Square One

Because I have about fifty other things going on, including a few stalled blog posts and an increasingly urgent need to pack for my trip to Greensboro tomorrow (my BFF is treating me to the Amtrak fare and a long weekend’s mutual writerly support, yay!), but I also feel like shaking up the uber-serious mood of this blog ever since that last piece posted, and finally, because I have been inspired by a dear friend’s adventures in (ahem!) ‘art’ criticism, I give you… this.

Please understand that I do not, in any way, endorse the practice of taxidermy. (FFS, I’m a vegetarian!) But I happened upon this… thing in a bookstore near VCU (which, in keeping with its catering to eccentricity, is open sometimes, closed at other times, with no predictable pattern to it), and I just didn’t quite know what to do with the surreal image. So of course I’m foisting it upon you.

…And, what was even more inscrutable? The other end (business end?) of said chipmunk¹:

(Note: If you couldn’t make that out, the lettering says, The rule of consciousness is near. Um, okay, WHAT?)

Which, to me, doesn’t make me a lick of sense, but maybe I’m just not enough of a ‘real artist’ to get it.

I suppose this would be called, by aficionados of the form, either ‘mixed media’ or ’sculpture.’ (And/or ‘animal cruelty,’ ‘crap,’ and ‘OMFG what drugs was this person on when they made this thing’ by others.)

Let’s say we agree to call this ’sculpture.’ (For the purposes of argument. C’mon, just play along.)

If, indeed, it is sculpture, how did it get there? Is this ’student work’? And if so, is it, by any bizarre chance, the work of a student in VCU’s Sculpture Department, ranked again by US News & World Report as the top program of its kind in the country?

(Clearly, stranger things have happened.)

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¹ Unless it’s actually a squirrel and I’ve got everything wrong. It’s not like I’m an expert in differentiating between varieties of taxidermied rodents, okay?