Markers. Ants. Tectonics. X. & Pain. & Illness.

Example 14

Gregory had the main gallery wired a week before Elise started installing her paintings, his microphones strung and hidden above the bare rafters, us vacuuming up the dust Gregory knocked down while he climbed the ladders, saying, I won’t have one of you getting famous on my account, but he even crawled on the floors affixing the contact mics, and mudding the pickups of his own design into the walls themselves, all the cables and wires and wireless sound Gregory’s amalgamation of sensors picked and snatched from the air or culled from the walls and floors captured our conversations but also the whispers of the ceiling fans slow blurring, the scratchings of the mice at night and sounds we couldn’t identify, pressing Gregory’s headphones to our ears while Elise tapped her feet next to floor sensor seven making dull booms and Gregory said, OK, OK, and then he switched on the analog to digital converters which parsed each sound into a one or a zero and the hard drives spun in a separate dark room where we could go and watch our breaths puff even as outside Elise’s exhibit opened to the largest crowds we’ve ever had not even the July heat keeping people away and we mingled but had been ordered by Gregory to speak as little as possible but not too little which is harder than it seems and Elise’s paintings it turned out had a shelf life of one weekend as the four by eight foot paintings of heaps of broken toaster ovens rendered in crisp chrome brought out the heat in the viewers and the arguments became so common that we became experts at lowering our voices to create diffussions and though the day the show came down there was only us Elise was beaming and handed to all of us tickets to the water park from her prized collection of tickets from defunct amusements the water park having been shut down after years of decline with the final push into extinction being a pair of dolphins teaching an entire fifth grade class that birds and bees not only existed under water but at least half the duo had to be upside down and because I had been there I was the star of the pull down as we packed Elise’s work into crates except for the largest set of canvases, three paintings each ten by twenty feet and featuring cell phones from edge to edge and in a an unusual display of generosity Elise even let me have that story as I had held her waist as she had stretched out over the cat-walk while the cell phones were being shredded by a machine that wouldn’t even have hiccuped at us and she took the photographs she needed to work from and her series Phones Calling Home we handed off to the men from Nokia who had purchased the paintings to adorn their lobby and it wasn’t until the next month when it was Gregory’s turn and he had installed speakers where the paintings had been and speakers above the water fountains and speakers at floor level and speakers above below and beside the refreshments cart that we realized he had never stopped recording and was even recording as his exhibit opened and the people moved through it whispering listening to what was said about Elise’s work, about each other and because it’s a small town they heard what words were about them and how few words were about them and they were hungry to find any mention of themselves and because of the feedback loops even as they whispered their words were added to the mix and at the last blank on the wall where Elise’s final canvas had been they stopped and said, That’s not all? and, Is there nothing else? and Wait, listen, I think that’s me, and from where I stood in the corner I could watch Gregory watch them reaching out with their hands as they spoke, their hands hovering over the wall while all about them Gregory said in his low voice, Don’t touch.

Example 16 : The Repeated Meals

Simon trained us so it was of some surprise when he was the one who tripped me on the order of sole by asking for salmon instead when he damn well knew there wasn’t any salmon or white fish or tuna or catfish for that matter because each dinner on the menu had been planned down to the ounce, half ounce, eighth, sixteenth of all the ingredients from the steak platter with nine point seven five ounces of potatoes and half a pound of filet mignon seasoned with thirteen grains of sea salt and tenderized for four hours and hell it doesn’t really matter the point is that each of the twelve meals was all planned out and not like at a normal restaurant because we were in the Museum in Simon’s constructed rooms that together constituted his latest installation work where we all were trained to repeat our motions and words and to lay out the silverware with the same gentle motions of our arms and the perfect half bend to our knees, in particular, my knees had come under quite some scrutiny from Simon because I’m taller than the other waiter, Melissa, by nearly a foot, and Simon had me bending at the waist and flexing at the knees to lower myself to precisely six inches above Melissa’s as I bent to take the orders and for six days Simon had been eating in the gallery three meals a day with a different critic or friend each day each meal and things had been going splendidly as at night we sat around after the restaurant closed and counted the grains of salt in the shakers so that Simon could pour them on his hand for the critic from his favorite art blog and pulling a small scale from his pocket he told the critic there would be two point three eight grams of salt and there was and then he licked all of it off his hand and together they laughed while Simon told the critic that Gregory, the chef, always salted each dish to perfection and Simon had to destroy perfection and so he made sure to ruin his palate before each meal and the critic got a kick out of that and the quote led the review on the site and Simon seemed very happy and we were all looking forward to the closing meals and it was in the middle of the day when the artificial sun was burning through the rose windows and forming the perfect rhomboid of light on the carpet and I had watched the light crawl through its shapes for the week we had been open and the thirty days of rehearsal mapping itself exactly the same each moment and I was clueless when I came by the table and smiled at Simon and asked what he would like for dinner and Melissa poured the water and the critic from the big glossy magazine showed his teeth and sucked his lips and peered at his own menu while Simon closed his and said to me, I’d really like the fish tonight, but ask Gregory to forget the sole and let’s have salmon, OK? and then he had slapped me on the butt and Melissa had dropped a glass which didn’t shatter on the thick carpet but thumped its ice and water the water darkening to black as it seeped into the carpet and the critic had turned to me and said, you know, that sounds good, me too, please.

