The atrocity exhibition (10 page)

The Transition Area.

Here I see the disaster on the launch-pad at Cape Kennedy in terms of the most common dislocation of time and space the rest of us ever know - the car crash, and in particular the most extreme auto-disaster of our age, the motorcade assassination of JFK.

Algebra of the Sky.

‘Neuronic icons on the spinal highway.’ Here, as throughout
The Atrocity Exhibition
, the nervous systems of the characters have been externalized, as part of the reversal of the interior and exterior worlds. Highways, office blocks,faces and street signs are perceived as if they were elements in a malfunctioning central nervous system.

A Watching Trinity.

The Chilean painter, Roberto Matta, one of the last of the surrealists, asked this as yet unanswerable question. All disasters - earthquakes, plane or car crashes - seem to reveal for a brief moment the secret formulae of the world around us, but a disaster in space rewrites the rules of the continuum itself.

Pentax Zoom.

The flattening effect of the zoom lens reduces everything to a two-dimensional world, eliminating the sense of time. Years ago, while on holiday in Greece, I would borrow my son’s telescope and gaze at the town across the Bay of Argos. People were clearly visible, but none of them seemed to move, although the resort was in fact a hive of holiday-makers and busy traffic.

Operating Formulae.

At the time of writing I was publishing my series of paid advertisements in
Ambit
and other magazines (see
Re/Search #8/9
, pages 148-52). One of these, ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’, actually appeared as the second of the series, a still from Steve Dwoskin’s film
Alone
, about a woman masturbating. Sadly, I ran out of cash, and my half-serious application to the Arts Council for a grant (I asked for funds to pay for ads in
Time
and the American
Vogue
) was turned down. I can’t remember the significance of 11:47 a.m. on a June day in 1975, then some eight years ahead. As it happens I was probably reading the
International Herald-Trib
on a Spanish beach and wondering how to escape from England altogether.

The Soft Quasars.

‘Young virgin auto-sodomised by her own chastity.’ One of Dali’s most original paintings. The notion of an attractive woman being ravished by her own beauty is familiar to us all, but here Dali convinces us purely in terms of the body’s geometry.

The Skin Area
. Each morning, during this last phase of Talbert’s work at the Institute, Catherine Austin was conscious of the increasing dissociation of the events around her. As she entered the projection theatre the noise of the soundtrack reverberated across the sculpture garden, a melancholy tocsin modulated by Talbert’s less and less coherent commentary. In the darkness she could see the group of paretic patients sitting between their nurses in the front row. All week they had watched the montaged sequences of commercial pornographic films, listening without response to Talbert’s analysis of each posture and junction. Catherine Austin stared at the giant frames. Fossilized into the screen, the terraced images of breast and buttock had ceased to carry any meaning. His face and suit dappled by the projector, Talbert leaned against the screen, as if bored by his own exposition. Every evening he examined the barely legible questionnaires, apparently searching for a pointer to his own behaviour, the key to a new sexuality. As the lights came on she buttoned her white coat, suddenly conscious of her body.

The New Eros
. From the window of his office, Dr Nathan watched Talbert standing on the roof of the multi-storey car park. The deserted deck was a favourite perch. The inclined floors seemed a model of Talbert’s oblique personality, forever meeting the events of time and space at an invisible angle. Aware of Catherine Austin fidgeting beside him, Dr Nathan lit a gold-tipped cigarette. A young woman in a white tennis dress was walking towards the sculpture garden. Talbert’s eyes followed her like a voyeur’s. Already he had built up a substantial collection of erotica. What new junction would he find in the sex act?

A Diagram of Bones
. Talbert stopped at the entrance to the sculpture garden. Programmes in hand, the students wandered among the exhibits, staring at the truncated segments of coloured plastic tubing, the geometry of a Disney. From the smiling young woman at the open-air desk he accepted a programme. On its cover was printed a fragment of a half-familiar face, an enlarged detail of the left orbit of a film actress. Here and there on the lawn the students were fitting together the frames. Where would the pubis lie? The young woman in the white dress walked among the fractured profiles of Mia Farrow and Elizabeth Taylor.

