The unbearable lightness of the world of kitsch

Defending the garden gnomes

By Vasile Dncu
The garden gnome is the symbol of kitsch. Its been 30 years since I presented a
graduation thesis on a subject inspired from the psycho-socio-logic of taste and the kitsch in
esthetics and in day-to-day life and I still read everything it comes at hand about this
phenomenon. When I lay my eyes on the untranslatable, odd word, the first image that comes in
mind is that of a garden gnome.
Travelling by car on Romanian roads, I often stop to take a look at the gnomes which are
exhibited to a steadily growing extent, on the side of the road. I observe their faces, their clothes,
I try to ask their creator about their name and how the sale goes. Ive never realized their
importance in the history of mankind until the moment I met a member of the Garden Gnome
Liberation Front (GGLF), while I was travelling in a TGV from Paris somewhere in the south of
France. On that occasion I found out that teams of young people were kidnapping the gnomes
only to release theme somewhere in the woods, with supplies of food and even wine. As I tried to
find out more on this subject, in the following years, I realized that there are also many people
who hate garden gnomes, that there is a confederation for their extermination, I believe in France
also. But more than that. I recently found that there are two very cruel methods to torture
gnomes. The first one presumes to throw the gnome, in which case the distance matters and you
get a bonus if the gnome breaks; the other one presumes to break the gnomes head with a single
knock. Tens of lawsuits are known, mostly in Switzerland and Germany, where people tried to
force their neighbors to banish the little gnomes stating that because of them, representatives of
bad taste, there might be the possibility that the house prices in the region would go down.
In 1937 Hitler and his companions decided that the garden gnome, although it was a
German invention, does not have the size, the blue eyes or the muscles of the Arian lad, and so
the gnomes were systematically killed, an authentic genocide, and the workshops where the
gnomes have been fabricated, were closed. The communism which also came in Germany after
the war, ruled by decree that the fabrication of gnomes is forbidden, as they were considered
symbols for the Bourgeois, but in their pragmatism the communist allowed the production for
export. In the 80s, the garden gnomes started to become an important merchandise and also
started to have a more vivid presence, if I may put it so, in peoples life. A German from
Switzerland founded the International Association for Protection of Garden Gnomes, as a
response to the frequent attacks upon the poor gnomes all over Western Europe. The gnome is
starting to have an increasingly difficult life in the world of grown-ups.
Starting with 1995, lots of organizations emerged whose purposes were to defend the
gnomes, thousands of gnomes appear in international exhibitions, representations of gnomes
became an area of interest for avant-garde artists, but the gnomes greatest achievement was the
fact that it became a character in many advertising videos.
Ultimately, why all that noise for the insignificant gnome? The gnome is the abnormal, it
is a faulty imitation, and it comes from a mythical place. It is the symbol of the bridge between a
humane world and a materialistic one represented by objects, a world of the living against the
non-living. The juxtaposition in the human habitat gives it substance, it humanizes it, as a matter
of fact it becomes a character equipped (illicitly) with personality and sometimes with a soul, by
its owners who talk with it and place it in an existential domestic order. The garden gnome is
also an inhabitant of a chthonic imaginary, which for the modern man, defined by consumerism
and by the lack of spirituality, appears as a memento of being far from the essence, a memento of
imitation.

Todays man is suspected of having a kitsch attitude, of being too materialistic and then
the removal of the sign indicated by the genuine cultural background is being rejected with fear
and anger.
Now imagine that you are in the situation where you hate the garden gnome or that you
have no sympathy for it, but someone dear to you leaves on his deathbed a garden gnome asking
you to take care of it, an experience which was described magisterially by a French
anthropologist. Obviously you try to understand what the meaning of the object for that person
was. Freud would say that it is a fetish for objects and it replaces the intimacy between two
human beings, but in this case it replaces an ABSENCE. Eventually, for most people, objects
become active presences, they become characters and when they are alone, people talk with
objects and they act in their presence as if they have a human companion. As Umberto Eco
would say, in fact this transformation, where an object is synonym with nothingness becomes
SOMETHING.
We see this more clearly when we do a lucid analysis of the things that surrounds us, too
many, too old and of which we dissociate very hard. The gnomes are kitsch, as many complain
about, they drag through the mud the natural and authentic landscape, but lets take a delicate
look at the social functionality of kitsch, at its social presence and at the practices which occur
regarding this phenomenon. A truism says, after Milan Kundera have rightly said it, that we
shouldnt talk about kitsch only in regard with an aesthetic category, but also as a continuous
social presence, as a facet for reality and consumption, in fact for the democratization of
consumption. Maybe the bourgeois brought the massive and inauthentic consumption, the heavy
multiplication of each nice object and of its imitations, but the Communism didnt back down, it
is enough to see the creations of the social realism.
I constantly remember the Soviet engraving workers forcing the gates of Paradise
depicting gigantic musclemen who force the entrance in Paradise, a Paradise which was probably
left behind by both the commander and the doorman. Milan Kundera was right The Kitsch is
the aesthetic ideal for each politician, every party and every political movement, it was fancied
by the dictators, and also by the great democratic leaders.
Mingling with the crowd, movies with politicians giving children a hug or grannies with
tears in their eyes are the essence of PR political campaigns, and the storytelling which romances
the moments of a fabricated biography proliferates sloppy and touching stories.
Maybe the kitsch is very much about the excess of sentimentalism or romanticism, as the
aesthetes reveal or a dictatorship of the heart when the mind has no words to say as Milan
Kundera writes, but it is the essential fragment of the human nature, as the great writer also
admits. In an age of individualisms and of narcissism where the romanticism transforms itself in
different states degraded by reverie, the kitsch is still a presence of the humane. The kitsch
creates sloppy emotions, but it binds the wounds of more and more fade lives, it is easy to
decode, it signals the presence of the sensible, of the soul, of reverie. In an uncharmed world, the
ones without aesthetic education, that is the whole majority, are devouring the kitsch with the
intention to beautify life.
The garden gnome is decorative, it can transform into a partner for a lonely grandmother,
and it receives a name from a child who doesnt know much about aesthetics. When people are
relocating their life on Facebook and enjoy some mechanical appreciations, as surrogate signs of
admiration and love from others, we also have a kitsch, but a cosmic one, an existential one,
which regards identity and you have no one to say that it is unaesthetic when you hide yourself
in a virtual world, more remoter and fader than an absence. Eventually, the technological
mediation of the social networks or the media convergence depict different forms of existence of
pure kitsch, the embodiment of a lack of authenticity and of stereotyped plasticity, encountered
so far in history. The new media gives the illusion of universality, of the creative spirit, the users
contents (Users-Generated Content or UGC in media studies) are some nave signs of an
existence which doesnt communicate, doesnt experience authentic and original feelings, but
lives with the illusion that it exists in a world of creators without audience. A simulation of a

