Absolute New York, mural by Richard HaasI became strangely obsessed with Chocolate Haas by Sander Plug. It seemed that for a day at least, everywhere I turned there was a Haas of some variant or another. On the CBS evening news, Richard Haass suggested that GW has to tone down his rhetoric about Iran now that there is no evidence of a nuclear conspiracy. Trying to figure out who he was, I stumbled on Richard Haas, a wonderful painter of trompe-l’œil works on the sides of buildings. An odd confluence, triggered by a melting chocolate bunny. Each in its own way involves a magic trick.
I suppose what really drew me into the film was the emotional nature of what is essentially a good science project for a ten-year-old boy. The beauty of the collapse leaves you feeling oddly guilty that you find it aesthetically pleasing. Ruins have that sort of pleasure: the scars of misfortune find a sort of resonance to people constantly under assault from the new. There’s a question of course, “what would happen if,” that seems to underwrite such experiments with ruin. In that sense, the piece seems to be as much an experiment as a beautiful object. The remix with a death metal soundtrack recasts it in a different adolescent milieu.
The beauty is strictly in the facade; underneath the bunny is hollow. It’s a moving trompe-l’œil, disappearing in moments before our eyes. But perhaps it owes its impact to a visual variant of the Haas effect—the first sense impression persists, even as the contradictory impressions flood across the visual field.
