The Diviners (19 page)

The victim’s handwriting is small and precise, cursive, bending slightly to the right. Some letters are tall and willowy, as if blown across the page by a gust from the margin.

Some of the victim’s remarks concern the weather and the pleasantness of temperatures still in the sixties in the first week of November. Some remarks concern films currently in release, including what is described as a tirade on the subject of the film known as
Pay It Forward.
The film, it should be noted, is not without favor among detectives. The victim, however, is apparently disappointed with the career choices of the lead actor in the film. To continue, the victim can’t believe that she agreed to go to this movie entitled
Pay It Forward.
The people who made the film “should be towed out to sea on a barge,” according to the diary. The victim writes favorably about other film releases.

One section of the diary, it should be said, was for the detectives kind of a page-turner. This portion of the diary particularly concerns the untimely death of an acquaintance of the victim. This acquaintance, notwithstanding the efforts of many in the peer group of the victim, drifted off into the “demimonde” of addiction, traveling in fast and more dangerous crowds in Manhattan, later adventuring in the crack houses of the outer boroughs, where a young gay man is likely to get into a lot of trouble. The victim describes the addicted young man in affectionate terminology, despite her exasperation at his relapses and his inability to show up for work at a competing gallery. He was, according to the diarist, “the most beautiful boy I’ve ever seen,” and he was given to thrift store clothes that impeccably mimicked the current designers. Still, he “drifted away like a helium balloon drifts away,” prompting some of the best writing in the diary. Who can understand why the scourge of relapse happens? asks the diarist. Who can understand self-destruction? For a time, an addict will seem as if he or she might make a go of life and then, inexplicably, just when things seem to be going better, just when “his boyfriend starts to like him again, then
wham,
” the addict relapses. Which is something that the detectives have encountered many times themselves. It is a routine part of their job, and they are all but inured to it, this treachery and self-destruction. This inexplicable nature of relapse occurs to the diarist when the body of her friend is found in the Bronx, and his parents come from Durham, North Carolina, to his funeral, his parents, of whom the diarist observes that they “would never accept him for who he is.” Oddly, this body, too, was subjected to blunt force trauma, according to pathologists, and perhaps sexually violated. All of this is not “something to be learned,” reports the diarist. This is something to “accept the way you accept that winter will come.”

It’s interesting to the detectives, combing the diary for clues about the victim’s own assault, that the death of the friend in the Bronx was not recent. In fact, the death in the Bronx dates back almost eight months.

Other entries in the diary amount to notes about art that the victim was considering for her group show of work by contemporary African American artists. It is likely that some of these notes were in fact taken on the day of the attack, when the victim was visiting the library. The victim feels great solidarity with persons of color, perhaps owing to the fact that the victim’s parents are second-generation Chinese American. The victim observes that her interest in this art by African American artists is not “ghetto exotica,” as in the cases of graffiti artists invited into the art establishment through tokenism. Of African American artists attempting work inside the traditions of art history, the diarist writes that “pretty much no one gives a shit about them or their work, unless they are putting slave imagery into their paintings or something obvious that will reassure an elite white audience.” For the show planned by the diarist, she has assembled work by painters and sculptors and mixed-media artists who simply “happen to be African American”—artists who don’t shy from “symbology about African American experience” but who are also about “paint handling, texture, and luminosity.” She would include these painters, the diarist remarks, “because they’re good, because they’re moving, because they’re important, because they’re vital, energized, beautiful, lasting.”

A list of such painters and photographers and multimedia artists follows, none of whose names mean anything to the detectives on the case, who, at any rate, are reading through the diary in one sitting and are eating doughnuts at the same time, while also talking about the trade that sent Patrick Ewing to Seattle.

One of these artists, however, did come in for more attention than others. The name of the artist in question is Tyrone Duffy. Duffy, according to highlights from a curriculum vitae included in the journals, is known, to the extent he is known at all, for shows and artwork from the early 1980s. Shows at galleries associated with what the victim describes as the East Village gallery movement. After some brief success in this East Village environment, a success that the artist didn’t parlay into wider recognition, Tyrone Duffy, according to the diarist, decided to attempt to get an advanced degree in philosophy from the University of Minnesota, a degree he never completed, dropping out of the program in 1987, after which he moved to Hoboken. According to the diarist, Tyrone Duffy “falls off the edge of the world” in
1993.

