Museums are better than clubs

[imomus]

This week Hisae and I have a friend from Japan, Yukiko Sawabe, staying with us. I'm working with Yukiko on incidental music for an art project she's doing on the Grimm fairy tale Allerleirauh, part of the "Catskin Cinderella" series of folktales based on "desublimation": the overcoming of the incest taboo, and the expression of sexual love between fathers and daughters. "Allerleirauh" is the story of a princess who marries her own father; by disguising herself as a "hairy animal" she both attempts to escape his advances, and turns herself into another girl in order to accept them.

We've been showing Yukiko around Berlin—it's her first time in Germany, her first trip to Europe, in fact—and it's become a running joke that we're "repressing Germany". We eat in Japanese restaurants, shop in Thai supermarkets, and visit Oriental Museums. When Yukiko goes back to Tokyo and people ask her what Germany was like, she'll have to tell them "Well, the food in Germany is Asian food, the museums show Asian art, and the supermarket has sukiyaki sauce and frozen Thai fish."

Sure, we're sublimating Germany. The thing about sublimation, though, is that the things banished from consciousness tend to end up somewhere else, unexpectedly. Yukiko will have lots of opportunities to investigate the soul of Germany when she gets back to Tokyo, thanks to Deutschland in Japan, a big German culture festival that's going on all year. It's quite emptied this country of its cultural actors... I mean, if DJ Hell is over in Japan, what the hell's left, right?

This curious phenomenon—the fact that there almost seems to be more Japan in Germany than there is in Japan, and more Germany in Japan than there is in Germany—is an aspect of globalisation, but it's interesting to think of it as a form of sublimation. Sublimation is the psychoanalytical term for a redirection of pleasurable energies, but it also contains the idea of the sublime, and what are cultural goods but incarnations of the sublime? So when cultural goods are redirected to another part of the world, they're "sublimated"; they're pleasures barred and banned from local consciousness, popping up unexpectedly thousands of miles away in a surprising new context.

If Yukiko's friends ask her about the famous Berlin nightlife, she won't have much to say: we're not very fond, to be honest, of lingering in smoky bars where people drink and gabble and listen (or rather, don't listen) to music picked by some hapless DJ, even DJ Hell. In fact, for me Berlin nightlife is exactly a sort of "DJ Hell", where people stand around smoking as if their lives depended on it (rather than their deaths), not-listening to really bad house music. This is what passes for pleasure, but it's always seemed a peculiarly joyless activity to me. As Y, H and I walked around the vast, empty and gorgeous ethnological museums out at Dahlem yesterday I was in ecstasy at the Apollonian grandeur of it all, the sensual coldness of the endless succession of rooms, vitrines, dead cultures on parade. "Museums are so much more fun than clubs!" I thought. I remembered how, when I first moved to London, I spent most of my spare time at the British Museum, even doing my music press interviews there.

"An intellectual is someone who's found something to think about more interesting than sex", said one wag. That's true, but you can also make the case that museums are sexier than clubs, just as the Grimms' Allerleirauh story is, in its disturbing way, sexier than a lingerie poster or a pouty pop video. Museums might be a frosty sublimation of sex, but they're full of it, from the naked statues to the tribal photographs of bare-breasted women, voodoo totems, Indian erotic miniatures... What's more, museums challenge our own sublimation: their deadness awakens us to our own. They force us to confront other cultures and the very different ways they codified sex. Like a tale by the Brothers Grimm, the results are often shocking. Sublimation is a lot to do with mental habit: we're so used to the ways that sex is likely to be thrown at us in our own culture that we're ready with blocking tactics should the need arise to resist or sublimate it. For instance, if we're passing a sexy lingerie ad in the subway we don't particularly want to embarrass ourselves by falling to our knees in front of it and masturbating furiously. We need to go to work, so we sublimate. Not right now, Dionysus, maybe see you tonight at the club! But what if Dionysus doesn't go to clubs? What if he lives in a museum?

Herbert Marcuse had a nice idea he called repressive desublimation. His theory (in Eros and Civilization) was that to sublimate was to concentrate on the elevated, the lofty, the sublime, "to transform sexual or other biological impulses to more refined forms such as the pursuit of learning or artistic creation. To desublimate, then, would be to return energy lodged in refined forms to the level of its more immediate, sensuous (i.e., of the senses) impulse.  In other writings Marcuse argued that the increasing acceptance of open sexuality in modern culture was not truly liberating but only a way of offering people (in fact or in their fantasy) a very immediate pleasure that would divert them from challenging the more widespread and enduring denial of pleasure in repressive routines of everyday life (alienating work, subordination to exploitative authority, etc.)."

