Treatise of Mannequins
Effigy of woman consecrated to shop window exposition, to preserve the life of whoever, at a price, will be able to don its garments.
Theatre where mannequins are piled up helter-skelter, naked, unabashed, like children thronging under the sun, yet motionless.
The nudity of impudence.
Gratified bodies, in a state of grace.
To find the access key to childhood, within the oneiric memory if necessary, and in accordance to the anamorphic rules of dreams. Dramaturgy is the external incident, outside the dream, that clashes with and deviates oneiric activity, a physical event: someone caressing us as we sleep; legs entangled in the sheet that turns into who knows what horrific monster that attacks us
and drags us under,
or the ring of the alarm clock that becomes the recess bell.
There is no dramaturgy. The contextual information does not facilitate comprehension of the event, but rather accentuates the spectator’s disorientation, as one is led wide-eyed through the forest of one’s early years,
only to be abandoned and left waiting to meet one’s childhood self eye to eye: who will be the first to pounce on and devour the other?
The pattern of the actions is obscure and as unaccountable for as are the games of children, seduced as they are by mournful conclusions, likes moths attracted to the light. Night constitutes the dark flame that seduces, until a crepuscular figure draws the curtain, thus conceding a glimpse at the moon, the brilliance of which subtracts our Mother from life itself. It is then that the Servant, as in a fairy tale, appears “just in time” and, removing the veil, shows us that somewhere there is a terrorized child that simply wants to be embraced.
This atemporal return to childhood amounts to a dream that cannot be recounted, minutia in which no one believes. Yet this minutia is visible, a piecing together of reality’s images,
and can be contemplated.
The substance does not lie in the pattern but in the drama of clashing impulses, as when a shell cracks open. To capture these creatures as they blossom.
The chrysalis: egg – worm – larva – butterfly: not four separate images but one and the same, with each element following a different timeline.
As when one is invested with an image that seeks our gaze yet foists no story upon us, engaged as it is in the simultaneous reenactment of its own life cycle.
The visitation of childhood is not a personal matter, it concerns us all. Eyes opening to the appalling sight of a unique and painful initiation to life: an unfathomable cry of both terror and uncontrollable joy. |