Bright Shards of Someplace Else (15 page)

“You know what would really be great? To have a slide with a viewer's blood blown up right next to the picture he just saw. So, you have someone look at a Clyfford Still—let's say that big black one. ‘Untitled' something or other. Then, you look at his blood under the slide, take a magnified picture of it, blow it up, and tack it up right there next to the Still painting. I bet the blown-up blood would look like the Still painting, only more advanced. Like the next aesthetic step.” Gasping now, and doubled over in a barely repressed dry heave, I was forced merely to think my protests to this. O'Hara had a different reading of my response.

“Whoa there!” O'Hara reached out, grabbed my arm, and turned me around to face him. “Hey now, calm down. I know it's shocking to see that level of composition under a slide. Believe me, when I first placed a photo of blown-up intestinal flora next to a Gorky, I had about the same reaction. 'Bout had to breathe into a paper bag, to be frank.” It always baffled me when people announced frankness about matters that demanded neither openness nor caginess. Whether or not he needed a paper bag after epiphany #453—and whether or
not he was up-front about that fact or kept it tucked away in euphemism—seemed wildly beside the point as I was overtaken by a new round of heaves. Perhaps, I thought, feeling another contraction of my gut in protest to something likely more potent than any insight I heard today—perhaps O'Hara's thoughtless recasting of my physical trouble as awe at his idea indicated a larger paradox of great and small minds alike.

There seem to me two types of artists and thinkers. There are those who work under a heavy mantle of self-skepticism, barely able to plow through their own doubt enough to clear any room for their creations. Then, there are those who seem not to acknowledge—or perhaps even sense—any doubts whatsoever. This style of mind sees everything in the world as support for its creations. Even contradictory evidence, detractors, a whole world shouting “this is not so” seem only further proof that the world needs them. Otherwise, why wouldn't it already believe? Clearly, O'Hara was in the latter category: so romanced by his own thinking that even a totally unconnected phenomenon—such as a retching journalist—registered as a rising cheer for his theory. The problem is that it is hard to know which type of thinker to admire. At first, a skeptic's wise tempering of his or her own insights seems nobler, as he or she is at least acknowledging all human fallibility. But then the realization hits: both the skeptic and the believer are equally solipsistic, as the extreme nature of both their doubts and convictions can be born of nothing less than a mind untethered by outside reality.

Maybe this was why, even after sitting me down in a swiveling chair and rushing off to hunt down a paper bag, O'Hara hardly broke stride in his pontificating. “I have in my mind's eye a new art,” O'Hara shouted from across the room, over the sounds of his own rifling. “Pigments in Petri dishes. Cells on canvas. Diseases exposed to art. Artists exposed to disease.” O'Hara had now returned, and he shook out a paper bag inches from my bowed head (bowed, that is, not in reverence of Microaestheticism, but to ward off a wave of nausea and
dizziness). “There might be a bit of powder left in this bag, but don't worry about it.” O'Hara then jammed the bag on my face, kindly leaving it up to me to decide whether to christen it as a hyperventilation bag or a vomit bag. Not wanting to inhale, ingest, or otherwise encounter any more substances of O'Hara's, I brought up my arms and pushed it away, bringing on a new round of wheezing. “Suit yourself,” O'Hara huffed. “It was just filled with harmless spores.”

Insensitive is surely too mild a term for someone who begins discussing the beauty of disease in the face of true physical agony. But it was the only term I had the energy to supply as O'Hara elucidated his meaning. “See, you expose disease to art, and then check it under a 'scope. Is it more beautiful? Is it trying to outdo the art with its own composition of viruses, bacteria, or malignant cell overgrowth? I bet it is. Conversely, you could also look at the cells of ailing artists. How does the image of their disease size up to the average sufferers? The thing is …” Here, O'Hara lowered his tone, taking the manic lilt from his voice to show how admirably even-handed his consideration of these matters was. “I think we really need to answer these questions before we even
consider
treating disease with art or contracting disease for art's sake.”
How prudent of you!
I badly wanted to quip, but it was a distant third on my list of present wants, after “to breathe” and “to see.”

