'The Triumph of Death' or the killing of thought Good urban walkers and the occasional junkie literature
know too well that the city form a dialectical unity of two sides.
During the day, the arteries of the city office are governed by cowards who hide their frustration behind his eyes expressionless
; children who, like Atlas, carrying knapsacks on their backs with the weight of civilization
, housewives, with a surplus of time
estheticize their boredom with the pilgrimage to clothing stores, and commercial
tiburonescos lurking, when they smile, show your adversaries the lethality of their dentures.
When night falls, the dark streets and alleys school as a runaway river, fighting street lights and illuminated signs, a small meandering visibility. Among shadows can be glimpsed
jerky movements
announcing the exit to the surface of the intestinal fauna
cosmopolis.
A receipt and in their cases, residents of the city day give way to night. Pickpockets and police, pimps and drunken students, street vendors and cleaning crews, all of which claim their turn in the ring
survival is the big city. Shadows, the night trading in the recesses of the human soul, whose existence is denied by the day: oblivion, pleasure, power, negligence and wantonness.
This scenario seemingly inhospitable part of a private ritual I share with my friend
Davidovsky. Sometimes, when the weight of our lives is overwhelming, we go diving at night to a local
modernez comment expires where our recent readings until excessive intake
of absinthe lost our eyes and speeches ways to stormy. Davidovsky
as a good humanist contemporary sound that lives in the postmodern societies
, has a formation for which there is no correlation work. It is, paradoxically
, an expert on unskilled labor.
Well, in a recent
conversations, talking about his last job as a guard room of a museum known for an even more famous avant-garde painter
. After long hours of surveillance in the same room-has-one loses all interest in paintings and focuses to observe visitors: types, speeches, reactions, etc. Boredom drives my friend to the Orthodox practice of an "esthetician
welcome."
describes, not without some regret, the
visitor behavior standard. Note that most of the people entering the museum seems more interested in saying you have visited the museum in seeing the pictures.
The
modus operandi of these murderers art is simple: stand in front of the box, look at the picture, read the relevant comments, look again at the picture and move to the next table. Estimated time: thirty seconds and four cents. This is, in our view, a
systematic procedure results in the silencing
of the work.
Given this comment, I remembered thinking that I raised a similar experience to the table purpose
The Triumph of Death of Peter Bruegel . In this painting, an army of rampaging skeletons without mercy
a village. A wave of destruction and murder colorful row pass before the eyes of the spectator, who, after impact original may be lost in the myriad details that make up this scene of a macabre and sadistic manners.
If you want
complement this experience with an explanatory placard reading specialist offering the Museo del Prado, find a sentence like this:
"shows the moral Work Triumph of Death on worldly things, symbolized by a huge army of skeletons sweeping the Earth. The background is a barren landscape where even develop scenes of destruction. In the foreground, Death at the head of their armies on a red horse, destroyed the World of the living, who are led to an enormous coffin, with no hope of salvation. All social classes are included in the composition, without the power or the devotion to save them. "
Well, according to this interpretation
The Triumph of Death is a plea to the basic condition of all existence: the inescapable mortality the human being. A table with the classic theme empalmaría own the art of Middle Ages whose key
The Dance of Death . According to which universal thing in the world, all is imperishable and eternal death. This, in the metaphysical sense, is a balancer
relentlessly uncompromising social class differences.
This is a nice speech, whose meaning is extracted from the picture, but the accompanying text, because if we look at the experience of the work of Bruegel
, see how
this interpretation is insufficient. My thesis is that
The Triumph of Death not be understood in a sense an existentialist
, but
key seen in a "dialectic of enlightenment."
Let me explain.
What really seen in the picture is not a disparate group of people in his wandering life, going more or less randomly stumbling with final embrace. On the contrary, what any viewer can see is a village assaulted. Death, the army of skeletons, sega life in an instant with different
sophisticated techniques. This is the idea: the war is the true and ultimate triumph of death, because war is the technical provision of human activity for the production of dead. In fact, essential
to war and violence is not so much the technique.
not forcing the interpretation, stating that Bruegel
feared the destructive potential to the advancement of
civilization entails. It is enough to appeal to his obsession, reflected pictorially
, the Babel myth to suggest that there is in
moral worldview aversion to technological progress. By the way, will encourage other hypothesis. The revulsion by
technical progress is almost typical of Flemish painting. A good example of this are the works that are in the room as the Prado Museum is dedicated to this artistic movement. In them, all the devils wear and use instruments. Or, to invoke
best known example, contemplate
The garden of delights of Bosco. Look how
in the section on table where is hell and look for objects or human instruments.
then lead! the same question with paragraphs questionably qualified "Genesis" and "Paradise." Technical and ill
are , in my opinion, these authors
intimately linked. Back to
Bruegel. A characteristic of some of his paintings is to draw listings, think of
Children's games or
Dutch sayings. However, in
The Triumph of Death same thing happens. Throughout the picture, there is a huge list of assassination techniques, sticking
,
hanging, drowning, beheading
, etc. It can even be seen as the army of skeletons use the strategy of the funnel to catch men. For what purpose? To create more dead, more skeletons. Death in war, as the technique is an entity whose being is to grow exponentially and unchecked.
could be putting special attention the fact that death enters the two dimensions of man: body and soul. The technique, while streamlined
murder , boycotts
normal functioning of the body, and while action protocol, which need no reflection, kills the human soul. This becomes a puppet
: an empty body and functional.
We can begin now to think what these skeletons. Contrary to an early idea could compel
to think, the skeletons are not demons. No to
angels nor demons in
The Triumph of Death . Humanity is alone in the land locked with its opposite: the skeletons, which are neither more nor less than men who have lost their humanity. The skeletons are the puppets
technique used by all human activities to convert men. Any discipline that makes the man, you can repeat the death and used by it to increase its power, fencing, games, music, love, religion and cuisine, which is nothing more than the art of death-all the good practices humanity become accomplices
of mortality.
At this point it would be interesting to notice in the skeletal figure that appears on the left side of the table. Beside the death monks who officiate the killing, there is a skeleton sitting on the floor in a deep position
speculative. It is, in my view, the human skeleton, who based their thinking and action, while the only figure in the scene of the picture is not apparently complicit in the construction
death. Indeed, reflection, to the extent that it is an activity that has as
essence postponement of practice, is the only possible means of resistance
technification and death of human life.
The human is something inherently useless and has to do with the movement of the formerly called soul. Without culture is nothing more than a set of manuals for obsolete devices. Therefore, to understand art, to give life-the work must be able to speak, and this will only be possible if we ignore the interpretation
institutional and dare, without fear of wasting time, to have a
experience personally significant with it.
art today recovering their sacred value when possible to avoid the logical
industrialization contemporary soul. Art may well be an object of consumption and propaganda, but also the gap where the human is filtered and prison escapes modern utility.
