Consumption of Man

Consumption of Man, by Lev Rukhin

Two heads facing each other, one has a crown of thorns and a human being in its mouth. The other, mouth agape with edifice incisors, is on the brink of taking a decapitating chomp. At first sight, you contemplate the dynamic and struggle to make sense, but it’s not until you look deeper that the bitterness begins to congeal. As the images appear before you one by one, like pixels, they float by so that you can actually make out the language on the placards the subjects are holding and clearly see the amateur perfection of the performers in the various tableaux vivants. You see the calculated distancing of Epic Theatre and the now-quaint conviction on the faces of the “professional” actors who were a part of the legendary Living Theatre’s agitprop guerilla theatre. As you begin to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of ideas, you
may perceive the composite technique’s similarity to Dali’s portrait of Lincoln. BUT when the individual portraits fade back and the Big Picture takes a hold of your eyeholes you may think: Dürer. The cornucopia. The juxtaposition of the iconic 14 Stations of the Cross with that of Camus’ masterpiece, The Stranger, illuminates the true source of love-‘em, stab-‘em and- leave-‘em existentialism: Christianity. It’s more inane than the hard times of LA where everyone is so craven and so reveres the maudlin. Christianity, like all other hokum, seems to wear thin until you remind yourself of the vacuousness of its imitators. The hackneyed Scientology cult comes hard to mind. OR what if the archetype we’ve been copying all this time turned out to be a stereotype? What could possibly go wrong? Meursault hopes the decapitation is a success, and may we all be killed “with a little shame and with great precision.”