The sublimation of kitsch
Viceversa, Rome,
Fabrizio Marzilli discussed the Paradiso [Off Club] in Viceversa magazine
Critique
Fabrizio Marzilli
The tenth issue of Viceversa opens an investigation into kitsch in order to understand the reasons for its elusiveness and to collectively approach its mystery. Within this space – whose boundaries are undefined, as the nature of the theme suggests – it is desirable to bring out multiple horizons of meaning that give rise to new theoretical devices and interpretative tools. This is the question that Viceversa 10 asks the authors: what is kitsch today? The aim, therefore, is to reconstruct and update the “contemporary atlas” in a fragmented way and restore a panorama made up of strident images and phantasmagorical architecture.
The interplay between form, object, matter, and perception delineates the dual nature of a kitsch heritage. Through the procedural maneuvers of postmodernist and trans-avant-garde art, it underscores its inherent ability not to freeze the moment, nor to comprehend it, but to enable the movement of the eye to diagnose a schizophrenic disorder, where everything is felt but nothing endures – a temporal sublime that signifies a rupture in the artistic essence of the object.
Between 1970 and 1990, art underwent a profound transformation as society transitioned from being consumers of experiences to devourers of images. Some movements, such as the trans-avant-garde, delved into themes closely related to the individual’s body, intending to cultivate a self-generative hope for intellectual engagement among the masses through conceptual masking.
Simultaneously, another phenomenon, influenced by the contradictory responses of art, emerged in the architectural realm: post-modernism. This movement, both collateral and fundamental, sought to understand the anxieties and fears that surfaced increasingly after the Second World War. Post-modernism, in fact, reinstated themes such as beauty, taste, and style at the centre of the debate, moving away from the peremptory nature of modern functionalism and directing the discourse towards the exploration of the body of the individual as a sensitive system.
As Eco noted, kitsch has consistently provided satisfaction to the soul and eyes of the people. It represents an unconscious taste lacking apparent control yet containing a potent input: the explicit and forthright narration of oneself. To a critical eye, it was categorized as the expression of bad taste or as ‘it’s not in the right place’ or ‘it’s just too much.’
Isn’t kitsch precisely that – the allure of error, the discovery of the euphoric and carnal object? Perhaps in these very questions, postmodernism found its escape route, recognizing in history its roots and faith to be desecrated, awakening the attention of a popular mass defenseless against the difficulty of accepting change. Postmodernism and kitsch, then, could be said to have shared a parallel path, where the boundary, understood as the scale determining right and wrong, good and bad taste, became a subtle tool for understanding what lay beneath the surface in our societies.
If the former emerged as a clear and peremptory will to showcase the process rather than the product in its entirety, staining the perfectionist force of modernist functionalism indelibly, the latter, riding the wave of showcasing, increased and magnified the image consumption mode through perpetual and flexible accumulation.
These two themes, stemming from some common roots, define their essence through the concept of the sublime, ensuring a possible interpretative path for the hyper-sensory trend toward which contemporary architecture is increasingly moving and directing. For post-modernism, the sublime can be understood as the schizophrenic vertigo of sensitive feeling, while in kitsch, it becomes a lack of selectivity and, consequently, a schizophrenic paradox.
The analysis of the Pescetrullo project realized by Gaetano Pesce, Studio Talent, and Gabriele Pimpini in Carovigno, Puglia, in 2008, reveals a contradictory emphasis expressed as sensorial accumulation. The project, sculpted with anthropomorphic taste, molds external material into a leprous and shapeless skin, incorporating organic deformations that transform into drips or arms, serving as structuring elements such as a staircase. The interior, rough and monastic, dissociates from the exterior, embodying the simple and rugged soul of Puglia’s masserie.
Running parallel to this project, where kitsch can be identified in the taste for the absurd and the archetypal paradox, Antonino Cardillo’s Paradiso project for the Off-Club in Rome, in 2018, defines a sublimation factor through the creation of a ritualistic atmosphere. In this case, the postmodernist heritage becomes more evident. The forms inserted and adapted to a commercial function become the pretext for a formalism guaranteeing the user the possibility of immersing oneself in an alienating and atopic space.
The rough plaster covering the interior walls, in contrast to the smooth basement, and the use of shadow as a form of revelation, conceal an aura that elevates the perceptive superimposition of space to a higher level. Navigating within it becomes a macabre and fascinating experience, where the interaction between elements becomes an interpretation of sensory adjacencies.
If kitsch was initially depicted as a room within which one could find all the experiences of an individual, defining a space of fetishistic and chaotic accumulation, in this case, the accumulation becomes exclusively sensorial, where the insertion of objects becomes a theatrical representation of the function that will take place in it. In both cases, the context is neutralized, and the place is thus annulled, detaching the user from mere observation and projecting them towards a formally defined allegorical dimension.
In an era where architecture transforms into a smooth and reflective surface, continuous and eternal, kitsch, viewed through the lens of the sublime, defines a conscious intention to crystallize time. This occurs not through the formal and plastic arrest of the building but through the highlighting of its discontinuity and sensorial mutability. An interrupted accumulation of the contemporary individual’s schizophrenic eye, alien to fixity and inclined to transience as a romantic and sublime element. A deformed and folded space still defines kitsch as a hieratic taste that, pushing the boundaries of abundance, delineates a space constructed with the individualist peremptoriness of the artistic gesture.
Source
- Fabrizio Marzilli, ‘The sublimation of kitsch’, viceversamagazine.com, no. 10, dir. Valerio Paolo Mosco, Dec. 2023 [English].