The unbearable lightness of the world of kitsch

Defending the garden gnomes

By Vasile Dâncu

The garden gnome is the symbol of kitsch. It’s been 30 years since I presented a graduation thesis on a subject inspired from the psycho-socio-logic of taste and the kitsch in esthetics and in day-to-day life and I still read everything it comes at hand about this phenomenon. When I lay my eyes on the untranslatable, odd word, the first image that comes in mind is that of a garden gnome.

Travelling by car on Romanian roads, I often stop to take a look at the gnomes which are exhibited to a steadily growing extent, on the side of the road. I observe their faces, their clothes, I try to ask their creator about their name and how the sale goes. I’ve never realized their importance in the history of mankind until the moment I met a member of the Garden Gnome Liberation Front (GGLF), while I was travelling in a TGV from Paris somewhere in the south of France. On that occasion I found out that teams of young people were kidnapping the gnomes only to release theme somewhere in the woods, with supplies of food and even wine. As I tried to find out more on this subject, in the following years, I realized that there are also many people who hate garden gnomes, that there is a confederation for their extermination, I believe in France also. But more than that. I recently found that there are two very cruel methods to torture gnomes. The first one presumes to throw the gnome, in which case the distance matters and you get a bonus if the gnome breaks; the other one presumes to break the gnome’s head with a single knock. Tens of lawsuits are known, mostly in Switzerland and Germany, where people tried to force their neighbors to banish the little gnomes stating that because of them, representatives of bad taste, there might be the possibility that the house prices in the region would go down. In 1937 Hitler and his companions decided that the garden gnome, although it was a German invention, does not have the size, the blue eyes or the muscles of the Arian lad, and so the gnomes were systematically killed, an authentic genocide, and the workshops where the gnomes have been fabricated, were closed. The communism which also came in Germany after the war, ruled by decree that the fabrication of gnomes is forbidden, as they were considered symbols for the Bourgeois, but in their pragmatism the communist allowed the production for export. In the 80s, the garden gnomes started to become an important merchandise and also started to have a more vivid presence, if I may put it so, in people’s life. A German from Switzerland founded the International Association for Protection of Garden Gnomes, as a response to the frequent attacks upon the poor gnomes all over Western Europe. The gnome is starting to have an increasingly difficult life in the world of grown-ups.

Starting with 1995, lots of organizations emerged whose purposes were to defend the gnomes, thousands of gnomes appear in international exhibitions, representations of gnomes became an area of interest for avant-garde artists, but the gnome’s greatest achievement was the fact that it became a character in many advertising videos.

Ultimately, why all that noise for the insignificant gnome? The gnome is the abnormal, it is a faulty imitation, and it comes from a mythical place. It is the symbol of the bridge between a humane world and a materialistic one represented by objects, a world of the living against the non-living. The juxtaposition in the human habitat gives it substance, it humanizes it, as a matter of fact it becomes a character equipped (illicitly) with personality and sometimes with a soul, by its owners who talk with it and place it in an existential domestic order. The garden gnome is also an inhabitant of a chthonic imaginary, which for the modern man, defined by consumerism and by the lack of spirituality, appears as a memento of being far from the essence, a memento of imitation.

Today’s man is suspected of having a kitsch attitude, of being too materialistic and then the removal of the sign indicated by the genuine cultural background is being rejected with fear and anger.

Now imagine that you are in the situation where you hate the garden gnome or that you have no sympathy for it, but someone dear to you leaves on his deathbed a garden gnome asking you to take care of it, an experience which was described magisterially by a French anthropologist. Obviously you try to understand what the meaning of the object for that person was. Freud would say that it is a fetish for objects and it replaces the intimacy between two human beings, but in this case it replaces an ABSENCE. Eventually, for most people, objects become active presences, they become characters and when they are alone, people talk with objects and they act in their presence as if they have a human companion. As Umberto Eco would say, in fact this transformation, where an object is synonym with nothingness becomes SOMETHING.

We see this more clearly when we do a lucid analysis of the things that surrounds us, too many, too old and of which we dissociate very hard. The gnomes are kitsch, as many complain about, they drag through the mud the natural and authentic landscape, but let’s take a delicate look at the social functionality of kitsch, at its social presence and at the practices which occur regarding this phenomenon. A truism says, after Milan Kundera have rightly said it, that we shouldn’t talk about kitsch only in regard with an aesthetic category, but also as a continuous social presence, as a facet for reality and consumption, in fact for the democratization of consumption. Maybe the bourgeois brought the massive and inauthentic consumption, the heavy multiplication of each nice object and of its imitations, but the Communism didn’t back down, it is enough to see the “creations” of the social realism.

I constantly remember the Soviet engraving “workers forcing the gates of Paradise” depicting gigantic musclemen who force the entrance in Paradise, a Paradise which was probably left behind by both the commander and the doorman. Milan Kundera was right “The Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal for each politician, every party and every political movement”, it was fancied by the dictators, and also by the great democratic leaders.

Mingling with the crowd, movies with politicians giving children a hug or grannies with tears in their eyes are the essence of PR political campaigns, and the storytelling which romances the moments of a fabricated biography proliferates sloppy and touching stories.

