What I Loved (30 page)

Her wardrobe for the job had consisted of bikinis that related to the game's fruit theme. "Lemon yellow," she said, "Strawberry red, lime green, you get the picture." She pointed to her head. "And I had to wear these fruit hats."

"Carmen Miranda style," I said.

Lola looked at me blankly. "The show was pretty stupid, but I learned Italian, and it got me a couple of film roles."

"Without fruit?"

She laughed and adjusted her bustier, which had been sinking slowly for about half an hour. "No fruit."

When I asked her how she knew Bernie, she said, "I met him last week in this gallery—the Teddy Giles show. Oh my God, it was so disgusting." Lola made a face to indicate her revulsion and lifted her bare shoulders. She was very young and very pretty, and when she talked, her earrings shook against her long neck. She pointed her fork at Bernie and said loudly, "We're talking about that show where we met. Wasn't it disgusting?"

Bernie turned toward Lola. "Well," he said. "I'm not going to disagree with you, but he's made quite a stir. He started out performing in clubs. Larry Finder saw him and brought the work into the gallery."

"But what's the work like? " I said.

"It's bodies all cut up—women and men and even kids," Lola said as she wrinkled her forehead and stretched her lips to telegraph her distaste. "Blood and guts all over the place, and then they had photographs from this show he did in some club—spurting an enema. I guess it was red water, but it looked like blood. Oh my God, I had to cover my eyes. It was soooo gross."

Jillian looked at Bill. She raised her eyebrows. "You know who's taken Giles under his critical wing?"

Bill shook his head.

"Hasseborg. He wrote this long article about him in
Blast."

A brief look of pain crossed Bill's face.

"What did he say?" I asked.

"That Giles exposes the celebration of violence in American culture," Jillian said. "It's Hollywood horror deconstructed—something like that."

"Jillian and I went to the show," Fred said. "I thought it was pretty hokey, thin stuff. It's supposed to be shocking, but it's not really. It's tame when you think of the artists who've really gone the distance. That woman who has plastic surgery to change her face to look like a Picasso or a Manet or a Modigliani. I always forget her name. You remember when Tom Otterness shot that dog?"

"Puppy," Violet said.

Lola's face fell. "He shot a little puppy?"

"It's all on tape," Fred explained. "The little guy's bouncing all over the place and then bang." He paused. "But I guess it had cancer."

"You mean it was sick and going to die?"

Nobody answered Lola.

"Chris Burden had himself shot in the arm," Jillian volunteered.

"The shoulder," Bernie corrected. "It was his shoulder."

"Arm, shoulder." Jillian smiled. "Same area. Schwarzkogler, now there's radical art."

"What did he do?" Lola asked.

"Well, for one thing," I said to her, "he sliced his penis lengthwise and had the whole thing photographed. Pretty gruesome and bloody."

"Wasn't there another guy who did the same thing?" Violet said.

"Bob Flanagan," Bernie said. "But it was nails. He hammered nails into it."

Lola's mouth dropped open. "That's sick," she said. "I mean mentally sick. I don't think that's art. That's just sick."

I turned to look at Lola's face, with its perfectly plucked eyebrows, little nose, and gleaming mouth. "If I picked you up and put you in a gallery, you'd be art," I said to her. "Better art than a lot I've seen. Prescriptive definitions don't apply anymore."

Lola moved her shoulders. "You're saying that anything's art if people say it is? Even me?"

"Exactly. It's perspective—not content"

Violet leaned forward and rested her elbows on the table. "I went to the show," she said. "Lola's right. If you take it seriously at all, it's horrible. At the same time it feels like a joke—a one-liner." She paused. "It's hard to tell whether it's purely cynical or whether there's something else in it—a sadistic pleasure behind hacking up those fake bodies ..."

The conversation drifted away from Giles again and onto other artists. Bill continued to talk to Jillian. He didn't participate in the lively dispute on the best bread in New York that followed or in the discourses on shoes and shoe stores that somehow came after that, which led to Lola lifting up her long leg to display a sandal with stiletto heels by a designer with a very curious name I forgot instantly. On the walk home, Bill was silent. Violet linked arms with both of us.

"I wish Erica were here," she said.

