions of burnt Norwegian churches desecrated by death metal fans. Stone makes shamanic tableau of the young, beautiful and elegantly wasted after the dark intensity of Caravaggio. Koh becomes the Anti Christ and his boys, dark angels in orgy rituals straight from the Marquis De Sade’s “120 Days Of Sodom”.
If Violette makes art of black holes, then the deafening drone metal of his sometime co-collaborator Sunn o))) fills them. “God is dead,” said Nietzsche “And we killed him.” Using amplified guitars, Buddhist-style chanting, layering and pitch shifts to create trance like states and appearing on stage cloaked like a monk, Sunn o))) has resurrected him. Only the god of his beat-less, borderless, amorphous white noise is necessarily a faceless one.
If freedom, then, is one of the greatest triumphs of consumerism and authenticity one of its greatest obsessions, death is one of its greatest dilemmas. Existing in the moment, we struggle to process what may or may not come after. Wanting to look eternally young and beautiful, we photo-shop everything about mortality that is messy, ugly and grotesque from the picture. On the one hand we crave authenticity but when the authentic is neither pretty nor attractive nor aspirational, our enthusiasm for the real becomes counter-productively selective.
Whether consciously seeking to embrace religiosity or simply to comment on it, what unites those who dance in the dark is a shared obsession with the pre-modern, the pagan, the medieval and the gothic where not only ritual but death was part of everyday life. Whatever else their art might be, it’s a genuine act of rebellion against the anasethetising effects of consumerism. As the endless river continues to carry the boat we’re all in to its end, they are the ones standing at the prow staring the dark of the universe in the eyes.
-Rachel Newsome (November 2007 issue of i-D magazine)
