a generation to enter basements and discothèques at night, dance until they dropped and leave in the morning describing the experience as ‘transcendental’, ‘communion’, ‘ritual’, ‘trance’, ‘altar’. These signs of the recent past, with their mythical, lysergic, community inscriptions, are elaborated on in the exhibition in the form of a small museum. If years earlier, also at the Museo Moderno, Aráoz had put together an exhibition that was a party, an atoning ritual for anyone who remembers it, here he brings back the music converted into listening, proposing these sounds as a hallucinatory ambient layer that both adds to and contains the exhibition, but that also points to its dimension as a reliquary. These compact discs, with their naïve analogue technology, are today precious objects for ‘vintage’ consumption, as is the motorbike that crowns a pearled gangway. In its excessive use of polyurethane, an oil derivative that creates smooth, shiny surfaces off which any history slips, a compound used to make anything from credit cards to baby toys, computers or plates, the exhibition points to certain unavoidable forms of the world of consumption. The motorbike and discs, exhibited as fetishes, underline both the ritual nature of the show and these objects’ pre-eminence as talismans of fascination.
is the fundamental myth of advanced capitalism. In light of this, it is at the very least mistaken to think we lack myths in contemporaneity: it is precisely through our belief in the religious myth of neo-liberalism that the image worlds produced by this regime become concrete reality in our own existences.’9 If, in several of his earlier shows, Aráoz had worked on repressed urges – crime, sexuality, torture – he seems here to be asking himself about the universe of consumption and its infinite capacity for metamorphosis as one of the most obvious and shameful forces of desire. Following the structure of desire, Araóz aspires, like the neo-baroque poets, to ‘a total flight from meaning’, a branching universe of explorations that betrays any link with explanation or didactics. By placing his images in the inviolable universe of sleep, that space that survives as ‘one of the great human offerings to the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism’,10 he dares to give form to a stimulating post-humanist garden, where technology and the forms of the living intersect, a space of latent religiosity for all who desire a life full of exuberant, contradictory meanings, a life more hallucinated and dignified than the one we are living.
In a recent interview, the Brazilian psychoanalyst and cultural critic Suely Rolnik describes the ways in which financial capital, while not producing goods like industrial capital, shapes worlds, images for us to identify with and desire. Only when those goods are desired are they produced. For Rolnik, capital is a factory of worlds, bearing the message that paradises might exist: ‘In its earthly version, capital replaced God as the underwriter of the promise, and the virtue that makes us deserve it became consumption: this
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