Lana stood before her in the dark, on the porch. Her body was glowing with an otherworldly light. The woman’s lips quivered. Her eyes were wet. The woman took a step forward and reached out to her with delicate white arms.
* * *
I. Apparent magnitude is the measure of the brightness of celestial objects. The maximum brightness of Mars is –2.4, a full moon is –12.
All art is quite useless.
—Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
I, Tristan Hurt, am a Fat Artist. This is a modus of being quite distinct from “fat person.” Obviously, I am that as well; at my peak weight I believe, though unfortunately I cannot prove, that I was the heaviest (such is the admittedly crude rubric/analogue I have necessitated to adopt to read: “fattest”) person alive, moreover, possibly ever to have lived. While fat person indeed I may be, in my anomalous case, that of the Fat Artist, the adjective fat, applied to the noun artist, modifies not so much the man as the art. Fat is not (not just) a descriptor of the matter contained within my corporeal boundaries (i.e., my body—what in the quaintly benighted days of mind-body dualism would have been called on the gravestone I do not at this late stage hope to have, “ ‘all that [was] mortal’ of Tristan Hurt”). I am an artist, and fat is the medium in which I work. I have made my body into an art object.
I certainly do not presume to suggest my project is an unprecedented one.I (I bore myself with the usual mentions: Abramovic, Acconci, Finley, Burden, Orlan, et al.) However, I shall maintain unto my death, which—as I sit here on this rooftop, unable to move, without food or water, alone and naked (as opposed to nudeII), abandoned, forgotten and forsaken by the world—I presume is imminent, that I have suffered uniquely and (if I may so flatter myself) more terminally than other artists who have adopted their own bodies as their primary medium.
I am thirty-three years old (please, should there be any gloss of the messianic over the age of my death, know that it is entirely accidental) and I am about to die.
• • •
When I was young—and at thirty-three I am young yet, although (Nos morituri te salutamus) I am about to die—I was a handsome man. In my late twenties my hairline began its slow vertical creep up the corners of my forehead and thinned on top, but that is all; my hair has always been this dusty-brown color and my eyes have always been these pellucid swirls of whale gray and celadon (every lover who looked into them described them as “sad”). My face—now swollen with loose pouches of fat that merge smoothly into my fat neck, which merges smoothly into my fat shoulders, and they in turn into the squishy mammarian saddlebags of my chest—used to sport robust and angular features, a boxy jaw, sharp cheekbones. In those bygone days when I was physically able to stand, I stood six feet and one inch and weighed about 200 lbs (91 kg). I was a relatively big man, and for most of my life had enjoyed the slight deference of authority that is paid to the substantial occupier of space—but I was not fat.
I would always lie to interviewers about my upbringing, and I never repeated the same lie twice. When they pointed out inconsistencies, I glibly manufactured more lies. Of course they knew I was lying, but that was part of the game, n’est-ce pas?, the Moriartian cat-and-mouse of it.
I was born (this is, so far as such a word means anything, the truth) in Hartford, Connecticut, and raised in a leafy, moneyed Nassau County suburb on Long Island, a child of considerable wealth and privilege. My father was an investment banker, and my mother’s pedigree stretches back to a Mayflower Compact signatory. I tolerated my mother and hated my father. I’m half-Jewish on my father’s side; the wrong side, as far as Rabbinic law is concerned. We did not practice any religion, though. Nothing was worshiped in the many rooms of my father’s house; each December we erected both a menorah and a Christmas tree, and both were rather secular suburban objects, signifying only a certain season of the year. As a child I saw no conflict in displaying them together in the same room: Both were good, both were the harbingers of an increase in material abundance for me. I was lucky to have two older sisters to demystify the feminine for me early. I was a spoiled and intelligent child and a rebellious teenager, impotently upset that all the usual paths of rebellion had been trodden flat by the pioneers of twentieth-century male adolescence before me: Marlon Brando’s leather jacket of 1953 presaged Sid Vicious’s leather jacket of 1977, and by the time I donned the article, the thing had become a dead signifier,III the sign having long ago devoured itself (like Beethoven’s Ninth; once a paean to religious ecstasy, later blasted from loudspeakers as the Third Reich marched down the grands boulevards of Paris). My adolescence was, though I was too naïve to realize it at the time, an off-brand cliché: cigarettes, drugs, safety pins, early attempts at sexual experimentation, interests/indulgences in the French avant-garde, German Expressionism, New York punk, high fashion, self-mutilation, Dada, Fluxus, etc., etc., sigh, etc. My mother wrung her worried hands over her troubled baby boy, while my father—stoic, implacable, cadaverous with sangfroid—did not seem to care; he seemed to regard his three children as household pets that his wife had purchased whimsically but promised to care for. Once, over dinner, I informed my father that he was a stooge of late-capitalist oppression of the third world. My father shrugged and took a sip of wine, as unfazed as if he had not heard me.
