61
The Rituals of Madness and Badness in Music Festivals
its own creative makings. A vulgar imagination is one which produces and consumes, speaks and listens, performs and applauds, sings and dances; it recognizes the vulgar and has intentions to sustain it. Phallic Creativity and Dominance: From the Corporeal to the Symbolic Let’s consider the image on the previous page. What we have here is a very young Moroccan, carried on the shoulders of someone we cannot see. Standing at the background is a cameraman, with his camera directed toward the stage. The young Moroccan holds two fingers in the air. He looks angry; infuriated and overexcited in the least. Two different hands rise up in a local finger fucking manner. A forth hand is in the process of writing the same f-expression, the fifth concealed by the head of a spectator. Basically, we have four (eyes) and ‘Is’ here, and two types of orations. The first I (eye) is too visible to disregard, that of the young spectator(s). Second on the list is the eye of the cameraman. The third eye is absent, yet it is suggested by
the two other eyes (artist). The fourth eye is that of the photographer (observer, researcher, etc). To begin with, the cameraman and the spectators, though looking in the same direction, construct different messages. While the spectators are trying to bring into the fore an aesthetic of vulgarity, the cameraman downplays the act by not filming them, given that such is a mediated performance. This is a discursive practice, marked by inclusion and exclusion, addition and omission, marking some statements valid, others invalid, in a Foucauldian sense. Here comes the role of the observer to lay it all bare, and discuss it, being the fourth eye. The camera man gestures towards very deliberate tactics of oversight, a technique of suppression, being a pressing ‘polite’ erasure process for confiscating likely vulgar scenes, by not looking at them, and therefore, by counting them as inexistent. Had it not been for the fourth eye, the act of vulgarity could have never been documented. The cameraman is aware of the tension, his position is unclear as to what side