Festival Faeces: Diacritics and Defecation at Aardklop 2006

The Aardklop festival grounds were awash with odors representing the opposite ends of the digestive tract of a not too healthy human when I visited it on the final day of the festival this year. Approaching the grounds from the North I was greeted by the sounds of a singer liltingly imploring the gods of the local folk religion – rugby – to select all of the Blue Bulls players for the national rugby team. While still wondering if the Cheetahs would not be a better option based on the 2005 season, I was struck by the sickeningly sweet smell of disinfectant almost visibly oozing from the army of portable chemical toilets barricading the northern side of the park. Full to bursting with the unconvincingly disguised inevitability of the gastric debauchery immediately in evidence upon rounding the malodorous bulkhead and entering the grounds, the toilets stole the show. My thought was forcibly shoved from rugby hymns to fecal allegory. If the medium is the message, what was the message of this dually indexical smell? If social categories emerge dynamically out of everyday practices, what do the toilets tell us of the scale, pattern and pace of cultural festival activities and social categories emerging from them? Alimentary dear Watson, alimentary – to solve this mystery I would, as a body in attendance, have to take my part in the process.

My project of participation in and investigation of the festive feeding frenzy for that day kicked off with a 38cm diameter crepe-style pancake bought at the point where the odors of the tail end of the alimentary canal mercifully yielded to the olfactory courtship of the gut. Waiting in the pancake queue, with the odors around me struggling for ascendancy, the vision and assembly-line production of the enormous starchy bulk I was about to task myself with eating joined the fray for representative ascendancy against the image of the disinfectant-oozing toilets with their visual and olfactory subterfuge exposed and failing a short walk to my right. At this location, an otherwise unremarkable space became the limen between the alpha and the omega of festival food. I found myself-at-Aardklop temporarily as that positioned at the olfactory, visual and imaginary mid point of the cultural life of ethnic food. Synchronicity had charged me with the responsibility of understanding this life, of understanding the contribution of culinary culture to the emergence and production of those social categories we call ethnic groups. It is this dynamic I imperfectly set out below.

Of course, for subterfuge to work it must not be recognized as subterfuge. Its intended audience must not recognize itself as the audience of a performance. This is the great failure of air freshener. Similarly, cultural diacritics such as foods to which particular meaning related to identity is attached are of course also performances – especially within the festival setting. And these performances also rely on their not being recognized as performances. Both require the suspension of disbelief for the realities they animate around their audiences to be experienced as actual rather than as the set of a make believe show, where ‘make’ denotes both coercion and collective activity.

However, when you find yourself at the end of a week of gross and sustained mass consumption, your attention captured by the failed subterfuge surrounding the peloton of pungent public privies, or at the head of a queue, your attention fixed by the magnitude of the pancake being waved in your direction, these performances give way to a gastro-chemically fuelled moment of truth.

The nakedness of the lunch becomes apparent at times and places such as this. The exaggeration, to the point of parody, of the cultural form you are going to begin ingesting and digesting, together with the proximity of its production to the natural form those processes will ultimately bestow upon it (and the failure of culture to contain it with chemicals and camouflage), sees the pancake flop towards earth – a warning against the dangers of exercising irresponsible ambition on the materials of saleable tradition.

A lesser pancake may perhaps have flown so close to the rays of the putrid, its cultural form sufficiently unremarkable to pass without powerful association. Such vulgar ambition however, forced an association; generated an image capable of circulating with what lay menacingly and immovably behind the ruptured toilet subterfuge. The wax attaching the material to the meaning to form the wings that hold the pancake aloft as a culturally meaningful object in the everyday could not withstand the strain resulting from the proximity of two such bulks. Under the gravity of such mass human excrement the new born parodic monster crashed earthwards, wrenching and dragging with it, in a narrowing gyre, the meaning that once transformed mere materiality into the nesting diacritics that make up any ‘date on the cultural calendar’.

The symbolic spaghettification that in this moment stripped the foodstuffs on sale of their diacritical status as they approached the metaphorical singularity and finality represented by the chemically treated stool stuffed parentheses enclosing the context of the festival grounds (an illuminating and reinforcing clause in a much larger ethnic utterance) laid bare a paradoxical and frightening dynamic. The volatile mixture of an unsatisfiable lack and an inescapable presence fuels a frenzied and entropic carnival of consumption. No matter how large the pancake, it cannot be transformed into a that final identity fixing diachronic, and no matter how cunning the camouflage, the pancakes final destination persistently tears away at the imaginary materiality of the fragile mind forged membrane of meaning containing the universe of shared identification.

To fill this lack, art festivals and giant pancakes emerge via a logic suggesting that collective celebration and consumption will suture the impossible category. The great paradox of this logic, momentarily brought to sensory consciousness in the terrible pancake queue, is that as the pancakes get larger and the consumerism more frenzied, the membrane it is in service of increasingly threatens to denature and disintegrate under the onslaught of the abject; the waste that increases in direct proportion to the frenzy of collectivity and rapidly exceeds the power of camouflage to contain. Human waste of all kinds; the barren spent desires of the threatened ethnic bodies they falsely promised to save, spill into overflowing bins and toilets. This process begun, the only way to stop the fetid from returning to finally collapse all meaning, and the category along with it, is to increase output – to hold back the disgusting excess by celebrating the impossibility of attaching to material that ends towards putrid excess any meaning capable of imbuing it and the rituals of its consumption with the power to confer stable identities free from the threat of that undesirable excess. So make bigger Pancakes, set up more toilets and attract more visitors – bring on Aardklop 2007