What the victim likes about the early work of Duffy, which she first saw at the apartments of some friends, is that it manifests the “d.i.y. energy” of the work of the early 1980s, the violence, smarts, and sincerity of that time. What she likes is the desperation of the work, the sloppiness. What she likes, it seems, is the idea of Tyrone Duffy, an artist of some modest success who completely disappears, an artist who knew the art world legends of a certain period but who then vanished entirely. The idea only improves when the victim finds someone, a mutual friend, still in contact with Duffy. This friend reports that Duffy was diagnosed with bipolar disorder or some similar complaint. He was institutionalized on one occasion. He was not close with his family, who apparently lived in New England.

In late September, the diarist began to attempt to contact Duffy, having learned that he was now working in midtown as a bicycle messenger. The detectives take note of this sudden appearance in the diary of the apparent or alleged profession of the victim’s attacker, but they decide to continue to read into the diary before presuming that the two bicycle messengers are one and the same.

What they learn about next is so-called outsider art, very popular in some circles. And what outsider art is
not,
according to the diarist, “is art.” It is not like Michelangelos and Titians with their assistants and their papal commissions. Because art is a “discretionary choice” where “mimetic skill and distortions of mimetic skill” serve a higher purpose, that is, artistic vision. And outsider art, made largely by people in institutions and by shut-ins with paraphiliac inclinations, does not manifest “discretionary choice,” in part because the artists do not have “mimetic skill” in the first place and also because they can often be disabled in the perception of reality.

Much of this material seems to come from a book on imagery in the artwork of disturbed adolescents by Deborah Weller, PhD, for which the victim submitted call forms at local libraries on several occasions.

“Painting by bipolar patients in an inpatient environment,” according to Weller, as quoted by the victim:

is noteworthy for wildness of color, for flamboyance. But it is also restless and reflective of disordered thinking, more so than in the work of other adolescents, and as such it has a compensatory aspect, a reifying and ordering disorder, enough so that it’s hard, in all cases, to look at this work simply as art, as a commodity for aesthetic consumers. It is, therefore, devoid of aesthetic choice. The aesthetic strategies indicated in this work are, on the contrary,
reflexive.
Can art that is made reflexively still reside in the same category with art made according to discretionary choice?

Weller then speaks to the art of elephants in captivity, and gorillas. What do we know about the intentionality of these artists? Is intentionality a condition of front-brain function, Weller asks, unhindered by disorder of any kind? If so, art is rather limited in terms of its effects and strategies. Art by bipolar artists is noteworthy for connections being made between disparate agencies or entities, connections suggestive of conspiracy. Members of families, for example, are considered agents of foreign powers. Teachers or clergypersons are considered secret members of fraternities and possessed of Masonic insights into the workings of the world. For bipolar adolescents, according to Weller, the discovery of these conspiracies can even be joyful, as in the case of one adolescent painter who produced in a matter of weeks a number of diagrams, painted on very large canvases, detailing connections between multinational corporations and the regimes of twentieth-century despots like Pol Pot and Idi Amin. This painter was ecstatic about his output and slept little, if at all, during the period of its creation. As Weller states:

Perception of
entanglement,
my word for a particular set of symptoms that appears frequently in paintings by adolescent bipolar sufferers, precedes formulation of aesthetic strategy, and since
entanglement
is merely a symbolically exaggerated representation of the fact that the patient is connected to other people and feels, in this connection, exaggerated sets of human emotions, is it correct to interpret canvases featuring
entanglement
as types of discretionary choice, or rather as diagrams that offer possibilities for self-understanding or even recovery? Perhaps in this way, as in the automatic activity of the surrealist movement, so-called genuine artwork, art in the category of the high, begins to become more meaningful as it recoils from aesthetic strategy and moves closer to the compensatory and therapeutic artwork of disturbed adolescents.