I didn't answer her for a moment. "She doesn't want to be here, Violet. I don't know how many times we've planned visits. Every six months she writes to say she's coming to New York, and then she backs down. Three times I had plane tickets to California, and each time she wrote to say she couldn't see me. She wasn't strong enough. She told me she's living a posthumous life in California and that's what she wants."

"For someone who isn't alive, she's written a lot of articles," Violet said.

"She likes paper," I said.

"She's still in love with you," Violet said. "I know."

"Or maybe she's in love with the idea of me on the other side of the country."

At that moment Bill stopped walking. He let go of Violet, looked up at the night sky, spread his arms, and said loudly, "We know nothing. We know absolutely nothing about anything." His loud voice carried down the street "Nothing!" He boomed the word again with obvious satisfaction.

Violet reached for Bill's hand and tugged at him. "Now that we've settled that, let's go home," she said. He didn't resist her. Violet held his hand as he shuffled down the block with his head lowered and his shoulders hunched. I thought he looked like a child being led home by his mother. Later, I wondered what had provoked Bill's outburst. It might have been the talk about Erica, but then again, it might have been rooted in what had been revealed earlier: Mark happened to have chosen a friend whose staunchest supporter was the man who had written the cruelest review of his father's work to date.

Bill found Mark a summer job through an acquaintance of his, another artist named Harry Freund. Freund needed a crew of workers for a large art project in Tribeca about New York's children, which was being funded by both private and public money. The enormous, impermanent work was to be part of a celebration in September for the "Month of the Child." The design included huge flags, some Christo-like wrappings of lampposts, and blown-up drawings by children from every borough. "Five days a week, nine to five, physical labor," Bill said to me. "It'll be good for him." The job started in the middle of June. While I sat with my coffee in the morning and began the day's work of puzzling out another couple of paragraphs on Goya, I would hear Mark running down the stairs on his way to work. After that, I would move to my desk to write, but for a couple of weeks I found myself distracted by thoughts of Teddy Giles and his work.

Before his show closed at the Finder Gallery at the end of May, I went to see it. Lola's description hadn't been off the mark. The show resembled the aftermath of a massacre. Nine bodies made of polyester resin and fiberglass layon the gallery floor, dismembered, ripped open, and decapitated. What appeared to be dried blood stained the floor. The instruments of the simulated torture were displayed on pedestals: a chain saw, several knives, and a gun. On the walls hung four huge photographs of Giles. In three he was performing. He wore a hockey mask in the first and held a machete. In the second he was in drag, dolled up in a blond Marilyn wig and evening gown. In the third, he sprayed his enema. The fourth photograph presumably showed Giles as "himself." He was sitting on a long blue sofa in ordinary clothes with a television remote control in his left hand. His right hand appeared to be massaging his crotch. He looked pale, calm, and not nearly as young as Mark had said he was. I would have guessed that Giles was at least thirty.

The show repulsed me, but I also found it bad. In the name of fairness, I had to ask myself why. Goya's painting of Saturn eating his son was just as violent. Giles used classic horror images presumably to comment on their role in the culture. The remote control was an obvious allusion to television and videos. Goya, too, borrowed from standard folk images of the supernatural that were immediately recognizable to anyone who saw his work, and they were also meant as social commentary. So why did Goya's work feel alive and Giles's dead? The medium was different. In Goya, I felt the physical presence of the painter's hand. Giles hired craftsmen to cast his bodies from live models and then fabricate them for him. And yet, I had admired other artists who had their work made for them. Goya was deep. Giles was shallow. But then sometimes shallowness is the point. Warhol had devoted himself to surfaces— to the empty veneers of culture. I didn't love Andy Warhol's work, but I could understand its interest.

The summer before my mother died, I'd traveled alone in Italy and made the journey in Piedmont to Varallo to see the
sacro
monte
and the chapels above the town. In the Chapel of the Massacre of the Innocents I saw the figures of weeping mothers and murdered babies with real hair and clothes, and their effect on me was
WRENCHING.
When I walked through the Finder Gallery and looked at Giles's polyurethane victims, I shuddered but felt little connection to them. It may have been partly due to the fact that the figures were hollow. There were a number of artificial organs, hearts, stomachs, kidneys, and gall bladders lying among the mess of bodies, but when you peered into a severed arm, there was nothing inside it.

