by Ben Marcus
One commends the level of detail in this realistic hospital. Even the most advanced scrutiny did not reveal rigging. Blood tended to be housed inside puppets, who, in a surprising touch, were represented by actual people, pulled into the space and dosed with purpose. Traces of bone were found in the air, a dust misting over the island. The use of bone in such a way felt far too obvious, almost embarrassing. In other words, this spectacle was supposed to seem like it was taking place right now, in our own world. A full set of chemical tests were not conducted, but one felt, after witnessing the hospital and the elaborately created area around it, a strenuous petition to exist, as forceful as any area anywhere, ever.
Part of the suspense, in participating in this hospital and its surroundings, involved the mystery of who would do what and what would happen. The hospital neither increased nor decreased one’s curiosity. If mood alteration was at work, or indeed any manipulation of emotion, it was being done environmentally.
The buildings behind the hospital, in an interesting touch, were real. In the distance beyond the island loomed another island, attached to a skyline of actual buildings, many of which must have taken years to erect, and beyond that, a vague landscape was inferred, a possible continent, as if this was all taking place in a kind of world. Even different weather erupted in these other areas. A tremendous amount of care was taken to create details in the very far distance beyond the hospital, as if the materials elsewhere, in a space that was days away on foot—not that we could ever travel there—were just as important as the materials right in front of us. One heard reports of people perishing hundreds of miles away. Real people were born and lived out their lives never hearing of the hospital. Even the waterway bordering the island was fabricated with real water. Such a democratic approach to detail is troubling. It amounts to a celebration of technique, suggesting a creator slightly too satisfied by method, showcasing a skill, as if the making of something mattered more than that thing’s purpose.
Is not real water a dull choice here? Water, perhaps the most overused substance of our time. And so much of it. Actual water even at the greatest of depths, surrounding the island, running under it. It is not clear who is meant to appreciate such effects, or why, more importantly, a valuable resource is made so glaringly inaccessible. One senses a kind of hostility in the gesture. A taunt.
Even after we have gotten the point, the point keeps getting made.
The hospital staged a series of exhibits, punctuated by intervals called the workday, evening time, the shadow, and a fourth category of time that would seem to have never been named. Night and day occurred on schedule, but something felt wrong, as if the whole notion of time had simply been given too little attention in the first place, unless its very design was meant to cause deep ambivalence and dismay.
At the hospital, for instance, the day might feel too long, the night too short, or the night was too long, followed by a series of short, secondary nights and then a sudden flash of day, which seemed to never end. People expired at a steady rate, regardless of the time, but for some reason, one could not hear little popping noises each time someone died. It would have been so easy to implement such an effect, a little popping noise when someone died, so that to live and to sleep and walk the earth would be to listen to a steady stream of popping noises, marking death in the vicinity.
Sometimes at the hospital, just when night would seem to have expired, night continued to deepen instead, achieving levels of darkness heretofore thought impossible, with the hospital presumably hidden inside this purely dark fold, operating as usual, even while night kept bursting deeper, with people now expiring at an accelerated rate, faster than they were being born. An accurate measurement of the true passage of time could not be obtained. The fourth interval was determined to go unnamed. The people, too, if that’s what they really were—a definitive test was impossible—would be unnamed. That whole part of the world could feel likewise unnamed. On a map the area would be blurry, never quite coming into focus.
It is hard to escape the feeling that this is a weakness of the project, no matter how profoundly ambitious it is to create a world, build things in it, and then allow life to bloom. It is a clear weakness to create an erratic, confusing experience out of time, to give each creature an apparently unique perception of time, and then to make time itself inconsistent, poorly designed, and finally simply too hard to believe. An unfortunate weakness in an otherwise intriguing project.
Moving inside, the hospital featured people bent over each other in postures of carnage. These exhibits did not expire, which makes it awkward to comment on them now. One must believe that nothing of interest will ever happen again in order to declare anything of substance now. The trick behind work like this is how foolish it makes you feel for trying to observe anything about it. To be invited to the exhibit, you had first to fall ill, then be carried there in an ambulance. Or you needed to apply for a job and then actually perform it, which guaranteed a bias that prevented lucid reflection on the hospital itself. To join the exhibit was to recuse yourself from a rational state. This would explain the long lines, the carefully constructed illness narratives, the displays of frailty. It is perhaps no accident that leaving one’s home is also called “joining the exhibit.”
