In recent news, officials of the City of Bend, Oregon, in the United States, bemoaned the invasion of a new pestilent predator of the plastic-adhesive variety: googly eyes.
On the noble, high-art sculptures installed in the city's roundabouts, laughter-inducing googly eyes have suddenly and mysteriously begun appearing on everything from abstract spheres and ponderous squirrels to bronzen deer and their shy fawn - transforming them into strange cartoonish versions of their formerly distinguished selves.
The googly eyes have delighted citizens. The City's Council, however, cannot tolerate the irreverence: "Please stop ruining the art," some officials recently said. "It costs money to maintain them."Beyond the usual conversations about vandalism and the integrity of original art, this episode got me wondering about the hidden fidelities and moral-aesthetic fields that generate and sustain our commitments to certain forms of representation. In a manner of speaking: what counts as art and what counts as spoilage.
When art spoils, what does it become? Does it become less than art? Something monstrously "pedestrian"? What practices maintain art-as-object, thus obscuring the ways the 'object'/the installation/the statue/the monumental is already migrating and becoming 'something-else'? And perhaps, what do these commitments to the stabilized monument, to the pristine object of our civilizing gaze, teach us about subjectivity and how we meet a world that worlds itself with decay and loss?
In precolonial Igboland, now in the eastern part of Nigeria, there were also public installations. They called them 'mbari'. A priest of a certain goddess would call for the people to come together to a designated spot to build a structure. Over several months, sometimes in excess of a year, with food and drink and prayers of the propitiatory sort, the mbari would rise from the inchoate into stunning definition, a storeyed building filled with ordinary artefacts of everyday life, with busts and heads and sculptures and stuff. Then in the slow, ensuing months, in morsels of irreverent loss, the mbari would fall to the earth.
To the uninitiated, the mbari dies because of abandonment. To the ones that know, the mbari - the art itself - isn't the building at all. It is its decay. It is the falling away, the returning to the ground, the spoilage, the becoming-googly-eyes that marks the point high-art surrenders to the low fidelities of a ravenously hungry goddess.
Perhaps googly eyes are both vandal and fugitive. Bayo Akomolafe
