Leaf 9

“Why Are We Still Not Thinking?”

[Omari Douglin, Odd Dolls, at Best Daze Cannabis Shop]

from @matthewbrowngallery

In the green back lounge of a fragrant cannabis shop, the amazed visitor assumes she is lost in a storage room for baby-sized stuffed dolls. Haphazardly seated, fallen, flopping, bending, lying, lopsided or erect, weirdly twinned or alone, they are everywhere. What is this druggy place? What is being awaited by these piles of ineffable stuff: shipping, remaindering, shelving, or simply cast aside? Hardly voluptuous, despite their curvy contours, Omari Douglin-- with the help of a toymaker—styles these pudgy consumer oddities in farmer’s checked overalls, aprons, pinafores, pinstriped jackets, green shirts, yellow vests, or slacks beneath an actual, geographical world -globe stomach. Topping this tasteless fashion are red or brown or black google-eyed capped or hatted bowling-ball heads. Made and sewn from cardboard, paper, glue, wire, mixed fabric, foam, paint, they stagger the mind. Are they thought-jokes or satires on the business of self-presentation?

Inconspicuously hovering at the edge of the surrounding chaos, on a low side table, lies theory-queen Avital Ronell’s Stupidity. i Ranged alongside it are two aged postcards and an old-catalogue of French-born sculptor Gaston Lachaise’s bronzes from the 1920’s of swollen breasts, female organs, heads, and tumescent nudes. Published in 2002, the book contains Deconstructionist aphorisms by writers stretching from Heidegger, Robert Musil, to Deleuze, and, of course, to Ronell herself--former professor in the German Department at NYU. Are we, then, to consider her, or other writer’s remarks on stupidity [as not simply unfortunate taste; or thought reduced to error; but thinking one knows, but failing to judge the truth of one’s certitudes] as applicable to Douglin’s flagrantly -exposed consummer desire for, and ardent conviction of value, of these puerile dolls? I think yes.

i Avital Ronell, Stupidity [ Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002].