Attention to detail on the island was staggering. An actual landscaping firm had been hired to produce what was probably considered actual landscaping. Grass and pavers, shrubbery patterned after a shield. From high above, the topography achieved a devastating insignia, most awful to behold, but no one was privileged to this view. As with many buildings, something unbearable was inferred. You didn’t need to see or even know about it. It was inferred, and that was certain.
The streets surrounding the hospital, themselves authentic in materials, were given actual names, and the names were ratified through constant use. Advanced surveillance revealed significant adoption of the streets, with a troubling degree of realism. Pedestrians questioned there showed no sign that they were aware of being part of the exhibit. In some ways, these pedestrians were perhaps the exhibit’s most striking feature, a clear sign of the new kind of work being done today. Certainly a trend can be observed in which the civilian members of an exhibit insist that they have arrived under their own power, pursuing tasks they are sure they thought of themselves. Very few of these civilians seem aware of their true purpose. Dissection revealed otherwise, of course. Dissection revealed a clear program carried out at what can only be called the cellular level.
Testing revealed that the inhabitants of the island came from all over the world. They had been born into different families, grown with food, sometimes managed by handlers, other times left alone. Some of them actually existed. No real pattern in their origins could be detected.
The doors to the hospital operate just as one imagines real doors should. Inside, a series of smaller exhibits takes shape as you approach them, then vanishes from view when you turn your back. This effect—objects vanishing if you are not looking at them—is ingenuous, and so easy to take for granted.
In one piece, set inside an authentic-looking room, a man in a doctor’s costume approaches the sickbed. This is not a painting. The man seems made of a soft, fleshy substance. You have this feeling, looking at him, of wanting to touch him, but not romantically. Actual vocal noises emerge from this piece. Heaps of cloth surround the sickbed, faces buried inside. These are ostensibly the loved ones of the patient, collapsed in postures, one must guess, of grief. The cloth would appear to be real cloth. It’s uncanny. Even the bed seems fabricated of actual material: steel, plastic, and cotton. One is impressed by the trouble such fealty must have taken. The hospital makes a mockery of convincingness. The hospital achieves believability so easily, with such facility, it seems to suggest that believability is a terrible criterion for our daily lives, one we would do well discarding, and yet everywhere throughout the hospital believability seems to be what matters most. Perhap
s the hospital satirizes the idea of being alive. Certainly there is a critique, in this piece, of waking up, of bothering to live.
So much of the piece is well made, not in the classical sense, but in the brutal, violent sense. It looks as if it was made by skilled craftspeople at gunpoint. The hospital looks like it was built at gunpoint. The people inside the hospital look as if they were born at gunpoint. The hospital looks as though it was positioned on the island at gunpoint. Even the island, when one examines its undercarriage, when one swims its circumference, seems to have been assembled, piece by piece, at gunpoint, dropped from the sky at gunpoint, made to decay just as real things decay, at gunpoint. One looks at such a hospital at gunpoint, then one walks away at gunpoint, travels home and goes to bed at gunpoint, only to wake up years later with the same awful gun held to one’s head.
The hospital is deliberately made to outlast us, to still be standing when we’re gone. There is a clear critique of the ephemerality of people, the way they reliably perish. The hospital would seem to gloat; not in the personified sense. Can a piece like this be faulted for its desire to feel more lifelike than we do? One pleasing feature of the piece is that you can reach into the space surrounding the bed. You cannot touch the bed itself, for some reason. The bed is off-limits. But you can handle the space around the bed, digging your fingers into the cloth where the patient’s loved ones are hiding their faces. With practice and focus, you can feel the faces inside the cloth, and they seem to actually respond to your touch. One has one’s hand kissed. One feels tears against one’s palm.
