Jen remembers a sunny autumn afternoon five years earlier, the day she met Jace. She was in the public gallery that was exhibiting her work.
“Can you stand a little more to the left so that shaft of light hits your cheek,” the photographer said.
Obediently, Jen slid over a pace, nearer the hospital bed and her beloved robot. There was a staccato of clicks. The photographer crouched low to the ground, then rose, firing away the whole time.
“Now just let me climb this ladder. Stay right where you are but tilt your head up slightly toward me,” he said.
Jen complied. She felt utterly stupid. She suspected he’d get back to his office only to find that self-conscious purse to her lips. She cannot for the life of her smile on command.
“I’m feeling a little objectified,” Jen said, and raised her eyebrows. Unflappable, he fired away.
“Good,” he said. “Once you’re in a picture, you’re no different than your sculpture.”
You would think he was shooting a national magazine spread instead of the small market newspaper hungry for the hometown-girl-makes-good feature scheduled to populate the Sunday edition.
Again, Jen tried to force a wry smile. “Are we there yet?” she pouted.
“Perfect,” he said, capturing the pout that would become her trademark shot in the press.
Jace stepped closer to the ladder. He’d been standing there trying hard not to look impatient, tapping his pen on his notebook and shifting his weight between his two feet.
“Okay, Karsh, that’s good. I’ve got to cover a meeting in an hour and I haven’t started the interview,” he said, flushing.
Karsh? Jen wondered, then realized this reporter was being sarcastic. The photographer bit his lip and sighed, climbing down from the ladder and packing his gear.
“Go to it then,” he muttered, and walked briskly down the vaulted hall of the gallery.
“Is there somewhere we can sit down to chat?” the reporter wanted to know.
Jen slid down the exhibit wall and folded herself cross-legged on the floor. “How about right here,” she said, patting the floor behind her.
She could tell this man thought she was nuts. He must have drawn the short straw that morning. Reluctantly, he padded over to the wall and slowly lowered himself to the floor.
“Okay. So, I’m really sorry that took so long. Dennis is painstaking in his work, usually to good end. But I do have a meeting, so if it’s alright with you, I’d like to pick back up where we leave off later this evening. Are you available?”
“What’s your deadline?” Jen asked.
“Thursday, so the weekend editor can play with it. But I’ll need the writing time if I’m to do you any justice.”
“Okay, that’s fine by me.”
He began with the standard open-ended questions. Tell me about…Pretty soon, Jen felt like she was having a conversation with herself. He wasn’t saying much except egging her on. Did they send her a general news reporter, she wondered? His questions weren’t couched in current art theory. Jen decided to change direction.
“What do my sculptures evoke in YOU?” she asked.
“No fair,” he said. “I get to ask the questions.”
“Quid pro quo,” Jen said.
“Okay. But don’t hold it against me. They make me feel sad.”
“Okay. What’s so bad about that?” she asks, disarmed by the simplicity of his answer.
“You know. Sad equals not happy. I mean, whatever it is you meant to say, it didn’t have to be sad. It’s sad that you see humans that way,” he said.
“What way?” she asked.
“You know. As monsters,” he nodded in the general direction of the rest of the exhibit.
Jen scanned the room. Clay, tubes, metal. Indeed, she has monstrified those gentle forms, merged the created with the creator. It’s not that the interpretation is new to her. What was new was the emotion of it. The hopelessness buried in the thin superimposed hopeful idea of sharing the observation to effect some kind of change.
The reporter was undeterred. “It could be another way. You could celebrate our innovation. Instead you have it overpower us, as if we’re slaves to the creative impulse instead of masters. To me it’s just a little cynical,” he said.
Jen could see he was earnest, if naïve. “A little cynical, to a reporter?” she said.
“To each his own,” he said, snapping his notebook shut. Then he looked at Jen for a minute, a little playful, a little nervous.
“Shall we continue this over dinner? I owe you for the inconvenience,” he said.
“Sure,” Jen said, completely bemused. Disarmed. Intrigued.
That night, the wine flows and the lights dim and dinner turned into a protracted discussion about ways of looking at the world. What Jen found so adorable about this man was his enthusiasm, edged with a hint of sarcasm. Just enough for her to believe a very self-reflective and ironic human resided within the northern-built hockey body. His shock of blond hair framed his face in a halo of innocence. His liquid blue eyes seem to both drink deeply and yet reflect. Jen didn’t mind that he saw things very differently from her. In fact, it was what was stirring the deadened mass of desire that was coiling back to life in her. She had flashes of him in an oversized cotton knit sweater, stoking a fire. She pictured him surrounded by Ikea furniture in a sleek chalet. Simple, healthy, part earth, part wind. But as rugged as he was in her visions, he was now telling her now how he loved the water, describing the beauty and peace he found watching the light change, the waves rake the shore.
“Hmmm, Likes long walks on the beach,” Jen said, mocking a singles ad. He flushed. Jen bit her lip, wishing she could just shut up sometimes.
“So, I am that transparent,” he said, flushing even deeper.
In fact, Jen wondered if he was having a pre-coronary moment. She’d never seen someone turn so red. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to be mean. I was just teasing you,” she sputtered.
“I guess you hit a little close to home. I mean, I moved here a year ago and you’re the first person I’ve even been able to really talk to, let alone date,” he said. “But I’m glad we’ve spent this time. I can use a good friend. I should let you get back to your life now.”
Jen was overwhelmed by this sudden shift of tone, the hint of bitterness, the sudden chill between them. She was not sure what happened, but she assumed it was quite bad.
“I don’t have anywhere to get to,” she said.
“Well, I’ve got to get started on this story,” he said, signaling the waiter. “I don’t have a lot of time tomorrow.”
