audience in her early-music performance. Now she can show a young generation that even a gifted musician can shock, and thus build a market for herself.”
“That’s so cynical,” Petra protested. “She’s just being brave enough to put herself out there.”
“Where art and commerce intersect,” Jake said. “You make art, you sell it—to make a living, to get some validation—you make compromises with your art to make a living—why not go the whole way? Which isn’t to say she doesn’t believe as deeply in heavy metal as she does in early music.”
We had planned to leave before the Body Artist came onstage, but the lively arguments in our party—accompanied by the amount of beer and wine everyone was putting away—went on until the houselights were dimmed again for the evening’s main event.
Young men at tables around us gave catcalls and stomped their feet in anticipation. During the intermission, I’d been watching a table in the middle of the room. The five young men sitting there were all drinking heavily, but two in particular had been banging their beer bottles on the tabletop, demanding that the Body Artist get going. When the lights went down, theirs were the shrillest whistles in a noisy room.
We sat in the dark for perhaps thirty seconds. When the lights came back up, the Body Artist had appeared onstage.
She sat on a high stool, very still. She was naked except for an electron-sized thong, but cream-colored foundation covered her body, including her face. Only her brown hair, swept up from her neck in a jeweled clip, belonged to the world of the living.
The Artist was completely at ease, her bare legs crossed yoga style, her palms pressed together in front of her breasts. It was the audience that was disturbed: little rustlings, as people crossed and uncrossed legs or fiddled with zippers. Explosions of whispered laughter.
Behind the woman, photographs of body art appeared on a series of screens: a field of lilies grew out of a vagina, with the flowers blooming across the breasts. A face painted like a tiger, magnified so that each whisker, each stripe around the muzzle, was visible. The tiger was replaced by a jungle scene that covered the back: elephants trumpeted on the shoulder blades, a giraffe straddled the spinal column. The jungle was followed by a giant blue eye, lid lowered, on an abdomen, seeming to wink at the vulva below.
The slides changed in time to a sound track of Middle Eastern music. At the front of the stage, two figures clad in burkas gyrated in time to the music. I hadn’t noticed them at first, but the burkas somehow exaggerated the eroticism of the dancers’ movements and made them almost as disturbing as the body art itself.
I was as uncomfortable as the rest of the audience. The spotlight on the Artist’s breasts, the sense that this was a mannequin sitting there, not a woman, was both arousing and unpleasant, and I resented my body for responding to what my mind rejected. Jake Thibaut shifted away from me involuntarily, while Mr. Contreras said in a loud whisper, “This ain’t right. It just ain’t right!”
The Artist let the tension build until we were all ready to claw at each other, and then she lowered her hands, palms open toward us, in seeming invitation. “Art is in the hands of the maker, it’s in the eyes of the beholder, it’s in the air we breathe, the sunsets we admire, the dead bodies we wash and wrap in linens for burial. My body is my canvas, but tonight it’s yours as well. Tonight is a night to let your imagination run free and to paint, the way you used to paint in kindergarten before you started worrying what someone might say about your work, your art. I’m your canvas, your—bare—canvas.”
The five guys who’d been pounding their table, demanding the start of the Artist’s act, now whistled and called out. One of them shouted, “Take it all off, girl, take off that thong thing. Let’s see some pussy!”
I half turned to look at them. One of them was trying to signal for another round. All five were big guys, and the one shouting for the Body Artist to take off her thong had the kind of muscles you get from lifting heavy stuff all day long. The room was lit dimly, but I could make out a thicket of tattoos along his arms.
The woman on the stool smiled. Maybe she was used to drunken vulgarity.