Description
A satire as sharp as a mosquito’s bite, the fable of The Art Critic & The Mosquito is a theatrical short that hovers between the grotesque and the sublime, probing the strange intimacy between critique, obsession, and desire.
In a sweat-slicked summer evening, an art critic taps away at her latest dissection of an elusive artwork that she simply cannot stand — or understand. Her frustration, wrapped in typewritten keystrokes and the buzz of professional fatigue, is interrupted by a tiny, insistent intruder: a mosquito.
But this is no ordinary pest.
Drawn by her discontent, the mosquito becomes a kind of vampiric muse, feeding quite literally on her lifeblood as she claws at the edges of understanding. The scene spins into surrealism as the act of critique becomes an act of consumption, of violation, of surrender.
With a painter’s eye and a poet’s wit, Laurence Fuller crafts a metaphor for how art takes from us, how criticism becomes a dance of intimacy, and how even revulsion can become a strange kind of affection. As the critic slaps her own blood across the surface of the painting she once despised, she realizes what she’d been missing all along:
It was love.
A fever dream of irony, flesh, and ink, Art Critic & The Mosquito asks: Can one truly critique what one hasn’t yet been bitten by?
THE ART CRITIC & THE MOSQUITO
A mosquito floated lazily in the hot Summer air,
Buzzing exactly in the same spot of that warm evening in the art critic’s living-room.
The study tapped, with sharp notes of a type writer, tapping out the latest essay dissecting an oeuvre.
The mosquito followed the sound that tapped throughout the house.
The air was so wet with Summer night and sweat of discontentments, the mosquito hung by barely buzzing .
Portraits on the mantle, their subjects sweat past the empty whiskey bottles.
Until he heard by closer proximity, her whispers and shrill exclamations at the end of a sentence;
“Why don’t I like this art?!”
She could not uncover what was it about this art which irked her so??
That raced her fingers by the night lamp’s glow.
The mosquito landed on her arm and lifted its nose,
To the air in order to thrust down into her veins,
Piercing her skin like a pin pricking balloon.
He gulped and gulped and gulped!
The sudden loss of blood at first made her giddy and she at the thought of her subject until her arm went blue and she stood up in shock;
“What, what?!”
But the mosquito kept gulping,
She grabbed the nearest book to swat what she thought was her attacker,
But as she thwacked the bug buzzed away, and she slapped her arm leaving it red again.
She went back to typing
Nearing the end of her column and pronouncing;
“Now then”
The mosquito licked his lips for what was the best feast of his life he had just tasted;
He must return to the banquet once again.
Yet this time as he landed, like a blood
sucking bandit, she was prepared.
And when she thwacked the mozzie!
Lifted up the cover, there was the painting
But covered in her own blood.
And at last she felt it,
It was true love.
Cinematic poetry by Laurence Fuller
Adaptation of Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis"
@laurencefuller
www.laurencefuller.art