The Fat Artist and Other Stories (13 page)

•  •  •

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 blankly 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. (Perhaps 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

Olivia, however, learned to see through it, and was probably a bit irritated with herself for having been at first seduced by it. A few friendly interrogations over dinner on matters approaching the erudite were enough to reveal that I probably had not finished a book since high school. So, in the first few months of our nearly meaningless affair, back when Olivia was still at least ostensibly entertaining the possibility of allowing herself to love me, she bought me a present: a volume of the collected stories of Franz Kafka. Written on the inside front cover, in her filigreed female handwriting (but in rather assertive black marker), was the businesslike inscription: “Tristan— Here you go. Most of them are pretty short. Olivia.”

That sign-off was characteristic of her, by the way. No “love,” no “with love,” not even a tepid “best wishes.” Just her first name followed by a period, as if that alone constituted its own sentence.
^VII

For her I was probably at most a brief, interesting infatuation or experiment. I don’t think she was ever really in love with me. She did once tell me I was the most, quote, “fake and pathetic person [she] ever made the mistake of fucking.” Much later, she also told me she would, quote, “call the cops on [me] if [I were to] show up [at her apartment] coked out of [my] mind [in the middle of the night] again.”

•  •  •

But all that is beside the point. I mention Olivia only by way of explaining how it was I came to admire Kafka’s haunting allegory, “A Hunger Artist.” A man sits in a cage and refuses to eat. He is gradually forgotten by the public. He starves himself for so long that everyone ceases to care. But his art goes on—unto his death. His last words are: “I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I would have stuffed myself like you or anyone else.” When he dies, they sweep out his cage and replace him with a young panther. “The food he liked,” writes Kafka, “was brought him without hesitation by the attendants; he seemed not even to miss his freedom.” The people crowd around the cage that now contains this creature so ardently alive, and “they did not want ever to move away.”