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By Root 1969 0

an international market to some extent. Reiner Grossvogel was also celebrated in feature articles that appeared in major art magazines and nonartistic publications alike, although he was usually portrayed, in the words of one critic, as a “one-man artistic and philosophical freakshow.” Nevertheless, Grossvogel was by any measure now functioning as a highly successful organism. And it was due to this success, which had never been approached by anyone else within our small circle of artists and intellectuals, that those of us who had abandoned Grossvogel upon hearing him lecture on his metamorphic recovery from a severe gastrointestinal disorder and viewing the first in his prodigious Tsalal series of sculptures, now once again attached ourselves and our failed careers to him and his unarguably successful body without a mind or a self. Even Mrs. Angela eventually became conversant with the “realizations” that Grossvogel had first espoused in the back room of that storefront art gallery and now disseminated in what seemed an unending line of philosophical pamphlets, which became almost as sought after by collectors as his series of Tsalal sculptures. Thus, when Grossvogel issued a certain brochure among the small circle of artists and intellectuals which he had never abandoned even after he had achieved such amazing financial success and celebrity, a brochure announcing a “physical-metaphysical excursion” to the dead town of Crampton, we were more than willing once more to pay the exorbitant price he was asking.

This was the brochure to which I referred the others seated at the table with me in the Crampton diner: the photographic portraitist who was subject to coughing jags on my left, the author of the unpublished philosophical treatise An Investigation into the Conspiracy Against the Human Race on my right, and Mrs. Angela directly across from me. The man on my left was still reiterating, with prolonged interruptions of his coughing (which I will here delete), the charge that Grossvogel had perpetrated a “metaphysical swindle” with his high-priced “physical-metaphysical excursion.”

“All of Grossvogel’s talk about that business with the shadow and the blackness and the nightmare world he purportedly was seeing … and then where do we end up—in some godforsaken town that went out of business a long time ago, and in some part of the country where everything looks like an overexposed photograph. I have my camera with me ready to create portraits of faces that have looked upon Grossvogel’s shadowy blackness, or whatever he was planning for us to do here. I’ve even thought of several very good titles and concepts for these photographic portraits which I imagine would have a good chance of being published together as a book, or at least a portfolio in a leading photography magazine. I thought that at the very least I might have taken back with me a series of photographic portraits of Grossvogel, with that huge face of his. I could have placed that with almost any of the better art magazines. But where is the celebrated Grossvogel? He said he would be here to meet us. He said we would find out everything about that shadow business, as I understood him. Furthermore, I have my head prepared for those absolute nightmares that Grossvogel prattled on about in his pamphlets and in that highly deceptive brochure of his.”

“This brochure,” I said during one of the man’s more raucous intervals of hacking, “makes no explicit promises about any of those things you’ve imagined to be contained there. It specifically announces that this is to be an excursion, and I quote, ‘to a dead town during a time of year when one season is failing and the next is just beginning its rise to success.’ Grossvogel’s brochure also says that this is a ‘finished town, a failed town, a false and unreal setting that is the product of unsuccessful organisms and therefore a town that is exemplary of that extreme state of failure that may so distress human organic systems, particularly the gastrointestinal system, to the point of weakening its delusional and totally