The Collective: A Novel

by Don Lee

  “There need to be certain adjustments,” the Gallery 57 director, Gustaaf Dekker, told us that night in our living room.

  “What adjustments?” Jessica asked.

  “In order for the exhibit to proceed,” Dekker told her, “they want the temporary partitions to be permanent, so people who are going to get their dog licenses won’t see it unless they intend to, and they want signs posted.” He pulled out a sheet of paper and read: “ ‘The works in this exhibition address provocative issues of sexuality and identity. To be specific, this exhibition contains explicit displays and symbols depicting genitalia, and these objects may be offensive to some viewers. Please use discretion in entering the exhibit space and viewing the artwork. Because of the sensitive nature of the exhibit, it is not recommended for viewing by minors.’ ”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Jessica said.

  “That’s blatant censorship,” Joshua said.

  “There’s a last little bit, a disclaimer of sorts,” Dekker said. “ ‘The City Council is not responsible for the contents of this exhibition and in no way endorses it.’ ”

  “What kind of chickenshit nonsense is that?” Joshua asked.

  “I’m not going to do it,” Jessica said. “I won’t accept it. It’s complete bullshit. Why am I the one who has to compromise? This asshole decides he’s the guardian of morality for the city, and he vandalizes my exhibit, yet he’s allowed to get away with it without any punishment? If anyone walked into a gallery or museum and defaced the art, they’d get arrested. Why hasn’t this guy been arrested?”

  “I’m behind you one hundred percent,” Dekker said. “All the members of the Arts Council are, too. We’ll stand by you, whatever you want to do. It’s tragic and reprehensible, that’s what it is, this whole thing. Tragic.”

  He bowed his head, as if to solemnize the depths of the tragedy. Tall, with a trim, muscular frame, Dekker had thinning curly blond hair, and there was a bald spot beginning to form on top of his head. He was Dutch, born in Curaçao and raised in Maastricht, and he had come to the States because he had fathered two children with an American expatriate. He lived with her and the kids, but remained unmarried. Jessica had told Joshua and me that when Dekker was helping her move the mannequins from the Vernon Street Studios to Gallery 57, he had hit on her.

  “But I wonder if this is not so onerous of a compromise,” Dekker said. “At least the mannequins would not have to be covered or altered in any way, and the exhibit could carry on as scheduled. That is, if you are able to repair and reinstall the sculptures by Friday. Do you think you can do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Jessica said.

  We all stared at the two erections on the coffee table, which rested on the base of the scrotums and were sitting upright, glowing feebly. They had been attached to the mannequins with epoxy, and parts of the shafts and testicles were cracked and tattered. The labial folds on Suzie Wong in Gallery 57 were also chipped, marred.

  “There’s a lot of damage,” Jessica said. “What it would mean is patching and doctoring them, and the whole point had been going for strict authenticity. But I don’t really have any other option at this point, do I? It’d take me at least twelve days to do them over. They’re not sculptures, you know. They’re replicas. They’re from molds of live models.”

  Dekker glanced at her, then at Joshua and me. As he caught on, his face bloomed vermilion, and he twitched his head in aversion. “Well, why don’t you see what you can do.”

  “That information does not leave this room,” I said.

  He looked at me dully. “Of course,” he told me.

  It started on Tuesday with a small article in the Harvard Crimson, recapping the previous day’s City Council meeting, headlined “Phallic Art Exhibit Gives Rise to Councilman’s Protest.” On Wednesday and Thursday, more newspaper articles appeared, the puns too inviting to resist: “Artwork Neutered by Politician,” “Dildo Sculpture Manhandled,” “Cambridge Mannequins Castrated.”

  And in the articles, Vivaldo Barboza was talking. “The potholes are so bad in Cambridge, people can’t drive down the street without getting their wheels knocked out of alignment, yet the Arts Council decides to spend taxpayer money on this?” he said. “What’s this exhibit have anything to do with art? There’s a boundary between what’s art and what’s junk, and this is undeniably junk. It’s trash. There’s no redeeming social or artistic value to it at all. As an elected official, I had a civic responsibility to take action and protect my constituents from this kind of smut.”

  Reporters called the house, but Jessica declined to give comment. She was too busy. She carefully restored the genitalia and managed to reattach the penises to the mannequins just in time for the exhibition to open on schedule on Friday at noon, with a line of people winding down the stairs—the biggest crowd to ever appear for a show at Gallery 57. Certainly a good number were lookie-loos, merely curious or seeking titillation, but many were serious arts patrons, far more than would have come to this particular venue without the attendant publicity, and they seemed appreciative. There were no snickers, no cries of outrage, no scowls of denunciation. And there was a rumor that among the crowd was a critic for the Boston Globe.

  “Maybe,” Jessica said, ecstatic over the attention, “in a strange way this was the best thing that could have happened.”

  “How about doing an interview, then?” Joshua asked. “This is exactly what the 3AC needs. There’s this chick who’s been calling. She’s Chinese American—fourth generation from New York.”

