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.
