My project diverges from the four historically dominant understanding of excess: the sublime, Kristeva on the abject, Bataille on the “accursed share,” and postmodernism’s consumerist excess. For all four of these approaches, excess instigates an involuntary attention and an involuntary affect. All four make excess inextricable from a very specific affect, one of euphoria, of confusion, of being overwhelmed. The consequences in the face of these affects are unpredictable, with excess being an attack on directed and controllable cognition.
My project argues that, culturally, excess and its affects are more varied than these dominant approaches suggest, because what you do with excess depends on your starting point. I begin with art, and starting with art has significant consequences, because unlike, say, the sublime, art excess arises from a thing that is a product of an intent; it is the excess of a made thing. Second, because it is art excess, it is an excess that steps on and is entangled with semiotics and representation.
The work of art is always a representation (or uses the tools of representation, or addresses questions of representation), and its excesses are entangled with that. Moreover, because it is a representation or semiotic, art, when it is excessive, leads to analysis, at the very least of the semiotic system it is disrupting through exaggeration. While there always is a moment of bafflement, of euphoria, perhaps even of threat, cognition isn’t completely short-circuited by the excessive artwork. Even Jeff Koons’ shiny baubles aren’t just consumerist objects; they are also a representation of consumerism.
One then might ask the question: as a semiotic system can art really achieve the self-forgetfulness of the sublime? Is art ever sublime? Or is art an instance in which the sublime is tamed, represented?