Wrack and Ruin

by Don Lee

  “I have a confession to make of my own,” Laura Díaz-McClatchey said.

  “You do?” Lyndon asked. He ran through several incarnations with which this confession might present itself—all salacious.

  But he had to wait. Their food finally came, two waitresses bringing out all of their backed-up orders at once, the grilled asparagus and eggplant, yakitori, the duck breast marinated in sake, tempura, braised short ribs with daikon, fried softshell crabs, soba salad, gyoza, marinated mackerel, steamed egg custard, ohitashi, and potato croquettes. There wasn’t enough room on the table for everything, the rims of plates stacked on top of one another. Looking at the spread in totality, they realized they’d ordered way too much food. Still, they dug in, welcoming the respite.

  They ate and ate, drank more beer and sake, and skipped from one inconsequential subject to another in a free-flowing manner, loose enough now that Lyndon had nearly forgotten about her confession until she said, “So, the thing I wanted to tell you…”

  “Let me guess: you’re an ex-con?” he joked. A bad joke. He was bad at jokes.

  “What?”

  “You said you did a bad thing before.”

  “Oh,” she said. “No, no time in the big house, but another type of purgatory. This is related to what I want to tell you.” She hesitated, playing with her chopsticks.

  “Don’t stop now,” he said. “You have my undivided attention.”

  She laid the chopsticks down on the table, squeezed them together so they were parallel, and looked up at Lyndon. “I know who you are,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I know you were Lyndon Song the sculptor.”

  Lyndon grimaced. Things had been going so nicely. He had actually begun to enjoy himself, and he’d been entertaining the possibility that something might happen with Laura Díaz-McClatchey, that he might indeed move on. “What did you do, Google me?” he asked testily. There really was too much information on the Internet. He had always expected Sheila or Hana to do a search on him and discover the truth about his artistic career, at which point he would have been willing to divulge all the sordid details, but they never had.

  “As a matter of fact, I did,” Laura said, “but only to refresh my memory. You see, I’m a curator. Or, rather, I was a curator, at MoCA in San Francisco.” She leaned across the table and, faux-confidentially, whispered, “I got fired earlier this year.”

  “Why were you fired?”

  “It’s a long, convoluted story,” she said, “uninteresting to anyone but me.”

  “The short version.”

  “All righty,” Laura said. “I was having an affair with a dealer, which was really no big deal, everyone in the art world, as you know, sleeps with everyone else. But I acquired some of his artists’ works at maybe a tad higher than market price, which, again, was more a failure of judgment than anything else, maybe a tiny conflict of interest, not a huge amount of money, though. But what I didn’t know was that my boss at MoCA, the executive director, with whom I’d never seen eye to eye on the collections, had also had an affair with said dealer not too long ago, and he was still pissed about the way it’d ended, and he saw this as a great opportunity to exact his revenge on the dealer and get rid of me at the same time, so he talked the board into letting me go. You see, nothing very dramatic. But it’s not so easy to get hired by another museum when you have the taint of impropriety on you.”

  “So that’s why you’re now giving massages in Rosarita Bay.”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you in love with him?” Lyndon asked.

  “Said dealer? Oh, I don’t know. I thought I was.”

  “What about him? Did he love you?”

  “Or was he just using me? I keep asking myself the same thing, though I shouldn’t be so naïve.”

  “You’re no longer involved.”

  “It’s funny how that’s worked out, now that you mention it, how he hasn’t called since I moved down here.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She wagged her head as if to say no matter, but obviously it did. “What about you?” she asked. “Why did you leave New York? Why did you quit?”

  He sighed. “Long, convoluted story, uninteresting to everyone, including me.”

  “You were a star,” Laura said. “The first Asian American to be included in the Whitney Biennial. Arts in America called you the discovery of the decade. You weren’t even thirty!”

  “Ancient history,” Lyndon said.

