Don DeLillo by Mao II

Author:Mao II [Mao II]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-06-05T10:27:21+00:00

People stood gathered in a rambling white space set on several levels under ducts and sprinklers and track lights, chatting over silver cocktails. The walls were hung with works of living Russians, mainly large color-brave canvases, supernation paintings, ambitious and statement-making.

Brita moved through the crowd, edging sideways, drink held high, and she felt the interplay of glances, the way eyes consume their food, taking in faces, asses, tapestry jackets, raw-silk shirts, the way bodies slant involuntarily toward a well-known figure in the room, the way people carry on one dialogue and listen to another, the way every energy is directed somewhere else, some brightness nearby, the whole shape and state and history of this little hour of truth. There seemed to be some imaginary point of major interest, a shifting middle cluster of conversation, although every person in the room retained an awareness of the street beyond the plate-glass windows. They were here, in a way, for the people in the street. They knew exactly how they appeared to those who were walking or driving by, to standees on crammed buses. They appeared to float outside the world. They were only art browsers but they appeared privileged and inviolate, transcendent souls lighted against the falling night. They shared a stillness, a way of looking sharply etched. This gave the incidental scene a claim to permanence, as if they believed they might still be here a thousand nights from now, weightless and unperspiring, stirring the small awe of passersby.

It took her a while to reach the picture that had attracted her. A silk screen on canvas measuring roughly five feet by six feet. It was called Gorby I and showed the Soviet President’s head and boxed-off shoulders set against a background of Byzantine gold, patchy strokes, expressive and age-textured. His skin was the ruddy flush of TV makeup and he had an overlay of blond hair, red lipstick and turquoise eye shadow. His suit and tie were deep black. Brita wondered if this piece might be even more Warholish than it was supposed to be, beyond parody, homage, comment and appropriation. There were six thousand Warhol experts living within a few square miles of this gallery and all the things had been said and all the arguments made but she thought that possibly in this one picture she could detect a maximum statement about the dissolvability of the artist and the exaltation of the public figure, about how it is possible to fuse images, Mikhail Gorbachev’s and Marilyn Monroe’s, and to steal auras, Gold Marilyn’s and Dead-White Andy’s, and maybe six other things as well. Anyway it wasn’t funny. She’d taken the trouble to cross the room and look closely at this funny painted layered photo-icon and it wasn’t funny at all. Maybe because of the undertaker’s suit that Gorby wore. And the sense that these were play-death cosmetics, the caked face-powder and lemon-yellow hair color. And the very echo of Marilyn and all the death glamour that ran through Andy’s work.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.