Art Object, Text, & Media

Text: Pastoralia by George Saunders

Pastoralia is a satire about two people, a man and a woman, who work at an amusement park in modern day. the park does not offer rides, however, and instead features bits of human history as something that can be visited. Unlike a natural history museum, the humans are alive and play the role of the humans of the time. This goes on 24 hours a day, and 7 days a week. The two that Saunders focusing on are the man and woman playing the cave men. People come by and watch them pick fleas out of each others hair, smash rocks together, and cook the goat that is placed in a metal box at the end of every day by the authorities of the park. They authorities who run the institution do not allow them to every act like real human beings, and are forced to stay in character constantly. When reading, I feel pity for the cave men, and disgust for the visitors of the museum, but the story does not seem so unlike something we may have in the near future, as entertainment has become more and more dehumanizing. A lot of Saunders stories use this kind of satire of humans exploiting others for entertainment, and dehumanizing them to do so.

On Saunders: "He has been giving us ever more interesting and distinctive glimpses of a surreal world that is not quite our own, but frighteningly close. Saunders creates a world of people who regret their lives but still manage to find optimism, a world where free market economic principals dominate every aspect of life, and a world where everyones languages is suffused with corporate doublespeak and self help homilies"

I look at Saunders writing as a less terrifying brand of science fiction, but it is some how much sadder. There is a quite tradegy in the stories, because even the characters that can see the darkness of the world they are in, they have no one to share their fears with. For example, in "Brad Carrigan, American", Brad witnesses his own wife and her disturbing side kick, Chief Wayne, watching FinalTwist, a reality tv show in which sick pranks are played on people:

" Doris, come on," says Brad. "These are real people, people with thoughts and hopes and dreams." "Well, nobody got hurt," says Chief Wayne. "Except those kids who unknowingly ate their own mothers," says Brad. "Well, they signed the releases," says Chief Wayne.

Object: Natural History, Damien Hirst Hirst's Natural History project consists of numerous dead animals preserved in class tanks in a museum so that he can discuss his curiosity into his own death. I find this entire project cold, and not at all about death, but the inflation of his own life over all these others. The fact that he finds the dead bodies of these creatures more interesting than the lives that any of those species have, reminds me of the entertainment created by the institution in Pastorialia. Just as those former human histories are intended to appeal to human curiosity of the past, these dead animals are some how intended to comfort Hirst in the thoughts of his own death. The animals have "the illusion of life", just like the characters in pastoralia. They are putting on the illusion of life, but must completely suppress the lives that they actually are living for the benefit of the viewer.

Film: Thx 1138, and or Equilibrium Both of these films are dystopian films with essentially the same plot. Both are focuses on a character who is well behaved, and follows the rules of the repressive dystopian society. They are both forced to consume emotion killing drugs so that they can better function as a utility for the new world. I think that the sentiment of pastoralia, and my judgment of Hirst, are both a preview of the kind of loss of emotion and sentiment that is enforced in these kind of stories. If people can so coldly institutionalize people and animals for their own curiosity, it is not that far of a reach to imagine a government that would institutionalize all of us for a new type of world, focused on utility and structure, and free from all emotions. Films like these, and stories like Saunders are an example of a concern that humans we eventually detach from our emotions for the priority of utility, or entertainment.

why did i chose these? what is the link between my interests, and these obejcts?