"Art is Dead" - Joe Kapitan
My father, and the argument. Again with it. Philosophical debate dragged from a bar and beaten senseless, degenerated into a permanent parlor game between immovable objects. Musical chairs, with too many chairs.
I will be an artist. It is not frivolous. Moreover, it is necessary. More so now than ever.
You cannot be an artist. Behold, proof this time! He held up a copy of the Post, pointing. A consensus had been reached among larger intellects.
Art is Dead.
Thus began a difficult phase for me.
I acted out.
A Picasso bender. I struck blindly, destroying symmetry. I moved ear to shoulder, nose to where ear was, eye to where nose was. Each move begat a vacancy. Another chair game. It went nowhere.
When I was ten, my father took me to visit his place of business. He was a herder of numbers. He wore a necktie, just one of many. They, both herders and numbers, lulled about in pens of fabric and steel. The music stroked them docile. My father left me alone in a chair and went to join his. For hours I toyed with a stapler. Whenever my spirit started to wane, I punched a staple into the back of my hand. Everyone thought it strange, how I called it saving my life. That day, I was the subject of prayers.
It was that time again.
I took stock of my creation. It shrank from my touch. It whimpered, cringed into dark corners, put its hands to its ghostly face and screamed, and in doing so, showed me my error: no conviction. Half-measures. My work was a mirror. Its failings bore twins of my failings.
I found new resolve. I replaced one of its legs with a horse’s, let it hold its kidney in its fist, put the head upon a giraffe’s neck, and as it struggled to break free of my grip, I placed the ants upon its lips and set it afire in the darkness and watched as it lumbered, flaming, across the stubbled cornfield until it collapsed in the distance.
I ran to it, him, smothered the flames with a bed sheet, wrapped him full-Christo, but it was no use. He could not survive his birth. Slowly I unwrapped, and said my farewell to him, and spread wide the sheet spattered red, spackled black. Thereupon I lay until I could accept the truth.
He had been right. Art was indeed dead. Murdered. Pollack himself had envisioned this crime scene, years ago.
I guarded the carcass until the wild dogs quit circling in frustration, until its stench rose with the fog of morning. Then I buried him, it. But I couldn’t dare forget; it was too big a thing for that. It had been an underpinning of culture, after all, and the only true love I had known. It demanded a memorial of some kind.
That same day, I built a monument of red and white soup cans to mark the grave.
For a father: something useful, in a father’s eyes.
Joe Kapitan architects, writes and chops wood in northern Ohio. His writig has appeared in Wigleaf, elimae, SmokeLong Quarterly, Annalemma, and others, and is pending publication in Fractured West and Bluestem. People always ask him to lift heavy things for them.
I will be an artist. It is not frivolous. Moreover, it is necessary. More so now than ever.
You cannot be an artist. Behold, proof this time! He held up a copy of the Post, pointing. A consensus had been reached among larger intellects.
Art is Dead.
Thus began a difficult phase for me.
I acted out.
A Picasso bender. I struck blindly, destroying symmetry. I moved ear to shoulder, nose to where ear was, eye to where nose was. Each move begat a vacancy. Another chair game. It went nowhere.
When I was ten, my father took me to visit his place of business. He was a herder of numbers. He wore a necktie, just one of many. They, both herders and numbers, lulled about in pens of fabric and steel. The music stroked them docile. My father left me alone in a chair and went to join his. For hours I toyed with a stapler. Whenever my spirit started to wane, I punched a staple into the back of my hand. Everyone thought it strange, how I called it saving my life. That day, I was the subject of prayers.
It was that time again.
I took stock of my creation. It shrank from my touch. It whimpered, cringed into dark corners, put its hands to its ghostly face and screamed, and in doing so, showed me my error: no conviction. Half-measures. My work was a mirror. Its failings bore twins of my failings.
I found new resolve. I replaced one of its legs with a horse’s, let it hold its kidney in its fist, put the head upon a giraffe’s neck, and as it struggled to break free of my grip, I placed the ants upon its lips and set it afire in the darkness and watched as it lumbered, flaming, across the stubbled cornfield until it collapsed in the distance.
I ran to it, him, smothered the flames with a bed sheet, wrapped him full-Christo, but it was no use. He could not survive his birth. Slowly I unwrapped, and said my farewell to him, and spread wide the sheet spattered red, spackled black. Thereupon I lay until I could accept the truth.
He had been right. Art was indeed dead. Murdered. Pollack himself had envisioned this crime scene, years ago.
I guarded the carcass until the wild dogs quit circling in frustration, until its stench rose with the fog of morning. Then I buried him, it. But I couldn’t dare forget; it was too big a thing for that. It had been an underpinning of culture, after all, and the only true love I had known. It demanded a memorial of some kind.
That same day, I built a monument of red and white soup cans to mark the grave.
For a father: something useful, in a father’s eyes.
Joe Kapitan architects, writes and chops wood in northern Ohio. His writig has appeared in Wigleaf, elimae, SmokeLong Quarterly, Annalemma, and others, and is pending publication in Fractured West and Bluestem. People always ask him to lift heavy things for them.
