Celeste Olalquiaga, 'Holy Kitschen: Collecting Religious Junk from the Street'
In: Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America. Edited by Gerardo Mosquera. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1995,
pp. 270-288.
Catholic imagery, once confined to sacred places such as church souvenir stands, cemeteries and botanicas, has recently invaded the market as a fad. In the past few years the realm of religious iconography in Manhattan has extended beyond its traditional Latino outlets on the Lower East Side, the Upper West Side and Fourteenth Street. The 1980s appropriation of an imagery that evokes transcendence illustrates the cannibalistic and vicarious characteristics of postmodern culture. This melancholic arrogation also diffuses the boundaries of cultural identity and difference, producing a new and unsettling cultural persona.
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Religious Iconography as Kitsch: Developing a Vicarious Sensibility I will begin by describing the peculiar aesthetics and philosophy underlying the circulation of the iconography of home altars. A popular Latin American tradition, home altars or altares are domestic spaces dedicated to deities and holy figures. In them statuettes or images of virgins and saints are allocated space together with candles and other votive objects. Triangular in analogy to the Holy Trinity, altares are characterized by a cluttered juxtaposition of all types of paraphernalia; they are a personal pastiche. Illustrating a history of wishes, laments and prayers, they are built over time, each personal incident leaving its mark. Altares embody familiar or individual histories in the way photo albums do for some people.
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Kitsch is one of the constitutive phenomena of postmodernism. The qualities I have attributed to kitsch so far – eclectic cannibalism, recycling, rejoicing in surface or allegorical values – are those that distinguish contemporary sensibility from the previous belief in authenticity, originality and symbolic depth. [10] Furthermore, the postmodern broadening of the notion of reality, whereby vicariousness is no longer felt as false or second-hand but rather as an autonomous – however incredible - dimension of the real, facilitates the current circulation and revalorization of this aesthetic form. Likewise, in its chaotic juxtaposition of images and times, contemporary urban culture is comparable to an altar-like reality, where the logic of organization is anything but homogeneous, visual saturation is obligatory, and the personal is lived as a pastiche of fragmented images from popular culture.
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In what I will call first-degree kitsch, representation is based on an indexical referent. Here, the difference between reality and representation is explicit and hierarchical, since only what is perceived as reality matters. Acting as a mere substitute, the kitsch object has no validity in and of itself. [11] This is the case with the imagery available at church entrances and botanicas, sold for its straightforward iconic value. Statuettes, images and scapularies embody the spirits they represent, making them palpable. Consequently this imagery belongs in sacred places, such as home altars, and must be treated with the utmost respect. In first-degree kitsch the relationship between object and user is immediate, one of genuine belief. Technically, its production is simple and cheap, a serial artisanship, devoid of that perfectly finished look attained with a more sophisticated technology. [12] In fact, these objects exhibit a certain rawness that is, or appears to be, handmade. This quality reflects their ‘honesty’, as lack of sophistication is usually taken as a sign of authenticity. On the other hand, this rawness adds to first-degree kitsch’s status as ‘low’ art, when it is considered art at all: usually, if not marginalized as folklore, it is condemned as gaudy. [13]
Little Rickie and Second-Degree Kitsch
First-degree kitsch familiarizes the ungraspable – eternity, goodness, evil – while tacitly maintaining a hierarchical distinction between reality and representation. The opposite is true of second-degree kitsch, or neo-kitsch, which breaks down this difference by making representation the only possible referent. [15] In so doing, it distorts our notion of reality because representation itself becomes the real. Neo-kitsch is inspired by first-degree kitsch and is therefore second-generation. Sold as kitsch, it lacks the devotional relation present in first-degree kitsch. Its absence of feeling leaves us with an empty icon, or rather an icon whose value lies precisely in its iconicity, its quality as a sign rather than as an object. This kitsch is self-referential – a sort of kitsch-kitsch - and has lost all the innocence and charm of the first-degree experience.
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Third degree religious kitsch consists of revalorization of Catholic iconography and the accentuation of these traits that make its aesthetics unique: figurativeness, dramatization, eclecticism, visual saturation – all those attributes for which kitsch was banned form the realm of art. In providing an aesthetic experience that transcends the object, kitsch is finally legitimized as art, an issue that has been of more concern to art critics than to kitsch artists. Consequently it has been argued that the recirculation of kitsch is but a co-optation by the late avant-garde, a formal gesture of usurpation stemming from its desperate attempt to remain alive. [22] There is little difference between the use of kitsch as a motif by the market and its use by avant-garde art, since for both the value of the icon lies in its exotic otherness, its ornamental ability to cover the empty landscape of postindustrial reality with a universe of images. Such pilfering of religious imagery is limited to reproduction, displacing and subordinating its social function but not altering the material in any significant way. But what is happening in the third-degree revaluation of kitsch is more than the avant-garde’s swan song. It is the collapse of the hierarchical distinction between the avant-garde and kitsch - and, by extension, between high and popular art - a collapsing of what modernity considered a polar opposition. According to that view, sustained principally by Clement Greenberg, the avant-garde revolution transferred the value of art from its sacred function (providing access to religious transcendence) to its innovative capabilities (leading to a newly discovered future via experimentation and disruption).
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It can be said that each degree of religious imagery satisfies the desire for intensity in a different way: in the first degree through an osmotic process resulting from the collection and possession of objects still infused with use-value; in the second degree by the consumption of commodified nostalgia; and in the third degree in cannibalizing both the first and the second degrees then recycling them into a hybrid product that allows for a simulation of the lost experience. Even though they are produced at different moments, these three degrees inhabit the same contemporary space. Their synchronicity accentuates the erasure of cultural boundaries already present in third-degree kitsch, throwing together and mixing different types of production and perception. This reflects the situation of the urban cosmopolis, where myriad cultures live side by side, producing the postmodern pastiche. Such an anarchic condition destabilizes traditional hegemony, forcing it to negotiate with those cultural discourses it could once oppress. The ability of cultural imagery to travel and adapt itself to new requirements and desires can no longer be mourned as a loss of cultural specificity in the name of exhausted notions of personal or collective identities. Instead, it must be welcomed as a sign of opening to and enjoyment of all that traditional culture worked so hard at leaving out.
[10] The concept of cultural cannibalism was advanced in a different context by Oswald de Andrade, Do Pau-Brazil a Antropofagia e as Utopias, Obras Completas, vol. 6 (Rio de Janeiro: Civilizaçao Brasileira-Mec, 1970).
[11] For some art theoreticians, this is a ‘primitive’ confusion between referent and representation. See Alecsa Celebonovic, ‘Nota sul Kitsch tradizionale’, in Gillo Dorfles, Il Kitsch, (Milan: Gabrielae Mazzotta Editore, 1969), pp. 280-89.
[12] Décio Pignatari, ‘Kitsch e repertório’, in Informaçao, Linguagem, Comunicaçao (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1968), pp. 113-7.
[13] Gillo Dorfles, Il Kitsch, and Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, in Art and Culture, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), p. 3-21.
[15] This term was first used by Abraham Moles, Le Kitsch, L’Art de Bonheur, (Paris: Maison Marne, 1971), pp. 161-86.
[22] Gerardo Mosquera, ‘Bad Taste in Good Form’, Social Text 15 (Fall 1986), pp. 54-64. For another view on Cuban artistic kitsch, see Lucy R Lippard, ‘Made in the USA: Art from Cuba’, Art in America, (April 1986), pp. 27-35. For kitsch in the USA, see J Hoberman, ‘What’s Stranger Than Paradise?’, in ‘Americanarama’, Village Voice Film Special, 30 June, 1987, pp. 3-8.