Exhibits from the Museum of Daily Life
Store windows in Chicago
The moral of the story has finally been edited out of our new fairy tales, but do not celebrate this liberating moment too soon. The bloodthirsty tropes once attached to the end of every child’s adventure like a useless arm, trading agony for wonder, have vanished to make way for a totalizing void. Where yesterday’s pointed barb once hung, this void gives neither continuance or cessation of the story. A lesson of no lesson, harsher than the old ethics of discipline and thrift, the pedagogic violence of vintage children’s yarns has become chillier and chillier. Walk this way. Caution that. The goal is now the purity of a total lesson which weighs less than dust but is more lasting than stone.
Arrayed for the bridal, the girl in the white dress plays Marie Antoinette with her lacquered sisters. The ghosts of tradition still permit a paper carnation. Old Splitfoot grins from the icicle-glittering screen above her, granting the loan without paying himself back in the backlands. He leaves behind a trail to track his movements, fearing his eventual dismissal from the case. Who are all these women?
Something has changed in the laws of depth of field. In every image, perspective has been savagely altered—off kilter in past & present, shifted a little like the angles in a horrible geometric nightmare. This is not just confined to that accursed flatness sold as ‘Hi-def’ to the gullible, so please no celebrations of your cleverness, you who decry this leveling of all spatial distinction, you rememberers of the fuzz of yesterday’s air raid drills or the close-up blur of a fatal wound on a newsreel—the child who has lost his hands accuses you of an infernal arrogance.
This stranger who has entered into the frame stares out from the back of the shot, sitting cross-legged under rows of surplus and crumpled shipping containers. This alien to the composition casts no shadow, aping nosferatu, but unlike the undead, he does deign to appear in the mirror occasionally. He likes the fleeting glance, the flicker on the window, quick movements in the corner of the eye. The stranger mistrusts his surroundings and turns the color white into something so pale as to be nearly translucent, lodged between the stranger and the host, between the guest and the stranger, between the watcher and his watch.
Birthdays, bridal showers, wavelengths through joy. Her face is turned to the ultramarine wall. Sounds of a parade echo and someone fires a shot.
It is disconcerting to see chains barring the entrance, cutting off the wares with such finality at night, hanging as nervously as old slave ship shackles. This distant cousin of De Milo plays an Aphrodite from an anatomy lesson or acts out the mysterious early obsessions of some future physician. She conjures up the pettiness of our more tropical crimes, the trendy crimes of mass murder and open warfare. We make our mannequins play victims, load them up with the insidious phantoms of trauma, bind them to a landscape of shuttered doors and tropical destruction. The history of the sweatshops that churn out this kind of tat is a lesson of lost limbs, so maybe the doll is reminding a deaf world where its celebratory ribbons came from. No, she is just an unpaid shell herself. Why should she pity either the exploited or the exploiters? They will both toss her aside, the former following the orders of the latter. It’s all so typical.
If the showroom dummy has a heart, it beats sawdust. We should not expect these near-androids to be allies. We rarely save them from the trash, and when we do take rare pity on them, they are added to the junk in an overgrown garden or put to work as whores in the corner of a room, dressed again in fake furs and a Louise Brooks wig to make conversation among our guests. So mannequins are mannequins and our dolls always end up in horror stories.
But this one is still working behind the metal coop. Andromeda was the daughter of the king of Ethiopia. Chained to a rock, the African princess was then given to Perseus, who had slayed the dragon to whom she had been promised. Their subsequent marriage meant that she was dragged around the world on a series of increasingly stupid quests devised for her husband by bored and petty gods. How young the night and its offerings always seem to be against old stories. How she wished she would have loved the dragon.
We chanced upon the Medusae at ease, without their serpent coif or rings of tentacles. In this dark fish tank, the girls have already dealt with a dummy foolish enough to try and win their hearts. Forget it, Hercules—your tux is the $25 variety and all your strength will not give you back your head (this is revenge for what your great grandfather Perseus did to the Gorgon). After this little scene, however, the Medusae will refuse to enact the old myths. Why should we repeat those senile anecdotes, they say, just so you can teach fraud and rapine to your youthful prodigies? Never shall we again!
The streets are lined with display cases of old products, now that things have crystallized into a purely financialized haunt. In the lower quadrants of the city, you will find a different kind of installation. Despite surface similarities, the dummies of the two zones share nothing in common. The former trade in liquidity, the latter in memory.
So this grand museum, which is the final museum, takes in finally all of daily life. We were born to be exhibit material, just as we were written in the register of debt before we started to work. But do not despair completely: there’s always blind luck. Drawn to light in dark windows, Lady Luck of the Moths might brush you with her wings.
Everywhere is potentially a holding cell. ‘Repurpose’ is the name of the game here. The great camps under the viaducts can now be easily transformed, and several well-known security firms are competing for the contract. The only fear in most people’s minds is of that hoary old Machine specter, No-Bid. Who knows what goes on in the halls of power?
A special term, ‘unhoused’, has replaced that rather bleak old adjective, ‘homeless’. Certainly an admirable evolution in the language, with real human warmth to it. There has been little push back against the installation of iron bars around these isolated areas. Means jobs, after all. And a level of distinction for the Unhoused: Look at Us! Shades of the old circus shows that once roved through the land with such profit and fortitude.
Every new home begins with loneliness. But at least you have room to stand up here and turn around to look backward.
Is this all that is left of Black Athena? A sell-off, a discount, a two-for-one? Pages rattle in the wind, a beetle scuttles over the stone floor. Mother of Tears, Mother of Sighs, only sentry in an alcove reserved for reduced prices. I have no words for this desolation. No letters from home come to announce the arrival of a loved one. I waited for the knock, for the ring, a deceit to help me carry on. And the Planetarium guide tells us other worlds are made of ice and the canals of Mars are waterless. This last childhood illusion has been taken from me. In the museum, it is forbidden to touch the objects on display. What is left? Impressions in the case, for a burnt out case.