Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  London was colder than Bucharest, the faces on the street angrier with less cause. But the interiors were warmer, and the gallerist, a stringy woman high on forty years of an undiagnosed eating disorder, introduced him to artists so celebrated even he recognized their names. He was given a drab, elevator-size room in an East End hotel, but the bed was soft and the room was warm, and from there he wandered around the rolling parks and side streets, fully international, starving but too poor to buy himself lunch. He waited to eat at Laura Lucas’s never-ending strategic dinners, her thin arm on the back of his chair, introducing him as her latest “find.” When a culture magazine asked to take his picture, he refused. He had witnessed artists in Venice posing for fashion photographers, sucking in their cheeks, channeling their favorite film star, smiling like some misbehaving monkey about to be given an orange, and he swore he’d never play that pathetic game.

  Laura Lucas went ballistic. “What you need is exposure!” she screamed. “Exposure is what’s going to keep that work from being forgotten in a week.” She said the word exposure as if it were a virus that would kill him if he didn’t contract it. “Do you want to go back to Bucharest and stir cement for the rest of your life? Will you please just trust me? I had to call in a favor for that profile.” He finally had his picture taken in a headache-lit studio in Islington, where a tipsy woman with silver-plated eyelids handed him a sport coat that happened to be hanging on a clothing rack. Later, reading the magazine caption, he discovered the black sport coat was Givenchy, Spring/Summer 2006. A journalist conducted an interview by phone, uh-huhing through his explanation of Ceauşescu’s slave nation and his fascist desire to build a palatial, first-world empire on the backs of its citizens, and Gavril’s own attempts at finding meaning in the fractured remains of that regime. Under his picture—with his birthmark Photoshopped out—ran the title “Dracula Rising,” and, in smaller type, “Hot, up-and-coming Romanian artist bites the hand that beat him.” The article told a story that must have been spoon-fed by Laura herself: “In an art market whizzing with million-dollar surfaces, one rogue artist is literally smashing his way into the gallery scene. Gavril Catargi claims he is ‘making gestures of reparation,’ but his seriously destructive tendencies are catching all who sift through his rubble. . . .” He was disgusted, enraged, and correctly quoted. Yet he hoped the magazine would find its way into the hands of Luz Wilson in America. The smashed tiles sold for eight thousand pounds to a collector in Geneva. Laura Lucas gave him four thousand, more than he had ever made in his life.

  In Bucharest, there were no further shows, no offers of photographs. Most of his friends drifted away from him after hearing of his success in London, as if he had indeed come down with a case of exposure. He couldn’t go back to construction. His girlfriend moved to Constanta to work as a nanny for a family of Moldovans. Gavril applied for a paid artist internship at a small contemporary art center located in Chelsea, New York, where Luz Wilson was from, where the less-pretentious big-name stuff was shown, where his career might flourish from the attention of intelligent, black-suited New Yorkers. He received his acceptance by e-mail and waited four months for his student visa to be processed.

  Everything in Bucharest was slow—the weather, the bureaucracy, the face of any passerby above the age of fifteen. His mother was furious about his departure. She had suffered for years so that her children could have a better future in Romania, not someplace where things were already better. He brought his four thousand pounds to the bank, where they converted it through the Romanian leu into U.S. dollars, $2,178 to be exact. From there, he went alone to Henri Coandã International Airport and shut the eyelid of the window before takeoff. He didn’t call Luz Wilson until he landed.

  He punched her number in while he was waiting for his luggage on the Newark carousel. He loved the carousel, the iron plates rotating on a conveyor belt while travelers stared longingly at the gleaming emptiness. Everything in New York could be art. “Yo, this is Luz,” beep. He left a rambling economy-class, two-connecting-flights, trans-Atlantic, jet-lagged, just-drilled-by-a-homicidal-customs-official message.

  Manhattan glittered iridescently, told him dreams of fortune through its arrow-sharp streets as he passed into and then out of the island, to an apartment in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. The New York Craigslist section, where he’d found the apartment, was like his childhood idea of New York, a place where all was available: sex, psychics, used stereo equipment, tickets to Carnegie Hall. Unwilling to admit that he knew not a soul in the city, he told his grad-student roommate that he had a girlfriend named Luz Wilson, although his accent was so thick the guy sharing his bedroom hardly understood his declarations of love. He called her again, two days later, and left another message.