A walk around a good museum shows you, well, not so much "human universals" as the shockingly diverse and perverse ways different cultures (or even our own at different times) have partitioned work from play, business from pleasure, and totem from taboo. When you see photos of barebreasted tribeswomen, for instance, you have to ask "Is the fact that we now regard barebreastedness as obscene and ban it in public a sign that we love or hate femininity? Would a West in which women walked around barebreasted be a better or a worse West? By hiding breasts, do we sexualize or desexualize them? By showing them, would we sexualize or desexualize women? Is our breastfear womanlove? Would naked breasts in public wreak havoc with sublimation, throwing the working day into chaos? Why are women's nipples considered sexy, and men's nipples not? (Unless you're Hisae, who has a fetish about them)?" And so on.

Museum questions like these are a lot more interesting than pub conversation, and museums, where barebreasted women dance in ethnographic films and Indian carvings copulate, really are sexier than clubs. I guess the corollary of Marcuse's "repressive desublimation" would be something like "liberating sublimation" — a pretty good description of a trip to a museum. And you never know, Dionysus himself may well be waiting around the next corner, a stone wink frozen on his face.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

your view of berlin's nightlife can't possibly be seriously documented if all you can find is "bad djs" and "bad house music", right? i hope not.

(odot)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, put it this way, the highlight of my Berlin nightlife experiences is still seeing you and the other Active Suspension people playing live at Podewil! And one of the reasons I liked that so much is the museum quality it had, the deadness I noted (http://www.imomus.com/berlindiary.html) at the time:

"Podewil: It's magical in a dead sort of way. The street is heavy with ex-communist gravitas; sepulchral institutional buildings, blackened pillared churches, museums. A major road cuts this little corner off from the hubbub of Mitte, and a little-used subway station, Klosterstrasse, is filled with ghostly images of the trams and buses of yesteryear. East Berlin was also rather heavy, dark and cut-off, and this street captures that feeling. Podewil, a state-funded arts centre, is cut off from commercial concerns. It's a Soviet-style cultural centre that nobody seems to come to, a place of marble lobbies and vast public rooms. In one of these, up on the first floor, the groups play. A sparse audience of young intellectuals sits on leather sofas on raised plaforms surrounding a central podium which seems to float on a mysterious curtain of white fluorescence. The laptops, decks and mixers the groups will use are hidden in a tangle of transplanted bushes and twigs, amongst which stand heavy ornamental table lamps with orange shades. There's a huge baffled screen at the end of the room onto which are projected Monitor Automatique's graphics, chopped up scenes in which windows zoom around until they become unreal digital samples of windows, then red vector lines dance in time to the music across grey facades. I sprawl on the wooden platform, feeling happy. I like the 'cultural centre' feeling, the unfunkiness, the unpopularity, the coldness and deadness..."

Actually, I rather like a dead, empty feeling in blogs too. There's something nice about an eerie, abandoned blog like Robert's (http://glitchslaptko.blogspot.com/), in a hinges-creaking-in-the-wind sort of way. Now that my comments regularly top 50 a day, I might have to start getting deliberately boring or obscure. Get that delicious dead cobwebby weirdness my records have into my blog, cos that's my thing! Who wants to be Grand Central Station?

¿Born to be a blogger?

[reflejos.livejournal.com]

In Democracy and Democritus you seemed to be complaining for not being so popular. Now you say you would have become deliberately boring in order to imitate the course of your records. ¿Do you think you have control of the popularity of your music? I think you have gained in your music a liberty to experiment (although I hate the disorienteering transitions)that is very important. ¿We can think of that as an excuse?

Like some commentator of the previous post ("God must hate you"), and as I somewhere else ( http://jozefpronek.livejournal.com/58282.html / http://www.monadas.net/momus/ ) spoke with a friend, I consider this the most interesting blog I know.

Maybe, as hard as you try to become boring here, you will get the most popular. Maybe as many bloggers, you will disappear and reappear with another face. I think is strange the "persona" ¿pessoa? one can "design" as a blogger. And you have "manufactured" the most interesting one.

[sonjaaa.livejournal.com]

Very interesting thoughts on intercultural contact, sublimation, bodies and sexuality!

Hey, I think Peaches (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaches_%28artist%29) lives in Berlin too. With yourself, that makes two great musicians/artists whom I love in that city.

