Esse 115 | decay

"Damp viscera ooze across the pages of Jenny Hval’s 2018 novel Paradise Rot. Her profoundly weird world of putrefying food, decaying flesh, and fungus reminds us that everything is temporary. Bodies age, food spoils. Over time, everything falls apart. According to the second law of thermodynamics, all closed systems move irreversibly toward increasing states of decomposition. It’s not just physical structures that decay, but cultural, economic, and political systems also.

In the Powers of Horror: An Essay of Abjection (1980), the French theorist Julia Kristeva describes decay as a privileged site of “mingling,” an ambiguous space where life is contaminated by death. Rogue taxidermists have engaged this site by developing new ethical practices of caring for dead animals. Resisting the entropy inherent in all living things, artists have explored the cryogenic storage of human embryos, semen, and eggs, and museologists struggle to preserve media archives from the digital decay that threatens to erase cultural memory. Other artists have collaborated with decay, staging its material forces in ephemeral installations and process-based art. Drawing attention to the domestic labour of compositing, ecofeminists remind us that putrefaction processes are powerfully generative. “Decomposers” such as moulds, fungi, mushrooms, and other micro-organisms break down not only organic waste but the synthetic debris of consumerism, facilitating toxin remediation in a creative transformation of death. Entangling the “human” with “humus,” Donna Haraway’s “hot compost piles” conjure multispecies worlds and alternate visions of what it means to be alive..."

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