resetting/phantasana (curtain falls)

A circus trick is being performed in Moussa Kone’s design for the arena. What remains undecided is what came first: the elephants throwing different coloured balls to one another with perfect coordination, or the ideal trajectory of these dots, whereby each elephant represents a starting point and an endpoint. The animal trainers responsible for the choreography operate with the convincing force of well-turned curves and artificially arched backs that seem sure of the audience’s attention.

The group of youths participating in this exercise are sitting on the stalls to the right. Their authority figure, positioned right at the top of the tribune, guarantees the audience’s attention and is keeping an eye on their eagerness to watch. The curtain will not fall as long as this figure stands there without moving, nor will any break bell ring. It is showtime – and class time – and as long as, in their elephantine asanas, the protagonists in the action demonstrate the victory of free-will over their own physical clumsiness, nobody leaves their seat without a valid excuse. Distinguished by his academic gown, the professor appears in the void between the housing blocks. These lend his outline monumentality and reflect his demand for order and conformity. As Magister ludi, though, he also sanctions the events on the stage and makes them acceptable for the curriculum.

Shown on the other side of the triptych, to the left, there is something approaching a psychological Ur-scenario of imagining oneself back to a time before one’s own existence. In this scenario one can observe oneself as an absentee, skiving, or succumb to feelings of nostalgia for a time when, in Rousseau’s sense, nature was our only teacher, when we sat well-camouflaged in the trees with a front row view. In this world of open options, the directed gaze had not yet been invented – nor had compulsory attendance.

As a further bearer of hope in this stage play, a small mouse appears. It is the unexpected factor in the system, the gap, the little black mark on the leg of the stool, the elephant’s fright during the ball game, and in this role it has the wherewithal to upset the whole event. The moment depicted in the drawings, however, is the moment before the escalation caused by the mouse’s subversive activity, and shows the stools in their servile form and not as the free radicals they appear as in the appropriate preparatory sketches.

The actual danger for every aspiring disciplinarian emanates from the floor of the arena in Moussa Kone’s drawing. What is essentially a backdrop presents itself as a zone of uninhibited, passionate and self-absorbed drawing, as a terrain of unwillingness to be representative and a refusal to illustrate. Moussa Kone draws without restraint but does not overdo it, coupling free-hand drawing with discipline. It remains a mystery how the explosiveness in this mode of drawing could go unnoticed by the authority figures in gowns – as a result of which error of judgement they expose their charges to this demonstration of unrestrained indulgement.

At Webster University – in the Th. K. Lang Gallery, for which resetting/ phantasana (curtain falls) was originally developed – the drawn setting continues into the real space. Circus stools were provided as seating, and a matching curtain with a striped pattern that ran the full length of the glazed façade created a circus ring-like atmosphere. This de facto transformation of the gallery space into an arena adds topicality and poignancy to Moussa Kone’s statement on the university context of his exhibition.

One stool had been broken by the time the show was over. It could not stand up to the strain of the students’ institutionally sanctioned contortions.

Text by Monika Schwärzler, Vienna, 2011