• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2287 0

up like refuse, until the gallery’s walls and floor-space were entirely cleared and the place looked like any other empty storefront. Grossvogel then got into the truck while the rest of us stood in wondering silence outside the evacuated art gallery. Putting his head out the open window of the rented or borrowed truck, he called to the woman who ran the gallery. She walked over to the driver’s side of the truck and exchanged a few words with the artist before he started the engine of the vehicle and drove off. Returning to where we had remained standing on the sidewalk, she announced to us that, within the next few weeks, there would be a second exhibit of Grossvogel’s work at the gallery.

This, then, was the message that was passed among the circle of persons with whom I consorted: that Grossvogel, after physically collapsing from an undisclosed ailment or attack at the first, highly unsuccessful exhibit of his works, was now going to present a second exhibit after summarily cleaning out the art gallery of those rather worthless paintings and drawings and whatnot of his already displayed to the public and hauling them away in the back of a pickup truck. Of course, Grossvogel’s new exhibit was promoted in an entirely professional manner by the woman who owned the art gallery and who stood to gain financially from the sale of what, in the phrase of the advertising copy associated with this event, was somewhat awkwardly called a “radical and revisionary phase in the career of the celebrated artistic visionary Reiner Grossvogel.” Nevertheless, due to the circumstances surrounding both the artist’s previous and upcoming exhibits, the whole thing almost immediately devolved into a fog of delirious and sometimes lurid gossip and speculation. This development was wholly in keeping with the nature of those who comprised that circle of dubious, not to mention devious artistic and intellectual persons of which I had unexpectedly become a central figure. After all, it was I who had taken Grossvogel to the hospital following his collapse at the first exhibit of his works, and it was the hospital—already a subject of strange repute, as I discovered—that loomed so prominently within the delirious fog of gossip and speculation surrounding Grossvogel’s upcoming exhibit. There was even talk of some special procedures and medications to which the artist had been exposed during his brief confinement at this institution that would account for his unexplained disappearance and subsequent reemergence in order to perpetrate what many presumed would be a startling “artistic vision.” No doubt it was this expectation, this desperate hope for something of stunning novelty and lavish brilliance—which in the minds of some overly imaginative persons promised to exceed the domain of mere aesthetics—that led to the acceptance among our circle of the unorthodox nature of Grossvogel’s new exhibit, as well as accounted for the emotional letdown that followed for those of us in attendance that opening night.

And, in tact, what occurred at the gallery that night in no way resembled the sort of exhibit we were accustomed to attending: the floor of the gallery and the gallery’s walls remained as bare as the day when Grossvogel appeared with a pickup truck to cart off all his works from his old art show, while the new one, we soon discovered after arriving, was to take place in the small back room of the storefront building. Furthermore, we were charged a rather large fee in order to enter this small back room, which was illuminated by only a few lightbulbs of extremely low wattage dangling here and there from the ceiling. One of the lightbulbs was hung in a corner of the room directly above a small table which had a torn section of a bedsheet draped over it to conceal something that was bulging beneath it. Radiating out from this corner, with its dim lightbulb and small table, were several loosely arranged rows of folding chairs. These uncomfortable chairs were eventually occupied by those of us, about a dozen in all, who were willing to pay the large fee