The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson [77]
“I do,” Buster said, looking at the sheer number of pages in front of him and feeling overwhelmed and slightly jealous. Even if it was terrible, goddamn, there was a lot of it.
“Bye,” Suzanne said, walking quickly out of the kitchen, and Buster stayed at the table, waving to her retreating form while she let herself out. He hoped, washing down the lasagna with a gulp of ice-cold water, that Suzanne was not crazy, was not overly prone to depression, and was instead a hopeful and kind, if somewhat eccentric, young woman who would find a way to make his life better. He put the rest of the food in the refrigerator and searched the kitchen drawers until he found a sharpened No. 2 pencil. There was, in his mind, a faint glimmer of something wonderful in his future. Suzanne. He looked toward his sister’s room and thought of what waited for him, the mystery that would perhaps never reveal itself. He felt a renewed sense of purpose, the desire to finish what he and his sister had begun. He would find his mom and dad, solve the unsolved, and then he would be free to break off this section of his life and begin laying down a new road that would lead somewhere wonderful.
shot, 1975
artists: hobart waxman and caleb fang
Hobart would not stop talking about “that goddamned fraud of an artist” Chris Burden, and Caleb began to grow worried, his body tensing for the inevitable moment when his mentor decided to do something about it. Burden, who a few years earlier had actually been shot in the arm with a rifle for a performance, had just completed his newest piece, “Doomed,” where he lay motionless under a leaning sheet of glass, a clock ticking on the wall of the gallery space. He’d stayed like that for almost fifty hours, until some museum worker put a pitcher of water close to Burden, which caused Burden to finally get up, go get a hammer, and smash the clock. “Motherfuckers should have left him there until he died,” Hobart said to Caleb, who shook his head. “No, see, that was the point, Hobart. He wouldn’t move until acted upon by the museum staff. They controlled the terms of the piece, but they didn’t know it. It’s pretty interesting.” Hobart looked at Caleb as if everything he had taught his favorite pupil had been for nothing. “It’s horseshit, Caleb,” he said, waving his arms over his head, drawing the attention of the other diners in the cafeteria. “What have I told you about anything that takes place in a controlled environment? It’s not art. It’s dead, inanimate. Who cares if you let somebody shoot you in a goddamn art gallery? There’s no danger; there’s no surprise. It has to take place in the world, around people who don’t know that it’s art. That’s how it has to be.” Caleb nodded, embarrassed once again at having disappointed his idol. He vowed that he would do better, would burn away all his previous notions of art. He would teach himself to dislike what he actually liked, to approve of what he did not totally understand, in the hopes that he would come out the other side with something that resembled inspiration, something that would make him more famous than Chris Burden or even Hobart Waxman.
Caleb had gained Hobart’s attention ten years ago, when Caleb was still a student at UC Davis, when he’d unveiled his senior project. He had wheeled a motorized contraption into the room and announced that he had built a device that would “make anything you’ve ever lost or ruined instantaneously grow back.” Hobart had lost the pinkie finger on his left hand in a car accident some years back, and the students in the class instantly focused on his hand. When Caleb flipped the switches, the machine began to hum, metal rubbing against metal. After only a few moments, smoke began to pour from the slits in the machine’s frame, and Caleb ordered everyone to leave the classroom, that something was going wrong, but