273

Drawing (273) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"A hammer stroke on an unwrapped sandwich, which then lurches down onto the naked chest of a beheaded man, in the direction of the arrow. Malevich's tombstone with the black square can be seen on the intersection of the man's throat, like a planted face. Beneath it to the left is a folded pair of trousers in front of the white iron bedstead where my mother gave birth to me. The Traber family of acrobats balances on a tightrope above the rubble of a big German city. The rope is attached to the bonnet of an Elim deaconess, who was my aunt and my mother's midwife. The air is full of differently-shaped hammer heads. Secretly, I reproached this aunt for deforming my ribs when I was born. A particularly eccentric interpretation of a birth trauma. In reality, I only had the English disease because of the rampant shortage of vitamin D after the war. Every morning, I had to swallow a spoonful of cod-liver oil for it but this did not help a jot." (From: arsenal, march 12).

(1993)

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