ULTRA PLASTIC STYLE NOW!

Cuteness & Cancer

If there is anything more dangerous than the Beautiful, it is the Cute: Since Delilah & Helen, we have grown wary of the impending atrocity associated w/ beauty: If not intentional beheading, the unintentional beginning of a war. But not grown weary, as it remains a concern constantly resuscitated if only to be stabbed at once again: Almost as if beauty itself were parting its luscious lips for the faintest of whispers: Kill me, but kill me softly—tenderly—w/ cuteness.

Such that actress Gene Tierney’s face—once an icon of beauty—becomes an icon of death, substituting for the skull in the sigil of crossbones. But it is not so much a substitute as a prosthesis: The face has been so embedded into the sigil that one can no longer say it’s a superimposed image upon another image. They are one & the same, their union hermetically sealed by the painting’s kitschy title, “Beware of the Look that Kills,” as if to evoke the vibe of early ‘90s B-movies w/ knife-wielding lookers for assassins—only to appropriate it for the 1944 film Laura, from whose poster the Tierney portrait is lifted.

But Tierney in Laura isn’t your archetypal woman-of-the-‘90s femme fatale. Despite being decades early, the film portrays a sinisterly advanced variation of the archetype—that of the semiurge as advertising director, manipulator of signs & the production of meaning, propagator of the Image in lieu of what images stand for. Better yet stood for, given now the primacy of signifier over signified, when once upon a time it was the signifier that was believed to be secondary, merely the vehicle for & instrument of meaning: Where the image of the dead (skull) can no longer signify death, why not use an image of life instead? The sharpness of this reversal is made blunt by the title—blunt in the sense that it has become at once dull (i.e., the blunt side of a knife) & more overt (i.e., one giving his/her comments bluntly). But blunt is not necessarily less fatal; in its kitschy-cute reference to the accidental comedy of B-movies, the word “kill” brings back a notion of violence into the crossbones, but a sugarcoated violence: a clump of cotton candy, at whose core is a knife—

or a bullet. A bullet at the heart of the banana. For it is a heartless banana, in the end: In “Kill yr. Idols,” the fruit is as ruthless as a gun, poses the same danger, the former a prosthesis for the latter. One wonders: If in the dystopian dream of half-robot/half-human perfection, flesh is part-by-part replaced by machine in the cyborg’s body, would machine being replaced by fleshly fruit instead be an ironic gesture?

There is the immediate temptation to say yes, but to do so is to ignore that a handgun is nominally the same as a small, sweet banana: a señorita. While initially the painting seems to evoke physical violence (or, more importantly, its absence), the kind of violence it more appropriately evokes—in fact, inflicts—is semiotic, epistemic: What “Kill yr. Idols” kills as an image is the notion of the full image itself, of embodied meaning: More than the Velvet Underground (w/c was the inspiration for the Warholian banana), & more than Fritz Lang (from whose 1928 film Spione the depicted hand is lifted), it’s the very notion of the idol as icon that is murdered. For irony to exist, there must also exist the presumption that the gun & the banana cannot simply be interchanged, for each has its own meaning; & irony is in the very reversal of things that cannot be interchanged. But here, the banana is an equally fatal weapon as the gun, if not more fatal because prosthetic: the exchange is total—& iconoclasm is never as brutal as when it is total.

Brutality thru cuteness: One cannot fight back if the aggressor is a darling. How dare one bemoan the desire for material objects when what gives this desire its body is a child? Or—even worse—does mourning acquire new heights of intensity upon realizing that this desire is inextricable from childhood? This is the ambiguity inherent in the painting “Most Girls”: Right from the very title, one expects a generalization to take place—but what? There is the hesitation to pass judgment on such cute little girls, their innocence accented by a playful cat, by the dominant colorlessness waiting to be tarnished. By the time attention is finally called to the blemish of flowers & prismatic colors—to the desire for physical beauty (conjured by the former) & wealth (conjured by the latter in its evocation of diamonds)—one no longer knows what it means.

No accident here that Gadia hints at materiality, again in the spirit of play of signifiers: Besides gain (beauty, wealth), materiality also deals w/ physical-ness, the signifier’s object-ness as signifier, as plastic object: Before a prism evokes a diamond, it is first & foremost a prism, at once self- & non-referential. Must “most girls” after all embody desire for wealth & beauty, or is this association a mere stereotype made possible thru ages of cultural accretion? On the one hand, these children could simply enjoy color & flowers. On the other hand, there could be no children at all—just colors & flowers shaped like children. They don’t even have to be flowers at all: just colors made to look like flowers: All surface & no depth: Baudrillardian simulation: All plastic.

Ultra Plastic Style Now! Ultra Plastic Style Now! Ultra Plastic Style Now!

No explosion of meanings but implosion: Where things mean nothing, things mean everything. The more an image stays still, in stasis, the wilder its movement becomes—the more it metastasizes. In “All Outta Angst,” the wolf means anger, the wolf means respect, the wolf means leader, the wolf means enemy, anger means madness, madness means insanity, leader means dictator, dictator means oppressor, enemy means other, other means partner, partner means spouse—the chain of simulacra extends infinitely, proliferating its own cancer cells: The wolf feminized by flowers, each flower masculinized by the wolf, all of them feeding off each other.

Welcome to total prostheticization. “SNAFU.” Military shorthand for “Situation Normal, All Fucked Up,” as if the normal were filled w/ atrocity. Again, one would think this to be ironic—but it’s not. What we perceive as natural is also simultaneously naturalized, that is, imposed upon us. Camouflage: a device for hiding: a prosthesis. What Gadia had intended to be a painting of a mountain went awry, for w/c blotches of paint were added as a cover-up. If only to extend the cover-up, the work turns into a diptych—& it is the camouflage diptych we see, we appreciate as artwork, not the intended mountain.

No one cares if the mountain was a mistake. Everything could be wrong & still we could swallow it: We can take the world’s cancers, for as all long as they’re all cute. (You can always make a new rabbit—a new prosthesis—if you don’t like this one.)

The exhibition Ultra Plastic Style Now! runs from April 30 to May 15, 2009 at Hiraya Gallery. Hiraya Gallery is located at 530 United Nations Avenue, Ermita, Manila. Telefax (02) 523-3331 E-mail Hiraya@info.com.ph www.hiraya.com