Young Star
Spitting images
SLEEPWALKING By Yason Banal
Friday, June 6, 2008
Dear Yason,
I hope this e-mail finds you well. Sorry for being out of touch. I’ve just come from a show of paintings. It was called Ebenbild. I’ve asked my German friends and none of them know exactly what it means. I checked online. Loosely, it means a spitting image, as in, “a spitting image of your father.”
That’s perfect, then. The paintings were exactly what paintings normally are, and the young German painter boy, my classmate, was a spitting image of an artist as a young man. If there was any irony I didn’t catch it, but my bad — too busy nursing my warm beer and the awkward small talk. Or maybe the irony was in the normalcy. Or the edginess was in the conservatism. Shit, death and violence can be so fuddy-duddy. I don’t know. Anyway, at some point a mini Dachshund arrived and stole the show, and that was that.
I didn’t finish the machine I was making for you. Sorry about that. I’ve attached the study for the machine. It’s called Melencholia I Rainbowmaker after Durer. Melencholia I is an etching of his. Wikipedia says that Panofsky says it’s his “spiritual self portrait.” Google it. I like that one about how it’s about Agrippa’s Melencholia Imaginativa, the third kind of melancholia, affecting artists. I don’t know if I have that much drama in my life but I’m making this machine so cheers to Durer on that. The machine is like a very elaborate hose with fancy housing and floodlights. I mean, I can make rainbows with a fishbowl of water and a flashlight, but that’s just not as sexy. It’s going to look like a pre-fab, German kitchen mod Tony Smith in his black metal phase. It’s going to be fabulous. Hyper-modernist fountain spraying water all over the gallery awash in Klieg lights. That is so sexy. If I ever get it done you’ll be the first to know.
Love,
Maria Taniguchi
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Dear Maria,
Many thanks for your e-mail. I just came from a comedy night with no name. No Germans nor Irony, just (g)old plated humor, as evidenced by a status-anxious youngster who dishes out “hey is dude” and “emo is jologs” jokes — his silly hat earning the most applause — and a Hong Kong socialite who was talking on the phone while his sketch was ongoing.
Is this still, modern life? Is Modernity melancholic or hysterical, ridiculous and boring? Are we the new Antiquity? I ask these questions because the preppy young comedian and the Chinese doyenne seemed to have hit it off well after the show.
I like the idea of the Ebenbild, by the way, “the spitting image of your father.”
It could mean an exact likeness to one’s father, or more exactly, the image of a father spitting.
The first description seems appropriate to both machinery and melancholia, the “mmmmm”s of modern life. Isn’t a machine after all a technological tool aimed to re-present reality by enhancing it? And isn’t melancholia via Durer a waiting for inspiration, because reality fails (and thus no spitting image to be likened or aspire to)? Can machines, spitting images of modernity but better, be melancholic? Machines cannot be, I know, and I know the questions aren’t sexy enough, but to me it’s interesting how these 3 Ms intersect. It’s kind of the reverse of your hyper-modernist fountain, where water comes from a single source but sprays in different directions.
The second description is funny but one-dimensional. He spits and we know why, and where it goes we’re sure it’s still within the plane of reality. The original father has limited strength and range, while his spitting image replicates, learns and destroys.
So I guess an eventual third is spitting the image of the father. Now this could be the triumph of design over law, of simulation against the symbolic. The elaborate hose you mention can be an initial vessel and all the fancy housing and floodlights, a sexy future retreat.
Besitos,
Yason
P.S.: Your studies for the machine wonderfully intersect figuration and containment — they invoke varnish and vegetation, of moss coated in and liberated by gloss.
