Lunar Follies

APPENNINES

A group, a line, actually, of determinedly, even aggressively unlifelike mannequins are arrayed, or lined up, against a ghastly backdrop of what is meant to be a Hawaiian sunset. The mannequins, male and female alike, have “breasts,” and a disturbing, large sign, ANOTHER NAIL IN THE COFFIN OF BOURGEOIS GENDER ROLES, in magenta neon or something glowing, shines upon them. The mannequins appear to be dressed, or partially dressed — depending on how each mannequin is situated as a “radical construct”—as investment bankers, venture capitalists, bond traders, arbitragers, and cocksuckers, each “construct” attended by a “wife,” “husband,” “lover,” or “partner,” appropriately dressed for daily tasks and plain fun. Music plays continually on a loop (?), to the annoyance of the gallery visitors; and although this music is extremely bad, it must be noted that it is not precisely music, but world music, and its infirm quality a mocking comment on inverse canon formation. One mannequin, whose “breasts” are quite enormous, seems to have an equally enormous “erection” in its tight Tonetti briefs, although the flashing strobe lights that accompany the passionate if off-key strains of a “white-bread” version of a classic Venezuelan fanfanzanga, may well be responsible for a “bulge” that is really not there, but is an optical illusion. The noise in the gallery space is so loud as to be painful and disorienting, and this may account for the lewd, even depraved acts visited upon the mannequins by ironic and rebellious iconoclasts at virtually all hours. Such acts have come to be called, by their perpetrators and would-be perpetrators, “rudiments of gesture.”