“Just in time for the cake” is a performance whose wish is to help people think about how the post-modern society pushes us towards contrasting directions. On one side, the contemporary man is constantly put under pressure to meet specific aesthetic standards, while on the other side, he’s the unaware victim of a command to feel pleasure at any cost.
From a Lacanian point of view, the performance aims at creating an opening in space and time; metaphorically, it represents a mental pause from the current dynamics of desire, and it investigates traumatic memories in a melancholic childish mood.
As a matter of fact, according to philosopher Slavoj Zizek, humanity is currently at its biggest circuit breaker in history.
As a consequence of an evaporated father figure, the Super-ego has lost its power to psychologically control the mind, and it has been dethroned by the Id. Therefore, humanity is now controlled by the id’s violent impulses to compulsively and unceasingly only feel pleasure.
We can find the origins of this standstill in the aggressive dynamics set off during the economic boom of the 80’s by capitalism and consumerism, where specific aesthetic standards sank their roots into our psyche and are by now an unconscious part of our dreams and nightmares.
Today we must pinpoint food and fashion to better investigate those dynamics that make the post-modern man’s psyche go completely adrift. Contemporary ideology is tied up to capitalistic underlying forces that feed on endless running operations and on the id’ strive to eternally desire, thus reducing men to hamsters in the wheel.
“Just in time for the cake” puts forward a passive experience as a plausible experience of suspension from these dynamics and maybe as a solution to go back to living authentic moments in the present.
