Why didn’t Sears smell like popcorn anymore? he wondered.
Popcorn, he thought, just before his windpipe was crushed.
Popcorn.
****
“Totals?”
“Two deaths, eighteen injuries…” There was a pause.
Too long a pause.
“And?” the police chief prodded.
“Five recruitments.”
“Damn it!”
“Want me to put together a press release?”
“Yeah. But leave out the…”
“I always do.”
“We don’t want people to freak out about—”
“I know.”
“Okay, then.” The chief looked out the window, sighed. “Five, huh?”
“Yeah. But at least it’s over.”
“For this year,” the chief said. “For this year.”
MONA RETROSPECTIVE,
LOS ANGELES
(2016)
The stereotype is that California is a vast cultural wasteland, the tired Woody Allen canard adopted by pseudointellectuals everywhere after they saw Annie Hall. But it’s not true, it never has been true, and this weekend’s program at the Museum of Nu Art proves it. For MoNA is offering a retrospective of some of the best installations and performance art pieces of the ’80s and ’90s, including several of those famously defunded by the NEA.
DAY 1
It’s odd to realize that what was once new and cutting edge is now old and safe, with formerly “dangerous” artists now comfortably middle-aged and taking the work from their glory days on a greatest hits tour to contemporary audiences in direct violation of the philosophies they once espoused. Several of the artists, however, will be premiering new pieces, including Mark Lunch, the artist I’m most looking forward to seeing.
I initially discovered Lunch’s work in college. Gay, black and proud, Lunch created pieces that were often violent and sexually explicit. This did not sit well with the university’s donors during the Reagan era, and his sole local exhibit was actually not on campus but in a rented space nearby. I had never seen any of Lunch’s work at that point, had in fact never heard of him, but an article in the university newspaper detailing how his installations had been banned by the administration was enough to get my First Amendment dander up, and I accompanied a group of like-minded friends to the empty warehouse where his show was being presented.
I was blown away.
The most impressive piece consisted of playground equipment constructed from the bones of Ku Klux Klansmen that had been dug up by African American children under Lunch’s supervision. The ropes on the swing set were made from nooses that had lynched black men in the 1960s.
The most outrageous piece, innocently titled “Reversal,” involved a jar of white men’s toes that Lunch had amputated and pickled. As patrons strolled in and out of a small room, he sat on a black toilet and, one by one, ate the toes. “Reversal” ended eight hours later when the toes had been digested and defecated.
Controversy had followed Lunch throughout that period, and he had thrived on it, creating one groundbreaking installation after another between 1985 and 1995. Reportedly suffering a nervous breakdown after the disastrous reception of a piece that consisted of a séance conducted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1997, Lunch had lain low in the intervening years, and rumors swirled about his whereabouts. Occasional accounts surfaced that had him studying with Sufi mystics, moving to Haiti, or living with a Native American shaman, but it was never clear whether those stories were true, false or fell somewhere in between.
This MoNA retrospective is supposed to be his re-entry into the North American art world, and for it he has prepared a new work. I am beyond excited, and I actually arrive an hour early, taking a chair near the front of the gallery, facing what appears to be an upright coffin “decorated,” if it can be called that, with racist invectives. I am not the only one seated this early, and within the next fifteen minutes all of the seats are taken, the room filling with pale-skinned young women in horn-rimmed glasses and thin young men dressed in form-fitting black. The usual suspects.
Eventually, Mark Lunch himself comes out to a rock star ovation. He’s wearing dirty work jeans and an Isaac Hayes chain vest. He holds up a leather-bound book titled Quotes From the Senate Floor and with no preamble begins reading outrageous statements of racism and homophobia as, on the white wall behind both him and the coffin, photographs of the senators who spoke those words are projected.
Two stooped and elderly black men emerge from behind us and walk slowly up the center aisle toward the front of the gallery, a figure in a Ku Klux Klan robe sandwiched between them. When they reach the coffin, they remove the Klansman’s robe and there is no one beneath it. A magician’s trick. They spread the white sheet over the coffin, and on it is projected the face of an angry white man. Beneath the man’s face are the words, “Jesse Helms, Senator (R-NC).”
For the next five minutes, Lunch continues to read hateful words that were presumably spoken by Senator Helms. He drops the book on the floor, then stands there as the two old men, singing “Dixie,” take the sheet off the coffin, carefully fold it, drop it on the floor and stomp on it. Lunch walks over and slowly opens the coffin. There is a figure inside.
It’s Jesse Helms.
He comes out buck-dancing as the two old men continue to sing “Dixie.”
“I thought he was dead!” someone in the rear calls out jokingly.
“He’s died many times,” the artist replies, and there’s a ripple of hip chuckles.
But I’m not laughing. Because it is Jesse Helms. It’s not an impersonator, someone made up to look like him for the purpose of the piece; it’s the racist old fuck himself, and he’s not dead but very much alive. How is that possible? I wonder.
As a senator, Helms was at the forefront of those trying to defund the NEA in the 1980s, and he got a lot of mileage out of demonizing Robert Mapplethorpe and the NEA 7. But it was for Mark Lunch that he honed his sharpest knives, and now the artist is having his revenge.