The See-Through Brain
. Throwing away her programme, Karen Novotny hurried towards the entrance of the car park. The white American car had followed her around the perimeter of the sculpture garden, always fifty yards behind. She turned on to the ramp leading to the first floor. As the car stopped at the pay kiosk she recognized the man behind the wheel. All week this hunched figure with his high forehead and insane sunglasses had been photographing her with his cine camera. To her annoyance he had even inserted zooms from the film in his little festival of dirty movies - no doubt his psychotic patients had ejaculated into their strait-jackets. When she reached the roof the white car cruised towards her. Out of breath, she leaned against the parapet. Talbert gazed at her with an almost benign curiosity, his eyes exploring the templates of her face. One arm hung over the driving door, as if about to touch her thighs. He was holding her discarded programme. He raised the fragment against her left breast, matching the diameters of cleavage and nipple.

Profane Marriage
. As they left the projection theatre a dark-bearded young man stood by a truck outside. He was supervising the unloading of a large tableau sculpture, a Segal showing a man and woman during intercourse in a bath. Karen seized his arm. ‘Talbert - they’re you and I . . .’ Irritated by yet another of the research student’s ominous pranks, Talbert walked over to Koester. His eyes were like those of a nervous priest about to officiate at a profane marriage.

A History of Nothing
. Narrative elements: a week of hunting the overpasses, the exploration of countless apartments. With stove and sleeping-bag, they camped like explorers on the sitting-room floors. ‘They’re exhibits, Karen -
this
conception will be immaculate.’ Later they raced around the city, examining a dozen architectures. Talbert pushed her against walls and parapets, draped her along balustrades. In the rear seat the textbooks of erotica formed an encyclopedia of postures - blueprints for her own imminent marriage with a seventh-floor balcony unit of the Hilton Hotel.

Amatory elements: nil. The act of love became a vector in an applied geometry. She could barely touch his shoulders without galvanizing him into a spasm of activity. Some scanning device in his brain had lost a bolt. Later, in the dashboard locker she found a set of maps of the Pripet Marshes, a contour photogram of an armpit, and a hundred publicity stills of the screen actress.

Landscapes of the Dream
. Various landscapes preoccupied Talbert during this period: (1) The melancholy back of the Yangtse, a boom of sunken freighters off the Shanghai Bund. As a child he rowed out to the rusting ships, waded through saloons awash with water. Through the portholes, a regatta of corpses sailed past Woosung Pier. (2) The contours of his mother’s body, landscape of so many psychic capitulations. (3) His son’s face at the moment of birth, its phantom-like profile older than Pharaoh. (4) The death-rictus of a young woman. (5) The breasts of the screen actress. In these landscapes lay a key.

Baby Dolls
. Catherine Austin stared at the objects on Talbert’s desk. These flaccid globes, like the obscene sculptures of Bellmer, reminded her of elements of her own body transformed into a series of imaginary sexual organs. She touched the pallid neoprene, marking the vents and folds with a broken nail. In some weird way they would coalesce, giving birth to deformed sections of her lips and armpit, the junction of thigh and perineum.

A Nervous Bride
. At the gates of the film studio Dr Nathan handed his pass to the guard. ‘Stage H,’ he said to Koester. ‘Apparently it was rented by someone at the Institute three months ago. At a nominal charge, fortunately - most of the studio is disused now.’ Koester parked the car outside the empty production offices. They walked through into the stage. An enormous geometric construction filled the hangar-like building, a maze of white plastic convolutions. Two painters were spraying pink lacquer over the bulbous curves. ‘What is this?’ Koester asked with irritation. ‘A model of SQRT(-1)?’ Dr Nathan hummed to himself. ‘Almost,’ he replied coolly. ‘In fact, you’re looking at a famous face and body, an extension of Miss Taylor into a private dimension. The most tender act of love will take place in this bridal suite, the celebration of a unique nuptial occasion. And why not? Duchamp’s nude shivered her way downstairs, far more desirable to us than the Rokeby Venus, and for good reason.’

Auto-Zoomar
. Talbert knelt in the
a tergo
posture, his palms touching the wing-like shoulder blades of the young woman. A conceptual flight. At ten-second intervals the Polaroid projected a photograph on to the screen beside the bed. He watched the auto-zoom close in on the union of their thighs and hips. Details of the face and body of the film actress appeared on the screen, mimetized elements of the planetarium they had visited that morning. Soon the parallax would close, establishing the equivalent geometry of the sexual act with the junctions of this wall and ceiling.

