THE EMPEROR OF ICE-CREAM

Call the roller of big cigars,
Themuscular one, and bid himwhip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in lastmonth’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Take fromthe dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

— WALLACE STEVENS

The Emperor of Ice Cream is one of themost famous poems written by the American poet Wallace Stevens. published first in 1923, it is almost nonsensical at first glance. Slowly some (disputable) meaning emerges. For so far as we can say, it describes a funeral—an angry, happy, sad, joyous paradox—in which mourners at a wake are called to order by the writer. “Call…bid…Let…Bring…Take…spread”, the poem directs behaviour. Like any occasion in which humans gather, it sets out the etiquette for sharing a moment, instructing and admonishing both the living and the dead. This is not the place to dig further into these fascinating few lines. Suffice it to say that they sprang intomy mind as I watched the three videos by David Maljkovic that make up the moving images of Scene for a New Heritage (2004). Why did these strange words come back tome from my reading of many years ago?
Rather than describe Maljkovic’s work, or offer a justification, I will try to answer this question. I take it as given that his work is worthy of contemplation, that it deals allusively with his own history and geography in a way that is unique and engaging—and that he speaks with an aesthetic fluency that takes it well beyond its point of origin. This is indeed proven tome, not in the least by the way Stevens and Maljkovic came so unexpectedly yet appropriately together in my mind.
On second reading, this coming together was confirmed to be not a simple glossing of one text onto another. Instead each work compensated for the other,made sense where there was doubt and clarified its foil without ever drawing a final dulling conclusion. I am not able or willing to pull each line and each scene apart, nor compare them or excavate their contradictions. The viewer and reader has to do this for him or herself.
In fact, my job as an interpreter of Maljkovic’s work is almost done simply by bringing these two artworks together and announcing their interrelation. Yet, I suspect I cannot get away with it that easily. You have a right to ask me to explain why and I would like to try and provide at least some lines of flight necessary to traverse the wide, white space of time and form between them.
If Wallace starts in an unknown location, Maljkovic starts in a certain very specific place. The ruined monument to the Yugoslav partisans of Vojin Bakic features in all the videos and many of the accompanying collages. The artist has even included models and other information about Bakic in his exhibitions to locate the provenance of the shining silver building more securely. Yet, despite all the clues, the site remains illusionary, its status and function left as unexplained as Wallace’s environment of the funeral. The Bakic building appears abandoned, yet people seem compelled to gather there in search of answers. Its perfect silver cladding is certainly damaged and at times the inside appears to have fallen into complete ruin—to the point where the walls themselves are breached—but people still climb up its misshapen organic interior to emerge on rooftops or to run through corridors.
Wallace’s funeral poem is also about a kind of decay. It speaks of a cold and dumb body at the centre of the scene, the draping of the embroidered shroud too short to cover both face and feet, thus leaving one or the other visible. These parallel inadequacies in the protective surface of building and body offer a clue as to how to read across the different forms of poem and art video. I think, if I remember rightly, that my recognition of the significance of this inadequate surface was the first moment in which Stevens’ poem came in to my mind in the context of Maljkovic’s work. I had never understood the callousness of the poet’s line about the winding sheet and its exposed body and it had vaguely troubled me until I saw Scene from New Heritage 3 for the first time. Then it seemed more observational than callous, a truth that had to be told. When I subsequently read the poem again, the remarkable appropriateness of flowers wrapped in “last month’s newspapers” gave the address to the surface and wrapping of the building in the films even more poignancy. Maljkovic’s silver foil shrouds (on cars or footballs) not only rhymes with Bakic’s structure, but also with the precisely described objects in Stevens poems. Both refer to something from the past that might once have predicted the future—a future that we ourselves are living. Why focus on such old, inadequate coverings at a funeral or on a building, if not to recognise human fallibility and the death of idealisms both ideological and personal? The skeleton in the cupboard is revealed, and proves to be nothing more than a skeleton. Suddenly, the flapping of the silver foil at the back