Literally.
For Lunch has withdrawn a large knife from somewhere—another magician’s trick—and he uses it to stab the senator. The blade slices through Helms’ abdomen as he screams in agony, blood like a waterfall cascading down the front of his crotch and legs. Lunch makes a vertical incision, pulls apart the skin and muscle, and withdraws something from the opening. It is not entrails as we expect but a gelatinous mass that already possesses the semblance of a human form and resembles a miniature embryonic version of the dead senator.
I don’t know how this is possible. I catch Lunch’s eye, and he knows that I know. This piece will be performed often in the future, and each time, Jesse Helms will die anew, suffering at the hands of Mark Lunch.
The two old men wrap the gutted bloody body in the KKK sheet and carry it away. Lunch shoves the nascent Helms into the coffin and closes it. Before the lights go down and a single spotlight shines on that most abhorrent of racial epithets, Lunch and I share a smile, and all is right with the world.
A masterpiece.
DAY 2
I arrive late, though I am on time. The Reynold Salton show has started early, and I should have prepared for this because it is part of Salton’s shtick. I recognize the faces of several fellow reviewers and bloggers in the crowd.
Why Salton is part of this exhibition is a mystery. Trendy in the early 1990s, his work has not aged well. “Skeleton Boy,” in which the skeleton of a boy was placed in such a position as to make it look as though it were fellating a department store mannequin, had lost more than half of its peak value by the time it was last sold at auction. It is one of the pieces here today, as is “Chink,” a trivial work in which the viewer is invited to peer through a crack in the breastplate of a suit of armor to see a three-dimensional collage of Asian-American faces.
But Salton is performing a new piece, and against my will, I find myself drawn in. The cognoscenti are blasé at first, t
oo cool to become involved with the proceedings, which at the moment seem to involve only the projection of an amorphous black shape on the white wall behind the spot where Salton is standing. The shape moves in a manner that seems organic, however, and there is something about it that speaks to me. I should know what it is, I think, but I don’t.
The shape is replaced by text. It appears first as a page torn from a book, then the words are enlarged and turn out to be a list of names.
Our names are displayed. Those of the people attending the performance.
One name—“Agafia Cornell,” a name I do not recognize—emerges from the list and grows to the size of the entire wall. At the same time, the woman next to me is grabbed from behind by a masked hooded figure and shoved before Salton. The artist reads a quote, “The piece is a kick in the head to anyone with refined sensibilities.” He then kicks the woman in the head. She screams, and he kicks her again. He continues to kick her until she has passed out.
Another name fills the wall: Annenberg Johanssen.
A fellow blogger, he is ripped from the crowd and brought before Salton, who intones, “The lack of subtlety was like being beaten with a large stick,” as the hooded figure beats Johanssen with a large stick.
This goes on. Salton is settling old scores, and I don’t know how he has gotten the names of all of the people attending the MoNA event, but he has.
Who will be next?
It is of legitimate concern, because it appears that Salton has nothing to lose. Have I said anything against him publicly? I wonder. Have I given him any negative reviews or mentioned him derogatorily in the review of another? I don’t think so, but he is much more likely to know the answer to those questions than I am, and I tense up, waiting to be attacked, waiting for my words to show up and mock me.
Bodies are piling up at his feet. They are not dead but they are injured, and the ones that are moving are moaning.
Several people have left quickly, obviously afraid of what might come their way, but others have arrived to take their place, and one of them, an older woman, is plucked from the crowd, stripped and thrashed on the buttocks with, of all things, a horse’s leg, which coincides with the decidedly odd criticism she had apparently made regarding “Chink.”
Salton bows, the list of names disappears, and the original projection returns.
We all recognize it now.
It is the shape of fear.
Sometimes even lesser talents can surprise.
Bravo!
DAY 3
Linda Gash is so popular that advance tickets are required for her performance. Gash creates what she still calls BitchArt, though the word “bitch” has been bastardized into meaninglessness over the past few decades. What once described an angry hostile woman is now used in the popular vernacular to describe what used to be called a “crybaby,” a man who behaves like a weak little girl, the exact opposite of its original intent, although how and why such a shift occurred remains a mystery. Linda Gash, however, proudly owns the word in its original form. She is a strong woman, she is angry, and she is not here to be nice to anyone, particularly men.
Gash has been allotted the largest space for her new work, and at first it appears to be a maze. We walk one-by-one through a twisting narrow passage whose walls are made from white-sheeted mattresses. Halfway through, we hear a terrible cacophonous noise.
The sound of women being butchered.
Of course, this is Linda Gash, and when we reach the end of the maze and enter an abattoir decorated like a locker room, it turns out that it is not women being butchered but men. College athletes, in fact, all of whom have been publicly accused of sexual assault. They are naked and lashed to lockers lined up on the left wall, label-maker tape with their names on it affixed to the metal doors, while women in sports uniforms stab them with knives. The men are screaming like women, and that is Gash’s point, that we are all “women” when we are murdered, all of us weak and submissive, none of us in charge of our own fates—all of the attributes a patriarchal society traditionally imparts to females.
