Universal Remote

Much as Michael Jackson’s life was an object of penetration, speculation, and interpretation, his death has also been subject to a dazzling array of heuristics. One tendency, often iterated, proposes the broader notion that Jackson’s story constitutes a tragedy in the classical sense of the term—meaning the portrayal of bad fortune as it unfolds in the life of a famous person, framed as a critical error or supernatural manipulation.

Indeed, Jaime Cortez’s Universal Remote is legible in terms of tragic literature. Jackson achieved something like an apotheosis while still alive. But as a god, Jackson’s humanity was effaced by relentless cultural interrogation. What was he—black or white? Gay or straight? Man or woman? What was he?

Cortez’s work is unique in its approach, casting the gospel about Jackson (brutal childhood, exploited by parents, untimely death) and casting it as a sort of deistic genie narrative, dislocated out of Arab literary tradition and reimagined as an animistic devastation fable inflected by the forms of classical tragedy. The wall of black, framed drawings of animals function as a chorus, some of them explicitly Jackson’s pets at Neverland, who wear or hold articles of his clothing and gaze out at the viewer with mournful looks.

Facing the row of animals, decimated works on paper interpret Jacksons’s surgeries; they represent the prosody of Jackson’s existence. A ravaged rhythm, brutalized by the father, the slice and suture of the surgeon’s knife, the racist narrative of his sexual desire as read by the media, the punctures and pokes of the interrogative mob. The sequentially shrinking form of Jackson’s representation does prevail in more or less regular shapes, much in the way the shrieks of tragic heroes always fit into traditional meters.

In the center, a jarring miniature of Jackson himself, portrayed shirtless, Afroed and motionless in the wrenched illumination of the spotlight above. In antiquity, tragic actors wore huge

Excerpt VI: In Which the ManChild Reaches Out and Dies, 2010; Mixed media, text; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Southern Exposure, San Francisco. Photo: Cesar Rubio.

masks, transforming their figures into larger-than-life representations of the human; the contrast in size mirrored the dangerous conflation of the mortal and deathless. The diminutive representation of Jackson in the middle of Cortez’s elemental play stands in contrast to the heft of his myth.

The apotheosis of Jackson’s transcendent celebrity was orchestrated and carried out by means of technology cultivated in and for a spectacle-rich and never-satiated society. Gods aren’t supposed to prowl the earth. As every ancient Greek would tell you, and as you learn in Cortez’s Universal Remote, transcendence of the human occurs concomitant with the destruction of the human.

Universal Remote is on view at Southern Exposure, in San Francisco, through February 19, 2011.

Brandon Brown's first two books of poetry, The Persians By Aeschylus and The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus will be published in 2011. He also writes for Open Space, the blog of the SFMOMA.