Expensive college, hypocrisy, expansion, experimentation, hypocrisy, growth. Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Bataille, Duchamp, Tzara, Céline, Artaud, Klein, Marinetti, Cage, Adorno, Debord, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan. Italian Futurism, Situationism, Lettrism, Bauhaus. The usual.
I was frustrated with Dada (and its children) in the same way I had been frustrated with the leather jackets of Brando and Vicious, spoiling the thing for future generations with too many layers of irony or recycled sets of meaning. A middle finger to the art establishment means very little in a time when the middle finger has long become de rigueur; after rebellion becomes fashionable, then fashion becomes expected—art collapses from rebellion fatigue, and collectors come like buzzards to pick at the remains. I found the dithyrambic had so entirely replaced the Apollonian that the prospect of taking a shit in someone’s living room and charging everyone to look at it wasn’t even fun anymore. My rage was impure; beset by second- and thirdhand rage anxiety. “Make it new,” as Pound said—easy for a high modernist in the first half of the twentieth century to say, isn’t it? How to make it new when making it new is the new old? The anxieties of the contemporary artist. Fuck it all—just get an MFA, or (a sunnier option) kill yourself.IV
• • •
One weekend close to my graduation from college, I took my parents on a tour through the modern wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was getting along well enough with my parents at the time. I was twenty-two, and I had the adventurous feeling that my future lay splayed out before my feet like a resplendent red rug.
We came, I remember, to an Yves Klein monochrome (the only one at the Met): a vertical rectangular slab of material hanging on the wall, coarsely textured and painted thickly and uniformly in International Klein Blue.
Had I, Tristan Hurt, at that moment been elected to the honor of choosing an object to include in a durable capsule to be shot into outer space under sway of the vain hope that perhaps one day billions of years from now some alien race might find it, crack it open, examine the things therein, and ponder the geist of whatever creatures produced these beautiful objects, I might very well have selected that Klein monochrome (my choice would be different today, but, again, I plead the romance and enthusiasm of youth); and maybe, if their organs of visual perception happened to be sensitive to the same band of the light spectrum as ours, they would understand that human beings had been animals who were indeed capable of artificing beauty so sublime as to compete with (rather than merely imitate) the forms of nature.
My father stood before the painting. I watched him look at it. The filmy annuli of his nacre-colored eyes (I was born last, late, probably accidentally, and he was old even then) examined it as bla
nkly as they would have the floral-print wallpaper in the dining room of a New England bed and breakfast. He tipped his head back and sleepily blinked at it; pale, swollen eyelids opened and closed on the image like the mouths of garden snails eating blueberries, and the flat zero line of his bloodless lips soured into a sardonic affect of boredom. He leaned forward to read the wall text with his hands clasped behind his back, as if he was thinking of buying it for me for my birthday if (though he couldn’t fathom why) I liked it so much, and was just checking the price tag. The placard beside it read:
Yves Klein. (French, 1928–1962) Blue Monochrome. 1961.
Monochrome abstraction—the use of one color over an entire canvas—is a strategy adopted by painters wishing to challenge expectations of what an image can and should represent. Klein likened monochrome painting to an “open window to freedom.” He worked with a chemist to develop his own particular brand of blue. Made from pure color pigment and a binding medium, it is called International Klein Blue. Klein adopted this hue as a means of evoking the immateriality and boundlessness of his own utopian vision of the world.