  The artist internship at the Chelsea museum was a model of indentured servitude. The museum assigned him a broom closet on the top floor to use as his studio, and in return required him to work part-time for $7.99 an hour as a gallery guard and as a barista at its rooftop café. Gavril learned how to make all the drinks he’d never sampled in Venice: latte, espresso, macchiato, decaf iced ristretto with a dollop of whipped cream. Luz never called him back.

  He made friends in the internship program, fellow artist aspirants more accustomed to the beat of Manhattan, none of whom had had their picture taken in a glossy magazine. He hated their artwork—ripped covers of Danielle Steel novels with microchips pasted over the heroines’ mouths; canvases dipped in latex—but he trusted his own talent and knew by the rules of art world Darwinism that many would end up making their careers standing as still as possible among white gallery walls or preparing caffeinated drinks. The museum cleverly offered apprenticeships in more practical vocations. He accompanied these friends to the Chelsea galleries, white boxes that confirmed Luz Wilson as a liar as well as an unreliable friend. The art was goose-liver pâté, rippling with currencies, the prices of semen-spotted paintings written in bold on the checklists. His new friends were mesmerized, because their own art was reproducible, generic, disposable, and so, in most ways, were they. They were desperate to prostrate themselves in front of anything that was awarded wall space. They had no real politics, although they wore pins to prove they had voted in recent elections. They also wore stickers suggesting they’d sold their blood.

  One afternoon, while he was on guarding duty on the third floor of the Dan Flavin exhibition, he finally saw her. Her black suit had given way to a neon orange sweatshirt and tight acid-wash jeans, and her straight hair had fossilized into dreadlocks, which dangled across her shoulders like decaying wind chimes. She eyed him as she stood amid Flavin’s fluorescent tubes, and did so again before disappearing into an exhibition room. He was ashamed to be standing there so dumbly, so pointlessly, in such easy reach. At least at the Romanian Pavilion in Venice he had been afforded a desk and chair. She circled back and stared at him, unblinking, moving a gold pendant across a chain on her neck.

  “I know you,” she said to him without smiling.

  “Do you?” He was ashamed of the seven messages he had left on her phone. “I am new to New York. From Bucharest.”

  She snapped her fingers. “Venice. Am I right? I’m right.” Her smile was the jagged line of a heart monitor. “And you called me two months ago.” He glanced at the scant foot traffic. The walls were so white in New York, glacier white. He had come to despise that whiteness, its replication of a brain-dead consciousness. In that moment he prayed for anything to happen: a missile strike, the thunder of drones, a rain of fire breaking from the heavens onto West Chelsea. “I’m sorry I didn’t call back. I mean, it was two years ago.” He felt the blush on his cheeks. “God, two years,” she wheezed. “A lot’s happened. I was a child then.” She couldn’t be older than twenty-five now. “But I remember you were an artist.”

  He was pleased she had at least retained that detail. Before he could stop himself, he told her of his recent show at Laura Lucas, his page in Wanted magazine.

  “Lucas is such an uptight
cow, isn’t she?” Luz laughed. “I’m sorry. She’s also good at finding talent. Good eyes, bad mouth. But I wouldn’t stay with her. She has a reputation for slowly embezzling her artists’ money.” He nodded, as if he hadn’t already assessed the works in his broom closet, three flights above them, for the security deposit on a studio apartment.

  “I’m doing a solo next month at Wexler Institute. Please come. No, on second thought—let me take you to lunch, to make up for my rudeness. We can check out some galleries too. Next Wednesday?” Wednesday was his day off. She scribbled something on the Flavin press release and handed him a series of numbers that were already stored in his phone.

