testing ground
For anyone wondering about the cultural importance of American Psycho, it lies in the fact that the film is one of the closest approximations in our time of Greek cathartic tragedy. It uncloaks the disquiet, the inner spiritual disease of contemporary society, through exposing the hypocrisies of its greed and the hollowness of its ideals. For happiness, prosperity, and respect in the capitalist world, the protagonist supposedly has it all: a top-class education, peak fitness, good looks, a great apartment, a coveted job, and of course plenty of money. But in this world (then of the eighties) of yuppified regulation, the rules are so dehumanized that anyone following them too literally will fall foul of them. It is a condition that dates at least back to the French Revolution – when the rhetoric of physical purity and civic virtue becomes fanatic dogma, it will always result in madness and terror.
Alex Gawronski’s exhibition, ‘Testing Ground’, was a miniaturized callisthenic themepark, coupled with a long board-room table affixed with a row of microphones. Above this was a projection of the goings-on in the exercise area, which had been domesticated with a swathe of steel-blue carpet. To the left was a placard declaring, ‘Macroeconomics’, with an oversize picture by Paul Klee. Taken from a university textbook, it was a strange union bordering on the aesthetically indecent – but telling. For Gawronski revealed to us that the higher aims of modernism has been assimilated or bowdlerized by the world of corporate formulas and economic rationalism, for which any quality exists only to be translated to a quantity.
Gawronski’s contraptions derived from those most often seen in community parks for outdoor exercise and