Thankfully the bars in Ontario (and many other Canadian provinces) are all smoke-free now! Happy, clear air! :)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yes, I must say I only today thought of globalisation as a form of sublimation: that frozen Thai fish at the Alexanderplatz Thai supermarket really is the sexy life of Thailand sublimated, preserved at subzero temperatures, and made a sublimely exotic product in a surprising new context. I wonder if any of those fancy French philosophers have had this stunning insight? It's probably in the foreword to an Andreas Gursky catalogue or something, but if not, I plant my flag in the concept and demand my Wikipedia entry forthwith!

[(Anonymous)]

if you find yourself thinking that there's more japan in germany and vice versa, might that not imply that your "japan" is actually a fake preconception?
Cuz I gotta tell ya, there's a hell of a lot of japan going on over here.

thanks for fun stuff, sorry for attacking a tangent.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

My line on this is that The Japanese are almost Japanese (http://www.livejournal.com/users/imomus/2005/02/07/).

[(Anonymous)]

The thing is, when you transport bits of one culture to another, there is always some serious 'contamination'. An Italian restaurant in London isn't really much like an Italian restaurant in Italy: they don't use those gigantic pepper-grinders in Italy, the pizzas are much simpler and crunchier, the cappucinos don't have chocolate sprinkled on them etc etc. In the same way, the English words adopted by the French are actually rarely used in exactly the same way the Anglo-Saxons use them ("flirt" means petting, not flirting, "footing" means jogging etc). All these things become nationally internalised until they are no longer really representations of the "other".

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Oh, I agree. But doesn't the "contamination" happen in time as well as space? And isn't there some sort of equivalence of time and space? In other words, the way traditional Japan is represented to postmodern Japanese is as likely to have been "contaminated" as the way the same thing is represented to tourists. This puts tourists and postmodern Japanese on pretty much the same footing.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

To be precise: I don't agree with your "they are no longer representations of the other". A representation is always partial, factitious, conventional. Cultural forms have to be remodelled and represented to survive at all. Things die in one place and pop up in another. Maybe in a tourist's dream! And then they're re-imported, perhaps, thanks to the tourist.

Also: when I said "isn't there some sort of equivalence of time and space" I meant as distancers and "distorters"; I'm not trying to rewrite physics!

[(Anonymous)]

Well, I think some cultural borrowings can become so internalized that they no longer convey to the consumer an image of "the other". Back in the 60s, having an espresso at Bar Italia in Soho was an exotic appropriation of an Italian "other". But having an espresso in Starbucks on Leicester Square in 2005 no longer is, although there's a direct evolution. It's simply become a part of our globalised culture. And even dining out on sushi is now simply part of our Western urban existence. Interestingly, though, it's not the part that tourists want to see. A tourist in Madrid wants to eat tapas, not sushi in a trendy restaurant, despite the fact that this is what young Madrilenos might actually be doing. The tourist is reimagining the culture without the globalised aspect.

[(Anonymous)]

Yup, sushi joins the 'urban' blob, which the 90s had a crush on, to the point where tourists increasingly demand harder 'real' culture. In the end, we're trading bumpkins - young urban Spanish want food from authentic country cousin Japanese, and vice versa. I'll swap you my educated and open-minded for your bloody-minded and insular. Maybe next we'll stand still, give up on 'lifestyle', see food as the fuel it is, clothes as the wrappers they are, and stop pointing at all the pretty things. What would we do with those Godless lives of leisure?

[thetemplekeeper.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't it be boring if we took no delight in food or clothes!

[(Anonymous)]

Or we were repressed about them. Teenagers would blush 'Ooh, I don't want to think about my parents EATING. How gross!'

[piratehead.livejournal.com]

As a scholar of medieval culture, "contamination" in time is the biggest problem I face, as the culture of Medieval Europe has been subject to centuries of expropriation and distortion. Like Japan to the Japanese, "Traditional" Europe as represented to postmodern Westerners is contaminated. To say nothing of neo-Gothic universities in New Jersey, Ontario, and New Zealand, I'm continuously baffled by the city of Dresden, where they've rebuilt the 'historic' Baroque center of the city as it was before the firebombing. And somehow, this seems satisfactorily authentic to the Germans, but to an American, it would be regarded as fake, because those stones are of recent quarry, and the hands that carved the statuary still live. But we take the London bridge, rebuild it in Arizona, and happily lay claim to possessing the 'real thing'.

