Terrorists Preying

It is Short Story Monday. This is the first section of the story I wrote about here on this blog last Friday. After sharing the first portion of this story with a professor and writer of fiction from Chapel Hill NC, I was encouraged by the words, "a good beginning." He suggested I develop it into a much longer piece. This is that first section.

Terrorists Preying
c 1992, ed newman

"The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths." ~ Bruce Nauman

Although I'd been an art major in college -- mostly painting and drawing -- I became discouraged with it shortly after graduation and gave it up. I was living with my family on Long Island at the time and for some while afterwards I still visited the New York art galleries, making regular tours of the Whitney, the Guggenheim and the Modern.

What finally got me out of art was the whole directionlessness of it all. No one seemed to know what art was about any more. DuChamp started it, of course, with his Readymades. It took the rest of the world a half century to catch on. Everything was art, the critics were saying. For myself, their steel-firm logic stubbornly taunted everything I'd built my life around, leaving me creatively disabled, impotent, and broken down. In the end, I became the essence of minimalism, and ceased to exist.

After leaving Long Island in 197-, I knocked about various parts of the Midwest until by some circuitous route I ended up in Minnesota. I hadn't been to an art gallery in nearly ten years when I finally decided, while living here in Minneapolis, that I should check out the Walker. By chance I had picked up some Twin Cities rag and saw mention of a show that included new work by Les Garnet, with whom I had shared a studio at Tyler where I'd gone to school in Philadelphia. Les was a small town Ohio hick who back in '72 got mesmerized by the Big Apple and turned freak, getting his hair kinked, wearing snakeskin boots and finding his way into the weird world of fashion design. On the side, he maintained a loft in SoHo, which was fashionable at the time, and began doing a lot of work with sprayers.

I remember how Les kept saying he hated the city and would one day get a farm in the country, but the review of his current show gave every indication that he and Kyle Benders -- it was a joint show -- were New Yorkers through and through. The review referred to Garnet and Benders as being in the forefront of New York's "New Breed Movement." Their work was described as "serious" and "provocative." The reviewer went on to praise their "refusal to compromise when dealing with the real issues of our time." Mention was also made of the "myopic vision of our age.

"Was this the same Les Garnet with whom I had painted at Tyler? I kicked myself for missing the opening -- he surely would have been there -- yet looked forward with eagerness to visiting the exhibition of Les' work as soon as possible nonetheless. I decided I would explore the Walker that following Sunday and experience first hand the hottest new trends in modern art.

Sunday afternoon. As I casually made my way through the Walker, I was impressed by the well-represented selection of Modern works, including pieces by nearly all the "names" of our century. The Chuck Close piece was strikingly placed. A prominent Frankenthaler, somber Rothkos, a colorful Morris Louis, some Pop art and kitsch by Lichtenstein and Warhol, pieces by Albers, Poons, Rauschenburg -- all these marvelous pieces hanging out together like an old gang.
They left their mark on all of us, the young painters who flowed through art schools in search of answers to the Big Q, "What is Art?" These are those who provided versions of the answer, annotated, up-dated, and outmoded, inebriating us with inframaddening inferences, delicious anti-art sentiments, and godlike gestures; fanciful creations that were probably not always authentic in their pretensions. So be it. I drank of that well and, for a time, it satisfied.

Had I not been seeking it, I may not have found the New Breed show at all, as it had been tucked away in a special gallery on another floor at the top of an unmarked flight of stairs. No doubt this would explain why there was no one else present to witness or experience what I was about to witness.

Entering the gallery, I noticed a small holder stuffed with silver brochures and I took one.

- Imitation Reality -
A Preview of Recent Works

by Kyle Benders and Les Garnet

Sponsored by The Walker Museum of Fine Arts

in conjunction with the "Best of Show" Modern Arts Series

Itself a very attractive piece, this silver chromecote brochure radiated slick sophistication, with its blazing blood red letters laying down the challenge, Imitation Reality, implying there's more here than meets the eye. I was ready. Still, I've never understood how the critics, the press and the galleries could take these guys so seriously.

Then I saw their work.

The first thing to capture my attention upon entering, on a wall directly opposite from where I'd been standing, was a series of eight or ten large framed pieces which gave the appearance of being the most grotesque color enlargements from a medical encyclopedia, body parts with the skin removed, infected with cancerous tumors but somehow distorted. The images were super-realistic, as if actual photographs, though the legend stated they were mixed media and non-representational. Title for the series: "Man's Essence in the Age of Science."I turned away and chose to find something else to dwell on.

There were a number of small paintings on the wall behind me and a number of unusual three dimensional constructions in various sections of the room. To my left there was a very large painting that was obviously Les' work, but before losing myself in it I was tantalized by the holographic image that was set before it. On a thick patch of lush grass knelt a life-sized image of a woman, a woman in motion, removing her robe in the most provocative way imaginable. She was kneeling with her back to the room so that one had to walk around to her other side to really see what men long to see, but as soon as I began to walk alongside her, she drew the robe back up over her shoulders and modestly bowed her head. The holographic scene was absolutely stunning in its effect and I walked around it twice to see if there were any way to gain access to some secret vision, and failing. I couldn't imagine how it was done. When I walked behind her, she slid the robe off her shoulders again and was about to let it drop. Yet when I stepped again to her side, she once more began pulling the robe back up over her shoulders.