Years later, as the piece ages, the room and the bed and the cloth are gone. We do not see them removed, they never appear to decay. But they do not survive the passage of time. What remains of the piece are the lifelike bodies—living bodies, one surmises—hovering in space. The floor is gone. What remains of the hospital is too little to remark on. It would seem that the entire hospital has been removed with surgical precision. The area where the hospital was is brighter than what surrounds it, as if a piece of furniture has been moved across a wood floor, exposing an unlived area just waiting to catch up to the rest of the world.
In the piece, the man who once wore the doctor’s costume but is now incomplete (“naked” would seem to be the wrong word, since he lacks finer detail) approaches the patient who, years ago, because of his bedclothes, was not visible whatsoever. Now we can see him and the effect is terrible. The patient’s loved ones, no longer hidden in cloth, but not naked either—unborn is how they also seem, their mouths unfinished, their hair not quite resolved—exist in a tangle on the side of the patient’s bed. The hospital and its host island are gone. The nearby island, tethered to a possible continent, is gone, and the extreme distance yields nothing to the observer. All that remains are the few people in what was once a room but is now nothing, even as these people begin to fade and soon leave just pale shapes, themselves dissolving slowly into nothing that can be named.
The hospital recalls a time when the entire world was referred to as Potter’s Island. A certain era is evoked when we lived on the graveyard. The hospital suggests that it is a myth that there are zones of earth in which bodies are not buried. It is a myth that some areas of the world are graveyards while some are not. One might accidentally, and infrequently, walk across a plot of earth in which, upon which, people have not been smeared away, hidden in soil once their time finished, but the chances are small. The chances may be nonexistent. The dead are beneath us, but the air contains the dead as well.
One strains not to be too judgmental of such work. While the project is ambitious, it is deeply imperfect. It celebrates the sorrow of knowing nothing. It revels in bafflement. It asks us to admit that we might not really be living. It seems to invite us to die without understanding even the most basic principles.
Perhaps we might be more sympathetic to the creator. Water is so hard to get right. It is difficult to do shorelines. The horizon is next to impossible. Horizons have never been done well. They cannot be forced, but so often they are forced, and then they are disgraceful. Hospitals are tricky, but not just hospitals. The people in them. The people outside them. People, in or out of buildings, on the ground, floating, at rest. People conjoined, people alone. Such a disgrace when they are not done right and they have never been done right. They are done badly, all the time, and then soon that is simply the way people are always done—with bodies and eyes, with feelings, so finally conventional, so deeply unimaginative—and something disgraceful becomes the norm. The norm is the hospital. The norm is people on their beds, having trouble breathing. Not breathing, in truth, is the norm. If a true norm must be spoken of, it would have to be not breathing, not moving, no longer living. Taking into consideration all the people who have ever lived. The norm would be to be dead. One must admit that being dead has become the norm.
A vacant hospital might have been easier for this artist, set in a vacant lot, itself situated in an empty space free of obstacles, a space so pure that no one could enter it. Perhaps no one could even know about it. A smaller, contained project, through which this creator could test out ideas more safely. Vacant vehicles to flow in and out of the empty hospital, across transparent roads, discharging vacancy, creating no impact whatsoever on the surroundings, which has never been achieved. That might have been a better apprentice work. Or simply the hospital itself, without a lot, without a site, absent a landscape. A real hospital for today, satisfying all of today’s true needs, if that’s not too much to ask. A hospital twisting in space. Less complicated. But space is hard. Rarely has depth been done well, for instance. Ever? Often it seems so melodramatic. One cannot recall a time when space has been done well. Sometimes evening is believable. Sometimes. Should one—one must ask—stop desiring what has never been achieved? Is this hospital, in its near miss of authenticity, meant to remind us how finally unreal everything will always feel, or is such an effect simply too old-fashioned to commend?