My father read the title aloud: “Blue Monochrome.”
He emitted a brusque, equine snort, and delivered his judgment: “No shit.”
That was all he had to say: quote—“No shit”—end quote. I tried to explain to him why the painting was beautiful. I probably proceeded to bloviate at great length about Yves Klein, about the unexpected violence in his work, the conceptual playfulness, even the dark sexiness of it, the deliberate provocation. Le Saut dans le vide. I fired every bullet of critical art theory at him that my education (which he had paid for) had loaded the chambers of my brain with. My father’s face slackened with contempt, a slowly deflating gray bag. The more I spoke, the further his understanding and interest in what I was saying got away from me, chugging indifferently into the distance.
When I finally fell silent, he waited a beat, and said:
“I guess it’s supposed to be art if you have to explain it.”
Perhaps, I thought, art needs the bourgeois in order to react against it. As long as there is a bourgeoisie to afford art without bothering to understand it, that underpinning rage of the artist may flourish, the rage of the captive animal biting the feeding hand, no matter if originality has been done to death. In that moment I more clearly understood the depth of the poverty in my father’s soul, and in that moment I more fully realized my father was a man with a worldview so far removed from anything worth loving that hating him was hardly worth the energy.
• • •
New York City. The enfant terrible loose in the art world, playing his role, making work, plucking strings, sucking on glasses of wine at gallery openings and committing long and unusual words to heart for use in the immediate future. Fashion, alcohol, cocaine, heroin, but never (I’m mildly embarrassed to admit) any real addiction: subsidized struggle, an MFA somewhere in there. My luck snowballed, then avalanched, was off and running on its own. Basel, Miami, Hong Kong. London. LA. Venice Biennales. Seven years later, I was famous (at least in some—the right—circles). Critics praised my work as ugly, angry, abrasive, disgusting, violent, scatological, pornographic, antisocial, and antihuman. It’s not terribly easy, mind you, to get called these things anymore. I lived as if my parents were dead.
• • •
Four thousand pink latex casts of artist’s testicles and (erect) penis covering entire interior of large, hollow, womblike enclosure illuminated from exterior by cunt-pink neon tubes, which viewer enters via spiral staircase through door in bottom of said enclosure. Artist mixes vat of artist’s own blood, urine, feces, semen, and vomit, stirs in block of melted wax; crystal chandelier is delicately submerged in heated mixture, then suspended from gallery ceiling such that cooling fluid coagulates in mid-drip; unsightly puddle collects on floor directly beneath, cools, hardens. Two thousand Manhattan telephone directories are shredded and scattered over gallery floor, artist spends five days living in gallery space intoxicated on various drugs, masturbating, urinating, defecating in shredded paper, scrawling obscenities and crude pornographic cartoons on white walls with Magic Markers. Artist films self defecating directly onto lens of video camera, projects footage onto four walls of darkened room, in reverse and slow motion; dark walls slowly recede into four giant, luminous images of artist’s anus.
My work was exhibited by Deitch Projects; my pieces found homes in the collections of Charles Saatchi and Larry Gagosian, among others. I became very wealthy. I squandered money lavishly, publicly.
Behold: Tristan Hurt, standing at gallery opening, glass of wine in hand, slovenly dressed in thirty thousand dollars’ worth of dirty clothes, face carefully peppered with four days’ stubble. I am pictured en medias schmooze with several other people as-or-more-famous than myself. This photograph appeared again and again in many similar variations, and the fame of the people with whom I stand in the photograph gradually increased; as it did, boat lifted by rising tide, so did my fame, so did the prices of my work, and so did my wealth. At a certain point I ceased to be Tristan Hurt, the blasé, angry young man infused with his perfectly suburban father-hatred, and became Tristan Hurt: Tristan Hurt, whose name stands alone.
