The Art Snob Archive

Post-Modernism - March 31 2006

Suddenly, I was in Italy. It was 1925, and I was dining with Benito Mussolini, that cheeky fascist bugger who somehow knew I was most ticklish under my third metatarsal. His dining room was decorated with conductors who had failed to keep their trains running on time, and although their pleas for mercy were a bit melodramatic, I appreciated them, and they very much complimented the meal. Ah…the meal. Exquisite, dear readers, absolutely outstanding. There is nothing I enjoy more than a cup of boiled beans and warm milk, nothing at all, except perhaps running with Kenyans in the fog, but that’s besides the point.

Benito, as I recall, was quite loquacious. Our conversation wandered from a discussion about bipedal marsupials to the musings of Soren Kierkegaard, whom I had built a house with in 1843. One morning, as we were laying roof tiles, he had whispered in my ear the words “truth is subjectivity”, but I was far too troubled by the news that Argentina was laying siege to Montevideo to really understand, so I just smiled and nodded and continued to hammer away. Mussolini, however, was so delighted by these three words that he ordered a conductor be freed. I protested but he insisted it had to be done.

Three words, dear readers. Three words was all it took for Nietzsche to send me out the door, shotgun in hand, in 1880. Locked and loaded: if god was dead, I was going to bathe in his killer’s blood, become baptized in vengeance, v for vendetta. The pudgy German philosopher had to lift my blue-pick up truck over his head before I understood he was merely provoking me, that slimy little Übermensch. God wasn’t dead! Only absolute values! I had to chew on cactus for an hour before the veins in my forehead un-bulged. Luckily, Benjamin Franklin was baby-sitting my kids, so I didn’t have to worry that little Fitzgerald wasn’t getting fed.

Speaking of which, in 1970, Jacques Derrida deconstructed the house Soren and I had built. Eight years earlier, Thomas Kuhn had found a pair of dimes on the sidewalk and based an entire career around the discovery.

And all this time Benito was still laughing, his body bubbling underneath his rigid uniform, moving back and forth, swiveling, swirling, lovely, precious. At one point, he pushed back his chair and stood, raising a glass of warm milk in his hand, trampling the colony of parasites that had gathered by the crumbs at his feet. It was then that I noticed the sky outside the window was screaming, the colour of cars running on the blood of Wessex manure. It stretched my smile muscle to an extent that would not be matched until Gravity’s Rainbow filled my retinas fifty years later. I remember that moment as one of my happiest.

This is not to say, of course, that Jean Baudrillard does not enjoy boiled beans, he just likes them when they are hyper-real, fed to him through spectacle and one hundred and fifty-three inch television sets. Unfortunately, we cannot hold this against him; at least his trains are on time.

Levels, dear readers! Where is reason in all of this?! We dream in bright colours, like broken computer monitors and splintered mirrors; how can you even dare to hope, to believe you can assemble understanding in the way one assembles furniture and airplanes? How dare you explore! Give up, and leave hope for the savages. Benito Mussolini fed me post-modernism for dessert.

posted by HLL @ Tuesday, March 28, 2006