  Every morning, before guard duty or the flagellation of the espresso machine, he worked in the broom closet. Every night, after guard duty or the hot-water flush of the espresso machine, he worked more. He took his art so seriously it frightened him. Every day he knelt at his own temple and slit his throat as an offering. He experimented in bulletproof glass, took pliers to steel sheets, deconstructed lightbulbs, and stripped wires from extension cords, trying to achieve an awkward, brutal poetry through the broken industrial equipment. Occasionally he invited friends, curators, and older artists to his closet, subjecting them to the obligatory, mutually misunderstood jargon he had learned in his months in New York. “It’s about a paradigmatic shift in value, and, um, working-class labor directed against finished production, and, err, dispersion instead of the authority of closure.” His Romanian accent gave the lecture a kind of coarse conviction. He hated, but began to agree with, the words he was speaking. For his sanity, he always said, “But you look, it is what is.” He was invited to participate in two group shows, one at a major blue-chip gallery.

  Their lunch was awkward. They both kept their knuckles wrapped around their wineglasses, and Luz slapped a credit card over the bill and refused his tissue balls of ones and fives. She wore a Yankees cap through lunch, and when she removed it as they walked west on Twentieth Street toward the galleries, her hair was cut so short he could see the shine of her scalp. It made her eyes huge and her lips a center ring. She was the sexiest organism he had ever walked down a street with. They made out in an abandoned doorway, kissing hungrily after their untouched salads. As he pressed his groin against her, she said, “I have a boyfriend, Gavril. I’m sorry. I can’t go further. It wouldn’t be right, and you’d only hate me later.” “Who?” he asked, like he already knew everyone in New York. She cocked her head. “A-Dep. He’s a rapper. His real name is Marcus. We’ve been at it five months.” Fifteen minutes later, a black limousine slid up to the curb, like in some terrible movie about class defeating love, and she climbed into a backseat he could have sworn was filled with golden retrievers. He had separation anxiety. Then he had plain anxiety. He broke many things in his broom closet.

  He didn’t see her again for months. She missed the openings of his two group shows and he returned the favor by not attending her solo at Wexler (“a special private reception to honor Luz Wilson at Le Bernardin, formal attire required.”) Instead he got wasted and had sex with a few lost strays of the wealthy. He sold three sculptures, quit the internship, moved out of his shared apartment in Bed-Stuy for a studio in Greenpoint, and refused three different solicitations to join fledgling galleries on the Lower East Side. He had enough money to survive and to send one hundred dollars home each month to his family in Bucharest.

  Right after that, jackpot. Samuel Veiseler, proprietor of the hallowed, billion-dollar Veiseler Projects, phoned him up on a March afternoon and asked if he could do a studio visit. Gavril expected to hate him, to spit in his face, and planned a career-killing mutinous no when asked for a single artwork. But still he straightened his studio and waited for the buzzer. Veiseler, who had satellite galleries cropping up faster than Starbucks across the globe (Veiseler Projects Beijing, Veiseler Projects Dubai, Veiseler Projects Aurora Borealis), appeared in his doorway in ragged chinos and a wrinkled blue oxford. He name-dropped artists that Gavril admired (Beuys, de Maria, Andre, Benglis, Turrell) and never mentioned the artists he sold on the secondary market (Warhol, Johns, Lichtenstein, Koons). He dangled a plastic six-pack ring that held only two beer cans, one for each of them. “I can’t drink more than one or I find myself liking everything,” he said with his Swiss inflection. “The truth is, I like very little of what people as young as yourself are making these days.” Samuel inclined his chin—his chin actually pointed—ready to consider Gavril’s work.

  Gavril had just started exploring tar and concrete, pulling it in uneven goops across the floor, stretching its limits and textures. He started to explain it to his guest: the shifting paradigms between East and West, the failed dynamics of the Ceauşescu regime, and the haunted residue of a toppled empire undermined by the belief in a democratic utopia of pariahlike self-fulfillment. Gavril rambled on, and Samuel Veiseler sipped his beer and stared out the window at a homeless woman pushing a grocery cart. Gavril sputtered, “And, uh, just the formal elements of material, the stuff.” Samuel’s eyes redirected, snapping awake. “Yes, yes. Tell me about the material. Don’t connect it to Ceauşescu right now.” “How tar and steel and concrete bend. They’re not rigid. They are soft, pliant, yielding. A flexible form of violence.” “Yes,” Samuel purred, taking new interest in the work. “I like the formal qualities. Go with that.” So he did, and Samuel Veiseler left two hours later offering Gavril twenty-four hours to decide if he’d like to join his gallery.

