work. Each entry had a set of numbers separated by an exclamation point, but, other than that, I couldn’t see what they shared. The strings of numbers weren’t the same length from entry to entry.
I wondered if they might be phone numbers, perhaps for disposable phones in an overseas market. Europe doesn’t share our fixation with the ten-digit phone number. Or perhaps Rodney was a spy for a burglary ring and used the Body Artist to broadcast safe combinations. Or he’d picked pockets at the club and was relaying credit card numbers. No matter what he was transmitting, why do it like that at all? In an era of instantaneous communication, this was incredibly cumbersome. The only thing he really seemed to gain was a sense of power over the Body Artist, and over Olympia.
Before I left [http://embodiedart.com] embodiedart.com, I looked again at the changing images and captions on the home page, stopping each slide to study it more closely. Many of the pictures were overtly cruel: The Hind at Bay, for instance, showed dogs mauling a deer that had a woman’s face. Crucifixus Est depicted a woman on a cross, a spike hammered through her vulva. Her face was divided in two, one side expressing bliss, the other agony.
As I went through the exhibit, I realized I’d misread one of the captions: “Deader than the Male,” it said, not “Deadlier than the Male.” And the face was the one Nadia had been painting on the Body Artist, a young woman with curly dark hair, her face cut in two where Nadia had sliced it with the palette knife.
I found myself shivering. Women savaged by dogs. Women crucified through the vagina. Women with their faces slashed. It was horrible and horrifying. If a man had done these paintings, I’d say he hated women. What was going on with Karen, that she hated other women, or hated herself so much she had to dismember her female body? And Nadia Guaman—was that what had drawn the two women together? Slasher art?
I rubbed my arms and got up to walk around the room, trying to dispel the images, or at least push them far enough away that I could think. I needed human company. I crossed the hall to see if my leasemate was willing to be interrupted, at least for five minutes. Tessa was hovering over a steel bar with a blowtorch, her dark face wet with sweat underneath her protective eyewear. She looked up at me briefly, continued her work until she’d finished the cut to her satisfaction, then turned off the flame and came over to me.
“I need someone alive and wholesome for a minute before I go back into my computer.” I explained what I’d been looking at.
Tessa was interested enough to wipe her face and neck dry and come across to look at the Body Artist’s slide show. She went through it twice, pausing at several of the images, before she said anything.
“She’s a skilled representational painter, no doubt about it, and she knows her art history. The Hind at Bay, it’s constructed like The Stag at Bay, even if Landseer’s dogs were more genteel and not actively attacking the stag. And the crucifixion, that’s modeled on one Michelangelo painted.” She brought up a new window and found reproductions of both paintings so I could see how similar they were to Karen Buckley’s work.
“I see why you find them disturbing,” she continued. “There’s no life here. There’s a kind of rage under these, and a kind of exhibitionism, but not vitality. I’d rather see something like these uncertain lines.” She pointed at one of the slides of customer art from a Club Gouge night. “The person who held that brush was willing to take a risk.”
“You don’t think it’s a risk being naked on a stage, letting strangers put paint on you?”
“I think it’s an extreme form of self-indulgence,” Tessa said. “Every time you put paint on canvas, or flesh, you’re taking a risk, but your Body Artist isn’t doing that. Come to think of it, I’m surprised she isn’t cutting herself onstage. I don’t like the performance art of people like Lucia Balinoff, but she works along the same themes: the savaging of the female body. Your performance artist isn’t doing anything new and she’s not taking any risks. She’s exposing herself, but not her self.”
Tessa left on that stern note. A moment later, I heard her blowtorch fire up again.
9
The Dead—Before They Got That Way
I tried