35 Reproductions of Youth
>> at the Jānis Akuraters museum
Jānis Akuraters, a 20th century neo-romanticist poet, fetishized beauty to the level of religion to oppose the predominant rule of Rationalism among his counterparts. Praising exaggerated aestheticism, the spontaneity of impressions, the cult of the present moment, and the sophistication of style in his collaborative essay “The Motifs of Our Art” (signed by nine authors, although J. Akuraters is generally considered to be the author of the main body of text) which was regarded as the “Manifesto of Decadence”.
It was ridiculed by contemporaries loyal to the ruling regime, most notably in the voluminous article by J.Jansons, titled “Fauns or Clowns? Notes on our Newest Literature” where he calls for the extermination of their ideas by “cutting off with sharp knife leaves and branches eaten by these harmful caterpillars”. The naivete of the ideas portrayed in “The Motifs of Our Art” (especially if viewed as a protest against Socialism) invites a juxtaposition to Tiqqun's publication “Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl” (1999) - a critical commentary on consumer society's colonization of the body, its beauty, and youth. “The Young-Girl is simply the model citizen as redefined by consumer society since World War I” - the Young-Girl rule of our time is just the inevitable result of the dominant romantic ideals of the period, mixed with the soon- to-follow post-war shift from a wartime economy to a peace time economy, focusing on desires of the consumer. Leaving us in a society where youth is a commodity to be exchanged for goods and status, where the possibility of originality is diminished by appealing to the masses and the generalized idea of beauty (beauty as a socially controlled consumerist desire) for mass reproduction on a never-before-seen scale.
The abence of privacy brought by the digital age has created a society that is constantly seeking external validation, to such a level that its only interest is the value itself, therefore lacking any substance at all. There has been an evolution of ideas (change is not always for the best, but the fittest survive) - Jānis Akuraters and his confederates believed that aesthetics could become the religion of the masses, but it turned out that aestheticization on a global scale has led to the devaluation of beauty. It has made it not only profane, but has turned it into a cheap whore, refusing to perceive herself as such, a commodity trying to unsuccessfully transcend itself and the penance of materialist society.