general and elementary impression of the theatrical turned into authentic terror as soon as I entered the wax museum with its mannequins. It was a fear mixed with a tinge of vague pleasure and somehow with that bizarre feeling we each sometimes have of previously living in a certain setting. I think that if the urge for an aim in life were ever to arise in me and if this impulse had to be bound to something that is indeed profound, essential and irremediable in me, then my body would have to become a mannequin in a wax museum and my life a simple and endless contemplation of the display cases of the dioramas.
In the gloomy light of the carbide lamps I used to feel that I did indeed live my own life in a unique and inimitable way. It was as if all my everyday actions had been shuffled like a deck of cards. I felt no attachment to them; people’s irresponsibility towards their most conscious acts was a fact whose obviousness was plain to see. What importance did it have whether it was I or another who committed them, as long as the variousness of the world enveloped them in the same uniform monotony? In the wax museum, and only there, no contradiction existed between what I did and what occurred. The waxwork figures were the only authentic thing in the world; they alone falsified life in an ostentatious way, becoming part of the true atmosphere of the world through their strange and artificial immobility. The bullet-riddled and blood-stained uniform of some Austrian archduke, with his sad, yellow visage, was infinitely more tragic than any real death. In a crystal casket there lay a woman dressed in black lace, with a pale and gleaming face. An astonishingly red rose was fixed between her breasts, and the blonde wig at the edge of her forehead was coming unglued, while in the nostrils the red colour of the make-up flickered and the blue eyes, as clear as glass, gazed on me motionlessly. It was impossible for the waxwork woman not to have a profound and disturbing significance, one known to no one else. The more I contemplated her the more her meaning seemed to become clear, lingering vaguely somewhere inside me like a word that I was trying to recollect and of which I could grasp only its faraway rhythm.
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I have always had a bizarre attraction for feminine trinkets and for cheaply ornamented artificial objects. A friend of mine used to collect the most various found objects. In a mahogany box he kept hidden a strip of black silk with very fine lace at the edges, to which were sewn a few glinting glass disks. It was, of course, torn from an old ball gown; in places the silk had begun to moulder. To see it I used to give him stamps and even money. Then he would lead me into a salon in the old style, while his parents were sleeping, and show me it. I would remain with the piece of silk in my hand, mute with stupefaction and pleasure. My friend would stand in the doorway and keep a look out in case anyone came; in a few minutes he would return, take the silk from me, put it in the box and say, “Enough, now it’s over, you can’t have any longer”, which was the same thing Clara sometimes used to say to me when the lingering in the cabin lasted too long.
Another object that disturbed me exceedingly when I saw it for the first time was a gypsy ring. I think it was the most fantastical ring ever to have been invented by man to adorn the hand of a woman.
The extraordinary masked-ball ornaments employed by birds, animals and flowers, designed to play a sexual role; the stylised and ultra-modern tail of a bird of paradise; the rust-coloured feathers of the peacock; the hysterical lacework of petunia petals; the wholly unlifelike blue of a monkey’s chops – these are but feeble attempts at sexual ornamentation compared with the dizzying gypsy ring. It was a tin object, superb, fine, grotesque, and hideous. Above all hideous: it assaulted love in its darkest, most basic regions. A veritable sexual shriek.
Of course, the artist who fashioned it was also inspired by visions of the wax museum. The stone of the ring, which was a simple piece of glass melted to the thickness of a lens, wholly resembled the magnifying glasses in the dioramas of the wax museum, in which I used to gaze at sunken ships enlarged to the extreme, battles against the Turks and the assassinations of royalty. On the ring could be seen a bouquet of flowers chiselled in tin or in lead and coloured with all the violent hues of the paintings in the dioramas.
The violet of throttled cadavers next to the pornographic red of women’s garters, the leaden pallor of furious waves within a macabre light, like the semi-obscurity of funeral vaults covered with a pane of glass. All these framed by little brass leaves and mysterious signs. Hallucinatory.
Otherwise, I used to be impressed by everything that was an imitation. Artificial flowers, for example, and funeral wreaths, especially funeral wreaths, forgotten and dusty in their oval glass cases in the cemetery chapel, framing with old-fashioned delicacy anonymous old names, submerged in an unechoing eternity.
The cut-out pictures with which children play and the cheap statuettes from flea markets. In time, these statuettes would lose a head or an arm and their owners, repairing them, would surround the delicate throat with the white scurf of plaster. The bronze of the rest of the statuette would then acquire the significance of a tragic but noble suffering. And then there are the life-size Jesuses in Catholic churches. The stained glass windows cast into the altar the last reflections of a russet sunset, while the lilies at that hour exhale at the feet of Christ the plenitude of their heavy, lugubrious perfume. In this atmosphere full of ethereal blood and scented dizziness, a pale young man plays the final strains of a despairing melody on the organ.
All these things emigrated into life from the wax museum. In the dioramas of a fair I rediscover the shared space of all these nostalgias scattered through the world, which gathered altogether form its very essence.
A single and supreme desire remains alive for me: to witness the incineration of a wax museum; to see the slow and scabrous melting of the waxwork figures, to gaze petrified as the yellow and beautiful legs of the bride in the glass case writhe in the air and a real flame catches hold between the thighs, burning her sex.
Flying, Mixed Media, 1999
August Fair
Besides the wax museum, the August fair brought me many other occasions for sadness and exaltation. Its sweeping theatrical performance would swell like a symphony. It commenced with the prelude of isolated dioramas, which arrived much earlier than all the rest and set the general tone for the fair, like the scattered and drawn-out notes that announce at the beginning of the concerto the theme of the composition as a whole. The grandiose finale, on closing day, was an explosion of shouts, firecrackers and brass bands, followed by the immense silence of the deserted field.
The few dioramas that came early comprised, in essence, the fair as a whole and represented it with exactitude. It was sufficient for only the first of them to set up in order for the entire colouring, the entire sparkle and the entire carbide odour of the fair as a whole to seep down into the town.
From the throng of everyday sounds a thrum would suddenly detach itself, which was neither the creaking of tin, nor the far-off clinking of a bunch of keys, nor the drone of an engine: a sound easily recognisable among a thousand others, that of the “Wheel of Fortune”.
In the obscurity of the boulevard a diadem of coloured sparks would then kindle, like the earth’s first constellation. Soon others would follow it and the boulevard became a luminous corridor, along the length of which I walked petrified, just like I had once seen a boy of my age, in an illustrated edition of Jules Verne, leaning up against the window of a submarine, peering outside into the sub-oceanic darkness, into the wonderful, mysterious, marine phosphorescence.
A few days later the fair was in place. The semi-circle of booths was laid out, complete, and all at once became definitive.
Well-defined zones divided it into regions of shadows and lights – the same every year. There was, first of all, the string of restaurants with dozens of necklaces of coloured lights, then the dioramas with their freaks, the façade
