2009/06/09

commercial memories

because the personal is political and the aesthetic is ideological.
reading about the videos of stanya kahn and harry dodge, i had to think about my latest post below and started to figure out why tarkovysky´s or jonas mekas´ aethetics had turned into what they had.
because indeed from the beginning on, they were ideological.
i guess i tend to think sometimes, if something is good and righteous it can´t be ideological. but of course it is! these things are probably even the worst ideologies, like christianity´s love for entire humanity which is mere racist, colonial, missionary, magisterial disrespect of the heterogeneity, the manifoldness and difference in the world.
it´s difficult thinking of all aesthetics as ideological, especially sensing the specific ideological background behind the aesthetics of someone like jonas mekas who i deeply admire so much. but i guess you could call his films aethetics of the sentimental, the lost time, the lost paradise, when things were whole and at home (which is and has of course never been the case, because nothing is ever there when we think it, we are never ontologically at home and nothing is unbroken). there are quite a few christian and humanist ideas in his thinking, maybe even reactionary ones. still i love the films and him, but it does help to understand why they work so well today for commercial styles.
commercials are constantly trying to sell and praise the new, but they know how we feel lost and lonely, disoriented and insecure, so they show us the aesthetics of the super8 childhood films, the old grainy projections, when things were overexposed and imperfect, but retrospectively (and falsely) seem to us just perfect, they show us our lost past and lost paradise, to give us the illusion of buying it back, buying a home and an identity with our new phone, car, camera or kitchen aid. to make us feel secure again, in the arms of imaginary parents who hold ud tight and tuck us in at night, to constitute our lost selves.

commercial man you are such a phony deceiver!
yuck.

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