or a bullet. A bullet at the heart of the banana. For it is a heartless banana, in the end: In “Kill yr. Idols,” the fruit is as ruthless as a gun, poses the same danger, the former a prosthesis for the latter. One wonders: If in the dystopian dream of half-robot/half-human perfection, flesh is part-by-part replaced by machine in the cyborg’s body, would machine being replaced by fleshly fruit instead be an ironic gesture?

There is the immediate temptation to say yes, but to do so is to ignore that a handgun is nominally the same as a small, sweet banana: a señorita. While initially the painting seems to evoke physical violence (or, more importantly, its absence), the kind of violence it more appropriately evokes—in fact, inflicts—is semiotic, epistemic: What “Kill yr. Idols” kills as an image is the notion of the full image itself, of embodied meaning: More than the Velvet Underground (w/c was the inspiration for the Warholian banana), & more than Fritz Lang (from whose 1928 film Spione the depicted hand is lifted), it’s the very notion of the idol as icon that is murdered. For irony to exist, there must also exist the presumption that the gun & the banana cannot simply be interchanged, for each has its own meaning; & irony is in the very reversal of things that cannot be interchanged. But here, the banana is an equally fatal weapon as the gun, if not more fatal because prosthetic: the exchange is total—& iconoclasm is never as brutal as when it is total.    Continued...