Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit . . .
Milan
Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1984
On the
face of it, Milan Kundera’s declaration that kitsch is the denial of shit
appears wrong. Kitsch, after all, IS shit. It’s all that cloying, mewling, cutesie crap
found in gift shops and tourist strolls, all those visual gags of dogs playing
cards and mechanical singing fish for sale at the hardware store, and those
maudlin Elvis busts and Diana icons and acres of knick-knacks on the shelves at
Value Village. For Kundera, what makes all that stuff kitsch, and not art (or
at least not art with a capital “A”) is that it is missing a vital organic
element. Kitsch, for Kundera, is art removed of life’s messy bits: pain and
suffering, hunger and sorrow, decay and waste. Kundera’s kitsch is a sanitized
art of Pollyannaish desire that wants nothing to do with the more disturbing
parts of our existence. It just wants to be liked. Excessively needy and too
willing to please, its lack of shit overwhelms it, and it becomes what it
lacks. Kitsch becomes shit.
In recent
years, Toronto-based artist Katharine Harvey has been creating sculptural
installations using plastic packaging and cheap dollar-store items – materials
and merchandise that are intended only for a single or limited use or for the
stimulation of momentary sentiment – things which, having passed only briefly
through the stage of utility, are destined to quickly become refuse, stuff we
tend to call shit. Harvey’s fascination with this material came from her
experience as a painter trying to capture the fleeting reflections and
refractions of water. Her investigations into water’s infinitely variegated
visual qualities led her to a remarkably similar phenomenon found in the
reflections of store windows. She was drawn to those curious, older,
family-operated stores whose windows display an accumulation of dusty unsold
gift items and bric-a-brac. Viewed from different angles, the
windows featured a parade of curios suspended between the reflections of the
activity on the street and glimpses into the store’s interior. Flattened first
through the working photograph and secondly through painting and glazing,
Harvey’s Storefront paintings became liquid spaces in which
inside and outside flowed into each other, punctuated by a dream-world of
floating Venetian gondolas, ballerinas on point, elaborate clocks and fancy
vases.
Harvey’s Storefront paintings were elaborations on water as a metaphor of
the subconscious – a diorama of submerged desires and stunted fantasies. They
were also the basis for installations that used existing art gallery vitrines
to assemble fantastic versions of the vernacular (Seasick , YYZ Artists Outlet, 2003; Storefront, Stride Gallery window, Calgary, 2001; To the
Depths, Parts I & II, Solo Exhibition, Toronto, 2001-02). In
these installations, Harvey organized dense collections of giftware and costume
jewellery by tone and hue, and in the process created a series of
impressionistic tableaux that deflected attention from the individual objects. The
collections of spectrally shifting coloured objects seemed to strike a familiar
but minor chord, evoking those dyspeptic feelings of detachment and alienation
we often experience during the Christmas season in face of a sea of pointless
merchandise and hollow commercial sentiment.
During
2006 and 2007, Harvey’s media migrated from glass and ceramic giftware to
plastic packaging and mass produced dollar store items. She continued her
colouristic approach to assemblage, prismatically organizing the recyclable
blister packing and muffin containers as a clear spray at the top of Waterfall, (Rodman Hall, 2006-07) down to the deep pools of
translucent greens and deep blues of the plastic waste baskets, water bottles,
dish racks and other seemingly limitless blue-green coloured plastic dollar
store ephemera. In the installations Fountain (Making
Room, 2006), and in the Waterfall, (Service
Canada, Harbourfront, 2007), Harvey left behind her dollar-store merchandise to
create impressionistic assemblages made entirely of transparent packing
material – works of pure plastic froth.
Harvey's
work is notable for the parallel investigations she pursued into both the
optical and metaphorical qualities of her subjects and her chosen media. Her
open process of free association allowed her to move from a study of the
optical effects of water, to water as a metaphorical container of submerged
consciousness, from an investigation into the attractions of kitsch back to the
optical possibilities of colour-classified junk, and from the foamy optical
character of a dense mass of polyethylene packing, back to the existential
reality of a mountain of plastic shit.
One would
be hard pressed to find two things materially more opposite than plastic and
shit. Plastic is organically inert – a product of the petrochemical industry. Shit
is fetidly natural, organic and very personal. Shit belongs to each of us
individually. Plastic comes from somewhere else. Plastics are associated with
cheapness and disposability. They can be easily moulded and mass-produced. They
can be made flexible, elastic and paper thin or rigid and sturdy in proportion
to their lightweight. Plastic can be transparent or opaque and is highly prized
as an impermeable moisture barrier. All this make plastics cheaper and more
adaptable than either wood, leather, cloth, ceramic, glass or metal would be
used for similar purposes.
We know,
however, that plastics are not as durable as organic materials and we know damn
well that plastics do not decompose. Moving plastic parts break and wear out
all the time and many plastic objects are just a waste – designed for limited
or single usages, rendering their active life cycle shorter than that of many
insects. And the passive life cycle – life after disposal – is immeasurable. While
many plastics can be vaporized with intense heat, most often they avoid
decomposition and continue to exist somewhere in the world: in a landfill, at
the bottom of a lake or ocean, or ground up and melted down to be made into
more plastic. Plastic is two times shit: first because it so often fails us and
second because we are continuously in the process of disposing it.
By
representing and including kitsch, plastic merchandise and disposable plastic
packaging in her work, Katharine Harvey ensures that romantic sparkle and
liquid shimmer is not merely a vehicle of escape, but a memento mori of
our embodied subjectivity. That is the existential reality that Harvey’s work
probes. As we find ourselves drowning in our own refuse, we are forced to
examine our habits of consumption and production. In any dollar store, Wal
Mart, Zellers, Canadian Tire or Best Buy we can see our own infantile and
narcissistic desires reflected in row upon row of cheap merchandise and the
mountain of plastic garbage that they generate. This stuff will never die. We
will.
Gordon
Hatt, 2008