  Meredith Yee worked for the Boston Record, a new alternative weekly that was trying to compete with the Phoenix. She came out to the Walker Street house on Saturday, and we fixed her a lunch of sesame noodles and salad. We told her about becoming friends at Mac as freshmen, then reuniting last year and forming the 3AC, about the shared purpose of the collective, to support one another as Asian American artists, gather and exchange ideas and experiences, subvert and provide a counternarrative to stereotypes—all the catchphrases that had survived the vetting of the mission statement.

  “That’s what’s behind the exhibit,” Jessica said. “It’s not about sex or eroticism. It’s about identity, sexual identity, and how Asian Americans are affected by external tropes. Asian women are objectified, and Asian men are encumbered with these emasculating anxieties, like about penis size, which isn’t an accident, since the phallus is a symbol of male power.”

  “Basically,” Joshua said, “Asian American men have been relegated as the eunuchs of the world.”

  “So I wanted to provoke debate about all of this,” Jessica said. “What the councilman did was a violation of my constitutional rights, my civil rights. This is yet another hegemonic attempt to suppress the voice of Asian Americans.”

  Meredith seemed receptive to everything discussed. She told us she had grappled with many of these issues herself, and was interested in attending a 3AC gathering sometime. But she was oddly, persistently nosy about our personal lives, saying, “I’m sure there’s been some pairing-off in the group, yes? That’s natural in any group dynamic. Have the three of you ever been involved? In any combination?”

  We shook our heads no.

  “Really?” she said. “In all these years? Never been tempted?”

  Jessica refrained from delving into her sexual orientation.

  Later, Meredith asked for a tour of the house, and as we led her around upstairs, she seemed to be absorbed with the sleeping arrangements. “So who’s got this room?” she asked, pointing to the master bedroom.

  “Noklek,” Joshua said.

  “Who’s Noklek?”

  “She works with Jimmy at Pink Whistle,” he told her.

  “She’s just crashing here temporarily,” I said.

  A photographer arrived, and after he set up his lights and reflectors, Meredith arranged us on the couch, shifting us into different arrays, asking us to pose with our arms and hands here and there, to gaze forward, to the side, at one another and awa
y. It all felt a bit silly, yet, succumbing to vanity, the three of us kept checking our hair and wondering if we should change clothes. “Is this going to be in color or black-and-white?” I asked.

  At the potluck the next day, some 3AC members were less than thrilled hearing about the interview.

  “Why didn’t you call the rest of us?” Annie asked. “If the article’s going to be on the 3AC, all of us should have been interviewed.”

  “No one should’ve been excluded,” Phil said.

  “It wasn’t intentional,” Jessica said. “It was all last-minute.”

  “She interviewed me,” Jimmy said.

  “She did?” I asked.

  “I made the wigs, remember? She came over to the shop after she finished with you three.”

  “Did she contact you about the costumes?” I asked Trudy. She told me no.

  “A little starchy, that Meredith,” Jimmy said, “but kind of a babe, don’t you think?”

  “Listen, we did the interview to promote the 3AC as an organization,” Joshua said. “It wasn’t about us, it wasn’t an ego thing.”

  “Did you mention all of us by name and discipline?” Jay asked.

  “Yeah, we did. Didn’t we?” Joshua asked me.

  “Yeah,” I dissembled.

  “At the very least,” Cindy said, “I wish we could’ve been part of the photo shoot, you know? That’s what I’m most disappointed about.”

  Yet on Tuesday, when the Boston Record came out, the group quelled any objections they might have had, because it became apparent that Meredith Yee had been planning to sandbag us all along.

  Her article was entitled “Slits and Eunuchs: A Most Unusual Collective.” She accurately described the aims of the 3AC and quoted us without error, but often out of context, and her tone was mocking throughout. She sketched us as a bunch of pretentious twentysomething layabouts with ample time for “almond-gazing,” as “wannabe Asian Panthers” whining about racial injustice while lolling, rather comfortably, in a tony Harvard Square house, where the bedroom assignments appeared to be “very fluid.” She profiled Jimmy individually in a sidebar, with a photo of him—shirt open, leather-panted legs spread wide—sitting in front of Pink Whistle, “in which ‘massages’ are offered by a Thai teenager who happens to be the kneader-in-residence on Walker Street.”

  Our own photograph had Joshua and me on opposite sides of the couch, squared around so we morosely faced Jessica, who was between us in her zippered corset top and eyebrow ring as she leered forward, sticking out her tongue with its silver stud. An Asian sandwich in which Jessica was the dominatrix meat. Meredith described her as “a shock artist whose most recent exhibit has her focusing her hooded eye on two Asiatic erections, standing head to head, the casts for which were made, expediently or perhaps extra-collectively, from the in-the-flesh molds of her two houseboys’ aroused penises. Whether they measure up or not is in the hands of the beholder.”

  “That cunt,” Jessica said.

  “It had to be Dekker who told her,” I said.

  “The article could have at least been well written,” Joshua said. “Her prose is abominable.”

