Closer to we live in the world of simulacra and simulation. We see this edited version everywhere, think how actors look in TV, how makeup looks in magazines, how people behave in youtube videos.... then we collectively become that.
> Marx’s famous introduction to the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte—that history happens twice, first as tragedy, then as a farce—has become something of a leitmotif in the works of artists, cultural critics and journalists grappling with the absurd elements of political agitation in the 21st century. Notably, Hal Foster poses the question “What comes after farce?” in his 2020 book of the same name; a book cataloguing contemporary art responses to existence in the Trump era. However, with its renewed appeal, and with support from numerous textual and visual examples, a new addendum has emerged: LARP comes after farce.
> The notion that LARP historically emerges after farce is incapsulated in a quote found within A.M Gittlitz’s biography of Homero Cristalli, better known as J. Posadas.
>> “What we on the Left flatter ourselves in calling our political and even our revolutionary work is in fact nothing of the sort. It is more akin to religious ritual. Mass rallies, newspaper sales, endless meetings, electoral campaigning, street fighting, writing articles that no one will ever read and books absolutely no one will ever get any practical use out of … In another time, in another place, these rituals may have had a relationship to a broader movement, a broader strategy, and such stirrings have always accompanied revolutionary moments. And so, having no real conception of the thing itself, we try to grasp at revolution by playing out its inessential weirdnesses ad nauseam. This is what comes after farce. This is LARP.”
Closer to we live in the world of simulacra and simulation. We see this edited version everywhere, think how actors look in TV, how makeup looks in magazines, how people behave in youtube videos.... then we collectively become that.