One thing this piece does impeccably well is to use wind to create feeling. On the island a wind, created in the usual way, travels around objects, cooling them, but that’s not all. The wind is not created with any special technique. It is as technologically simple as it ever was, but this creator has a special feel for the use of wind. This creator is, without question, a genius in the use of wind in spaces both outdoors and in, a wind that follows one home from the hospital, across the realistic waterway, back to the adjacent island, itself so deeply real one feels an enduring confusion, a confusion one must now conclude is wind caused. This creator has fashioned a wind that does not leave you alone, even as you enter your home, which was created especially for this project, and even as you crawl into your highly vivid, full-scale bed made of real materials, this wind follows you, encircling you, holding you rather coldly as you wait, perhaps forever, for more understanding. Even if one will never arrive at this fuller understanding, this wind makes one certain that such an understanding is out there, however finally unavailable to people like us.
Lotion
A child was sick in Kansas. He had fever. His father prodded him awake, dressed him, led him outside in the dark morning for chores. The child slumped and the father raised him upright, propped him on the machine. When the father turned away the child fell, seemed to die. The father drove the child to water and sank him at the head, lowering his body into the cold lake, but the child sputtered and cried. Back at the house, in the front yard, the father warmed the child’s body in the sunshine, shook him to rouse him. The father slapped the child, as he’d seen done to other children who would not respond, and the child sat up and cried, looking at his father with fear. The child’s sister came and struck her father, climbed on his back. She was too small and could not stop her father and yet he stepped away. He was afraid now.
The doctor came in the evening and measured the child’s temperature, tested his limbs for heat, for bloat, drew a vial of blood. There was a fever, but no infect
ion, no mistakes heard in the child’s cavity. The boy was tired and should rest. Yet something other was afoul. Had the child, the doctor asked, been down a well or in a cave by the lake, or had the child tasted something dead. What is this, the doctor asked, scraping something from the child’s body. The doctor wiped the child’s mouth with a rag, then sniffed the rag. He questioned the child and the child grew soft and loose in his arms. There was no indication of poison’s nine signs but there was the listlessness of the child, its cold body. There was the unidentifiable paste the doctor had removed from the child, a whitish glue, a tacky gum. Had something been scraped on the child or pierced him or had the child been operating any of the yard machines without his mask, breathing too much of their smokes and fumes? The father did not think so but he agreed with the doctor that they would treat the child as though he’d been harmed from the outside. They took him to his room and they waited each day for the child to rise as ever, to commence his day’s chores, but the child kept to his bed and took no food and allowed himself only enough water to soothe his mouth. He would not read and he no longer sang in the morning, before his family had woken. When his family visited his room, the child did not look at them. He no longer spoke. At times, from downstairs, they thought they could hear him speaking, in the voice of an older man, calm and mature, but when they arrived in his room the child was silent and perfectly still, staring at the wall, hardly breathing.
The doctor had heard of this, or something like this, and he thought he might know of someone. He made a call to a colleague in Chicago who had returned some children from spells and coldness, and the colleague telephoned a contact of his own, along a chain of professionals threading into ever more mysterious illnesses. A week later, a specialist from North Dakota arrived at the child’s house in the early morning. He rubbed a cream on the child. The child thrashed when the cream touched him, clutched at his own throat as if to choke himself. The specialist asked that no one watch. By nightfall the child sat up. He got dressed in his best clothes and tidied his room. He sang one of his old songs, but coldly, a march he learned at the nursery. He spoke it like a foreign language. He combed his hair wet, posed at the mirror. He appeared cured, but when he spoke, to his father and the onlookers—the doctor had asked his colleagues to come view the techniques of the specialist—his message was not kind. First the child told them that they would die. He told them where and when. Sometimes he mentioned how, and he smiled, his boyish mouth pale, his teeth yellow from the illness. The child touched each of them at the face when he sentenced them. There seemed to be no possibility that he was wrong. They stayed perfectly quiet, receiving their dates, blinking with the new information. To his sister the child announced a date of death many years distant, more than a hundred years away, and her face was small and serious as she tried to count out her dying age in her head, so far in the future. She seemed to know she could not live that long and she laughed, hoping her brother was joking. Her brother, unsteady on his feet, spoke in whispers, moving through his room. It took all of his strength to speak. Some spots of blood were seen at his eyes. The specialist flinched each time the child spoke, as if he’d be harmed. He put more cream on the child and the child staggered back, falling to his bed, only to rise up again, speaking in the calmest voice of matters none of them cared to hear.