(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
At a hipster gallery in New York, writer Milo Yiannopoulos is bathing in pig blood in front of images of victims of Islamist terror. He's naked – except for a pair of sunglasses, gold chains and a cap with the Trump slogan Make America Great Again of. «This is the new punk. Republican is the new cool, "Milo said of his" globalization-critical "stunt.
Even before Trump was elected as the new president of the United States, this staging of himself as a power-critical rebel against it established an insult to the whole punk idea. And when his curator described the stunt as a "performance with art-historical whispers," he in turn spat on the concept of art. This was neither art nor punk.
Born in the mid-1970s in London and New York, the punk was an underground phenomenon: in England it was formulated by young unemployed people, in the United States by intellectual outsiders. Common to the movements were anti-aesthetics and provocative protests against society's unfair distribution of goods and opportunities. In 2013, I saw an exhibition at the Metropolitan in New York called "Punk – from Chaos to Couture". Here it became clear that this anti-aesthetic has become high fashion Today. In the essay I wrote about the exhibition, I reformulated the punk motto in the future and wrote punk has a future, punk is dead. With this, I tried to express that punk is anti-establishment in such an essential way that it cannot survive the class journey of the incumbent. It must find new forms if it is to survive.
A fanatical mass phenomenon. My explanation in the aesthetic field can be transferred to the political field. The ideals of the 1970s punks – the fight for minorities, justice and equal distribution of goods – have not become the ideals of the political establishment, as Milo implicitly claims when glorifying Trump. Even before the election, Trump's politically incorrect protest against these ideals was an outsider attitude, the new cool or from punk. The Republican campaign was always a fanatical mass phenomenon. The paradox of the new president – who himself staged himself as punk without using the word – is that he managed to imagine the followers that both he and they themselves had overlooked. When the underdog's racist prejudice suddenly represents the majority, it turns into mass murderous poison. Hitler showed that the underdog can become a criminal against humanity when he gains power – by virtue of his underdog attitudes, and does not reject them as a political leader. All true punks have a clue that class travel is not possible, and therefore try to resist the popularization of their attitudes, or they give up being punk.
In some cases, when it is absolutely certain that you are just part of a tiny artistic minority, holding up a Nazi mirror in front of society may be a real punk, or challenging it with a provocative flirtation of fascism. It happened when Sid Vicious flashed crosshairs. I myself have formulated politically incorrect things in subcultural performances, but I realized that I would fail as soon as a larger audience would applaud rather than condemn my stunts. The purpose was ultimately to give the protesters the opportunity to formulate the importance of morality and ethics. The process may also have a lightning rod function, which prevents anyone from staging themselves as suppressed by a "politically correct establishment," as Trump supporters did. But when one becomes more recognized, one must stop in the name of the punk god this dialectical race. For in combination with masses and power, immorality is not only pathetic, but a crime of violence. Trump and Milo have neither renounced their views nor objected to being accepted by a majority. On the contrary – their paradoxical underdog staging was just about seducing the masses.
The underdog's dangerous power paradox. But Milo also makes another mistake when he does math with incomparable sizes and hopes the result will make him look like punk. According to him, his pro-capitalist attitude is a rebel act. If there is something that has world domination, then it is capital. Judith Butler was truly punk when she wanted Clinton's friend Clinton as president, and at the same time warned to go on verbal barricades as soon as the female candidate had been elected. ("The paradox of democracy," Butler called the phenomenon, which is so much preferable to the underdog's power paradox, which we must deal with now.) Raising capital is a consistent affirmation of the elites in the globalized world Milo claims to protest. Of course, just as unbelievable was the businessman Trump's solidarity with financial losers, whom he, on his way to the White House – via Wall Street – is likely to reject again.
So Milo is not real punk. But is he an artist, as he claims? There are many great artists who have bathed in blood, and the bloodbathing still has artistic potential. But it's important to think a little about the context, polyphony and originality of Milo's stunt.
Bullshit-election campaign. One of the first to bathe in blood was the Wiener shareholder Hermann Nitsch. In his "Orgien-Mysterien-Theater" he has since the early 1960s experimented with ritual forms of animal slaughter, carcass cutting, meat and wine serving, music and poetry reading. Many people are repelled by this, but there is no doubt that Nitsch has a place in art history. He unites ritual traditions into a work of art, not unlike Wagner's festival play. Nitsch thus formulates an aesthetic and spiritual counter-draft to society. And the nausea, according to his own statement, is only the first step towards a Dionysian experience of reality the ritual opens up for.
Milo, on the other hand, sat uninspired in his blood bath, hiding behind sunglasses, smoking, babbling that he froze, and politely splashing some blood on the photographs of the terror victims hanging on the wall. This could has been a critical exhibition of the bullshit election campaign, where everything apart from factual arguments mobilized the voter – not least bloody shock trivialities. In an interview, Milo claimed that he "has no feelings". This absence, too, of which his apathetic splashing sense is an expression, could have been artistically interesting. For example, if the actor had exposed his own depression as a consequence of political self-determination requirements.
Lower league. American performance artist Ann Liv Young is a master of such self-critical staging. Growing up in the Republican state of North Carolina, she constantly exhibits her own white trash- Background to their performances: Low-cultural elements (Britney Spears) stand side by side with high culture (Elektra). At a performance, she sold her own shit. And those who bought the shit perfectly anticipated what the majority in her own state did when they went to this year's presidential election. But this is my interpretation – Ann Liv Young does not comment on her performances.
Milo, on the other hand, even ruined the opportunity to perceive what he did as art. The context was an exhibition called the "Pro-Trump Art Show". And in the lecture he gave before his stunt, he said, "I want you to interpret this as an expression of my frustration at how fucking the American press is." With the trendy frame, and the authoritarian interpretation order, he excluded any artistic significance polyphony. And the subsequent Trump tribute that crowned the white trash dictator of a brutal hipster king makes Milo seriously position himself in the bottom line of propaganda art. Did I say art? Propaganda. Dot.