‘Not in the Literal Sense.’
Conscious of Catherine Austin’s nervous hips as she stood beside him, Dr Nathan studied the photograph of the young woman. ‘Karen Novotny,’ he read off the caption. ‘Dr Austin, may I assure you that the prognosis is hardly favourable for Miss Novotny. As far as Talbert is concerned the young woman is a mere modulus in his union with the film actress.’ With kindly eyes he looked up at Catherine Austin. ‘Surely it’s self-evident - Talbert’s intention is to have intercourse with Miss Taylor, though needless to say not in the literal sense of that term.’

Action Sequence
. Hiding among the traffic in the near-side lane, Koester followed the white Pontiac along the highway. When they turned into the studio entrance he left his car among the pines and climbed through the perimeter fence. In the shooting stage Talbert was staring through a series of colour transparencies. Karen Novotny waited passively beside him, her hands held like limp birds. As they grappled he could feel the exploding musculature of Talbert’s shoulders. A flurry of heavy blows beat him to the floor. Vomiting through his bloodied lips, he saw Talbert run after the young woman as she darted towards the car.

The Sex Kit.
‘In a sense,’ Dr Nathan explained to Koester, ‘one may regard this as a kit, which Talbert has devised, entitled “Karen Novotny” - it might even be feasible to market it commercially. It contains the following items: (1) Pad of pubic hair, (2) a latex face mask, (3) six detachable mouths, (4) a set of smiles, (5) a pair of breasts, left nipple marked by a small ulcer, (6) a set of non-chafe orifices, (7) photo cut-outs of a number of narrative situations - the girl doing this and that, (8) a list of dialogue samples, of inane chatter, (9) a set of noise levels, (10) descriptive techniques for a variety of sex acts, (11) a torn anal detrusor muscle, (12) a glossary of idioms and catch phrases, (13) an analysis of odour traces (from various vents), mostly purines, etc., (14) a chart of body temperatures (axillary, buccal, rectal), (15) slides of vaginal smears, chiefly Ortho-Gynol jelly, (16) a set of blood pressures, systolic 120, diastolic 70 rising to 200/150 at onset of orgasm . . . ’ Deferring to Koester, Dr Nathan put down the typescript. ‘There are one or two other bits and pieces, but together the inventory is an adequate picture of a woman, who could easily be reconstituted from it. In fact, such a list may well be more stimulating than the real thing. Now that sex is becoming more and more a conceptual act, an intellectualization divorced from affect and physiology alike, one has to bear in mind the positive merits of the sexual perversions. Talbert’s library of cheap photo-pornography is in fact a vital literature, a kindling of the few taste buds left in the jaded palates of our so-called sexuality.’

A Helicopter Flight
. As they sped along the highway the young woman flinched against the door pillar, eyes fixed on the huge trucks swaying beside them. Talbert put his arm around her, pulling her on to his shoulder. He steered the heavy car with one hand, swinging it off the motorway towards the airfield. ‘Relax, Karen.’ In a mimicry of Dr Nathan’s voice, he added, ‘You’re a mere modulus, my dear.’ He looked down at the translucent skin over the anterior triangle of her neck, barely hiding its scenarios of nerve and blood-vessel. Marker lines sped past them, dividing and turning. The helicopter waited below the ruined control tower. He pulled her from the car, then buttoned his flying jacket around her shoulders.

The Primary Act
. As they entered the cinema, Dr Nathan confided to Captain Webster, ‘Talbert has accepted in absolute terms the logic of the sexual union. For him all junctions, whether of our own soft biologies or the hard geometries of these walls and ceilings, are equivalent to one another. What Talbert is searching for is the primary act of intercourse, the first apposition of the dimensions of time and space. In the multiplied body of the film actress - one of the few valid landscapes of our age - he finds what seems to be a neutral ground. For the most part the phenomenology of the world is a nightmarish excrescence. Our bodies, for example, are for him monstrous extensions of puffy tissue he can barely tolerate. The inventory of the young woman is in reality a death kit.’ Webster watched the images of the young woman on the screen, sections of her body intercut with pieces of modern architecture. All these buildings. What did Talbert want to do - sodomize the Festival Hall?