VKI_007_ VILLY KUMARI IMEDEMAAL: HOW TO EXPLAIN WESTERN CIVILISATION TO A DEAD HARE _ ART IN RUINS 1991 / PLAYBUNNY 19. 09. 2026
how to explain western civilisation to a dead hare
It can be stated simply that there are two fundamental concepts on which Western civilisation is founded which have importance with regard to the situation we find ourselves in today. In the beginning there was Plato, whose primary contribution to the development of Western thinking can be seen as a formulation which states that the conceptual model of ideal forms is the only true reality and that everyday local manifestations of reality, that is, nature, are imperfect and inferior, as they are subject to change and are therefore not to be trusted.
The second founding concept can, if not be attributed solely to St. Augustine, be said to have been given by him its perfect expression. This is the concept that “the flesh is the nag on “which we make the journey to Jerusalem” meaning quite simply that the body cannot be trusted, indeed should be “punished”, to avoid having “the shadow of the fleshly self fall between the mind and its first principle to which it should cleave.” Hence of course. the symbolic importance of the crucifixion of the body of Christ in religion.
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There is a photograph of an aborigine sitting on the ground in front of a tree. The trunk of the tree has been painted with a line which stretches down the trunk, along the ground and up over his body. Here is a perfect illustration of a refusal to see humankind as separate from nature and instead they are shown through ritual to be interdependent. Once again, just at the moment when such a “primitive” perspective was about to disappear it has been recovered in the West through the concern of ecology.
These cultures have survived just long enough then, to remind us of one thing, and that is that a post-structuralist, practical ecological realism is a fundamental challenge to the whole history of Western civilisation; and reveals the impossibility of “civilisation” in the West. Our brief Rough Guide is a re-writing of history to show that, founded as it is on apartheid, the history of the West is nothing more than the history of a mistake – a whole culture based on a concept of the “free-lunch” of short-term thinking where it is always for someone else to pay the bill.
Having learnt nothing from Chernobyl except how to turn an ecological disaster into an advertisement for even more technology, this civilisation has again gone to war. For the Third World of course, the Third World War began on the same day that the Second World War ended, except that the weapons used are economics, “development”, growth, structural adjustment, etc. and only as a last resort, military intervention. In having decided to continue the war against the Third World by military means, the failure of the transnational corporations to exploit their resources through economics alone is revealed; and at the same time, as the Third World stands on the brink of disaster, the West must gain control of all the world’s dwindling resources; the ever-more rapid destruction of natural resources will continue; the only uncertainty is the time scale.
As the American Indians and the Aborigines discovered to their cost, it is too much to hope that this so-called civilisation would see its mistake and change its ways, believing always that to go back is always worse than to go on. With the arrival of technological fascism, ecological realism has perhaps finally disappeared from view forever. We in the West are condemned to sit in our air-conditioned bunkers watching ever more advertisements for new technology, wishing that the image could be just a bit sharper, whilst outside Third World bodies will have a choice of dying fighting or dying of starvation. Technological fascism and more mindless consumption of the signs of our own repression for us, world revolution for them; the final solution of a civilisation founded on apartheid; this is the reality of the New World Order.
Finally, to return us to the beginning, a story of Ancient Greece. Once upon a time there were Plato and Socrates. Socrates commissioned artists to make perfectly proportioned statues of great beauty which astonished everyone in their perfect ugliness, for they were not human, not of the local and therefore not of nature – unnatural. Plato, on the other hand. commissioned artists to make perfectly proportioned statues of great beauty but which were then broken so that arms here, legs there, were missing – beauty in ruins. Plato, of course, was the smarter, for when they were seen everyone had to imagine them perfect, which whilst reminding them of their own human characteristics – their “imperfections” – would condition them to always look beyond the existing ruin, which is reality, to the perfect model. Unfortunately it came to pass that Plato’s statues were placed all over the country whilst those of Socrates were completely destroyed; and thus began the decline of Western civilisation. Today we still live with perfectly executed ruins, still dreaming of perfection, which blind us to the terroristic power of absolute beauty which goes about its work of creating “actual” ruins.
NOTES:
First published as:
Menace of the Absolute: Technological Fascism versus Ecological Realism
Feature by Art in Ruins
Building Design No 1030 April 12 1991
Reprinted as:
How to explain Western Civilisation to a Dead Hare: Technological Fascism versus Ecological Realism [English] and
Wie man einem toten Hasen die westliche Zivilisation erklärt: Technologischer Faschismus gegen ökologischen Realismus [German]
Catalogue Essay by Art in Ruins (download below)
Krieg: 1st Austrian Triennale on Photography Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz 1993
Video recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UL9uDUR3klE
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