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December 17, 2006
Poligoths by Tanja Stark, a Brisbane-based visual artist. The link is courtesy of the excellent Sarsaparilla. Poligoth is noted along with some brief comments by Ken Parish over at the literary-orientated Club Troppo.
Poligoth is an excellent example of a classy and biting visual humor and satire about our federal politicians in a gothic mode. This visual mode of expression of a gothic subculture indicates that this offshoot of the post-punk genre is alive and well in Australia. This pre-modern cultural form expresses a darkness that is the other side of the sunny Enlightenment delivering progress and material abundance; a darkness that is about death, blood life and horror. It stands in marked contrast to the Christian preoccupation with sin and evil.
Though this Rowson cartoon is not gothic-- it is all about death and decay associated with political violence --the face becomes the skull of the makeup artist, who represents death.
Martin Rowson, Rummy's Farewell Visit to Iraq, 2006
The skull suggests the transitoriness and distintegration of earthly power.The Iraq war reinforces the idea of ruins and fragility of empire---it is the place of skulls. The transitory US empire crumbles amidst, horror blood and death. For Christians this means a descent into Hell. That means the Americans in Iraq plummet downward into ruin.The debris of their western civilization will be covered over by the shifting sands.
What we have is a reaching back into, and appropriating the signs of, a pre-modern visual culture to express our current historical experience around war; a baroque culture that stands for excesses, illusion, artifices, decorations, trompe l'oeils and multiplied images. What Rowson's neo-Baroque aesthetic produces is a representation of a world made of images. The images do not hide the truth or adorn emptiness, they are the many layered, multiple faceted truth. This is the baroque of fullness, the baroque of the fold, the baroque of Leibniz and Deleuze.
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Spot on stuff.
There is an extraordinary dis-connect going on in the world. There was a report in the Oz today that Bush was praising Rumsfield as the best ever USA Secretary of Defense---really war. Remembering that the DD used to be called the war department, (wd) before it, the (wd), moved into the Pentagon at hells bottom which was what the site used to be called.
The Pentagon is also an inverted pentagram with its arms "withdrawn". In other words it is a geometric shape within which powers of black magic are generated. Very much akin to the dark tower and domain of Sauron/Mordor in the Lord of The Rings.