dialogue that it actually ends in monologues with no message, only reproductions of some states
with no relevance but acknowledged through tens and hundreds of likes.
In fact, it is impossible to distinguish between the veritable existence and the kitsch
existence because all the mechanisms in todays world are described through tens of attributes of
the kitsch. If we were to list some of the kitschs attributes which Ive gathered for years in some
notebooks dedicated to this phenomenon, well see that they are mentioned today as attributes of
our existence, of our weltanschauung: artificial, shallow, which mystifies, aggregative, delusive,
futile, fake, pseudo cultural, inauthentic, nostalgic etc. We see that all are corresponding to our
existence, they are attributes for simulacra and simulation, explained by Baudrillard as
mechanism of existential commitment.
When Milan Kundera said that, after all, the best definition for kitsch would be to deny
the crap referring to the fact that, in case of kitsch, we exclude from the visual field everything
which is unacceptable in our existence, in fact I believe that this definition is a lifesaver for our
friend and our subject, the garden gnome. It doesnt seem kitsch anymore because it is truly
unacceptable for many exactly because it is a sign of handicap, a malformation and maybe the
reminiscence of the unhappy childhoods.
The kitsch is the background where all our existence happens, where the garden gnome is
an ornament, a partner, an external decoration, an object which brings good fortune or it defends
our home from bad spirits. In the middle of the invasion, and of kitsch overflow towards
nonsemiotic or nonaesthetic fields of our lives, we can suggest our friends, specialized in
esthetics, to accept instating the kitsch with the well-deserved ism because we already can talk
about KITSCHISM. Certainly the garden gnome would not know to take advantage of the fact
that hes being part of the family of isms, but it can be happy of the fact that Tolkiens Hobbit,
which came along in 1937, and only in our days, through fascinating movies for most adults,
gave rise to an invasion of gnomes, cousins of the gnome, in a world which, eventually, will
make him justice. A real plot of the tiny beings in a world of giants.
Truly, in our days, a specialist in nanology (that is the psychology of the garden gnomes)
considers that there is a population of 30 million of gnomes worldwide and that two million are
being born each year. A real nation which, if it would gather in one place, could ask for
independence or at least for territorial autonomy. Or they could organize a referendum so that
their debts would be paid, or they could ask to be treated more kindly by the giants who exploit
them. The idea of the Utopian nation of gnomes could be borrowed by the IMF or the European
Central Bank, and taught to make austerity programs and much more. So far, the gnomes dont
live in unity, they are everywhere, denoting symbolically a sort of ubiquity of the worlds kitsch
in our existence. A world in which our tele-beautiful Dana Savuica has just uttered from the
television screen, that she is afraid of garden gnomes.
PS Dont get scared Dana, all gnomes in Romania have sad eyes! Pay a visit to the
creator of gnomes in Pucheni, nearby Bucharest, you will convince yourself. They will never rise
up against anyone, they are obedient, unworldly and they comply with the authority enforced by
the greater and stronger.
References:
1. Solomon, Robert C., On Kitsch and Sentimentality, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, Vol. 49, No. 1 (Winter, 1991), pp. 1-14
2. Gadbois, Jocelyn, Le nain de jardin : Objet en clats, Editions L'Harmattan, Paris, 2010
3. Kundera, Milan, Insuportabila uurtate a fiinei, trad., Humanitas, Paris, 2013
4. Broch, Hermann, Cration littraire et connaissance : essais, d. et introd. de H. Arendt, trad.
de l'allemand par A. Kohn, coll. Tel, Gallimard, Paris, 1966 (d. or. Dichten und Erkennen, 1955)
5.Mate, Gavril, Universul kitsch-ului, Editura Dacia, Cluj-Napoca, 1985
6. Moles, Abraham, Psihologia kitsch-ului, Editura Meridiane, Bucureti, 1980