A flaneur in the mud (fragments)

The world I was born in began to change. But unlike the ancient Metamorphoses, nothing in it would inspire humans to sing of bodies chang’d to various forms. For its transition would long run through the Formless – through the post-totalitarian social slime in which rotting corpses and new embryos were impossible to tell apart.
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When a society loses its form, what happens to the art of form? Does it become formless or does it go beyond any form?
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The visual arts have always worked with the available social form of space and gaze, while at the same time creating it. The clearest example of this were absolutist monarchies and totalitarianisms, which loved giant power  perspectives, imperial rationalism, symmetry and geometry. They imposed classicistic, that is, ideological forms of bodies and institutionalize a harmonic,   uniform and instrumental realism: clear outlines, an established connection between signifier and signified, masculine and sexless forms projected onto the horizon of the future. By contrast, religious or World wars produced anxiety, baroque and Guernica: outburst of disharmonic forms.
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One of the first memorable scenes in the squares after 1989: jubilant dancing crowds, nationwide partying, freedom staged in a colorful, childish forms. Against this background, as a parody of totalitarian unity, someone starts shouting “Those who don’t jump are red!” and the square is suddenly full of thousands of jumping, waving and kicking bodies. What a mockery of the hidden aesthetics of the secret services, present there - of their disciplined and discreet, minimalist bodies hidden in dark suits and inconspicuous raincoats!
How the poor cops must have suffered, forced to jump to the tune of a carnival bodily aesthetics!
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