I helped her step inside. “I never thought to ask, but what are you going to do in there for two hours?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged wistfully. “I never know. That’s part of the fun.”
She told me to go get the others. Shelly scurried in first, futzed with October’s hair one last time, and pronounced her good to go.
I shut and locked the door. Then I opened the app on my phone, made sure the bars, lights, and audiovisual devices were all detected, and signaled to Rodney that we were ready.
Rae gave Helen a thumbs-up, and Helen removed the ropes.
The lights blinked in the main gallery to indicate the performance was about to commence, and people began entering the room.
October nodded, and I pushed “Play.”
Nobody but Rodney had been allowed to see the visuals before the performance. October wanted her team to experience the installation in real time as much as possible. Films played on all three walls of the gallery, and they were provocative and disturbing—an in-your-face mishmash of statistics, social media messages, graphic photography, and video clips of everything from suffragette protests erupting in violence to botched back-alley abortions. In juxtaposition, the velvety voice of Leontyne Price, one of the first female African-American opera singers, blared from speakers hanging in the corners of the room.
I tried to focus on the gradual movement of the bars, but it was hard to take my eyes off October’s mesmerizing performance. At first she was inert, resigned to being locked up. Then she seemed to notice she was trapped and began trying to escape subtly. Then not so subtly. She pulled at the bars as they steadily closed in on her. She looked frightened as the cage narrowed. She opened her mouth to scream but nothing came out, only the sound of Leontyne’s tortured arias. She wrestled with her dress, and feathers blew around the cage. She pounded and collapsed onto the grate. She curled up into a ball and cried, and her eye makeup ran down her face like black wax. At some point she accidentally cut her arm on what must have been a loose nail—my bad—and blood dripped in an abstract, Pollock-like splatter all over the New York Times wallpaper.
The gallery was packed, and the audience was captivated. Most guests stared and gawked. A handful of people cried along with October. A few jaded jerks laughed and rolled their eyes, but nobody was bored.
Two hours went by in a blink and without any technical difficulties, and by the end I expected October to be as exhausted as I was, but as she sat on the grate, hugging her knees into her chest, unable to move, she looked wired.
October had done with her body what I tried to do with the guitar. She used it to speak a language that all humanity, if they were listening, could understand. It was beautiful, but it touched a nerve in me. I couldn’t put my finger on why right away, but something about the type of freedom she was exploring made me hyper-cognizant of the ways in which I held myself back.
There was more. I believed I knew October fairly well by then, and, yes, she was extraordinary, but she could also be vulnerable, complicated, awkward, and full of contradictions. I saw all of those qualities in her performance. I saw her humanness. What set her apart from most humans I knew was that she used those qualities to her advantage. She turned the dark and mundane into the poetic and magical.
That, I thought, is what it means to be an artist of life.
I didn’t perceive or understand this distinction when I was a kid. Cal was the closest thing to an artist that I knew, and in my eyes he was smarter, stronger, more enlightened than I was. He was unlimited. Single-minded. Special. That’s what I thought you had to be in order to be an artist, and that made it impossible for me to accept myself as one, because I didn’t see myself as a person with any exceptional qualities. Sure, I was a good guitar player, but that was a skill, something I’d learned through thousands of hours of practice. I didn’t connect it to my character or my destiny. I didn’t see it as the kite that lifted my spirit out of the dirt and off the ground.