At the time of writing this, as yet another accused
goes on trial at The Hague, we are all again invited to look upon the heart of
darkness. This, they say, is absolute evil: the extraordinary, unnatural force
that, once in a while, imposes itself on our community – the monster.
But is this what a monster is? I am never sure.
As I am fond of saying, the biggest lie of our time is
that we all essentially agree. Of course, we know that there are conflicts in
the world, wars, crimes, and all sorts of terrible things, but somehow we
always become convinced that these events happen in spite of our true nature,
as a departure from normality; they are a perversion of the ‘natural’,
conceptually banished to the realm of the deviant. Contemporary liberal
democracy seems to have persuaded us that consensus is our true underlying
state, while violence – although frequent – is merely incidental.
We unavoidably focus on this incidental violence –
what Slavoj Žižek would call subjective violence – in an almost voyeuristic
way, and the result is moralizing. Contemporary art is not exempted from this fallacy.
Many artists have assumed the role of commentator on the ongoing spectacle,
because, indeed, what else is there to do within the confines of universal
agreement?
However, one might say that contemporary liberal
democracy is masking its origins: it is not the greatness of humankind that
made the core of humanism, but the realization that humankind is capable of
greatness despite its capacity for evil. Indeed, evil was with us before
anything else, and humanity – in its dual meaning of humankind and ‘humanness’
– is a darker, dirtier notion than we might hope.
One of the consequences of this blindness towards our
underlying antinomies is the demise of the great narratives. Most of us do not
dare to touch upon them, unfortunately not out of any sort of humility, but
because they seem to us irrelevant: in a world where consensus reigns supreme,
great narratives are deemed an irrelevancy, at best a retro exercise, the
telling of a comforting, familiar story.
What I find particularly fascinating in the art of
Vasilis Karouk is that he is not a commentator. He grapples with the great
narratives as if there was no other way, as if the contemporary paradigm was
not constantly pushing him in a different direction. This is also true of his
latest paintings, as well as his film, Motivo, a dark, penetrating glance on
the perpetual problem of division of wealth.
For Vasilis Karouk the human is a monster, but not in
an incidental sense, not in the way that is defined by public moralizing or
international law. The human is a monster as a part of his/her constitution.
Yet, above and beyond its constitution, the human is also capable of violence
as a choice, falling squarely into the Shakespearean truism that condemns him/her
not to be a beast. This human monster – could it be anything else but human? –
appears slowly, as the veils of looking at violence as coincidence fall away, as
we travel through the narrative.
What is strange, however, is that it only becomes a
monster once we become attracted to it, because, whatever else Karouk’s art
might be, it is also unabashedly sincere: there is attraction lurking in the
darkest places, quite different from the voyeuristic pleasure we derive from
our everyday encounters with the horrors of the world. This attraction is not pleasurable;
it is more akin to how it would feel to be subjected to a magnet, a relentless
pull towards coming to terms with humanity at its darkest.
I feel that especially today, where morality has
become an object of administrative concern, such an immersion is particularly
poignant. It is confrontation with the monster that makes morality possible,
not the pretention that it does not exist, or, worse, that it does exist, but
it is someone else.
As I listen, in the news, to someone trying to
convince me that order and normality are finally, if slowly, being restored (The last thing he pronounced was – your name.),
I feel grateful for The horror! The
horror!, I feel grateful that there is a narrator, that I can sense the
rocking of the boat, that I can see the tranquil
waterway that seems to lead into the
heart of an immense darkness.
Το κείμενο γράφτηκε για την έκθεση του Βασίλη Καρούκ, "Monstrum", στη γκαλερί Akneos, Νεάπολη.
This text was written for the exhibition "Monstrum" by Vassilis Karouk, in Akneos Gallery, Naples.
Οι προτάσεις με πλάγια είναι αποσπάσματα από το "The Heart of Darkness” του Joseph Conrad.
Sentences in italics are excerpted from Joseph
Conrad’s “The Heart of Darkness”.
