Zombie Art & Living Things

I was recently in the town of Albury for meetings, and stumbled on their local art gallery exhibit entitled Zombie Eaters.

Regular readers would know that that I cannot pass up a zombie reference, let alone a whole art exhibit dedicated to the theme. It was not what I expected.

Instead of depictions of zombies, the art displayed under the aegis of Zombie Eaters covered a range of subject matter, from portraits to landscapes in a variety of styles.

What ostensibly tied the pieces together was indicated by the commentary at the beginning of the exhibit. In particular, the ties to the motif of the zombie is indicated by the excerpt below:

There is an art joke that suggests painting is a zombie medium. It refuses to die, and like the undead zombie, walks the earth endlessly in search of brains. The joke is easily applied to the kind of painting that, over recent decades has been produced purely for decoration and which has been taken up by cynical collectors playing a market for profit. Zombie Eaters claims this joke need not be true. The paintings within it are vital, intelligent, and thought provoking. They are made by artists invested in the social and cultural potential of art. These painters are the Zombie Eaters. The conquerors of the undead. They ensure painting lives forever.

I found this portion of the commentary striking on a number of levels (I am grateful to Kamila Soh for bringing this out). On the one hand, as I indicated in my book Redeeming Flesh, the zombie has become a pop-cultural standin for a culture driven by endless consumption. While all cultures, regardless of how ancient, have consumption as a dimension of its society, consumption for its own sake has become such an all-pervading and ongoing feature of postmodern societies. As indicated in the commentary, this feature-and-not-bug simply refuses to die, with chances for this kind of consumption invading every available space, both online and geographical.

This is particularly the case with respect to advertising which, as an industry, is geared towards the generation of markets for consumption, especially in areas where consumption has not become the overriding cultural logic. Rather than seeing a receding of the tide of advertising once the act of conumption is committed, the industry will find more opportunities and more places for the tide of ads to grow inexorably.

In the course of encouraging consumption, the industry is also engaging in its own act of consumption, namely in the form of turning all audio and visual art - both high and pop - into mere vehicles for the generation of profit. The exhibit’s commentary alerted me to what this does to art: it hollows out the work of art itself by taking away from it the ability to express its own self, whether its materials or the subject being depicted. Zombie Eaters, in seeking to resist this tendency, sought to bring out what the German philosopher Edmund Husserl called the “things themselves”. In the twentieth century, Husserl was credited with the founding of the philosophical subdiscipline called phenomenology, broadly understood as the study of the depth of meaning found in the experience of things in and of themselves. By that, one means an experience of things not mediated by anything that could artificially distort, obscure, enlarge or minimise the experience of the depth of the reality of things. In instrumentalising art, the advertising industry makes the work of art communicate something else entirely, which it does so because the inherent meaning of the artpiece has been hollowed out and killed off to do the bidding of another creator.

Interestingly, I found resonances between this hollowing out of the thingness of art and the vice of acedia, which the philospher RJ Snell explored in his Acedia and Its Discontents (I have also written a few posts on the vice of acedia here). Snell spoke of the vice of acedia pervading postmodern culture, not because it is a culture that is predicated on laziness, but because it is a culture that is predicated on what he called the “bleaching” of things, a siphoning out of their interiority, depth and ability to express itself. Interestingly, Snell ties this bleaching of things to the desire to be free. For if things had interiority, depth and self-expressive ability, they also call on us to acknowledge them, and submit ourselves to those things. In desiring to be free, we also desire to be free from any committments, including committments to the subjectivity of things. Snell tells us that, in this drive to be free from committments, acedia will drive us to flit from one thing or place to another.

One can see faint echoes of acedia’s tie between hollowing out and freedom in the force that Zombie Eaters sought to resist, the subordination of art to profit, what the marxists term capital. I saw the link with acedia because capital is less about the attribution of fixed value than it is about the never-ending flow from one market to another. Capital, the Marxists tell us, is constantly on the lookout to generate profit and this means that it is never invested in any fixed place, and thus any thing as such. Whatever capital does touch, however, will end up becoming a tool for the generation of profit, and usually under the guise of the thing’s self-expression. In actual fact, it is the expression of a thing that has been turned into a commodity, a unit of measure that is geared towards the generation of more capital.

I appreciated the intention of the exibihit, even as I have my own thoughts on how successful it was in its execution. It seems that art, even as it tries to draw our attention towards its own depth and subjectivity, requires at the same time a conversion - a turning of the attention - towards things in and of themselves, no matter how mundane. We need to develop habits that underwrite a posture through which we become oriented towards allowing things to communicate their inner depth and life to us, rather than submit to postmodernity’s default of looking at things as opportunities to consume dead objects.

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