A Flaneur in the Mud (Fragments) Alexander Kiossev
The world I was born into began to change. But unlike the ancient Metamorphoses, nothing in it would inspire humans to sing of bodies chang’d to various forms. For its transition would long run through the Formless—through the posttotalitarian social slime in which rotting corpses and new embryos were impossible to tell apart.
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When a society loses its form, what happens to the art of form? Does it become formless or does it go beyond any form?
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The visual arts have always worked with the available social form of space and gaze, while at the same time creating it. The clearest example of this were absolutist monarchies and totalitarianisms, which loved giant power perspectives, imperial rationalism, symmetry, and geometry. They imposed classicistic—that is, ideological—forms of bodies and institutionalized a harmonic, uniform, and instrumental realism: clear outlines, an established connection between signifier and signified, masculine and sexless forms projected onto the horizon of the future. By contrast, religious or world wars produced anxiety, the Baroque, and Guernica: outbursts of disharmonic forms.
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One of the first memorable scenes in the squares after 1989: jubilant dancing crowds, nationwide partying, freedom staged in colorful, childish forms. Against this background, as a parody of totalitarian unity, someone starts shouting “Those who don’t jump are red!” and the square is suddenly full of thousands of jumping, waving, and kicking bodies. What a mockery of the hidden aesthetics of the secret services, present there—of their disciplined and discreet, minimalist bodies hidden in dark suits and inconspicuous raincoats!
How the poor cops must have suffered, forced to jump to the tune of a carnival bodily aesthetics!
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After the death of utopia, time lost its form too. Today time is an endless present incapable of imagining a future and inclined to constantly rewrite its past, which no one is interested in.
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The artist Mariela Gemisheva bloodied her wedding dresses with giant fish heads. A tired female face, dirty white, and half-frozen bloody animal flesh. In another one of her performances, she staged a new version of the same plot—this time in a different style, making beautiful girls in fine lingerie fry fish. It was simply unbearable. There was not even a hint of edle Einfalt und stille Grösse.
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In the posttotalitarian societies, liberal capitalism advanced visibly, in the “form” of visual chaos. The empty gray and geometric-shaped squares of communism were suddenly splashed with color and commercial pictures. The Stalinist architectural panopticism was swamped, sunk, and shattered by thousands of private signs. Firms, logos, billboards, inscriptions, announcements, emblems crept all over it, like countless snails. Instead of the Politburo from the tribunes, now sexy bottoms smiled at us, Nestle and Benetton waved at us from the billboards. The artist Latchezar Boyadjiev revealed the urban geography of power behind the apparent chaos: the global corporate advertisements of Coca Cola, Sony, and Philips, dominated the townscape from above, from the rooftops, while hand-painted and handwritten local ads and announcements of the population, struggling for survival, crawled low on the ground below. In the middle was the hybrid commercial face of fledgling Bulgarian business. On its billboards local warmth and global glamour intertwined with macho aggression and contempt for all norms.
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The early 1990s produced successive versions of Beauty and the Beast in Bulgaria. More than 70,000 heavy athletes (wrestlers, weightlifters, boxers, karate and judo experts, rowers) were left unemployed. Headed by secret leaders from the secret services, they created a shadow of the Bulgarian economy, forming an army of organized crime that outnumbered the diminishing Bulgarian army: they monopolized violence in an extra-state way. Once strong and fit, their bodies morphed into beer bellies and rolls of fat, erupting into mountains of excessive flesh, brutal faces, and thick necks. As the poet said: Rather a rude and indigested mass:/A lifeless lump, unfashion’d, and unfram’d. The Bulgarian people called the athletes-turned-criminals moutri (sing. moutra, Bulgarian: “ugly mugs”).
Hidden by sport regimes and training camps in the past, they now crawled out into public space, ousting the carnival rallies and displaying themselves in full view—in an aesthetics of the criminal grotesque, of brutal, daily, physical violence. They were rich, powerful, and visible—a mix with an erotic touch, making them very attractive. Young men started taking anabolic steroids and building muscles at the gym. The even fatter moutri and crime bosses soon acquired their erotic other halves: the intertwined divine bodies of the priestesses of ancient and modern female professions: fashion models, photo models, pop-folk singers, fitness girls, mistresses, simple whores. This eventually produced the perverse posttotalitarian pastiche: the love couple of the synthetic, perfect Barbie and the chthonic Shrek, of Balkan titans and lifestyle nymphs. What forms and formlessness would we see in their future offspring?
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A series of photographs by artist Krassimir Terziev showed Sofianites new urban sculptures which they had not noticed before but were forced to walk around every day. All pavements in Sofia were littered with large remnants of erstwhile communist ready-mades: Trabants, Ladas, and Moskvitches at different stages of disintegration, rusting, and decay. They formed a layer of peculiar, technological decay in the city, the humus of the communist car industry from which wheel rims and axles were still sticking out. We were living in the aesthetics of a Sofia-made version of the movie Brazil.