They sat there in an awkward silence while the slow-motion waiter tallied their tab. Jen was rummaging in her purse for her share. When the bill arrived, Jace snatched it from the table.
“Let me put something in,” she said.
“No, really, I said it was on me. I appreciate your time.”
He’s all business now. Whatever that soft moment was, it had fluttered away. He’d also removed his eyes from Jen, she couldn’t connect without him looking away. This was seeming like an awfully big reaction to what she’d thought was a small tease. Clearly, she’d hit a nerve. She began to feel angry, like someone shortchanged moments shy of the promise of pleasure. Foreplay aborted. She couldn’t for the life of her figure out how to get it all back on track.
He rose and shook her hand. Perfunctorily, he lifted her jacket from the chair and held it open for her. He was for all the world polite and absent. He walked her to her car but didn’t linger. She drove away, disappointed, angry with herself, and frustrated that the local story of her newfound accomplishment is presently in the hands of a man she’d somehow made feel rejected.
His revenge was simple. He told the story exactly as he saw it. He started with the mandatory tale about her fabulous high school art teacher and her endearing childhood attempts at fort-fabrication. But midway, the light feature turned into more of an analysis.
“Jones’ earlier career was cut short when she succumbed to a struggle with clinical depression that led her to six month recovery process and time on her hands. In what she calls a “stripping down to the authentic” she found herself drawn back to her earlier interest in sculpture, for which she’d obtained a BFA at York University’s eclectic fine arts program.
“I felt the most honest thing I could do was to plunge my hands in the clay and see what emerged,” Jones said, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the gallery adorned with her dark visions of a humanity besieged by its own technology.
She’s coy about her message, and claims people are to take their own meanings from her work, citing a postmodern disdain for authorial control. She’s just the “hollow reed,” as she puts it.
But a survey of her works belies any hint of Zen in the act of creation. Closer contemplation reveals the extreme manipulation at every level of detail. Consider Room 104, where a malfunctioning robot lays in a hospital bed, tube fed by an IV populated with aborted fetuses. She has shaped the most minute details into clear tales of sci-fi horror not unlike the American relationship to stem cell research. There are not many options for interpretation. We are feeding our young, our future, into the program, even though the program is sick. We are but food for our creations, disposable bits of flesh in service of technology.
Surprised when her work is called cynical, Jones is perhaps walking her monsters in the trusted unconscious tradition of her artistic predecessors who engage in stream of consciousness work. It is one way in which the modern art world has abdicated its responsibility for social discourse. This laisser-faire about the message and the meaning, this expression for the sake of expression is not a unique failing of this artist. Like her growing list of successful compatriots, Jones is skilled and her work does calls to us. Rather, it reveals a failure of perspective that cloaks the personal power of the audience. In the end, we are entertained, but not empowered.
It wasn’t at all what Jen expected. He’d seemed more a puppy than an art critic and she’d been certain that wasn’t even his beat. She hadn’t expected the injection of opinion either. Just a story about a girl who was making a name for herself in the art world. Instead, she felt that he used her to take a stab at all artists. Was he a frustrated artist, bitter about his own lack of accomplishment or rejection from the art world? Was his ex-girlfriend in cultural studies? Try as she might, Jen could not connect these words to the affable northern guy whose humor and easy charm had made a surprising mark in her still-warming self. The most frustrating part was that he got the last word, when there was so much more to say.
Jen didn’t hear from him for a year. She often thought about him, but spent most of her days in Detroit, in interminable committee meetings about this public installation that was already boring her to death before its fabrication began. There was materials testing, flash point analysis, building codes, environmental reports and structural evaluations. She’d never imagined there would be so much involved. When she accepted the commission, the fee seemed generous, like winning a small lottery. By now, she realized, it was small change for the number of times she had to swallow hard and just keep going. Art by committee held an ugliness that threatened to raze to the ground her love of the work. So when the opening rolled around and she once again donned her formal blacks, she barely had the energy to nod at Jace in the media scrum.
That didn’t stop him and Dennis, his trusty photog, from following her from the dais into the lobby where the reception was held.
“Hey Jen, can you pose for the homeboys,” he shouted.
She stopped. Smiled.
“No no,” he said, rushing up to her side. “We want a shot of you IN “Playingstation.”
Jen’s agent smirked. It was, in fact, a good idea.
“Okay,” Jen said, ignoring the fact that her outfit offered no elegant way in which to climb into her installation. The guts of “Playingstation” was a maze of human-scale poly-resin tubes and tunnels, a rainbow of primary colors that swirled together like an enormous pile of psychedelic dog dung, a form that the critics did not miss. Each tunnel led to a platform where a child or adult could stick out their arms and face through holes. On the outside, the face and arms protruded through various aliens, spacemen and cyborg creatures. It was the perfect focal point for camera-toting tourists now absent from Detroit’s core. In her heart, Jen feared drug crazed crack addicts from Cass Avenue would instead take shelter in the sweeping tunnels, transforming what was meant to be a fun public piece into a testament of social ill. But she decided that it is for her to make the art, and for the community to decide how to use it.
She slid off her heels and began crawling through the slippery tubes, causing a static buildup in her designer dress that was now clinging to her nylons in suspicious places. She knew which creature she wanted to become – the conehead alien fashioned loosely after a childhood Saturday Night Live re-rerun. She slid her arms through the holes, fit her face against the opening, and gesticulated wildly, much to the amusement of the gathering crowd. The cameras clicked like locusts. She was sweating from the exertion, and nerves. She turned and bum-walked down the tunnels to the exit and emerged from the opening to applause. Her violent flush may have struck the crowd as “modest”, but it was in fact a response to Jace, who beamed a warm, welcoming grin from the perimeter like a beacon on a rocky shore.