  “That’s what I mean. You walked away at the height of your fame. You just vanished, and now you’re barely a footnote in art history texts. You were on your way to becoming a major figure in late-twentieth-century art. Why in the world did you give that up?”

  He didn’t want to talk about it. He hadn’t, in fact, ever talked about it since coming to Rosarita Bay, and now he felt he’d lost the capacity to explain it, the reasons ill-defined and hazy to him. An unexamined life was a life easily forgotten. Everything in New York had happened within the space of four years, from his arrival to his departure, from bleak obscurity to head-of-the-line celebrity. Blink, and it was gone, another life, or someone else’s life, a pothead’s woozy recollections that could be, in fact, erroneous, an elaborate web of synaptic constructs that was largely fabricated.

  He had gotten jobs as a bartender and as a welder in a machine shop and rented a loft on the border of Chinatown and the Lower East Side, no running hot water, a single space heater that was so anemic, he had to wear a coat and half-fingered gloves while he worked during the winter. The East Village was the hot spot then, Jeff Koons and Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, everything about spontaneity, post-abstract abstraction in the form of performance art, video art, graffiti art, appropriation art, street art. Homespun, raw, wild, often silly, they showed their work in makeshift storefront galleries, not caring about buyers or portfolios or reviews, reveling in the pure joy of creation. Was it good art? Maybe, maybe not, but who gave a shit? They just went with it, the more outrageous and absurd the better.

  It lasted about five minutes. If there was money to be made, the high-profile SoHo galleries were willing to ditch the Neo-Expressionists of the day and poach on the East Village. And there was plenty of money to go around. Auctions were fetching record prices. Wall Street was booming, and all those profits from leveraged buyouts had to go somewhere.

  At first, Lyndon was welding together pieces from scraps he’d found in junkyards or pilfered from construction sites: manhole covers, rebar, pipes, metal grates, industrial fans, stadium lights, exhaust vents. He’d amass the sculptures on the floor and walk around them, and while he thought the essential structure was almost there, the scale and perspective wouldn’t feel right. He wanted to get beyond the junk aesthetic and animate his sculptures, disorient them. He puzzled over it for months, dissatisfied, and then got an idea. He remembered the Korean screens his parents had at home, folding panels made of rice paper and silk layered over wood latticework, depicting a continuous landscape of lotus blossoms, fish, and birds. He made frames of steel and iron, cut his sculptures apart, positioned them onto the frames, and hung them upright as wall reliefs, sectioned into polyptychs. Then he sandblasted and oxidized the surfaces with hydrochloric acid to get a rich texture of rust, with hues of reds, browns, orange, and black. Afterward, he applied a hot patina, heating the metal with a torch, spraying on a nitrate solution, brushing on a thick coat of wax while the metal was still warm, and putting on a clear protective coating to deepen the subtle shades of blues and greens.

  This is it, this is it, he thought. He had found his medium, his process. He stayed in his loft for days at a time, not sleeping, forgetting to eat, his clothes dotted with burn holes, his head swimming from the fumes. All he wanted to do was work.

  In due course, he was plucked up by Alvin Zukof, a SoHo gallery owner who was a kingmaker. First a group show, and then a solo show, and then Lyndon had exhibitions in Zurich, London, Tokyo, Venice, and São
Paulo.

  He was mortified by his quick ascension. He liked that his work was being recognized, and he sort of liked the money—it was ludicrous, how much money he was making—and for a while he liked the women, but he hadn’t anticipated that he would have to talk to people so much, that he would have to attend openings and glad-hand buyers and schmooze critics, that he’d have to go to parties and clubs and act interested in other people’s lives, that everything he said and did or didn’t say or do would be noted and disseminated and almost always misinterpreted and politicized, for there was, right from the start, a perplexing tenor to the reception of his work.

