I have coveted kitsch for as long as I can remember. The garish, the retro, the ugly, the uncanny, the misplaced; those perpetually out-of-place, unbecoming, unbelonging things that fall outside of conventional definitions of taste, fail at any claim at universal appeal. Like the word itself, it isn’t quite right. The more you say it, think about it, own it, surround yourself in it, the less it makes sense.
Yet I know that it is the right word or at least that it is an appropriate label for the items I covet. I saw it in a book, a posh hardback book entitled Kitsch in a posh bookshop. Most of what was inside, I liked and wanted.
When people attempt to vocalise a special something, that invisible non-tangible set of characteristics that make a person or artwork or object more than the sum of its parts, that allow it to connect in some meaningful way, it is the same with kitsch. It is an indefinable quality that makes an artefact wonderful when many more rational indicators suggest it is repugnant.
Some objects will always be shit. Just because they are colourful, incongruous, bizarre, and fall short of what most people would consider aesthetically pleasing, does not make it kitsch. There is every chance it is in fact shit. Bonafide cack. Kitsch and shit are interlinked, bonded bedfellows, fickle lovers – a coin toss, a forked path – subjective.
Of course any matter of taste is subjective. And I readily admit that these objects of kitsch fall outside of current mainstream tastes, even previous schemes of taste and favour. These objects should not appeal. Their appeal is partly in their lack of appeal. The fact they can possess something so obviously jarring with a widely held sense of aesthetic decency is a delight. They are swearing grannies, a fart in a lift. Yet every time I see an item that I consider kitsch, it is an emotional connection, not a sense of anarchic glee, that draws me in. Primarily, it is delight and attraction that I feel. It makes me smile. Not laugh. It makes me smile and skip from foot to foot.
These objects do not possess any classical beauty, no timeless elegance, no form to caress the eye or stir the soul. They do not have some quality that prevails beyond the precise moment in which they were produced. They are hiccups, mistakes, cock-ups, unwanted bastard children screaming purple-faced at the world.
The reason I write this is because all is not well with me and my kitsch. My kitsch-o-meter is on the blink. The gut feeling and the accompanying semi-logical appraisal that once allowed me to distinguish between what was shit and what was kitsch has deserted me. I find myself lost at sea, with lobster telephones and comedy mugs bopping around me.
It all began on a Sunday at a carboot. A glorious mildly-hungover sun-pounding early-morning re-birth of a Sunday morning amidst corridors of shit and kitsch, side by side, intertwined, copulating on paste tables and tarpaulins. The ultimate test, the ultimate challenge, the ultimate reward.
I wandered along the dusty baked rows, great avenues of the unwanted and underwhelming. Trinkets, trash, treasures, tat. My eyes glanced over biscuit tins emblazoned with lusty Alsatians, WWF wrestlers with missing limbs, lime green vases, and rural tapestries. Past a woman sat behind a table carefully laid out with owls. Every type of owl: ceramic, ornamental, painted, as jewellery, on tea-towels, mounted on plinths. I wondered what had ended her infatuation with owls. What had happened to end her love affair with these feathered friends? How had they wronged her? I wondered if I liked any of these owls.
And then I saw it, the single object that sent me into turmoil. On a table over-crowded with mantelpiece guff, I spotted an ornament so ghastly yet so joyous that I instantly wanted it. Two budgies rendered in an early form of brittle plastic, bright and bold, captured in some ornithological courtship upon two rocks and beneath a hideous plastic palm tree. It made no sense but was perfect.
I pick it up, registering touch to confirm its existence. Then I imagine it in a cubby-hole or atop some bookcase in my house, not on display but a treat for the roving eye. But then I blink, breathe, focus in the haze of the sun, and look again at what rests in my outstretched palms. It is shit. Truly horrible. It’s cheap, ugly to the point of repulsive, deeply unsettlingly and down-right peculiar. Confusion descends. I do not know how I feel.
I walk away and I think about it. Did I love it or hate it? Was it kitsch or was it shit? I will never know and it is killing me.