  On the same day, the Boston Globe published a review of the exhibit, penned by the chief art critic, Kate Roper. Not a full review, but the last item in an omnibus. It read in its entirety: “Jessica Tsai’s new show in Gallery 57, Dis/Orienting Proportions, has been stirring up a tempest in Cambridge, namely because her triumvirate of mannequins—modeled after famous Asian movie stars—flaunt rather aggressive anatomical appendages. The artist’s intentions, as explicated in her statement, are earnestly political and identity-based, yet betray a bit of jejune thinking about the work’s impact. Instead of contending with codes of power, race, and typecasting, the exhibit exposes conspicuous shortcomings, failing to attain the density of expression, or at least wit, that is required for any art medium to succeed.”

  “It’s not that bad,” I told Jessica.

  “My career’s over,” she said.

  The following morning, Barboza went on a Boston talk radio show and yukked it up with the hosts. “The human body’s a wonderful thing, no doubt about it, nothing wrong with it at all,” he said, “but displaying their own genitalia like that is just perverted, not to mention self-indulgent and—what did you call it?—yeah, self-aggrandizing. I don’t know what this so-called artist and her friends do in that house in Harvard Square, and I don’t really want to know. Maybe it’s a commune or a cult, maybe it’s a club for Asian swingers and they have orgies in there, who knows. That’s their prerogative, I guess. But that doesn’t give this woman any right to foist her sordid lifestyle unto the public, shoving these obscene little egg rolls and bonsai bushes in our faces.”

  “That does it,” Joshua said. “He’s a racist! It was a fucking hate crime! And now he’s insulting our manhood!”

  “There’s nothing ambiguous about this,” Jessica told me.

  For the first time, the controversy no longer felt abstract to me. It was personal. “We have to get this fucker,” I said.

  I went to see Grace Kwok at her office, which was on the third floor of 929 Mass Ave, a concrete high-rise across from the Plough & Stars. She shared a suite with half a dozen other attorneys, all sole practitioners who split the expenses for the receptionist, conference room, copier, and kitchenette.

  Grace didn’t think we had enough evidence to file a civil rights case—certainly not a hate crime complaint. “It’d be difficult to prove he broke off the penises because of an inherent bias against Asians,” she said.

  “What about a First Amendment case?” I asked.

  “Maybe. I don’t know. It’s not my area of expertise. I’m just an immigration attorney.” She freelanced for several high-tech and biotech companies, obtaining H-1B visas for foreign engineers and scientists, as well as F-1 student visas.

  “This green-card marriage between Noklek and Joshua,” I said, “you really think they could get away with it?”

  “It’s not inconceivable. It’s been known to happen,” Grace said. “But not if she’s involved in something illegal. The INS tends to frown upon applicants engaged in criminal activity. What the reporter was insinuating about the massages, is it true?”

  “She gives massages. I don’t know what else she provides. She’s a sweet girl. I doubt she’d let herself be talked into doing anything more than wearing sexy outfits.”

  “Well, it’s not my business, I suppose,” Grace said.

  “You’re not going to represent them?”

  “Joshua asked for my professional opinion. I met with him and Noklek and gave it to him, and I billed him for it. That’s it, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Look, Barboza can’t get away with this,” I said. “We have to make him accountable somehow. His comments—instead of condemning him, people think it’s funny. Do you know someone who might be able to help us?”

  “Not really.”

  “Any ideas at all?”

  “Sorry.”

  “You don’t seem too upset about this,” I said.

  “It’s all kind of embarrassing, don’t you think? The sculptures?” Grace asked. “And then all of the proselytizing—politicizing everything. Does it have anything to do with art?”

  “You’ve fallen into Esther Xing’s camp.”

  “I don’t know. Why do there have to be camps at all?” Grace told me. “What I do know is that Joshua is a snob, and sometimes you and Jessica aren’t much better. I don’t blame Rick and Ali for not coming back. I doubt I’ll be coming back myself. You’re all very ambitious, but it seems you’ll exploit pretty much anything or anyone, including the 3AC, to get ahead. It’s a shame, because I thought we had something great there, something worthwhile, before the three of you ruined it.”

  16

  Joshua solicited the ACLU, the NAACP, the Anti-Defamation League, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and various Asian American advocacy groups. All of them initially seemed interested in the case, but
then, without explanation, dropped out. Finally he found an organization that was eager to become involved: the Cambridge Coalition for Freedom of Expression. Its core mission was to assist artists and organizations facing attacks on their artistic freedom. I had never heard of them.

  The CCFE representative who came to our house, Stan Margolies, was around fifty, heavyset, with salt-and-pepper hair tied in a ponytail. He wore a hunter-green corduroy sports jacket and sneakers, and he had the right leg of his jeans rolled up, exposing a hairy calf and a vivid red sock. He had ridden his bike over, and he smelled rank. He was, supposedly, both a lawyer and a painter. “I’ve been in this house before,” he told Joshua. “Your parents were my professors, years ago. They were terrific teachers and people. I loved them.”

  In the dining room over a cup of chai, Margolies said, “There’s no doubt this is a First Amendment issue. The city of Cambridge is under no obligation to support the arts, but having chosen to do so, they can’t retroactively impose content or viewing restrictions on exhibits. They are, in fact, prohibited from so doing by the Constitution. The First Amendment also precludes public officials from acting as freelance art vigilantes. Having said that, however, I’m not confident we could pull off a First Amendment case against Barboza and the City Council.”