“Caught your breath yet?” O'Hara asked, in the offhand, rhetorical manner of someone asking if I was enjoying the weather of a perfect day. I opened my mouth to answer in the strenuous negative, but all that resulted was a series of hacking coughs followed by another ominous retch, this one ill-content to remain dry. As matter gurgled and rose up into my mouth, I covered my lips and forced it back down, where it rumbled, prophesizing another uprising. “You, my friend, need to be out of the vicinity of the 'scope when you erupt.” O'Hara seemed to pack another aimless insult in his use of the crude, unsympathetic “erupt” to describe a body's natural revolt. He grabbed the back of my chair and rolled me to a corner, as if moving a piece of
unneeded equipment out of the way. “I was not planning on this when I invited you here, you know. I'm not here to play school nurse.”

Was it that reference to childhood, or something else, that suddenly prompted a montage of my growing up? Though seemingly still conscious, and still focused on the floor with my head bowed, and still slightly swiveling the swivel chair with every fought-down heave, I could suddenly see isolated images of my youth. I saw myself, four or five, finger-painting in a way not intended—delicately, using small parts of each finger for different colors, my fingernail employed as a crude spade to give the picture texture, and me, pausing for minutes at a time in contemplation of my next mark. I saw my art teacher, oblivious, leading me over to a classmate to show me how it's really done … and this kid, without the slightest plan in his mind, rubbing his entire hand and forearm in each color and slopping the muddy mix on paper, sometimes ripping it, sometimes missing it, and all the while grinning in that it's-damn-good-isn't-it way. So much like O'Hara was that baseless confidence, that idiotic pride in his every expression.

Then I saw myself, about twelve, at the scholastic art fair, jotting down flaws in the works I saw in a little field book. Little Holly Rander's “Two Faces”?
Too baroque! No one's eyelashes curl to that degree!
And Johnny Wiles's “My Mom, Dad, and Brother”? I remember my pleasure at coming up with:
All the sap of Norman Rockwell with none of the skill!
Then everything sped up, and it became harder to tell what time period images came from. Some were mere snippets—an exhibition catalogue falling to the floor, a fountain pen presented in a velvet case for a bygone birthday, an artist using the same circular gesticulation over and over to describe his series of tondo paintings, as if I needed his help to visualize “round.” The visions kept coming, and nothing tied them with the present moment except that they were a showcase of a life absent of Microaestheticism, a life where a clear line was drawn between art and science, cells and paint, illness and art-making.

If Markus O'Hara had his way, no life-review hallucinatory episode would ever be without the firm presence of Microaestheticism. A memory of kindergarten would draw up a different method of finger-painting, one which owed a heavy debt to O'Hara and his theory. Kindergarteners would simply rub their bare hands—still with abandon, of course—over a line-up of slides, which they would then look at under a microscope to see what sort of image their skin cells, oil, and perhaps
PB&J
residue would create. “A more accurately dubbed ‘finger painting,'” O'Hara would likely say of it. And a scholastic art fair? Maybe, rather than questioning the unearned sentiment of a colored-pencil family portrait, a young critic would comment on a diptych of a cartoon daisy and a few chambers of skin cells arranged to mimic it, pointing out that the resemblance between the two was too obvious to be evocative.

Perhaps that was, after all, the most damning criticism of Micro-aestheticism. Both the body, with its still-inchoate vagaries (ever mocking science), and art, in its untraceable power and inscrutable victories, still largely elude us, and rightfully so. To pin both art and science under a single slide, never allowing them free play in the unknown, is to sacrifice mystery for control. Still, when the vagaries of the body are upon us, when chests contract, when arms go numb, when vision falters, when retching asks for more than mere vomit, seeming to demand that the innards rise up in the throat as well—the mystery, admittedly, can be a bit hard to appreciate. But a critical mystery, I maintain, it nevertheless is. Through the in-and-out flickering that had now become my visual and aural field, I heard O'Hara, and as usual he hardly seemed to second me.

“Mmmm …,” O'Hara began. “I think I know
exactly
what's going on here. You've been skeptical about Microaestheticism this whole time, and now you've seen proof—in the image of your own blood nonetheless—of its validity. So you play up a coughing fit to stall until you can think of some clever way to refute it. Not a gracious loser, eh?”