  He texted Luz for advice. He trusted and resented her in equal doses. “YES!” she responded immediately. “He’s the best gallerist, way better than mine. You moron, the answer happened the minute he asked you.” “I worry I sell out too early.” “Huh? Are you flirting with me? Is this because I dumped A-Dep? Stop texting me and call him before he reconsiders.” She had broken up with Marcus. “I don’t think I want this.” “You are only as serious as people take you. Otherwise every talentless drudge on earth is serious. Take it now. Look back later.” He took it. The hardest part was telling Laura Lucas that he could no longer exhibit with her in London. First she sent roses to appeal to him, followed by intoxicated voice-mail threats, and she did have a stroke three months later, just as he had predicted, and her gallery didn’t survive the impending market crash.

  He and Luz had sex the night of the Whitney Biennial. He liked to think he had been chosen for the Whitney because of his talent, but mere news of his signing with Veiseler had brought a tidal wave of curiosity, an apocalyptic welfare line of collectors and editors and museum curators and rich dilettantes outside his studio door, to the point that his sudden fame must have been partly responsible for the Whitney inclusion. He exhibited a tar smear through the third-floor gallery, a formalist’s blood vein, and he had also wanted to break through one of the white walls to expose the copper plumbing behind the institutional façade, but the curator wouldn’t let him. “Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney would not have wanted that!” Luz had also been selected for the Biennial, showing five portraits of black Americans she had found working in gas stations along the New Jersey Turnpike: sad, discontent, gas-ravaged faces inside gold frames, like employee-of-the-month snapshots treated as CEO portraits. But her last painting was a secret ode to him. On the canvas, she had written with her middle finger, in black paint: “What GVW would have wanted.”

  She was single, she was his, the sex was miserable, but they were artists who craved misery, and they kept having it, all night, through the week, into the next, condom by condom, and then both crept away to their studios, and neither phoned for weeks. He was busy. Interviews, studio visits, his photo in a national men’s magazine, shirt and pants Yohji Yamamoto Fall/Winter 2009, the cover of Artforum, solo shows planned into summer, into fall, all the way to Christmas. He hired two full-time assistants just to keep up with demand. Instead of ransacking the walls of the Whitney, he exposed the copper pipes of a penthouse on Seventy-ninth Street for sixty thousand dollars (forty thousand directly into his bank account).
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br />   He kept watch on Luz’s career, which was similarly exploding: national women’s magazines, the Rome Prize, a conversation at the Public Library with Cornel West on the subject of blues in the arts. Gavril flew to Bern, Switzerland, to disassemble cold war airplane propellers and dip them in concrete at Kunsthalle Veiseler. Luz took the train up from Rome, and they spent an afternoon on the manicured Bern streets, admiring each other’s reflections in the windows of clock shops. They had sex in his hotel suite and both of them appreciated that their initial disappointment in each other’s performance during intercourse had not abated, a missing frisson for which they tried to compensate by holding each other uncomfortably tight in bed. “I feel like every painting I make is one step closer to my last,” she whispered against his chest. “I want to quit before I become a hack.” “I know,” he said. “I’m just doing what prehistoric cave painters were doing, holding a stick out, applying a mark on the wall. Why do those cave painters seem so earnest while what I do seems so frivolous?” “I don’t know.” She returned to her apartment overlooking the Spanish Steps; he flew to Oslo, and from there he toured white-walled rooms all over the planet.

  By the time they met up in Paris, three months later, two ominous facts were weighing heavily on Gavril’s mind: his visa was about to expire, and Luz was dating a fifty-three-year-old music producer who owned a hip-hop label in Brooklyn. He fought with her in her hotel room. He told her he was in love with her, had always been in love with her, that he couldn’t keep doing all this traveling and socializing and breaking his back in his studio until five in the morning, if she weren’t waiting for him at the end of the line.