A Golden Age of Harridanism
by Bev Pike
Baroque aesthetics appear during periods of radical cultural and socioeconomic transformations like the one we are in now.
This art movement began in Europe in the 17th century because male authorities were threatened by democratic movements. They needed to bedazzle their constituencies. Luxurious architecture hosted wild new entertainment such as opera, elaborate contrapuntal chamber music and ballet. These visceral communal experiences amalgamated many diverse elements to create gigantic, dramatic marvels.
In subsequent eras, the Victorian neo-baroque revival tried to anaesthetise the displacement of the body as a working agent during industrialisation. Still later, in the Depression era, monumental musicals distracted from world-wide misery. Today, as the main historical antidote to popular discontent, Baroque continues to provide mesmerising extravaganzas.
However, there was a subversive element to Baroque art. Unbeknownst to the nobility that commissioned showpieces like the Palais de Versailles, within these artifices artisans embedded their own imagery. At the same time as early invaders in South America over-built to quell dissent, indigenous carpenters created their own spiritual chambers underneath the new Spanish churches. This hybridisation is how Baroque became comprised of unusual juxtapositions.
Outrageous underground work is familiar to feminists. Think of our re-positioning of cartoons ridiculing Suffragettes, our flips of femi-nazi jokes, our re-takes on movies with the psychotic maiden aunt, and our send-ups of distortions of the female. As patriarchal infighting spawns new initiatives that mutate and mask themselves, women’s dissidence becomes more vigilant and creative.
The aesthetic pillars that underpin established order—that is to say rigorous purity and balanced good taste (colonial Classicism, monolithic Modernism)—have been unreliable friends to feminist art. This is because patriarchy prefers to associate what is different with what is uncontrollable and deviant, rather than with what is rebellious. Autocrats slander the bizarre and the proud together. Institutions repel contamination. Governments get agitated at the introduction of visual and political infections. Organised religion shores up traditional conservative earnestness. Mega-corporations become bilious from the vertiginous discomfort produced by emancipatory movements, swirling with equity demands. All those who benefit from the status quo look at feminism and see power spiralling down the drain.
To parody authoritarianism, activists have embodied baroque virtues. We imagine travesty, lampoon hypocrisy, create caricatures of hegemony, spoof autocracy, mock religiosity and pervert misogyny. Feminists employ elements of extravagance, impetuousness, virtuosity, thoughts abnormal and things bizarre. Dramatic devices can be vulgar, chaotic and exuberant. Baroque activism incorporates madness of vision, intertextuality and trompe l’oeil effects. Audiences can be swept away by carnivalesque excess, performativity and eccentric exoticism.
Then as now, multi-media, multi-purpose art forms can contradict prescriptions for identity, for gender and even for space, time and reality itself.
That is how Baroque creates a mental labyrinth of inner and outer, before and behind, real and imaginary, posed and impromptu, captured and unfettered, present and past. In activist art, the posing of these conundrums contests dominant ideologies. Burlesque tactics help to expose propagandistic mazes. Baroque can manufacture distortions effective in questioning mind-numbing and exhibitionistic self-reflexivity.
Then as now, Baroque remains a tool of colonization. Idea control is embedded in such pastimes as video games (aesthetisized forms of military muscle), theme parks and picture palaces. Therefore, beware the Spect-opolis: the mise-en-scène in the urban setting. Be suspicious. Then as now, beware those who parrot Baroque simply to destabilise through over-stimulation. Research their agenda. Then as now, beware the man bedecked as a frothy female grotesque. Ask yourself, “Did or does any of this further measurable power-sharing with women?”
So when you see 3D blockbusters, Olympic games, G8 summits, gigantic fanciful architecture, touring blockbusters, reality shows and rock concerts, look behind these curtains for nation-state building. Someone wants to merge us together within one experience of beholding. Someone wants our co-operation, our investments of time, money and our very thoughts.
However, just like the cheeky satirists who flourished in response to the first Baroque era, feminist activists have very same tools… especially the element of surprise.
Link on contemporary baroque:
http://web.mit.edu/transition/subs/neo_intro.html
Link on the need for feminist activism:
http://agony-aunts.blogspot.com/
Bev Pike is a Winnipeg polymath whose work encompasses Baroque painting, feminist satire and artist-books.