I regret not being able to get to the heart of Santiago Cucullu's wall drawing The Fates Await (Serious Delirium, or You Will Die Tomorrow). The work presently dominates the East Gallery in the Henry, and can be seen from the ground floor and the mezzanine. There are other works in the space—big wooden boxes called Nesting Platforms, a variety of airplane blankets stitched into a curtain that falls dramatically from the mezzanine, and aluminum sculptures that look like stick insects. None of these objects poses a problem; they can be explained without much effort. For example, the subject at the core of the airplane blankets is transcendence—something that's very ordinary and disposable becomes something that is majestic and permanent. It is The Fates Await that presents a theoretical impasse. Its meaning, its center, is frustratingly elusive.

The purpose of criticism is to obliterate a work of art—to find within it the switch of its aura and turn it off. One must never be captivated by an object, be it functional (a tea cup, a compact disc, a shoestring) or dysfunctional (a painting, a piece of music, a sculpture). For reasons that are mostly political, we must work hard to remove all mystery and mists from the world around us and make the meaning of things as clear as possible. A piece of criticism only attains success when the relationship between the critic and the art object is like the relationship between a coroner and a corpse. If the critic fails to enter that relationship, then he is weaker than the object of contemplation. This weakness necessarily results in the fetishization of the object, and festishization ultimately transforms a living being into a zombie.

The Fates Await still maintains a spell over me. The work is by Santiago Cucullu, who is very smart, young (36 years old), handsome in appearance, Argentinean by blood and birth, educated in Minneapolis, and presently based in Milwaukee. His art has appeared in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and at the Walker Art Center and New Museum for Contemporary Art. The new drawing in the East Gallery is an explosion of color that keeps the eyes busy. One wall is completely covered in florescent and drab strips of contact paper; the other two walls (north and south) are partially covered. In the mess of wonderful colors, two faces take shape: They are characters from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the 1920 silent movie that linked cinema with the expressionistic movement in painting at the time.

One of the characters from the movie, Francis, is on the north wall; the other, Cesare, is on the far end of the east wall. In the plot of the movie, Cesare is a somnambulist in a carnival that's passing through a German town. Cesare predicts the death of Alan, who is Francis's friend. Alan dies, and Francis tries to solve the mystery. Near the movie's end, we discover that Francis is an inmate in an insane asylum operated by Dr. Caligari. In short, what is real and what is not real cannot be determined, and it is this blurry area that Cucullu is referencing—a blur collapsing into another blur. But that is not a solid critical interpretation, and there are other problems to contend with, such as the fact that the drawing is very colorful yet what it cites is a black-and-white movie that's famous for (and defined by) sharply contrasting dark and light. Then there is the matter of the artist statement, in which Cucullu compares the exhibit to a mixed tape. Meaning, The Fates Await is a deliberate evocation of a mood, but exactly what mood—a happy hallucination? Color-bright nightmare? Febrile desire? Finally, the first part of the subtitle, Serious Delirium, is sampled from another movie, Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes (specifically the scene that involves the Wu-Tang Clan), and the second part references the silent movie. Behind one title is the wizardry of RZA; behind the other is the sorcery of Dr. Caligari.

My hand can't get to the heart of this artwork and squeeze its life pump to a stop. My best guess is this: The wild variety of parts that make up this work are not internally connected; instead, the living, external body of the artist, the assembler of the mystery, is the locus of their convergence. And so critical obliteration of the work would result in a real crime: murder. As I have no time to spend in prison, I will remain under the brilliant spell of this work about an evil spell.