Dicks and dicks and dicks

An analysis of anonymous land art found in Littleborough, UK, co-authored with Marxist economist Brecht Rogissart.

This piece represents an honest, full-frontal attack on petit bourgeoise values of sexuality. As a giant dick with smaller dicks inside of it, it potently disrupts normative sexual values. This grand display of the excesses of non-procreative desire is manic Eros at its most magnetic. Here, the desire to engage, to thrust toward the desired object in an attempt to attain its potency, is rendered as an impossible imaginary. As such, it speaks to the truth that the impossibility of attainment is inherent to all erotic love, as communicated in the Western tradition from The Song of Songs onwards.

Not only in the explicit depiction of a phallus, but these norms are also questioned in the very substance of the piece: since the snow will melt eventually, the artist states that the shocking effect of the piece will melt as well, caused by the inevitable liquidity of values throughout time. The only question left is what causes these changes. The artist seems to suggest that they happen naturally, or rather structurally, above the heads of individual agency.

It also looks like train tracks, A clear reference to the legacy of early industrialisation in this area and the heavy load of history: past abundance resulting in present unemployment and misery.

Whereas once train tracks were a practical material infrastructure involved in transmission — of colonial power (in the abstract) goods and services (practically) — here they are a mere hauntological representation of past glory. Their precarity (as constituted of snow) is the precarity of the post-industrial subject, on the one hand. On the other, it eludes to the fact that idealised pasts can never be possessed or made vital, as postmodern subjects, we are always alienated from the realisation of an ideal.

When we take both symbols together — the sexual and the economic — the observer is welcomed to engage in a more profound, holistic investigation: did the rails, representing the transitions in capitalism, determine the novel, conflicted stances on sexuality? The limits of historical materialism are questioned: do rails really transform views on dicks? As such, the semi-melted nature of the snow is even more interesting. The rail-dick nexus, patriarchal capitalism, has melted down to postmodernism, but a new structure in its old ruins is not clear yet. The old world is dying, but the new one struggles to be born, as Gramsci famously said.

Let us consider not what contrasts the rails and dicks but rather what constitutes the rail-dick nexus. Both represent the privileging of the Masculine (the Phallus) in the construction of the material. While the dick has been historically considered as that which provides form to feminine indeterminateness, the rail network structures the landscape in terms of human destination — enclosures of embarkment and departure — rather than an indeterminate wildness. Of course, the act of artistic creation itself has also been seen as an extension of the masculine: the chisel, brush and pen are extensions of the phallic instrument awarded to the male artist due to his privileged relationship with the creator God; like the creator God he makes meaning out of an abyss which is symbolised as feminine (see Battersby: Gender and Genius ). However,  this artist’s insistence on snow as their medium — and their stubborn anonymity — elude to an ironic reappraisal of feminine indeterminateness whilst using the previous signifiers of the Phallologocentric order. In this way, they are surely representing the crisis of the postmodern subject as Gramsci articulated. We can all agree that grand narratives — such as those of religion, nation-states, and political ideologies, are dying, but the new is waiting to be born…