The aesthetic of lack

In "An Aesthetic of Lack; or Notes on Camps," Katie Kresser argues towards an “aesthetic of lack” to counter the vacuity of modern consumerism. She looks at the “prosthetic mystique” to reveal an affinity for truncations, or a way in which beauty consists of supplementation. The prosthetic serves to fill in, to compensate, and Kresser likens this to drag culture, an “incubator for flagrant artificiality,” wherein the anesthetics of lack rides the neon energy of dissonance, grotesqueness, and various voids.

For Kresser, an "additive mania" is part of the aesthetic of lack, where excess detail and kitsch serve as supplements. This aesthetic is also characterized by the horror vacui, the fear of emptiness filled with whorls, hoardmarks, countless repetitions; a preference for compounds; a hunger for "the radiant and the radiating."

This is why the back road graveyard feels more gorgeous, more inhabited, more alive, than the meticulously planned lines and repetitions of the modern cemetery, whose plots embody what Kresser calls "the aesthetic of sufficiency."

The aesthetic of sufficiency

Kresser’s aesthetic of sufficiency is "galvanic, muscular, godlike," not needing completion. She gives the example of the neo-Doric sanctum, "a marble and affectless and supreme."

Or the nouveau-smug minimalism with its "heroic proportions," its extensive space and glass, which she takes as "vaguely fascist in their force." 

She mentions Piet Mondrian's calibrated frames, structured around their "own center of gravity," with no need to reach outside further outside themselves—and I think of the Instagram’s minimalist mansions—how all that glass enables its owner to admire themselves in a mirror at every configuration of sunlight. To tell time by how the sun wraps itself around the immaculate body. To sneak the pleasure of looking out at the world of tiny others, seeing oneself reflected back in them.

In my mind, the sufficient implies money, access, and coteries: the independence of high salary, social status, career-lacquered rank. The independence of money, the elegance of big brands and famous bylines.

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Kresser sees it in corporate logos which are “marvelously scalable in their monumentality.” Ultimately, the aesthetic of self-sufficiency is also an "aesthetic of whiteness" and purity, one which has no nuance or shadow, secure in the knowledge that being completely exposed and empty, is safe. 

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See also: the urban soccer mom with her expensive athletic clothes, the calibrated leisure time for the development of tiny, particular muscles, this weakness of shiny hair, the immaculate schedules of self-care, the Leni Riefenstahl of her stadiums where she watches little ones learn to win from the casual, half-hearted, beg of the sidelines.

(For the insufficient, see Eric Baus’ description of aphasia, or “communicasick”—how weirdness and Joel Brainerd came to his mind.)

The aesthetic of the accident

We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind—mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.

-J. G. Ballard

The "fascination with the marred and the pathetic" reminds me of X., a friend whose intellectual affinities tangled with mine (he even drew a diagram of our tangles, a visceral, visual disturbance) who couldn’t get over my survival, whose idealizations of me met in confluence of my accident. It’s tempting to lay love over the retrospective gaze, but also inaccurate. Simply, we were fascinated by each other. The intensity of that fascination never simmered, it threatened everything stable in our lives. X gave me a copy of J. G. Ballard's Crash, a peephole into symphorophilia, or sexual fetish related to car crashes. As a book, I savored it in the same key as Fight Club, the frisson of watching humans try to recreate highly-specific situations of pain which arouse and bond them.

The characters in Crash are turned on by staging car-crashes, but what they crave is intimacy at its utmost, at its least accessible moment. Perhaps what we all want, at some point, is knowing we are desirable at the extremities of human experience. To be tangled is to feel one’s self alive, implicated.

I had been there. He hadn’t. There was this wound between us. He wanted to fondle it. For X, each scar was something he wanted to connect to his attraction. As one who comes from the school of dead flowers on tombstones, I sympathized. I had no limits. I preferred to make love on the hard marble cover of the grave itself.

In our shared affinity for the grotesque, the improbable, the unspeakable, X and I were kindred. But the accident, itself, was an abyss. I didn’t recognize myself in the car crash, or read my ruins into the eros of absence. The scars were not mysteries: they were solid facts, secrets between myself and the night.

