Feeling the Affect

Watching Pier Paolo Passolini’s Salo I was struck again by JG Ballard’s maxim that we have long since succumbed to the death of affect: we are saturated with imagery and ideas of violence, ritualised, stylised, mediated ad infinitum, and thus conditioned to treat them with the deference we reserve for the mundane. I have to disagree.
In Passolini’s film the essence of De Sade’s 120 days of Sodom is transported to Mussolini’s idealised Fascist state, Salo. Here under the auspices of Nazi troops, four members of the Italian social elite comport themselves with decadence, with zealous, experimental, abandon.
Passolini makes it clear where he stands: the ideological associations of the participants, the setting of the story, the faux-polemic, and philosophically bogus utterances of the Faschismo alumni, shows us moral bankruptcy and indulgence so foul, so sexually violent and self-annihilating , that there can be no room for ambiguity. This is, he unequivocally states, wrong.
I found the experience shocking: this is Passolini’s greatest success - affecting me with a deep-seated and brutal convulsion toward his art, infusing me with the visceral disgust I felt gazing at the horrors of his work. I have waited a while to view this sometime banned and notorious film. I attempted to approach it with the same trepidation I felt when, as a kid on the hunt for forbidden enlightenment, I was finally able to procure a pirated, videotaped copy, of A Clockwork Orange. Now I can only imagine that Ludovico’s technique comprises compulsory and endless exposure to Salo. Poor Alex couldn’t close his eyes, couldn’t switch it off. I too was unable to completely look away. Nor could I refuse reflecting upon it.
What of comparative experiences, encounters with works that have shocked me? Cronenbourg’s Crash: a car showroom; automotive fetishism; wound penetration: but there is something in the prosthetic plasticity and stylised act that lacks real power and is almost ridiculous. And it is, of course, a consensual union.
Francisco Goya’s , Great Feat! With Dead Men! show war crimes, dismembered guerrilla fighters, body parts impaled on tree branches, a torso here, a head there, discarded limbs scattered about. And here come the Chapman Brothers with their contemporary sculptured version, Great Deeds against the Dead, the meaning of Goya’s original transmuted to suit their agenda: a physical metaphor of the psychic damage inflicted by ideology, much the same intent, possibly, as Passolini’s project.
I can’t claim to like Jake and Dinos Chapman’s work; like is simply not part of the lexicon they allow us to describe it. But it is worthy of my attention and gives me pause for thought. They understand provocation, repulsion. They know how to affect. As does Marcus Harvey with Myra were children’s hand prints in primary school hues coalesce into the serial killer’s portrait, her empty eyed gaze, the same as in the thousands of reproductions of that 1950’s, tabloid newspaper photograph. It is a devastating work, the economy of expression, the simplicity of the idea, the nauseous feeling of affect.