In the first century AD, when the priests known as the "Salii" danced through the streets of Rome twice a year and sang their special hymn, no one (not even the priests themselves) had the foggiest clue what the hymn meant. Perhaps in the early periods of Rome's history, the participants had understood; or more likely it had always been mumbo-jumbo. All ancient religion celebrates its own incomprehensibility, as part of its mystique. (Beard 8)
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Bound for the government palaces of Mangyongdae, a Pyongyang bus pushes its way through a dark, snowy morning. The light inside the bus is brilliant and shadowless; Kim Il Sung was born in Mangyongdae.
Flowers for Kim Il Sung 118. Click to enlarge.
No, my semicolon doesn't mark a non sequitur. If we think our sense of sight is subject to natural law, we won't perceive a connection between President Kim's birthplace and the way an artist paints the light. But in North Korea, light is a special effect under the control of a totalized magic, and a bus bound for Mangyongdae will be seen to fill with the thought of Mangyongdae as it nears its destination. In this image of the plenitude, Mangyongdae's light is atmosphere and perfume.
Glowing in the perfume, the bus's passengers act out little genre scenes from their Korean culture. In Korean grammar, communication can't occur until the senior speaker and the subordinate speaker have been identified, and on this Korean bus where a middle-aged man in glasses lectures from a newspaper to two smilingly attentive younger man, the visuals of the performance enact a lesson in grammatical etiquette. Watching the younger men as they watch the older one, a young woman also smiles. Her smile is not directly focused on anyone, however, and she covers her mouth with her hand in a gesture that only women make. A warm, happy modesty flows from her to the young men, and from them to the older man.
The bus is a rolling exhibit of language enacting itself in pictures: a little zoo of specimens behind glass, guided through the snow by a driver we cannot see. Stationed outside the glass by the artist, we look in at the happy people forever acting out what (thanks to Mangyongdae) they are. And just below the window, on our side of the glass, is the moral that the happy people on their transport enact with all their being: an exhortation reading, "Let's work for the people!" On the snowy side of the glass, those words are part of the steel that encloses soft flesh. The people on the bus can't see the words, but they have become them. The words and the people and the light have all been generated by a manifest whose ordering words filled the bus and set it rolling toward Mangyongdae.
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http://jonathan-morse.blogspot.com/2010/07/descartes-and-plato-humorists-in.html
On July 19, a New York Times article appeared to confirm my guess. The online art gallery's problem seems specifically to have been a failure to engage the human faculty of discernment. "With the rise of Web sites built around material submitted by users," said the article, "screeners have never been in greater demand. Some Internet firms have tried to get by with software that scans photos for, say, a large area of flesh tones, but nothing is a substitute for a discerning human eye" (Stone).
The gallery, then, committed the Bergsonian comic error of trying to be thrifty with its budget for body memory. The demonstration that that kind of thrift with the human is a false economy was worked out long before the era of the robotic by Henri Bergson, who explained: "What is essentially laughable is what is done automatically. . . . Absentmindedness is always comical. Indeed, the deeper the absentmindedness the higher the comedy" (155). Bergson wrote those words in 1900, and in 2010 a censor made of software confirmed the insight by generating a notion that it had absentmindedly forgotten the difference between a woman and a cloud.
However, when an Internet firm does budget for human memory, the human contact that follows often becomes the mechanism of a terrible dehumanization. Brad Stone opens his article about that metamorphosis of the human by introducing us to a screener named Ricky Bess who
spends eight hours a day in front of a computer near Orlando, Fla., viewing some of the worst depravities harbored on the Internet. He has seen photographs of graphic gang killings, animal abuse and twisted forms of pornography. One recent sighting was a photo of two teenage boys gleefully pointing guns at another boy, who is crying.
For the men and women who live through many of those eight-hour days, the emotional consequences are deeply distressing. The screeners huddle together like survivors of a daily cataclysm, and Mr. Bess tells Stone, "We help each other through any rough spots we have." But the handsomely rendered passengers on the Mangyongdae bus will never have rough spots. Protected from seeing outward by darkness and their magic pane of glass, they are riding through Happily Ever After, forever. To imagine pain in their vicinity would be merely comical. An artist's compositional training in the aesthetic theology that is socialist realism
("A recurrent template is a quartet composed of a soldier, a worker, an intellectual, and a farmer. The helmeted soldier in uniform leads from the front, weapon in hand. He is followed by another male worker, either a miner or a steelworker in work fatigues, always wearing a hard hat and holding a drill or other tool. Next is a male intellectual in a suit, holding either a book, or a blueprint. Finally a female farmer, with a sheaf of rice and a headscarf completes this iconic representation of North Korean society" [De Ceuster in Heather 15])
has changed those who ride the bus from objects labeled with an imperative verb ("Work!") to pure paradigmatic noun. Now and forever after, they are nothing but particles of social happiness. They will never again be mistaken for body forms. They are machine-readable. They have been made into art.
Korean translation by Haeng Ja Kim.
Works cited:
Beard, Mary. "Shh!" Review of Mystery Cults in the Ancient World, by Hugh Bowden. TLS 28 May 2010: 7-8.
Bergson, Henri. Laughter. 1900; anonymous translation in Comedy (Garden City, NY: Anchor-Doubleday, 1956) 59-190.
Flowers for Kim Il Sung: Art and Architecture from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. (Catalog of an exhibition at the Museum of Applied Art, Vienna.) Nürnberg: MAK Wien / Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2010.
Heather, David, and Koen De Ceuster. North Korean Posters: The David Heather Collection. Munich: Prestel, 2008.
Stone, Brad. "Policing the Web's Lurid Precincts." New York Times 19 July 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/technology/19screen.html