• • •
One night my parents did come unannounced to an opening. They wanted to “surprise” me. Pleasantly, I suppose they assumed. I was, of course, busy, standing naked (rather, nude) in the middle of the gallery floor, masturbating into a raw steak folded in my fist when I saw them walk in. (This was a performance of my piece Pursuance: Artist stands nude in gallery and masturbates into holes cut in slabs of raw meat, which latex-gloved assistants then dunk in tubs of shellac and hang with clothespins, dripping, from suspended wires.) My father’s expression did not change as my mother fled the room. My father calmly walked out of the gallery after her. I was twenty-eight years old at the time.
Later, sometimes I would meet my mother for lunch when she was in the city, but I would not see or speak with my father again.
• • •
There is such a thing as a fame drive. Or call it a glory drive. Like the ability to sing, like a taste for cilantro, it’s something you either have or you don’t. With the exceptions of people who happen to be caught standing in exactly the right place at exactly the right time, or people who happen to be caught standing in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time, almost everyone who ever becomes famous has it, while very few of the people who have it ever become famous, which is why to have it is a curse: It means you will probably feel like a failure for most, if not all, of your life. I have it. I envy and admire those who don’t. Those people can go to bed knowing that they are alive, healthy, and comfortable, and can be perfectly content with that. Those of us who have the glory drive cannot be content with just that. We are not happy unless the number of people we have never met who know our names is increasing. As with money and sex, only too much fame is enough, and there is never too much of it, hence never enough, hence we are never happy. A therapist once told me that people who have this doomed and repellant personality trait have it because of certain kinds of childhoods. What kinds, I asked him. He theorized that it happens to children whose parents tell them they’re wonderful on the one hand and on the other treat them as if they’re never good enough. They pump up your tires, take away your training wheels, and push you down a hill so you can go forth and live a life of restlessly straining to fulfill an inflated self-image, constantly making up for an inward feeling of inferiority. I thought: Mother, encouragement; father, denial—that’s right. That’s me. Feral children are lucky in that they don’t have to worry about this. God, to be raised by dingoes in the wilderness. That’s the best way to do it—this, life: Grow up thinking you’re a wild dog. If these children are out there, I hope for their sakes we never find them.
• • •
The fame, or glory, drive is, at least in men, a relative of, and collaborator and coconspirator with the libido. (Perh
aps in some women as well—but I can’t speak to that; I only know that female sexuality is usually more complicated and interesting than that.) I won’t bore you with a locker-room litany of the models and actresses whose interiors I have explored. And I can attest that like the goose that laid the golden eggs, it’s just ordinary goose inside. The pleasure of fucking a model isn’t fucking the model, it’s showing up at the party with the model. That’s a pleasure in its own right, of course, but the real pleasure of sex while famous is fucking people who are less famous than you.
• • •
Olivia Frankel taught creative writing at Octavia College, and wrote quirky, bittersweet short stories about the doomed love affairs of artists. Or so I surmised; I never actually read them. She twitched and babbled in her sleep, talked too much in conversation, and ground her jaw when she wasn’t speaking. She had a thin, squeaky voice that sounded to me like an articulate piccolo. She was pale, and skinny as a bug, and always sat with her shoulders slightly hunched. We were not in love—not exactly—and the relationship did not last very long. We casually dated for maybe about five months. She was initially attracted by my accomplishment, my fame, my easy charisma, my intelligent conversation and sparkling wit, but eventually grew into the realization that I am, in certain respects, a fraud. They always do wind up scratching the gold leaf off the ossified dog turd, don’t they?—the smart ones, anyway, and the dumb ones will eventually bore me.
As a person, I was nearly as lazy as I was self-absorbed.V I had never actually read very much. Almost nothing, really. All that critical theory in college and graduate school? All that heady French gobbledygook? Not counting the front and back covers, I probably read maybe a cumulative fifteen pages of it. That may in fact be an overgenerous estimate. I was, however, blessèd with the gift of bullshit—a blessing that took me far indeed. I knew the names of the writers I was supposed to have read, and could pronounce them with a haughty accuracy and ironclad confidence that withered on the spot those who had actually read them. Believe me, I could slather it on so thick and byzantine that most people—even those who did “know” what they were talking about—were dazzled to silence by the fireworks of obfuscation that burst from my mouth when I spoke.VI
The Fat Artist and Other Stories Page 10