Tomorrow, April 23rd, 2016, at 1344 Lambert Cir in Lafayette, Colorado in the USA, there is an Estate Sale. A pause before a life, its objects, is scrubbed. Green Rayon pantsuits laid out on floral polyester bedspread. Ornately bezeled mirrors. Rusting jewelry. A deflated donut cushion. Faint Naphthalene smells. Black velcro shoes. Frames with contents removed. Objects with sentiments evaporating along with the dead who left them to become voids of that sentiment. It's called staging. A purgatory, between vintage reincarnation and garbage. Threshold worlds in the trivial difference between a trash box and moving box. This last transitional moment art extends indefinitely, embalmed to pay respects, injected with formaldehyde to plasticize body without warmth.
Nostalgia suspends in formaldehyde's rose tinted veil our memories. Memories like fetal pigs. New research shows that nostalgia is the brain's way of combating negative feelings and nihilism, the brain self-administering drugs, the form of a memory, recalling a time when one did feel comfortable, safe, happy, jumpstart its human to face current adversity, depression. Nostalgia's "bittersweet" highlighting a continuum of time and thus progress made.
“If you can recruit a memory to maintain physiological comfort, at least subjectively, that could be an amazing and complex adaptation,” he says. “It could contribute to survival by making you look for food and shelter that much longer.” -Dr. Wildschut, nytimes
medical grade injections of nostalgia, Like leftover cake, nostalgia is an artificially sugary concoction we can bring with us, a souvenir that, like Gober's donuts, we desire forever. Nostalgia is how we laminate our heads to appear like there's more precious substances inside. We coat chairs in plastic to think they're worth preserving. This will all be gone soon.
And Art is symptom of death's fear, and men erecting their "monuments," tumescence, to outlast them, the fear. Thus most art is cast iron, unwilling impermanence or loss. But so much humanity isn't iron, instead it is kept in acidic cardboard, gnawed at by the affection rifling through it. Knowledge is kept on rapidly acidifying papers, stored in databanks we anodize against oxidation in deep storage basements to feign permanence, our security. But the world slowly deteriorates, look into the issue of archiving, it's complex nuanced and impossible, it's baby blankets spilled on, barfed on, a biological archive cum box. Bankers boxes purchased by the gross. Your touch leaves a mark, sews a patch, you reproduce yourself in the objects you attend. Statues eroded by touch, by people’s affinity for them. The more loved photographs in your collection slowly destroyed by your desire. Preciousness in warm cardboard, wearing touch, eroding to someone's love.
The word careworn.