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Communism had its giant phalluses: together with Tatlin, it dreamed and erected towers, Lomonosov universities, factory chimneys, and five-pointed stars. In 1990 the Party House (the Communist Party headquarters) in Sofia was about to be castrated (there was a large demonstration requiring the removal of red star its spire), then it was set on fire. Fifteen later years one can observe thousands of new private towers, turrets, castles, and transparent crystal hotels erected in the suburbs. Like Golden Prague, Sofia became the city of a thousand spires while the posh suburbs were transformed beyond recognition by the style that came to be known as “moutro-Baroque,” a style that featured virtually everything: the ubiquitous towers and turrets, of course, as well as bay windows, gold inlays, colonnades, grilles, capitals—a happy combination of ancient, Renaissance, and Baroque kitsch all rolled into one. Moutro-Baroque raised high garden walls, cut off streets, changed the social form of the city, privatized public sites. The kitschy castles continued to be surrounded by mud and puddles, broken pavements, and leaking sewer pipes. But this was a nourishing environment and everyone told themselves they needed to be patient. After all, as none other than Ovid teaches us: The native moisture, in its close retreat,/Digested by the sun’s aetherial heat,/As in a kindly womb, began to breed:/Then swell’d, and quicken’d by the vital seed./[And some in less, and some in longer space,/Were ripen’d into form, and took a sev’ral face.]
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The city’s animal morphology changed. The elegant Sofia cats disappeared, chased away by packs of dogs—it was as if homeless Nature, both snarling and miserable, had reinvaded the fragile urban environment. It was Krassimir Terziev again who captured the process in a one-minute video installation: dogs as big as Godzillas amid the decrepit, dirty apartment blocks of a posttotalitarian city; people are nowhere to be seen. Eventually, however, Sofianites developed friendly relations with the dogs, which became less and less vicious and more and more amiable. Eventually, they would rarely bite kids and often wagged their tails like friendly village dogs, becoming more and more dirty and scraggly. They somehow blended into the city’s fertile mud.
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I no longer know my city but I can follow its transformations. I myself have fallen into the global rhythm—which means that I increasingly take preplanned routes, that my time is fixed down to the second, and with it, the places I see. Occasionally I end up in neighborhoods I have not seen for years and cannot recognize because of their metamorphoses: next to the crumbling yellow façades rise glass giants in shapes born of the childish dreams of the nouveau riche. The cinema has become a bingo hall, the local greasy spoon a fast-food restaurant next to an upmarket cosmetics store; there are stalls everywhere, the familiar windows hidden by advertisements and the familiar old shops gone, swallowed up by global chains. There is no longer a single, unified Gestalt that can encompass this visual Babel; the signs, entries, and exits of the city have changed places, and the entire visual and material world is out of joint, swelling with self-offered consumer excess. My “lieux de mémoire” cannot connect with this chaotic abundance of neoliberal forms. My nostalgia has lost its spatial anchors, wandering formless.
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Actually, it just occurred to me that I am wrong—it does have form. It is the market which is both the realm and form of urban nostalgias. It has started recycling old communist products, forgotten sweets, communist biscuits, working-class cigarettes, pop songs, aging and balding communist faces. The old generation wants them and the market delivers them as commercial ersatz memories. The transforming visual environment is being glutted with consumer-nostalgic emblems, reviving the specter of communist shortages and their quasi-commodities. This process is captured admirably in Inventarna kniga na sotsializma (“An Inventory Book of Socialism”), a nostalgic parody album by Yana Genova and Georgi Gospodinov (designed by Yana Levieva) featuring images of everyday commodities from communist times. But it also shows the perverse side of this process—the images and forms of communist shortages now signify the opposite: oversupply and consumption. The market screams: “We have everything, we offer you everything, even the market’s Opposite! Please come and see our full range of lack, of the material humiliation of communist ‘commodities,’ of misery and shortage—but now in glossy photos and a warm-nostalgic design!”
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The artist Pravdolyub Ivanov has an installation featuring empty, transparent flags hanging in limbo. It is as if they are tired, waiting for any possible cause that might turn up. Or then again, it might not. In another version, the flags are muddy, as if made of earth.
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Maybe in a formless environment art should not look for any forms at all—physical, social, or geometric—as it has no chance of finding any perspectives and panopticisms. Besides, it must keep in mind that the present formlessness is not postmodern: it is not a paradoxical, formless sign of the Sublime and Unrepresentable, a zone of breakthrough in the established social and representative Order. For there is no Order, there is social mud, an inexhaustible moisture which swells and breeds. In such an environment, art is doomed to do nothing but discover processes—chemical, biological, and electric. To develop a sense of the movements of invisible muddy monsters, to unlock clashes of elements and geological plates. Its task—a dangerous one!—is limited to such recontextualizations, to generating “short-circuits” that suddenly produce new social acids and salts, firing sparks that are not born of it but of the giant voltages it unlocks. And that are as ephemeral as the latter.
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The manifestos of such art can be only fragmentary, semiformed—born of flaneurs wandering aimlessly along the muddy, potholed streets.