Degenerate Frame: a performance review.

Date: 2 February

Time: 18:82 (for those uncultured [re: non-”pretentious”] Americans–4:22pm)

Place: Diag

The bells oddly tolled a few minutes late, marking the time the artist arrived to when he started as a waiting period. He stood with brush in hand, close enough to the canvas to look like he was touching it (but there is always room for Jesus), and stood completely still. Dead still.

The frame was 3×3 and white—white like the frail, thin hands of the woman who stood a distance aways, flaming red hair. 3×3 like her mouth as it made a “C” to read the first word, “Lily…” She started from the top of the steps of the grad library and descended at a rate of one step per 3 minutes. After she had reached and tapped the bottom step, she repeated her motion backwards up to the top steps and topped the topmost step, and then she repeated her motion forwards down the steps and tipped the bottom step…

The man was too aware of her movement and each time a tap, top, or tip rang through his ear he jolted the brush in a circular fashion that obscured the staircase from being a staircase. In the end it resembled a face, a foetus, a flower, but really the staircase turned inwards. It was filled with color: light green, dark green, medium green. He was dressed in black and smoked a dark-chocolate brown cigar (rebel) that was shaped all to phallically for the passersby dressed in head-to-toe white.

Her hands quivered. The snow was falling over the scene and gently smudged the green into green into green. He w(h)ip(p)ed the mistakes out of the canvas and the wooden frame began to morph. But he couldn’t go too crazy. He stepped back and stared through it as if it were a window looking out onto the scene. As if he were paces behind the woman’s frame, safely inside the stacks of white pages, staring as if the blanket was coming down all too fast against his feet, and before long his eyes would begin to close over the white landscape of his eyes.

But they hadn’t any time and the chimes struck again. Her mouth folded into a “C” as she whispered–this time, “She was fast asleep.”

He quickly moved from the center of the “M” and grabbed, from behind a garbage can full of rats, gray paint. A gray that would paint the London sky on a rainy afternoon, a grey that would splash the sidewalks and sewers, the grey of cityscapes, and the gray of a fog that won’t quite lift. He took the gallon and dumped it onto the art. No canvas, no frame stood in its way and once the entire gallon had dissolved onto the canvas he got a spray bottle full of vodka. He sprayed and shot and shot and sprayed and now that the two were just buzzed enough he picked up the frame and brought it near to her. It was her 13th time on the 1st step. She picked up her foot and sent it crashing through the grey/gray/green stair-fa-foet-case.

“His own identity” as the artist “was fading out into a grey” canvas and all he knew to do was to rip the frame from itself. He could not have done it soon enough because as she read aloud the last word, the whole scene became “dead.”

These events I find most odd, peculiar. I can’t help but laugh and ask for forgiveness when something like this happens close to me. Guilty by association. I felt that it was…different…and some would even say…but I’m not them and I’m not to say. It is on these afternoons at 19:41 where I can only think that this was a “portrait” told by an artist, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

The bell chimed.