Nevertheless, explaining Giles's art wasn't easy. When I read Hasseborg's article in
Blast,
I saw that he had taken the simple route—arguing that the act of moving horror images from the flat screen into the three dimensions of a gallery forced the viewer to rethink their meaning. Hasseborg ran at the mouth for several pages, his prose roiling with hyperbolic adjectives: "brilliant," "riveting," "astounding." He quoted Baudrillard, panted over Giles's shifting identities, and then in one long and final grandiloquent sentence, pronounced him "the artist of the future."

Henry Hasseborg also reported that Giles had been born in Baytown, Texas, not Virginia, as Mark had told me, and in Hasseborg's version of Giles's life, the artist's mother wasn't a prostitute but a hardworking waitress devoted to her son. Giles was quoted as saying, "My mother is my inspiration." As the weeks passed, I came to believe that although Hasseborg was right about the fact that Giles reproduced the gruesome images of horror flicks and cheap violent porn, he was wrong about their effect on the viewer—at least in my case. They criticized nothing and they revealed nothing. The work was simulacra excreted from the culture's bowels—sterile, commercial feces meant purely for titillation. And although I was biased against Hasseborg, I began to feel that he had fallen for Giles because the man's work was the visual embodiment of his own voice—that smirking, cynical, joyless tone he usually adopted in his articles about art and artists. Of course, Hasseborg wasn't alone. He had many compatriots who wrote just like him—although with less intelligence—other cultural journalists who had adopted the slick palaver of the moment. It's a language I've come to hate, because it admits no mystery and no ambiguity into its smug vocabulary, which arrogantly suggests that everything can be known.

Although I didn't judge Giles's work hastily, I did judge it, and Mark's attraction to those vacuous scenes of slaughter and to the man who had created them worried me. Every time Giles gave his birthplace and age, he said something different. Hasseborg wrote that Giles was twenty-eight No doubt Giles wanted to obsfucate his background, perhaps to create a mystique about himself, but his prevarications couldn't be good for Mark, who, at the very least, was in the habit of bending the truth too often.

Late one morning in early July, I ran into Mark on West Broadway. He was crouched on the sidewalk petting a cocker spaniel and talking to the animal's owner. He put his face close to the dog's snout and spoke to it in a low, friendly voice. When I greeted him, he jumped up and said, "Hi, Uncle Leo." Turning to the dog, he said, "Bye, Talulah." I asked him why he wasn't at work.

"Harry doesn't need me until noon today," he said. "I'm on my way there now."

As Mark and I walked down the street together, a young woman stuck her head out of a clothing store and waved at Mark. "Hi, Marky. What's up, honey?"

"Darien," Mark called back. He smiled sweetly at her, lifted a hand, and wiggled his fingers. The wave struck me as out of character, but when I looked over at Mark, he grinned broadly at me and said, "She's really nice."

Before we reached the end of the block, Mark was accosted again, this time by a younger boy. He came running from across the street, yelling, "The Mark!"

"The Mark?" I muttered aloud.

Mark turned to me and lifted his eyebrows as if to say, People will call you anything.

The boy ignored me. Breathing heavily from his run, he looked up at Mark. "It's me, Freddy. Remember? From Club USA?"

"Sure," Mark said. He sounded bored.

"There's this really cool photo show opening tonight around the corner. I thought you might like to go."

"Sorry," Mark said in the same laconic voice. "Can't."

I watched Freddy press his lips together in an unsuccessful attempt to hide his disappointment. Then he lifted his chin and smiled up at Mark "Another time, okay?"

"Sure, Freddy," Mark said.

Freddy ran back to the other side of the street, scooting within inches of a passing taxi. The driver pressed on the horn, and the noise blared in the street for two or three seconds.

As Mark watched Freddy's close call, he slouched on one hip and lowered his shoulders in a posture I supposed was meant to look nonchalant.

Then he turned to me, straightened his spine, and threw back his shoulders. When our eyes met, he must have seen a trace of confusion on my face, because he hesitated for half a second. "Gotta run, Uncle Leo. I don't want to be late for work."