I Think I Love You - the title of the show comes
from a song by seventies singer/heart throb David Cassidy. Voorsanger
delights in being the obsessive fan and celebrates this through
her work, of which David Cassidy features prominently. What emerges
through these displays of fandom is a palpable sense of desire
and unrequited love.
“To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive”
Robert
Louis Stevenson
Considering how much we consume, it’s fairly rare to
find anyone who contentedly affirms that thay are full. Satisfaction
or gratification appears an elusive state, despite the ever-expanding
range of consumer choice. For critics of our saturated culture
of thrills, spills and entertaining spectacles, such dissatisfaction,
is symptomatic of the paucity of pleasures on offer. The flashing,
blinking lights of popular culture serve only as momentarily,
ineffectual distractions. Finding pleasure in these hollow
offerings reveals apathology of character - an inability to
confront the inescapable fate awaiting us all.
More sympathetic chroniclers of the human psyche, less prone
to criticise the urge to find solce and pleasure in the seemingly
trivial, inconsequential twists and turns of TV, film and music,
would see such pleasure as our only source of solace. Such
rare opportunities to get lost in music, to forget who you
are, to blank out the inevitable brevity and fragility of human
existence are essential, as opposed to superficial. We are,
after all, just worm meat on the shelf, so who can blame us
for getting our kicks when and where we can. Consequently the
pursuit of distracting pleasures is more important than their
ability to satisfy. As Zygmount Bauman in his book “Society
under Siege”, writes “people tend to sincerely
believe that what they truly desire is tranquility but they
delude themselves: what they are truly after is agitation.
What they truly crave is to chase the hare, not to catch it.
The pleasure is in the hunting not the prey”
Of course, once upona time, consuming was a fixed option; humans
had a limited number of needs that had to be satisfied in order
for them to survive. Survival was the name of the game. Once
these needs had been met there was no necessity to continue
to consume. Indeed prior to our current orgy of consumption,
over excessive or ostentatious consumption was regarded as
a mortal sin -”off with their heads”.
Today however, consumption has been liberated from instrumental
necessity and survival (admittedly a western phenomena). The
pleasures of consuming, however spurious they may be, are in,
and of themselves, sufficient motivation for consuming. Whereas
once the gratification of basic needs (food, shelter, survival)
was the engine that drove the motor of consumption, today the
dynamic is less about satisfaction of a basic appetite, but
the necessity to maintain the state of restless desire - to
keep chasing the hare, to keep wanting more. As Bauman says, “consumer
society proclaims the impossibility of gratification and measures
its progress by ever rising demand”. It is the pleasure
in maintainingthis state of restless desire, a constant state
of insatiability, which has become all-important.
The manner in which art has risen to the challenge of reflecting
and mirroring the omnipotence of the pleasures of consuming
and the desire to keep consuming, has been fairly tepid. Arts
sacralisation in the last century often led to it running screaming
in hysterical terror from the apparently ravenous pleasures
of popular mediums, such as film, TV. With ascetic renunciation
the order of the day, artists have often appeared to stick
their head in the sand or somewhere worse. Of course not all
artists are so terrified of the seemingly unstoppable, unruly
pleasures of the popular. What’s more they were unapologetic,
shamless and guiltless about publicly admitting that they were
prone to the ‘irrational’ desires of fans and culture
junkies. Afatal divide had been crossed. Artists now started
to own up to being consumers too.
Not surprisingly, admitting where they were getting their kicks
and fixes, often cast them as heretics within arts pious church.
Consistently their work was criticised for being fatally compromised
by this ‘irrational’ passion; the allimportant
position of critical distance and moral superiority for the
artist had been collpsed. Admitting to experiencing fun, enjoyment,
and entertainment was apparently incompatible with ‘serious’ art
and serious ‘critical’ thinking. With art placing
such a premium on a pseudo religious, higher truth, it was
difficult, almost impossible to acoomodate pleasure, passion
and desire with such lofty aims (of course its not always been
the case, ours is a peculialymodern bout of puritan terror).
For those consumed by a nightmarish vision of cultural apocalypse.
thefan represents the ultimate ghoul. After all, for cultural
conservatives and snobs, who better exemplifies the apparently
terrifying power of popular pleasures to consume and enfeeble
the individual, to blow them off the road to wisdom and enlightenment,
than the fan?
“
the rationality of consumer society is built out of the irrationality
of its individualised actors” Bauman
Only a fool would deny that popular culture is full of rubbish.
that it is capable of dehumanising its audience (just as art
does), but to retreat in an act of puritan aloofness increasingly
looks like an impotent move. In fact I can’t help thinking
any artistic respone to power, dominance and popularity of
consumer culture/the ‘culture industry’, call it
what you will, propelled by fear is ultimately going to be
revealed as impotent. Artists retreating into the securities
of autonomous, esoteric objects in th eface of”Big Brother” “I’m
a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here” and the staggering “Celebratory
Detox Clinic: increasigly looks both nostalgic and reactionary.
I want someone to illuminate some of the possible reasons why
I experience publicly announceMr. T’s favourite catchphrase
- “What you lookin’ at FOOL?” or why my work
colleague won’t shut up about Gary Coleman -”wot
you talking about Willis?”. Obviously for some, the enduring
appeal of Gary Coleman or Mr T. may be trivial. But to paraphrase
Bill Shankly. it’s not a question of life and death to
me , it’s more important than that.
John Beagles 2003