The whole scene left me both amazed and amused at the clever use to which modern technology had been put in this provocative demonstration.

When I at last turned, I found myself standing beneath and before an exceptionally large canvas titled "The Light" and I saw what it was before which this woman was kneeling, unveiling herself.

From a distance the painting appeared orderly and actually restful to the eye. It was a yantra of sorts, a focus for meditation in which one stills the mind by becoming absorbed in its balance and symmetry. On closer inspection, from my new position between the woman and the wall, the painting was an incredibly detailed and graphic reproduction of scenes of sexual perversion and unspeakable violence, crushed together in a horrifying vision of hell. But these images of cruelty and ugliness -- painted beautifully, I might add -- which fanned out across the canvas were not the primary focus of the painting; rather, they were obstacles hiding from view the primary theme: behind all darkness there is light. Ultimately, it was light which illuminated these scenes of degradation and brutality, a light that was hidden by these same scenes, though from a distance one could see gleams of that brilliance breaking out from its hiding place beyond the wall of corporeal images crammed into this immense space.

While staring at this awesome painting, which filled nearly a whole wall, I wondered how long it had taken Les to paint such a volume of detail. Only the drivenness of obsession could propel a man to produce this kind of work.

Just then, a jogger in a grey T-shirt and red shorts walked in through the main gallery door. I had been alone for some several minutes at this point, so he startled me. And he, being unaware of me, breathing heavily and wiping his forehead, cheeks and neck with a bunched up hand towel, strode past me on his way through the center aisle of the room. His sweat-soaked T-shirt clung to him. I guessed that he'd just finished a lengthy jaunt around the lakes and came in here to cool off. His vacant-eyed head bobbed as he walked, hanging forward with bushy black brows too full for his thin, slack-jawed face. I could feel his fatigue as he ambled through the pristine corridors of the Walker.

As the jogger approached the far end of the room, three men emerged from the double doors there. The jogger stopped when he saw them and responded as if he knew them. I couldn't hear what they were saying.

The smallest of these men squared off with the jogger in a half jest sort of way as if to box, like old school chums do upon meeting. Next, the guy started poking at the jogger, once or twice reaching out and pinching his leg, then slapping him lightly.

Suddenly, they were all over him, grabbing him and bringing him down. The one man was a huge, bull-necked kind of guy, all bronzed and enormous like a Turkish bouncer. The jogger writhed, making desperate spasmodic efforts to escape. They shoved the hand towel in his mouth as a gag and while the other two held him down, the Turk began twisting his foot. The jogger moaned in anguish.

Waves of panic shot through me as I realized I should do something. Should I run to get help? Then I became confused. Was this even real? Or was it some kind of performance piece, like the three dimensional woman who appeared to be disrobing there beside me? "Challenging our sensibilities"... "new level of intensity"... I stood dumbstruck; I didn't know what to do.

The Turk now had the leg sideways. A crackling sound of breaking bone echoed through the gallery and the agitated jogger went berserk. Wriggling his good leg free, he crashed it into the biggest guy's side, without result. Quickly the other two brought the loose limb under control and continued their torture.

I was walking toward them now, walking the length of the room until I was standing over them, close enough to touch them, and they didn't even notice me, as if I were invisible, a mute phantom eavesdropper.

Their faces were serious, businesslike. They worked quickly, not frenzied. One of the two smaller men, a man wearing a green army jacked, perspired slightly. Glancing up he caught a nod from the Turk and pulled out a knife, which he flipped open with a click.

At this, the jogger was in fits. His left leg had been broken and was pushed forward, perpendicular to the floor, the foot twisted around backward, everything all wrong and stupid and unbelievable and sickening.

At this, the jogger was in fits. His left leg had been broken and was pushed forward, perpendicular to the floor, the foot twisted around backward, everything all wrong and stupid and unbelievable and sickening.

The Turk shoved the knife into the side of the knee and with quick jerking movements severed the kneecap on three sides. Grabbing the dangling kneecap in his fist he pulled it away from the leg and, with a twist, wrenched it from its place, leaving a gaping hole, torn tendons and bloodied flesh. Immediately, like rodeo cowboys who have just finished branding a terrified calf, the three men leaped to their feet. As if on cue, all three shot glances in my direction, then turned and bounded from the room, leaving me alone in the gallery with the jogger, who was lying on the floor at my feet, his head arched back, arms and hands convulsing at his sides, the leg flopping now, pathetic and strange.

Evidently a guard who heard the commotion had run to call the police. An ambulance had been called while others from The Walker rushed about to help administer first aid to the violated man. When the police finally arrived, I was seated in the stairwell, staring with unfocused eyes, my hands fastened to the handrail.

Continued next week on Short Story Monday

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