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Like Rosanna Arquette, I wore the leg brace with skirts. Unlike Arquette, I wore it through the sophomore year of high school. I could not drive or pump gas. I couldn’t put pressure on a gas pedal.

To inhabit the haute of Cronenberg’s crash, I would have needed a stylist to slip sheer black nylon hose under the brace, and then some ghost with glue to follow me. The wreckage aesthetic of the film runs closer to the aesthetic of sufficiency, its glossy surface, its immaculate presentation.

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Consider could an aesthetic experience of accident that is wrecked, ravaged, lit with black stitches like the ones I selected for my forehead to match my prom dress.

To note backpacking through Europe with the high school sweetheart, returning to the US for scheduled back surgery, spending that night curled around each other in a hospital bed before heading off the college in opposite parts of the country.

To footnote how we first kissed outside a car where U2 sang: “Dressed up / like a car crash / Your wheels are turning/ but you’re upside down…” Maybe the limbs of what Ballard called his “psychopathic hymn” exist in this.

To endnote the times he looked at me on trains, our bodies covered in backpacks, his eyes reaching to ask the question I refused to answer: Does it hurt?

To shine a penlamp on the frame of what I didn’t speak, how silences infect a text.

The halo and the hipster

When Katie Kresser mentions the halo of old religious statues, and how the halo strains upward, I realize how much the halo undermines the status of the gold crown, whether rhinestoned beauty pageant tiara or Prince Charles etc. The halo substitutes a supernatural head-dressonly granted by the gods, suggesting an incompleteness in what the world can give us.

"Elite culture disdains the aesthetics of lack:" elite culture prefers it as a signal towards being conversant with the avant garde, or engaged by novelty, suffused in a newness that resembles the hipster's. Using Sontag’s definition, Kresser builds on camp as the elite marker for quaint unseriousness-- "tasteless yet amusing." The alleged-camp aesthetic associated with queer and drag culture is not as marginal as we think; Kresser sees it in pop culture, folk culture, and religious culture. the “flagrantly aristocratic” was camp. As was Henry James, Charles Dickens, art nouveau, opera, and velvet.

“Taste and ideology has ever been co-conspirators…” Notions of self-sufficiency are modern for Kresser, not ancient. She gives the example of the Greek Peplos Kore, a white statue once painted and tacky colors. She says the the whiteness is modern; the Kore used to wear garish colors and golds.

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As a result of her experience with breast cancer, the author situates herself in "camps.” She wears a pink wig, possesses one infinitely perky silicone breast: these props fill in the lack, or supplement the absence of what cancer treatment takes. 

"We all seek gods now; may they not be false ones," Kresser warns. Because we all lack, we are all lacking, all gesturing to fill this lack in various ways. I want to align the aesthetic of the accident with Kresser’s aesthetic of lack while challenging the performance of this aesthetic in visual culture.

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I want to look down from the brink without holding my breath. To remember my dad describing the horror of seeing me laid on out a stretcher, all the clothes cut from my body with scissors, the blood and glass glimmering from my skin, the folded limbs—and his tears, his words: “God, no one knew if you would live. And it had been years since I’d seen you naked…you were 15…I could not believe how beautiful you were—”

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Accidents aside, pandemic has increased my appetite for the intensivist agglomerations of literary apocalypse, which supplement the lack of stable vision for the future.

If the world is warming, ending, evaporating, it feels natural to reach outside the frame, seeking apocalyptic texts to imagine new maps, to navigate the melting glaciers. The hotness we want nestles close to the pain we think will connect us. The fondling of the wound is sexier when chosen, when marked by consent and rendered consensual. I am here— and not here—for it.

Ballard’s art works were sourced from a wrecker’s yard and were simply smashed-up cars, claimed as found objects and presented for the audience’s consideration. Yet these objects – long since consigned back to the scrapyard to be melted down – remain radical as an idea because Ballard’s gesture eschewed the trappings of experimental modernity for the cool surface of the contemporary object.

-Andrew Frost, “Crash and the Aesthetics of Disappearance”

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See also Katie Kresser on “The Real Jeff Koons: Consumer Culture and Grammar of Desire.”