Diane Arbus

I've never understood the controversy about Diane Arbus. It seems clear to me that she is a Goth. She was highlighting elements of the macabre and grotesque in everyday life because they're a part of everyday life and if you don't integrate them you don't have stability. This is Freudian and Jungian and archetypal and Greek mythical and all that. 

If you don't acknowledge and integrate the 'lower' things they rise up and take over. Run things. They're not really lower just things. In individuals and societies the 'higher' things must rule or you have chaos. Like we have now. Arbus grew up gritty, no matter her "privilege" and being a child of the American era and its crazy suburban postwar optimism. 

Arbus is about boundaries and sensitivities and sensibilities. My guess is Arbus couldn't keep stuff out. That she had boundary issues because she couldn't defend herself. That she saw stuff others didn't see and couldn't stop seeing it. She was forced to look.

She tried to reset her own circuits. And it can't work for a person like Arbus in a society that can't own its shit. Because Arbus defaulted to openness. When she let her guard down she was open. She saw it all. And it pissed her off and made her hurt. And how do you balance out a consumerist Eden? You reach out into the hinterlands of Eden, into the dark.

To the grotesque. Because it's always there.