Example : The Pedestals.

I found Cynthia next to Pedestal 3 its pure black side scarred showing where she had had to force it open they weren’t meant to be opened once it had started she says when she sees me looking at the scar but I tell her it’ll give the rest of them something to talk about and she smiles the smile that shows none of her teeth but her right incisor and I’ve been wondering if I’m in love with her or with her single tooth that shows against her delicate lower lip and then Pedestal One’s answering machine clicks and its outgoing message echoes through the gallery with Cynthia’s voice asking who am I why am I here and please leave a message after the beep which is followed by a pause and then Cynthia’s voice leaving a message though she isn’t she’s sitting right beside me her voice computerized sampled phrased and imitated asking about Pedestal 3 the one open to Cynthia with all of its motherboard innards spread on the floor around her the message ends with worry for Pedestal 3 and how sad it is that it hasn’t been heard from and then the ticker tape machine on Pedestal 7 at the far end of the room starts to rattle out a strip of punch marks its staccato racket tapping against the concrete walls at which point all of the answering machines trip and whir and rewind and Cynthia drops the circuit board and gets up and I walk to Pedestal Two where I can hear Cynthia’s voice asking who am I why am I here what is this place am I dead and please leave a message at the sound of the tone and then the reply asking about the ticker tape I don’t understand it I wish it would talk plain I wish it would talk sense the answering machines are the extinct kind with cassette tapes and under each answering machine the pedestal’s top is an lcd screen showing Cynthia’s face though averaged through different points in her life with her at twelve at five as a baby and aged through special software for missing people to look how she will look at fifty at seventy five at a hundred and twenty so each pedestal is its Cynthia and the clack of the cassettes and their rewinding stops and all the Cynthias wind down and there’s Cynthia with the master switch in her hand they’re driving me crazy she says and I say I could see why though for me I walk into a room full of the woman I love and my love a secret and I can stand over each machine and whisper love and know that it hears me and in its deep pattern recognition it hears the word love and I’ve heard them talking this word calling each other repeating it asking what it is and how can they get it and can love please do something about that ticking machine that won’t shut up and Cynthia pats its glass enclosed machinery chiming the globe with one thump of her finger and inside its gears still spin their momentum slowing its reels of tape and gears that mesh and she says they all hate The Ticker especially me number 3 and I can’t figure out why there’s nothing special about me 3 which is the one averaged with her face as she was only a couple of months ago so it’s the closest to how she is now and I have no idea why it would choose to misbehave out of all them the one closest to the creator the one least willing to obey.

You walk into the gallery well it isn’t so much a gallery as a warehouse and you walk down and back past the sorts of machines that made huge things or little things by the thousands though now the machines hulk silent bulked at their joints with grease thickened into porridge and the ground traced by ants but we’re all game and have come to expect this sort of place from Aaron who doesn’t seem comfortable in the main space down-town and zoning laws and the health department always seem to get in his way but in the basement of the warehouse he had removed the bricks from a back wall of the deepest room and instead dammed the earth with glass and behind the glass he had his slice of person built from the medical school body dressed by this mortician he knows in a suit and coffin donated by the Crisper Casket Company and Aaron won’t tell us how he cut a slice out of the middle of the coffin from foot to head and it’s that slice pressed against the glass in the basement of the empty warehouse and as he says nature takes over during the month the show has been up and the ants and grubs and even the worms that Aaron wishes he could keep out being so cliché pick  and chew their way into the coffin and remove the slice of corpse one mouthful at a time while we press our ears to the glass hearing the shifting of the dirt and the tap tapping of ant claws.

Arlene found out about Eric and Jean at the opening for the San Francisco Alternative Art League And Co-Operative Functions function where we all had to have our best foot forward because our funded lives depended on those fuckheads from the S.F.A.A.L.C.O.F who had to approve our designs and initiatives and concepts and actuality and reason for existing and so we were under a dungeon’s load of pressure and because Arlene was our star she went last with all of us gathered in the room that she shared with Eric that was too tiny for all of us to press into but she said that it was essential and we rolled our eyes but without her we’d have been out on the street because she was as high profile as a tree-sitter and so we pressed sweating into her room and she shut off the lights and turned on the ultra-violets she had borrowed from the San Francisco Police Department’s photography lab and there were these tracks glowing dots up the walls and over the ceilings and through the sheet and blankets of the twin bed she and Eric slept in and Arlene said that for weeks she had put a line of finely crushed vitamins at the edges of her room for the cockroaches to stumble through and track fluorescent paths criss-crossesed brilliant over and about and Arlene lifted her arm and on her own skin were the marks from the tiny feet and we all looked at Eric and he was lit too and as we followed the glittering paths we noticed Jean speckled trying to cover herself by crossing her arms over her chest but then Eric went to her and put his arms around her and Arlene sparked alone while Eric and Jean were matched as roads leaping creases on folded maps.

