The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson [89]
lights, camera, action, 1985
artists: caleb and camille fang
Bonnie watched the Fangs pacing around the studio, none of them acknowledging the others’ presence. They simply waited for whatever would come next. Their faces were so impassive that it seemed to Bonnie that they were not human, that they were robots programmed to perform their task without deviation, no matter how dire the circumstances, despite the inevitable disorder that would ensue. Finally, everything perfectly arranged, Caleb arose from his director’s chair and stood behind the cameraman. “Action!” he called. And now Bonnie, sweating through her nurse’s outfit, trying so hard to keep her hands from shaking, wondered how she was going to keep up with this family, how she could possibly help them make something beautiful.
She had learned about the Fangs earlier that year, when she had taken Hobart Waxman’s Introduction to Meaningful Art class. In the class, they had studied one of the earliest works by the Fangs, where Caleb Fang had taped a series of homemade, flare-like devices to his back and, while holding his nine-month-old son in the middle of a crowded mall, caught fire, the flame shooting from underneath his coat and smoke issuing from the legs of his pants, while he continued to walk through the mall with the baby in his arms. The whole event was captured on video by Camille, who was standing on the second level of the mall, hanging over the railing to focus on the unemotional faces of both Caleb and, even more amazingly, the baby, as the other shoppers tried to make sense of the event unfolding before them. “This,” Hobart had told the class, “is so rudimentary, so unencumbered by the traditions that have come before it, that it almost strains the notion of what constitutes art. The Fangs simply throw their own bodies into a space as if they were hand grenades and wait for the disruption to occur. They have no expectations other than to cause unrest. It is, if you are one of the few to witness it firsthand, deeply unsettling because of how little the Fangs seem to care about the psychic and sometimes physical pain that accompanies their performances.” Bonnie had watched the way Caleb Fang, obviously suffering some degree of burns on his body, walked so steadily through the mall that it felt to Bonnie as if she was being hypnotized by his movements. Caleb Fang walked, on fire, and shielded his own son from the flames. It felt so unnecessary and yet so arresting that Bonnie immediately fell in love, not with art but with the Fangs.
She had received a mailing address for the Fangs from Hobart Waxman, after some degree of flirtation, her considerable beauty something she was only recently learning to utilize for her own benefit. She proceeded to write Caleb and Camille letter after letter, hoping for a response, though not knowing what she would want them to say. She told them of her own artistic desire, which was merely to be yet another component of the performances that the Fangs enacted.
There was no response from the Fangs, and Bonnie could not blame them. They had developed something perfect and why would they seek to disrupt that process by including another person, especially one with no vision of her own? She had tried for months now to think of her own performance, some unique revelation of the absurdity of life, but she had no capacity for new ideas. She could see an existing artwork and understand why it was or was not successful. But she could not take that knowledge and arrange it into something wholly original, or even a reinterpretation of that existing piece. She was, as Hobart had explained to her, as kindly as possible, simply a critic.
She watched a few other videos of the Fangs that Hobart had loaned her, the quality so grainy and inexpertly framed that it was sometimes difficult to immediately ascertain what had just happened. If only the Fangs were able to stage their events with actual lighting, a cameraman