“Those Irrevocable Words”

    A jumping jack suspended in mid-air within the theatrics of a display case. His supple body is floating graciously, hands empty, a heart-shaped hinge screwed over his mouth: a dumb puppet, a lovefool, or worse – a people-pleaser? Tobias Koenig’s guileless wooden man conflates the old-fashioned mechanical toy with the silhouette of a minnesinger, a medieval minstrel tasked with idolizing an untouchable noblewoman. The medieval minnesinger was a rejected lover-on-demand with the gift to cast gender-related power play into entrancing rhymes: Masculine agency met chaste, feminine passiveness. The jumping-jack toy, on the other hand, provided some form of comic release to blasé Victorian housewives, who (some 500 years later) were still trapped in inactivity. Subordinate to men in every way – as daughter, wife, or mother – they could at least pull the strings on this one. Amalgamating both of these stereotypes, Koenig’s lovesick clown takes on a striking resemblance to another, much later doppelganger: Charlie Chaplin, who caricatured the very same socially rehearsed choreography, twisting and turning his stiff limbs in a tireless pursuit of love, as if pulled by invisible strings.