  He didn’t title any of his sculptures, but Alvin Zukof insisted on having titles. “It’s boring, as well as impractical, to title everything Untitled!” he said. Not much older than Lyndon, Alvin was an heir to a Pittsburgh steel magnate. He was a bit of a dandy—custom-tailored hipster suits with narrow lapels and trousers, always accented with a silk breast-pocket kerchief—and he liked to wear his hair long, swept back regally from his veiny temples. He had a fondness for cocaine and Dom Pérignon and young men, usually in combination. An intellectual jokester, with degrees in physics and literary theory from Yale, he convinced Lyndon to let him devise the titles of the sculptures for him—pseudo-postmodern, ironic nonsense titles: Toward a Generic Theory of Small-World Estimation. Contemporary Uses in Finite Paramimetic Infirmity. Endoplasmic Necrophagia in Omniphallic Cacophony. The exhibition catalogues adopted the same mock-serious tone, Alvin composing pretentious, incomprehensible treatises about spatial dissonance, dystopian visions, entropic associations, and Bataille’s concept of the informe, about subverting symbols of technology in order to probe the nature of seeing and perception and deliver a scathing indictment of the military-industrial complex.

  Yet, in their reviews, art critics latched on to an entirely different subtext, one that baffled Lyndon. With a wall relief he had crisscrossed with I-beams and barbed wire, they saw a reference to hedgehogs—tank obstacles—similar to those in the DMZ between North and South Korea, and talked about connotations of divided homelands and crossing borders. With a wall relief incorporating an aluminum boat he’d dissected into strips, thin as spaghetti, they saw a reference to Marco Polo’s voyage to the Orient and his fallacious claim to have introduced noodles to the Chinese, and talked about issues of migration and cultural appropriation. With a wall relief he’d studded with thousands of intricate projections of rods and wires, like twisted tree branches, they saw a reference to elk antlers and the Korean custom of ingesting powdered antlers as an aphrodisiac, and talked about stereotypes that belittled the virility of Asian men.

  And the interviews—they kept asking Lyndon about ethnicity and identity, about assimilation and diaspora, about racism and post-colonialism. Apparently he was not an artist. He was an Asian-American artist. Nearly every article had some sort of cutesy analogy to chopsticks or kimchi or the melting pot.

  People—journalists, collectors, patrons—felt they had license to ask Lyndon any question about his personal life, and they were usually the most inane, ignorant questions.

  “How’d you learn to speak English so well?” they would ask.

  “Well, actually, you know, I was born and raised in California.”

  “You seem so Americanized.”

  “Well, actually, you know, that’s probably because I’m an American.”

  As condescending and stupid and racist as these people were, Lyndon was assiduously polite and patient with them. He didn’t reveal that he was annoyed or hurt or angry. He pretended to be grateful. Grateful for the attention. And, as a result, he felt like a whore.

  A new series of sculptures proved to be even more problematic. These wall reliefs were of the same scale as the previous work, finished with the same process, but instead of jutting projections of steel or found objects, they presented mashed-together, warped prisms and polyhedrons made from wire mesh—a quasi-extension of Cubist constructivism. As geometrical as they were, the sculptures were unsettling for their asymmetry, the angles and planes somehow distorted and surreal, the vertices seeming to move as you surveyed them, the perception of depth eerily unfixed. The material with which they were made appeared dimensionally unstable, the permeability of the wire mesh contributing to a shimmering spatial fragility. Examined closer, the rusty, patinaed mesh ended up to be a pointillistic trick. The wire mesh wasn’t wire mesh. It was, actually, a linkage of thousands of tiny ideograms that looked like Chinese characters, each one delicately bent by hand with scroll benders and homemade jigs and then welded together. The catch—and the root of the subsequent controversy—was that Lyndon did not know Chinese, so he had made the characters up. They looked authentic, but they were meaningless.

  The critics saw references to origami and takeout boxes and Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and talked about the inutility of culture, the mutability of language, the disarticulation of syntax, the metaphysical cages of silence and paradox, the unraveling and erasure of signifiers, the ossification of repressive symbology.