Before Eric Arlene dated Bobby who had lost one grant after he burned his list but he was sure his eyes were changing color and got a new grant to document the hue shift so he built a special light balanced photo booth and used a calibrated digital camera made for medical and police work that dated and stamped and encrypted with anti-tamper algorithms the data so that he could prove the captured image of his iris was secure on the way to the color corrected computer monitors and printers run with pigmented ink bought all of one batch so as to be consistent from print to print to last for the entire year of pictures of his left eye-ball and it was all going better than the list had and was much quieter and Bobby had lots of free time to clean up around the warehouse and even learned to cook a few dishes not based on pasta and he found a gallery willing to house the prints so as he finished each one it went up with the proper lights voltage monitored and filtered and he had nearly three month’s worth of prints when he started vomiting blood and went to the doctor and learned that he was going to die and that’s when the arguments started between him and Arlene because he wanted to donate his eyes to her and have the left one placed in a fridge with a see through eye-ball sized door so that she could finish the series and then he could’ve completed at least one thing in his life and her screaming there are so many things wrong with that statement and he begged her and vomited and meanwhile kept up the pictures and I’d drop by the gallery on my way to the yogurt store and then Bobby died and was cremated with both of his eyes and the gallery hosted his wake where we didn’t look at the months of one eye but at all of the wall’s white space.

Bobby told me that while we were in school he knocked a girl up but where he found the time I don’t know because he was writing his list on his Royal manual typewriter one word carriage return another word carriage return pages of what Bobby referred to as related with what Bobby referred to as a happening with what Bobby referred to as a constant living goddamn performance always typing so you could only get him to take a break when he’d written eleven pages of ‘hungry’ so sure he was thin in those days but I’ve always had a thing for guys with jutting hip bones and it must’ve been that time I got pissed that he wouldn’t quit his list even after he’d learned about this Dennis guy in Chicago who’d been doing the same thing only with an Underwood and was already up to sixty thousand pages with no repeated words and so I’d suggested to Bobby that maybe the list had already been done and he got real pissy and I ended up for a week at Joan’s sleeping on her couch blissed without the constant clack of the typewriter and that must’ve been when he snuck off and nailed some whore and by the time I came back he had been burning his list for days videotaping the black smoke rising into the sky burning every page even though Bobby claimed his list was more honest than that Dennis’s list because of how Dennis’s list didn’t repeat and what kind of honest list didn’t repeat but Bobby’d been stuck on the word pan for nearly thirty pages and so I figured he was burning his list as a failure but maybe it was guilt or because he somehow knew that he was going to be a father and he didn’t want to be known as the second list guy.

Dante was lying in his room when the police arrived as one of the viewers had called for help after she had watched his head wrapped in the sheet and convinced herself that he was not breathing and why weren’t all these people doing something and she was going to be the one to save the day with her cell phone pressed to her ear giving directions to the 911 operator having to scream because the hiss from the speakers were blanketing us in white noise that a couple of cops broke through when they cracked open the room and found Dante tangled with his sheet wrapped around his head not moving until a cop shook him while the partner looked around the empty room and its one camera aimed at Dante and then at us when Dante yawned and asked what all of the fuss was about so we weren’t guilty of manslaughter that night but got a good talking to by the cops on the nature of art and why video art had been so done and how could we be risking a man’s life in such a cliché manner until his shoulder mic spoke and they left muttering and when we tried to find the woman who had called nobody would confess and then it was over and everything was empty the room and the viewing room and the hallways and I followed Dante to his studio upstairs where he showed me what he had recorded of us watching him sleeping and he paused the tape at the moment when we were peering through the broken door the cops leading the way but all frozen and Dante said that he was familiar with doorways because that was where he used to stand when his daughter was young because she had developed a habit of sleeping with the sheet over her head after they had gone to see a space movie and she had wanted to know what a shield was as the captain had kept asking for shields dammit and ever after pretended that her sheets were shields and covered herself saying goodnight to her father with shields up and then covering her head and Dante couldn’t help but stop on his own way to bed and stand in her doorway straining to see her small face under her shielding and tracing the outline of her lips to make sure that the cloth moved with her breath losing track of himself waiting for that shift of air in and then out.

Alex had been calling the major logging companies trying to find out who was logging in the rain forests explaining that he was an artist at which point they hung up on him figuring him for some damn tree hugging freak as Alex put it but he was trying to sell them on an idea that he figured if they would listen to him for a freaking second would make a good thing for all of them because Alex wanted the companies to cut into the forest canopy the face of a buyer or the logo of a company so large that satellites photographs would show their brands or the richest faces cut into the raw wood and then being torn down tree by log and one day while on hold with Bayer’s aspirin division Alex set the phone down and turned to me and said you know now that I think about it there might be more irony there than I had realized.