BIRDWAR is the obliteration of metaphor for which a Hitchcock stands: an utterly
ridiculous creature of the adrenal type. All body, only vestigial legs, resistant to
running, loathe to dance, and fond of a tipple of brandy poured over a dollop of ice
cream in the morning. Pudgy and innocuous, its unchiseled frame possesses a
sharp beak that is always peckish, but hates eggs and the hole they lack, not to
mention pregnancy too … no love for the tots. Various means to understate the
void’s singular vacancy.
Not fond of messages, certainly not those fit for Western Union. So no message per
se, but only a dogged insistence on a certain formality in excess. Here form is
delivered with pins and pricks, bite marks, tiny punctures that wheeze, and pecks
that slowly excavate the eye, leaving an empty socket, where birds can nest. This is
what one might call a hollow vision. Gouache drool and ink dribble: some other
materials better suited to taxidermy. One more effort to plug up some holes and
make new ones. Ample use was made of the cravat of the building trade.
So the show drags along its body as it must with all its leaking pores. Make-up
caked over acne sore, teeth out of sorts. No bother. There is no mending this
discontent – this Unbehagen – this eye that is out of place.
The Birds was advertised cleverly with a purposeful blunder: The Birds is Coming.
All who read must stumble over its awkwardness. When we trip we are left to hang
suspended in the interval of a meaning waylaid. Finally something for the
grammatically impaired. And this is what one can expect: a crooked entry into
language, words hobbled like the things they stain. Always a nuisance, the lumpen
of the skies know best. At odds with the humanity of the human, they enjoy our
scraps, knowing that they have already unseated us.
Let the trautonium then sound with all the artifice of the absent future it contains.
Alexi Kukuljevic
Druckversion