We can appeal to place, material, and time (e.g. a museum placard which dates an artifact) in various conbinations to index the uncontaminated, and therefore construct the authentic. But perhaps the artifact that is 'home' in all three categories fails to register our notice as art, being too fully integrated, like the lingerie ad you speak of. Perhaps art is the product of contamination...

Thank you for a thoughtful post, and your readers for a good discussion!

This brings us back to Sushi in Berlin.

Berlin: supply for body and mind

[(Anonymous)]

concerning berlin's asian supermarkets i prefer the smaller but more sympatico "Asia Markt WON-I" to the bigger, often overcrowded "Asia Mekhong" at Alexanderplatz. it's right above the street from Alexanderplatz at Dircksenstrasse 35. i guess it's a family business and they offer a bigger range of japanese products, e.g. silk tofu!
concerning the nightlife i think (without being a connaisseur) the city has much more to offer than boring house music. i think there are rather very diverse styles. you can definitely wack out to extreme music in berlin if you want to. and compared to other cities the clubs in berlin are run by people who love music. and that's the point about clubbing i guess: dressing up and dance all night to the latest tunes. things that seem superficial, but they're kind of basic human urges. non-verbal conversation.
anyway: finally it will all end in the museum. today's club-culture, tomorrow's high art exhibit.
sorry for the "dictionary-english"
eRiC

berlin tips

[(Anonymous)]

ciao Momus and all partecipants,

forgive the mundane nature of my request:
I'm heading to Berlin at the end of June and I'll stay there for a week
can anyone suggest me online resources or places to visit?
thank you in advance!

Francesco T

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Couldn't agree more. Repressive desublimation seems to have made itself into one of my squibs on the sexiness of museums (http://www.livejournal.com/users/lord_whimsy/2252.html) without my knowing it.

sniff sniff

[(Anonymous)]

yes museums...childhood nostaligia smell of dust, exhibts one was afraid of, fascinatiion...hold on whats that ?...sniff sniff....yes its an amazingly strong smell of rank stagnating pish coming from momus's hair...ho ho that chap and his wee-wee smelling hair....shoben dandruff crusts...and then we had cakes baked by a lesbian one armed cooked, of course from bahrain...which was twee

Re: sniff sniff

[(Anonymous)]

and by the way...for those who've been following my anon pish comments with intrest and a growing sense of sick curiosity over the months well i plan to start my own journal soon at livejournal pishman...to give intrested parties a glimpse of how i got this lively of mind...it's a very intresting story indeed...starting with me weeing in milkbottles my mum brought home from the co-op...ending with hate mail to kylie minogue...

Re: sniff sniff

[(Anonymous)]

Not all Anonymi talk with the same tongue. Don't tar us with the same brush, simply for not having a Livejournal account.

[ewigweibliche.livejournal.com]

I found the bare-breasted paragraph thought provoking. It's my impression that Europe has more public displays of breasts than the US does. What I find curious is the compartmentalization of body parts and sexuality. Boobs in museums: fine, scholarly. Boobs on a stereotypical hot chick in an ad: okay if not fully revealed (in the US). Boobs in movies: only used to titilate. Breast feeding in public: public controversy. Breasts are only okay publically if they are going to titilate and/or sell something. Breasts as a part of womanliness seem to make patriarchal society very uncomfortable. So far, breats, like most aspects of woman's bodies, are still controlled - visually, symbolically, commercially - by patriarchal forces. On one hand I want to be free to reveal my body as I see fit, but so much of how I see it fit to do that has been shaped by forces that convince me that my breasts are for the viewing pleasure of boys, when I was a teen, and now grown men. I can make more tips or sell more product in a v-neck than I can in a loose fitting blouse. And that sucks.

In general, I'm mildly stumped why breasts, fabulous though they are, are still such a magnetic force. I mean, boobs are everywhere. They're not going away. We see them all time and everywhere. I don't get it.

[(Anonymous)]

The roots of the right winger in me but..: Why don't women magnetize male body parts as much? Lots of news features about the female libido in the UK at the moment and at the end of the day the sex industry for women is a doll's house compared to the sex industry, an Empire State Building, for men. Again, the roots of male isolation and right-wingism, but I ask sometimes. Males are other-centric (in the private sphere), females are me-centric (in the private sphere).

[ewigweibliche.livejournal.com]

I don't understand what you're trying to say. Could you rephrase it, please? Are you wondering why women don't objectify men as much as men objectify women? If so, I think that is on the rise and I don't find it healthy, for men or for women.

[(Anonymous)]

Just not sure if there is sexuality without some level of objectification. Surely if we like something we take photos of it etc