  This time, though, there was an additional source of criticism, quite vociferous, and it came from other Asian Americans. They accused Lyndon of exploiting his ethnicity, of being a phony, of falsely exoticizing his work in order to cash in. At the same time, somewhat contradictorily, they condemned him for not challenging the media’s narrow categorization of his sculptures and life as “Asian American,” for willingly ghettoizing himself.

  “How’s it feel to be the Uncle Tong of the art world?” he was asked.

  He started hearing things over the grapevine, things other artists—white artists—were saying, the consensus being that his accomplishments were directly and solely attributable to multiculturalism, the largesse of political correctness. He was, they were saying, merely the color of the month.

  And then everyone really turned against him. For his next show, he abandoned the wall reliefs and hung his sculptures from the ceiling with filaments like kinetic mobiles, a phantasmagoria of birds and fish and crustaceans hovering in the air, appearing to be flying or swimming by, all the animals—constructed with fine interweaved strands of bent wire—bulbous and garish-looking, as if mutated. The animals were an abstract écorché, horrifying, really, his usual acid treatment making the animals look like they had been skinned and eviscerated, tendons and muscles exposed, yet they were, at least to some people, also unexpectedly beautiful. Lyndon had taken a vacation to Belize and gone kayaking for the first time, and he had been fascinated by the laughing gulls and red-footed boobies as he’d paddled into mangrove coves, by the fish bending and flicking with the current, the bright green and pink coral and sea grass and sponges and turtles he’d glimpsed through the clear blue water.

  Alvin, undeterred in his penchant for pedantic wisecracking, named the new show “Certain Epistemological Issues of Bestial Perversion,” and in the catalogue quoted Foucault’s introduction to The Order of Things, in which Foucault described how all of his familiar landmarks of thought, “all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things” and distinguish “between the Same and the Other,” had been annihilated when reading about Borges’s discovery of an ancient method of taxonomy in a Chinese encyclopedia called the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, which delineated fourteen different types of animals:

  those belonging to the Emperor,

  embalmed ones,

  those that are trained,

  suckling pigs,

  mermaids,

  fabulous ones,

  stray dogs,

  those included in the present classification,

  those that tremble as if they are mad,

  innumerable ones,

  those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,

  et cetera,

  those that have just broken a flower vase,

  those that from a long way off look like flies.

  The critics were not amused. They di
smissed the sculptures as kitsch. They had the substance of tchotchkes, they said, if that. They were unmitigated trash. They were equivalent to taxidermy, belonging in the American Museum of Natural History (which happened to be Lyndon’s favorite museum in New York).

  He got shellacked by the Asian-American pundits as well, this time for not including any discernible Asian references in the mobiles, regardless of what the catalogue was trying to appropriate. They rebuked him for trying to deny his cultural heritage and whitewashing himself. For being, in short, a Twinkie.

  It was a disaster, the show, and Lyndon could sense the disappointment in the collectors who had heretofore been devoted to him, his peers, his friends. “I saw your show,” they’d say when he ran into them on the street or in a store, and Lyndon would wait inquiringly. “It’s good,” they’d say tersely, eschewing further comment, and it’d be clear they thought nothing of the sort. They were embarrassed for him. They were thinking: the old stuff was better; he’d lost it; he was a has-been.

  Alvin tried to be encouraging. “Listen,” he said, “it’s all a wink and a nod, and if they’re too dense to get the joke, fuck ’em!”

  But that was the troubling part. It hadn’t been a joke, and Lyndon began to doubt himself. Sometimes he fumed about the stupidity of these critics, who were, let’s face it, all failed artists themselves, bitter they couldn’t cut it as painters or sculptors or whatever, and now they were consumed with schadenfreude, and they couldn’t write worth a damn, anyway, their reviews hackneyed and facile. But more often than not, Lyndon wondered if maybe they were right. Maybe he was a fraud. Maybe he didn’t have any talent.