Playing up a coughing fit? Of course. No drama exterior to the
drama in O'Hara's own mind could be anything but a ploy. “But I'm used to this stuff. Comes with the territory, as they say. But you
are
gonna look at the slide again. It's shifted into an even better composition. There'll be no denying it then, friend. No denying it then.” His words were followed by a series of what felt like seismic shifts, as my movement seemed to occur absent of my volition. “Oopsies,” O'Hara said, as I felt my body hurl forward. “Gotta watch out for these cords. Up you go!” It occurred to me that O'Hara was likely pushing my chair, but when I tried to feel around me, no definitive conclusion could be made on that. “Final stop, 'Scope Terminal. Everybody off.” I felt O'Hara grab me under my armpits and hoist me somewhere, presumably at the 'scope. I opened my mouth again in an attempt to impress upon O'Hara the gravity of my condition, but all that happened was a bubbling up of something bile-like, which I had barely the energy to choke down.

“
Look
.” I felt O'Hara's hands at the back of my neck and head, directing me into the proper craning at the 'scope. While he pushed down on the back of my head, presumably to line me up better with the eyepiece, the sudden force caused my legs to slide under me. As I felt myself oozing to the floor, like so much precious substance spilled from a beaker, O'Hara tightened his grip on my head. “Ah-ah-ah … you're not getting out of this so easily.” At that, he pulled me up, cranium first, and again thrust me at the 'scope. “
Look
.” O'Hara moved in closer to support me, effectively jamming me between him and the table, while the 'scope served as a balance point for my head. I probably looked much like Dali's seeping clocks, kept only from puddling by their precise arrangement on the crutches. Such an image could double as a representation of theories, like Microaestheticism, that try to balance something as fluid as the sublime on something as rigid as fact.

As O'Hara pushed my head more firmly on the 'scope, my vision finally graduated from intermittent to all black. I was embarrassed to admit that my instinctive interpretation was utterly layman. “I have
gone blind,” I thought, falling prey to that stock reading of everything going dark. Not wanting to give O'Hara the satisfaction of pointing out a conventional interpretation (even in my inner monologue), I concentrated until the darkness become something more. Balanced on the scope, I suddenly saw something—a vague form, a patch of lighter dark—emerge from the otherwise consistent field. The image was similar to Ad Reinhardt's “Black Painting #34,” with a ghost-of-a-form manifesting after enough concentration. It was a brilliant use of subtlety; a subtlety employed so successfully that it became more extreme than a white swath on a black canvas. The thing about blackness is that no one looks at it long enough; viewers assume there's nothing to see. But forming an image, even the shyest silhouette, in the language of black is more powerful than introducing color because it introduces the idea that there is no absolute saturation. Everything is a study in value.

If only I could have spoken then, I could have reached a tenuous common ground with O'Hara, conceding that what I saw under the slide was indeed spectacular, perhaps calling for a reevaluation of the worth of Microaestheticism, and thus forging a truce in awe. I tried to speak, but all I think I managed was “Blackkkkkkkkk …,” followed by a hot, wet clot spat up against the back of my teeth, which soon occupied all my energy in its gagging-down. O'Hara, still behind me to ensure I was wedged at the scope until I hit an acceptable epiphany about his work, saw this as a good time to make a pun. “Black? Hardly. For an art critic, you certainly have a limited ‘palate' of words! Ha! To
me
, the real beauty of those cells is their almost utter transparency … Hmmmm … It's sort of like jellyfish layered upon jellyfish, upon jellyfish …”

“Upon jellyfish”—which sounded like a fit title for a Damien Hirst work—seemed to ricochet around the room, multiplying and becoming a sort of nonsense mantra, terrifying in both its implications and ultimate meaninglessness. Again, I felt myself sliding into an even worse conventional reading, both philistine and alarmist.
I'm blind!
I'm dying!
But I gamely pulled myself back: perhaps O'Hara, in a jittery haste, had just left the lens cap on. Perhaps that was the black I was seeing. I swung my head away from the 'scope to test this theory, before O'Hara grabbed my head and pushed me back. “C'mon now. What do you gotta say about this image now? Huh?” In that instant away from the scope, the blackness remained.