Rocket Ship Honey Love Energy

A magazine I write for (attention, explicit advertising: REVUE) came out today with its new issue on rituals – “People commonly engage in rituals with the intention of reaching a desired outcome such as reducing their anxiety and boosting their confidence, alleviating their grief, performing well in a competition, or even making it rain”, it says in the pretext. The issue still carries that smell magazines have when they’re just freshly printed: something between acrylic haze and the aroma of an untouched exhibition (imagine a smelling-link here – I really wonder why such a thing has not yet been invented!).

The feature-artist who designed the cover – Melissa Steckbauer – is said to search for new ways of being close. Melissa cuts photographs. Also in this issue, what you see are cut, deformed, distinguished faces, bodies and surfaces. However, rather than a will to create ways of being close, what I see in those images is a distinct act of being close. It’s there! Seeing them reminded me of Ortega, what he wrote about love. Ortega describes love as an act of letting go (that is, getting out of oneself) and actively going towards the object. Love has a direction. He thinks of it as something like a surgical operation, it’s exactly this: dissection and appropriation. In Ortegas model of love is no longer limited to some romanticized helix between two loving partners. Attention for an object of intellectual (or artistic, as if there was a difference!) desire can just as well be an act of love. I feel this kind of love in Melissas images – they seem to me entirely humanistic. Plus, to say something less pathetic: The results really came out quite cool.

Melissa, we’ve never met in real life, but there’s another quote in your feature which says something about a mutual friend: “She was infatuating, she had rocket ship honey love energy.” You took words from my mouth before they had the time to (trans-)form themselves. Thank you!