Mona Lisa Monster Truck

As the carrion birds of the artworld inevitably seek out new contexts to inspire their peculiar brand of social concern, I predict that disaster zones will become the new black/BritArt/return to figuration. In galleries around the world, stick-thin bored model/intern/whatevers will be diverted from sneering at visitors by a klaxon-sound emanating from the gallery’s Emergency Detection Device. Imperceptibly ducking back behind her iMac, like a bitch on castors, she will check the monitor to locate wherever the latest apocalypse has snuffed out the lives of tens of thousand of poor souls who believed in a benign and merciful God.

The gallerist/dealer, upstairs, is eagerly informed by her that there’s been a Richter Scale 6 with a Mercali Scale of V.II Very Strong in Armenia (and she’d still love to do dinner one night and pick his brains on his encyclopedic knowledge of Jasper Johns multiples). The dealer quickly and efficiently calculates which artists in his stable aren’t already on field trips to Myanmar and China, or presenting human rights atrocity etchings in European art fairs. Cross-factoring data on soil liquefaction reports (where water-saturated granular material loses it’s strength, causing buildings to sink) with local histories of poor building regulations and bureaucrat corruption (far greater collateral potential), to try and get a sense of the scale of the carnage, he instantly calculates the expedition costs against future sales of resultant artworks. Better to make the body bag bronzes in series of ten rather than five…

Within 36 hours the artist has been dispatched. On the business class flight over he spends time, in between scanning the wine list and shuffling his iPod, meditating on the suffering of the people he will meet.

Once landed, he is met at the airport by a slight little local woman who steers him through the hellish throng of others arrivistes from the competing “Emergency Response Units” of Mayfair, Chelsea, Basel and Paris. His dealer has done his job well; the woman is not only the best interpreter available, but she has also lost some family members of her own, and is well in with the rescue services. Letting the others suck on his Trabant taxi’s fumes, the artist insists on foregoing a freshening up at his hotel (confirmed as one of the few built with adequate foundations, in case of aftershocks) in favor of going to the epicenter immediately.

An hour later he’s being guided through a miasma of collapsed buildings and misery and anger, as people use their bare hands to dig through the rubble (later he will cast the clawmarks for a series of semi-transparent ghost-like poly-resin sculptures that sit, almost unseen, on a dark lacquered slabs built to exactly the same dimensions as the defective building bricks. Artforum will observe, in it’s double summer issue, that “The resin, almost milky, is redolent of schools of sperm trying to impregnate concrete and breathe life back into the immaterial and gone that lies somewhere below.” ).

At intervals, the rescue workers all freeze and silence the machines and listen if they think someone trapped below is hammering for help (later he will edit his digital recordings into a series of “pregnant silences” signaled at the beginning by the expiration of the last sputtering throb of a generator, the agonized extended communal quiet, which is finally punctured by disappointed people getting back to work again as the pickaxes restart their doleful plaint. Frieze will call the suite “A requiem mass where the climax had curdled 36 hours earlier, its latent reverberations playing the Armenian rescuers like a cosmic DJ mash-up.”).

Finally that night, just before the artist collapses with fatigue and jet-lag, his interpreter pulls his arm and steers him frantically over to a recently uncovered corpse. Her voice is high-pitched and the tears roll down her face as she bends over the body. “My sister. My sister.”

Pulling out his 100 megapixel camera – discreetly, so as not be insensitive – he watches his guide lay down next to her relative, trying to somehow hug her back to life. Their bodies are the same size, and he realizes - with a sharp intake of breath - that that they were twins. She mimics her dead sister’s fetal position in a mirror posture - like dolphin’s mating - adjusting herself as she edges closer and closer, as the artist starts to snap pictures. He switches to macro as the two sister’s faces loom together, and their mouths touch in a final caress; one set of lips alive and warm, the other cold and dusted with a sprinkling of former Soviet Union compacted concrete.

Months later, passing through London at the Groucho Club, the artist would proclaim to a circle of enraptured fellow artists: “I had never felt more alive in my entire life.”

Art In America said that the artist’s photo suite - hung by meat hooks in 10 meter ripped strips, to great acclaim at the Venice Biennial before being purchased by Pernot Ricard as the backdrop for an Absolut vodka advert in Interview magazine - was “As if the spirit of Joel Peter Witkin presided over a desert scirocco that had blown in from nearby sister state Azerbaijan, uniting the sacred (dead) and profane (alive) sisters in an embrace of microcosmic resignation.”

After he’d had her drive him back to the hotel, the artist let the sister go home. Too buzzed to sleep any more, he checked the time difference and called his dealer.

“How’s it going?” the dealer asked.

“It’s humbling. There’s so much to testify to. I need to be here a little longer. Do you think you could send over one of those Emergency Response Studios?”

This entry was posted on Friday, July 4th, 2008 at 6:34 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.