of the car in Scene for New Heritage 1, which had always annoyed me, now makes sense…well, a “Stevensian” sense, at least. And the superficiality of surface covering is not the sole or strongest point of relation between the works. The action itself, described or depicted, creates pauses for thought. In both cases, there is a gathering. Stevens’ description of the funeral, indeed everything about the poem, serves to upset expectations of correct behaviour and solemn mourning. The “boys” and “wenches” are instructed inways that serve to disrespect any idea of immortality, they are told to come as they are, tomake little effort, even to recognise the potential “concupiscence” of themoment. The protagonists in Maljkovic’s films are equally displaced and distracted. Uncertain what to do they do their own thing — play football, sit, shuffle or talk in their own unfamiliar dialect. Just as the object, the building around which the gatherings take place, shows signs of decay and uncertainty, so too the subjects of the gathering ultimately fall apart—even the boy whose silver football might just offer some form of control is ultimately lost to snow-blindness in the final whiteout scene of Scene for New Heritage 2.
One of the most compelling moments in Stevens’ poem is that mysterious sentence: “Let be be finale of seem”. What are we to make of this and how does it relate to the Scene for New Heritage trilogy? Perhaps ‘seemliness’ is at the heart of what social convention demands from members of a community gathered for a formal procedure. To be unseemly, to behave badly, is not only embarrassing but it throws collective values and protocols into disarray. We are offended because unseemliness suggests lack of order and control. In this light, consider what Bakic’s monument seeks to remember—the mortal sacrifice of humans in an attempt to defeat European fascism. This sacrifice that now appears to be left largely unmourned as successive wars have unveiled their own sacrificial heroes who have intervened in and complicated the idea of patriotismand loyalty. If we relate the abandonment and dilapidation of Bakic’s monument to the “finale of seem” do we see a loss of control and a relative conjunction of forgetting and not knowing? Before we mourn this loss, consider that the “finale of seem” is exactly what the narrator of the poempleads for. “Let be be…” he says. The statement remains ambiguous but is it not some kind of recognition that this finale is due? While Stevens’ poem seems to argue for the assertion of life with all its contradictions at the very moment of a death, Maljkovic’s message about Bakic’s monument is equally ambiguous.
Neither mourning nor celebrating the loss of official memory and controlled respect, it takes stock and wonders what to do when things are indeed simply how they are. The question of what to do with those memories clearly haunts Maljkovic’s search for a new heritage. His films and many collages maybe set in the future attempt to come to terms with a history so loaded and reloaded within his own lifetime that he can have no trust in the meanings collective assigned to a tangible product of the past. Instead he makes of it his own, trying to deal with its existence in its own terms. This seems tome also what Stevens does in the poem as his way of confronting the dead girl’s non-existence. Both are attending to material facts in order to figure out how to behave. For both, this is neither resignation nor nostalgia nor foolish optimism, but something else—something more difficult to define that perhaps stays closer to seeing the world for what it is.
The comparison would not be complete without a thought about the two titles, each of which are repeated three times. Scene for New Heritage 1–3 and The Emperor of Ice Cream make reference to power—one to the meeting of memory and site, the other to the control of human activity. It is with both titles that the political, having been kept at bay in the substance of the work, enters centre stage. It is banal to point out the link between monuments and emperors, but the relationship can linger in the background, just as the history of the last Yugoslav war or the poverty of 1920s America stays in our mind as we read or look at each of the two works. What is worth attending to more emphatically is the subject of power—the “ice cream” of Stevens’ title and the Bakic building in Scenes for New Heritage. Both are odd, frivolous shapes, the Bakic building even recalls the shape of an ice creamcone. They are both objects of desire about which we can only speculate. Is it the pleasure associated with ice creamor its impermanence and triviality that Stevens’ titles allude to? Both may be valid—pleasure may be the only power worth wielding for an emperor. Or, if we consider the fate of Bakic’s monument at the same time, it appears that, in the end, a broken sheen of triviality is the only mark all emperors leave on the world, despite all the magnificence of their temporarily monumental achievements.