Maybe the kitsch is very much about the excess of sentimentalism or romanticism, as the aesthetes reveal or a dictatorship of the heart when the mind has no words to say as Milan Kundera writes, but it is the essential fragment of the human nature, as the great writer also admits. In an age of individualisms and of narcissism where the romanticism transforms itself in different states degraded by reverie, the kitsch is still a presence of the humane. The kitsch creates sloppy emotions, but it binds the wounds of more and more fade lives, it is easy to decode, it signals the presence of the sensible, of the soul, of reverie. In an uncharmed world, the ones without aesthetic education, that is the whole majority, are devouring the kitsch with the intention to beautify life.

The garden gnome is decorative, it can transform into a partner for a lonely grandmother, and it receives a name from a child who doesn’t know much about aesthetics. When people are relocating their life on Facebook and enjoy some mechanical appreciations, as surrogate signs of admiration and love from others, we also have a kitsch, but a cosmic one, an existential one, which regards identity and you have no one to say that it is unaesthetic when you hide yourself in a virtual world, more remoter and fader than an absence. Eventually, the technological mediation of the social networks or the media convergence depict different forms of existence of pure kitsch, the embodiment of a lack of authenticity and of stereotyped plasticity, encountered so far in history. The new media gives the illusion of universality, of the creative spirit, the users’ contents (Users-Generated Content or UGC in media studies) are some naïve signs of an existence which doesn’t communicate, doesn’t experience authentic and original feelings, but lives with the illusion that it exists in a world of creators without audience. A simulation of a

dialogue that it actually ends in monologues with no message, only reproductions of some states with no relevance but “acknowledged” through tens and hundreds of likes.

In fact, it is impossible to distinguish between the veritable existence and the kitsch existence because all the mechanisms in today’s world are described through tens of attributes of the kitsch. If we were to list some of the kitsch’s attributes which I’ve gathered for years in some notebooks dedicated to this phenomenon, we’ll see that they are mentioned today as attributes of our existence, of our weltanschauung: artificial, shallow, which mystifies, aggregative, delusive, futile, fake, pseudo cultural, inauthentic, nostalgic etc. We see that all are corresponding to our existence, they are attributes for “simulacra and simulation”, explained by Baudrillard as mechanism of existential commitment.

When Milan Kundera said that, after all, the best definition for kitsch would be to “deny the crap” referring to the fact that, in case of kitsch, we exclude from the visual field everything which is unacceptable in our existence, in fact I believe that this definition is a lifesaver for our friend and our subject, the garden gnome. It doesn’t seem kitsch anymore because it is truly unacceptable for many exactly because it is a sign of handicap, a malformation and maybe the reminiscence of the unhappy childhoods.

The kitsch is the background where all our existence happens, where the garden gnome is an ornament, a partner, an external decoration, an object which brings good fortune or it defends our home from bad spirits. In the middle of the invasion, and of kitsch overflow towards nonsemiotic or nonaesthetic fields of our lives, we can suggest our friends, specialized in esthetics, to accept instating the kitsch with the well-deserved ism because we already can talk about KITSCHISM. Certainly the garden gnome would not know to take advantage of the fact that he’s being part of the family of isms, but it can be happy of the fact that Tolkien’s Hobbit, which came along in 1937, and only in our days, through fascinating movies for most adults, gave rise to an invasion of gnomes, cousins of the gnome, in a world which, eventually, will make him justice. A real plot of the tiny beings in a world of giants.

Truly, in our days, a specialist in nanology (that is the psychology of the garden gnomes) considers that there is a population of 30 million of gnomes worldwide and that two million are being born each year. A real nation which, if it would gather in one place, could ask for independence or at least for territorial autonomy. Or they could organize a referendum so that their debts would be paid, or they could ask to be treated more kindly by the giants who exploit them. The idea of the Utopian nation of gnomes could be borrowed by the IMF or the European Central Bank, and taught to make austerity programs and much more. So far, the gnomes don’t live in unity, they are everywhere, denoting symbolically a sort of ubiquity of the world’s kitsch in our existence. A world in which our tele-beautiful Dana Savuica has just uttered from the television screen, that she is afraid of garden gnomes.

PS Don’t get scared Dana, all gnomes in Romania have sad eyes! Pay a visit to the creator of gnomes in Pucheni, nearby Bucharest, you will convince yourself. They will never rise up against anyone, they are obedient, unworldly and they comply with the authority enforced by the greater and stronger.

References:1. Solomon, Robert C., On Kitsch and Sentimentality, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 49, No. 1 (Winter, 1991), pp. 1-14 2. Gadbois, Jocelyn, Le nain de jardin : Objet en éclats, Editions L'Harmattan, Paris, 20103. Kundera, Milan, Insuportabila uşurătate a fiinţei, trad., Humanitas, Paris, 20134. Broch, Hermann, Création littéraire et connaissance : essais, éd. et introd. de H. Arendt, trad. de l'allemand par A. Kohn, coll. Tel, Gallimard, Paris, 1966 (éd. or. Dichten und Erkennen, 1955)5.Mate, Gavril, Universul kitsch-ului, Editura Dacia, Cluj-Napoca, 1985

6. Moles, Abraham, Psihologia kitsch-ului, Editura Meridiane, Bucureşti, 1980