Kitsch Aesthetics Research Articles

Avant-Garde and Kitsch in María Blanchard’s Neo-Cubism

Abstract The exceptionality of the women artists who achieved recognition within the circles of the avant-garde in the first decades of the twentieth century involved a number of performative strategies to avoid the risk of being confined to the category of ‘women painters’. The case of María Blanchard, a Spanish painter integrated in the School of Paris, exemplifies the problematics faced by women working in the avant-garde. Her trajectory from synthetic Cubism to neo-Cubist figuration follows the pattern of many of her male contemporaries working under the sociopolitical and market pressures in the post-war period, but the simultaneous assimilation of and ironic distance from the prevailing aesthetic ideologies is a distinctive feature of her style shared by other women artists. As Cubism became mainstream and began to lose its subversive power, Blanchard’s interest in challenging conventional artistic discourses and hierarchies found expression in kitsch aesthetics.

CULTURA KITSCH E MODERNIDADE: a ascensão do não-autêntico

O termo kitsch, que nasce e ganha sentido em plena ascensão da sociedade burguesa em meados do século XIX, traz à tona contradições fundamentais para o entendimento da modernidade: o autêntico e a cópia, a aura e a reprodutibilidade técnica da obra de arte. O kitsch capta a alienação coletiva da sociedade ocidental em ascensão, aspirando a felicidade pelo consumo. Ao imitar as classes abastadas, a cultura kitsch é reacionária à cultura erudita, e ambas coexistem: uma ascende, a outra imita. A aparente desqualificação do elevado, entretanto, parece não atingir a grande obra. Pelo contrário, a cópia e a imitação do que é convencionado como belo ou erudito afirma o próprio sistema, pois amplia e define com maior nitidez o verdadeiro do falso. Este ensaio supõe que a estética kitsch é fundamental para a construção do bom gosto na modernidade, pois é ele, o comportamento kitsch, que aproxima as massas da experiência estética do seu tempo, sustentando o ciclo de consumo.

The Representation of Genocide in Graphic Novels: Considering the Role of Kitsch by Laurike in 't Veld

Reviewed by: The Representation of Genocide in Graphic Novels: Considering the Role of Kitschby Laurike in 't Veld Candida Rifkind Laurike in 't Veld, The Representation of Genocide in Graphic Novels: Considering the Role of Kitsch. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 230 pp, $84.99, $64.99 (eBook). Any book whose title juxtaposes the weight of genocide with the insubstantiality of kitsch signals a provocative intervention into the well-established nexus of comics studies and trauma theory. Laurike in 't Veld's book is indeed a fresh take on these topics, and her readings of both canonical and lesser known graphic novels about genocide is a welcome and accessible contribution to the field. Reading a group of graphic novels (although some are more properly graphic auto/biographies, documentary comics, and comics journalism) about the Holocaust and the genocides in Armenia, Rwanda, and Bosnia, in 't Veld shows how a concept such as kitsch can provide a productive framework for understanding how these texts produce affective responses to the atrocities they depict. But this is not a purely celebratory discussion of the power of comics to overcome compassion fatigue or solicit new empathy for the victims of suffering. Particularly helpful is the author's considerations of the limits of kitsch and anti-kitsch strategies in a perceptive analysis of the aesthetics and politics of graphic representations of genocide. Chapter one is an introduction that delineates the scope of the study, provides an overview of early representations of genocide in comics, introduces the theoretical framework, and summarizes the chapters. Readers skeptical of in 't Veld's yoking of kitsch aesthetics to genocide narratives will find an in-depth discussion of her methodology here, as the author traces the history of kitsch from the early twentieth century to now in order [End Page 348]to unpack its potential for comics studies. While a richer answer to the question "What is kitsch?" unfolds over the course of the book, its aesthetic qualities of visual excess, narrative tendencies to hyperbole, and historical universalisms are clear from the beginning. Yet, like its close relatives camp and melodrama, the denigration of kitsch often attributed to the Frankfurt School and Clement Greenburg has more recently been overturned by cultural critics recuperating kitsch as a category of potential plurality and cultural resistance. This is where the study's core argument emerges: kitsch is an aesthetic and political category of tensions between excess/restraint, attraction/repulsion, distance/affect, and presence/absence. As such, some kitsch reaches its limits in the representation of atrocity; other versions of it unravel themselves to comment self-reflexively on these limits. Organized thematically rather than chronologically or by individual works, this book returns to its corpus of texts in each chapter from a slightly different angle. The primary Holocaust graphic narratives are Art Spiegelman's Maus;Eric Heuvel's The Search;Joe Kubert's Yossel, April 19, 1943;Dave Sim's Judenhass;and Pascal Croci's Auschwitz;the Rwandan genocide is represented in Jean-Philippe Stassen's Deogratias, Matteo Casali and Kristian Donaldson's 99 Days, and Rupert Bazambanza's Smile through the Tears;the Bosnian genocide is the focus of Joe Kubert's Fax from Sarajevoand Joe Sacco's Safe Area Goražde;and, the Armenian genocide is represented in Paolo Cossi's Medz Yeghern: il grande male(unavailable in English). Some readers may find it difficult to follow the thread of a single graphic novel's analysis through the whole book, but this organizational approach allows the author deeper comparative analysis and an enlightening set of twists and turns around a set of figures, tropes, and topics. Chapter two, "(In)human Visual Metaphors: The Animal and the Doll," introduces two common visual tropes in genocide graphic narratives that soften representations of violence, atrocity, and death. The chapter shows how animals and dolls work as signs of innocence and sentimentality in order to heighten affective responses and readerly interaction. The first section on animal representations draws on existing scholarship, particularly on the mouse/cat/pig figures in Mausand the real and surreal dogs in Deogratias, to show how these animal metaphors are not just substitutive, but also allow for self-reflexive commentary on...

Kitsch and Avant-garde Television in Blackpool (Peter Bowker, BBC, 2004)

As its American title, Viva Blackpool, indicates, BBC’s Blackpool originates in at least three glittering icons which epitomize the glitz and kitsch of Anglo-Saxon popular culture. Set in “Britain’s largest, busiest and best-publicised popular resort”, the six-episode television drama refers to the city’s attempts to create the “Las Vegas of the North” as well as to Elvis Presley’s famous song which opens the first episode. While mixing generic reference points such as the detective thriller, melodrama and the musical, Blackpool’s most notable achievement is its extensive and highly original use of popular songs. In a device reminiscent of Dennis Potter’s work, actors burst into song sequences and dance routines with their voice superimposed on the original, blurring the distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic origins and undermining all mimetic illusion. Reading Blackpool through the critical perspective of kitsch aesthetics allows one to pinpoint the ambivalence of its narrative and aesthetic choices. Thanks to the extensive use of generic conventions and iconic artefacts of popular culture, the serial drama builds up on their pre-existing emotional resonance while highlighting their artificiality through self-reflexive devices. Ultimately, Blackpool’s stylistic originality demonstrates the ability of television drama to provoke a dual mode of engagement, which combines the pleasure of immediacy while exposing it as artifice. In so doing, it proves that, contrary to what Walter Benjamin asserted, the use of kitsch can provide “emotional gratification” along with critical distance.