Leaping from the azure ecstatic night.
Angel wings fall, driving into the ground like a cruciform spike. Through the crisp crack of the racket, the shuttlecock plunges downward. The shuttlecock, strictly speaking, is not a sphere: only half of its body is curved, while the other half is vertical, decisive, and sharp. Yet it stubbornly claims its place among ball sports. In appearance, the shuttlecock seems like a deformed modification of an animal body. Its head has been replaced with an artificial prosthetic, the skirt forming a ring that mimics a ghost’s garment or an artificial flower. In rotation, the whole thing becomes a cone. Surrealist memes have cautioned us: “Don’t worry, it’s just a cone.” But who can say where in the cosmos the cone might appear frequently? In one instant the shuttlecock becomes a cone; in the next it reverts to a simplified, abstracted duck, mocking the observer with its bizarre skeletal structure and contentless head. In truth, it is almost purely a phantom, shifting shape as people swing at it, appearing and vanishing without warning in curved space, just like the cone.
The smash. That is a sound from elsewhere, a bird’s-eye poetic imagination that merges chaos, tears through the dark furnishings of the air, and leaps from instinct. The shuttlecock advances through destruction, suffering with each step, losing a feather with each step. Born from the wrapping of sacred white, it descends alongside the downward scale, fueled by its own inevitable death. The command to smash is a command to kill the rally, to kill the opponent, and to kill the shuttlecock itself. The smash is straight, rigid, hard to block, like the generatrix of a cone, like a molar line, a line of segmentation, a rigid line. The arc, on the other hand, the bouncing pitch, the supple curve, sheds momentum, revealing a looser side, seeming about to expand and drift rather than contract to a needle point. The base of the cone radiates outward, like ripples and sound waves. It lets the trajectory flow, like dance.
Striking the shuttlecock has a liberating quality: involuntarily, people engage in a sadistic activity and take endless pleasure in it. The shifts in offensive rhythm resemble the alternation of caress and blow; sweeping movements and the sound of splitting air trigger intense pleasure. In the course of play, the shuttlecock is battered back and forth by both parties; eventually it will be ruined, its pale skin marked with dark streaks, dents, and fractures. It will return its seduction and enter the next carnival feast.
Like an architectural projection, the shuttlecock’s sculpture takes shape, resembling a futuristic artwork, yet falls within the bounds of the everyday and the popular. Its imitation and its use for Jouissance open new possibilities for life, pouring all of itself into living. It has the shape of life: it is more than the combination of head and body, more than a cone. It is a complete and magnificent assemblage.