Against a row of lockers along the right wall, a group of anonymous men in underwear and jockstraps have been tied. Linda Gash herself is using a straight razor to slice the eyebrows and eyelashes off a crying athlete. Attendees are invited to choose from a variety of tools and weapons spread across a locker room bench, and join in the butchery.
Men and women pick up hammers and screwdrivers, knives and razors, hatpins and tweezers. They begin attacking the bound subjects, creating an uproar of agonized cries.
I am here as a reviewer, but Gash invites me to participate, taking the notepad from my hand and trading it for a pair of shears. “Cut something,” she recommends helpfully. I see her looking at the shriveled gonads of the jock in front of me, but that’s a little hardcore for my taste, so I settle for snipping off a finger. It is still unnerving—the tactile pressure, the spurting blood, the screaming—but there is something strangely satisfying about it as well, particularly knowing that this man is a sexual predator.
There are ten dead bodies on the floor of the gallery at the conclusion of the evening, and Gash exhorts the women who participated in the event to take a souvenir. Her face is bruised and battered, but I recognize Agafia Cornell from the Salton performance, and I watch as she picks up a football player’s amputated nipples. She places them in a plastic bag Gash provides her.
Unique and harrowing, the experience is vintage Linda Gash.
****
All in all, the MoNA retrospective is a satisfying collection of classic installations and new performances by some of the most recognizable names in the nu-art world.
It runs each weekend through the end of the month.
JORGENSENS’ FENCE
(2016)
“I really like that new fence the Jorgensens are putting in.” Rich glanced over at the house across the street as he pulled out of the driveway. “We oughtta do something like that.”
“We don’t need a fence,” Phyllis told him.
“No one needs a fence. But it looks sharp. Especially that kind of white picket deal. It looks like a magazine cover.”
“No one else on the street has a fenced-in front yard,” she pointed out. “It seems snobby, like they’re trying to keep the rest of us out, like they’re afraid one of us’ll walk on their precious lawn.”
He was getting frustrated. “That’s not the point.”
“What is the point?”
“I’m just saying that the fence looks nice. It gives the neighborhood a little class. It might even boost property values, unlike that dirty weed patch the Caldwells have.” He turned onto First Street. “I was walking Sprinkles the other day—”
Sprinkles.
Why in the hell had she named the puppy Sprinkles?
“—and I saw those fence boards up close. Smooth. Perfect. I don’t know what they’re made out of—some kind of recycled material, maybe—but I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“We’re not putting up a fence in the front yard,” Phyllis said.
“Jesus Christ!”
“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain.”
“As usual, you’re missing the damn point. I didn’t say anything about putting up a fence in our yard. I was just pointing out that it looks nice in their yard. That’s it. Period.”
But, of course, he had been talking about fencing in their front lawn. He was tired of every mangy animal on the street crapping all over his grass, tired of seeing those snot-nosed Caldwell kids and their white-trash friends using his sycamore tree as third base when they played baseball in the street. A little privacy would definitely be appreciated.
But he could kiss that hope goodbye. Phyllis had obviously taken a stand against front-yard fences, and only Jesus himself could make her change her mind once she’d staked out a position.
He wondered, not for the first time, what his life would be like if he’d married Joanie Murdoch instead of Phyllis. Joanie had bee
n his first girlfriend, and if she hadn’t moved away after senior year, who knows what might have happened?
But she had moved away.
And he’d ended up with Phyllis.
They were silent the rest of the way to The Store, and, once inside, split off in separate directions, he to Hardware, she to Health and Beauty.
****
Rich was walking Sprinkles that evening, and he chose to head west instead of east so he could go past the Jorgensens’. As Sprinkles did his business against a skinny tree on the narrow strip between the sidewalk and the street, Rich ran his hands along the boards of the fence. Whether they actually were boards was open to debate. The material, smooth and cool to his touch, was definitely not wood; it felt more like plastic, and there was something about its perfectly even texture that appealed to him.
“Hey, Rich.”
He jumped, startled, and quickly pulled his hand away from the fence.
Ted Jorgensen laughed. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
“You didn’t. I was just…” He couldn’t think of a way to finish the sentence.
“Admiring my fence?”
“Yeah,” Rich admitted. “It’s pretty damn sharp.”
“Thank you. I made it myself.”
Rich was surprised. Jorgensen didn’t look like a particularly handy guy, and he’d automatically assumed that his neighbor had hired someone to put up the fence. He looked to his left, toward the gate. When did the fence go up? He realized that not only hadn’t he seen anyone working on it, but he couldn’t recall exactly when he’d first noticed that it was there. No doubt it had gone up in the middle of a weekday when he’d been at work, but for some reason, the image in his mind was of Jorgensen installing it in the middle of the night.
He didn’t like that image.
“Where did you get the boards?” he wondered.
“Like I said. Made them myself.”
“The boards?” Rich said, incredulous.
Jorgensen chuckled. “Oh, yeah. It’s a Swedish system. I have a cousin lives in Lund, and he got me this machine that forms the boards out of raw material and cuts them to length. Want to see it?”
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