The victim, in her diary, uses these and other passages from volumes by Weller in order to talk about a particular series of artworks by Tyrone Duffy, apparently made toward the end of his productive life as an artist. These paintings, according to the victim, are known in some circles as the Thirst Paintings, at least among collectors of the work, though this title was not of the artist’s own design. Thirst here coheres with a theme noticed by the victim in Weller’s book:

Thirst is a frequent symptom of some of the medication used in treatment of these adolescents, both in outpatient clinics and in the hospital. Antidepressant medications, as well as lithium, used in the treatment of bipolar disorder, have dry mouth as a side effect. Inpatient psychiatric treatment centers frequently make sure that their clients have plenty of water to drink.

But, Weller goes on, as quoted by the diarist:

Doesn’t this thirst stand for something else, too? Doesn’t it stand for a quality that all adolescents have? A desire for religiosity and spiritual experience? A desire to be a part of adult life? A desire to have the self-determination of adults? Especially when confined in hospital, when self-determination is at a minimum, the adolescent thirsts, and so it’s no surprise that this parched quality is often a part of their dialogue and even of their artwork.

Duffy’s Thirst Paintings, according to the victim, here also compiling stories told by others, involve defaced works by contemporary novelists, wherein certain words are highlighted, as if to indicate patterns concealed in the work, patterns known only to Duffy himself, and although there is no indication that Duffy intended thirst to be the only theme of the work, he did, on every occasion, highlight the word
thirst.
The paintings themselves consist of paint applied with a “random energy” to leaves from books shellacked, varnished, or otherwise affixed to canvases. The paint then simultaneously conceals and reveals the secret texts, according the style known as palimpsest, so that, again, “
entanglement
is the secret being revealed, a secret web of stuff, people, themes, places, lives,” according to the diarist.

In middle October, the victim apparently made contact with Tyrone Duffy himself. The meeting took place in a Polish coffee shop in the East Village known for serving twenty-four hours a day. Her first impression, she says, is that Duffy is “completely sexy.” And she goes on to ask, with intuition about her own motivation, whether it’s desperation that looks desirable or some inherently attractive quality.

His eyes are really far away, though I’m not even sure what I mean by that. He has trouble making eye contact. He never seems like he’s looking at me at all. There’s never any of that seesawing of glances you get when men are doing their seductive thing. I never look away and then catch him looking at me. But especially if I say anything about the work, about having seen some of the work, he doesn’t seem to want to hear about it. His voice is a whisper, pretty much, and he mostly refuses to talk about things. He says, “Well, that was all a long time ago, and I haven’t done anything like that lately.” He says he just reads now. Says he started reading the books in those paintings, instead of painting on them, and that he regrets defacing some of those books. Says he figured he’d go to graduate school, where he could read more, and then he stopped going to classes. I asked him what he was reading, because it would keep the conversation alive, and he said Frantz Fanon and Michel Foucault and Edward Said. I’m not really sure he has stopped painting. I think he hasn’t and just says it.

The conversation between the victim and Duffy does not last that long because Duffy claims to need to return to work. When asked his profession at present, he looks at the victim skeptically, as if she should be able to tell. The victim indicates that a certain inexplicable horror overcomes her when she first learns that Duffy is now working as a bicycle messenger because it seems so hard. It seems to the victim that the economics of fame, however brief, however long ago, should have inoculated him against a marginal working-class job. And so she is simply hoping it is not true. However, it is true. At this point the victim asks Tyrone Duffy the one question she has been intending to ask him all along, which is simply: “Do you have any of the old work left?” To which Duffy, according to the diary, responds, “I got a whole mini- storage box of that stuff. Not that I’ve been in there in a while.” After which he makes an exit, “like a cavalier on his mount.” The victim reports that her feelings afterward were like “love feelings, all confused, like he was going to start affecting my appetite. I think it’s just the work, or the proximity to the work. Maybe to talk to Tyrone is to take my own job seriously, whether he can take his work seriously or not.”