Tailors' Dummies

"We are not concerned," he said, "with long-winded creations, with long -term beings. Our creatures will not be heroes of romances with many volumes. Their roles will be short, concise; their characters - without a background. Sometimes, for one gesture, for one word alone, we shall make the effort to bring them to life. We openly admit: we shall not insist either on durability or solidity of workmanship; our creations will be temporary, to serve for a single occaison. If they be human beings, we shall give them, for example, only one profile, one hand, one leg, the one limb needed for their role. It would be pendantic to bother about the other, unnecessary, leg. Their backs can be made of canvass or simply whitewashed. We shall have this proud slogan as our aim: A different actor for every gesture. For each action, each word, we call to life a different human being. Such is our whim, and the world will be run according to our pleasure. The Demiurge was in love with consummate, superb, and complicated materials; we shall give priority to trash. We are simply entranced and enchanted by the cheapness, shabbiness, and inferiority of the material."



Bruno Schulz, from Treatise on Tailors' Dummies, Or the Second Book of Genesis



The Polish Jew writer/artist, Bruno Schulz, thus foresees the very fetishists that will kill him a decade and a half later through the agency of SS-Scharfuhrer Karl Gunther (may he rot in hell eternally). Thus he also foresees, the whole psychological canvass of the second half of the twentieth century and beyond which survived its grossest manifestations in Nazi Germany only to be sublimated in the fetishists that would follow and ultimately become the norm in the Western World. Where there are no Tailors' Dummies, we will make them, and amazingly, they are only to happy to comply with our wishes. Inferior stuff indeed. We salute the Tailors' Dummy with his hand on a Blackhawk's joystick as he guns down a crowd of Iraqi civiliams. "Fog of War!", cry our nifty Tailors. But it is precisely a self-induced fog that allows us to fetishize the human being, to turn him into a dummy with a short role and no background.