Chapter 32: Sex Doll

Having had Thanksgiving weekend off work, I still had to be back on Monday morning. I had progressed far enough in my training that I could open the meat department by myself. Most of the early morning work was stocking the coolers and making sure meat was tagged with special sale prices if it had been on display in a cooler for more than 48 hours. After a holiday weekend, there was little left in the coolers and I needed to move a lot of previously frozen meat out of the meat locker into the refrigerated cases.

After the coolers were stocked, I went to work on fresh cuts. I had a dozen chickens to cut, pork loin to turn into chops, and Choice beef to make steaks, roasts, and filets out of.

The time all seemed to blend together as I cut and sliced.

“Aren’t you about ready to go home?” Grandpa asked. I hadn’t even noticed he was there until he spoke. I was butterflying some thick pork chops to be stuffed this afternoon as shoppers came by to pick up dinner items.

“Home? What time is it?”

“Almost two o’clock.”

“I’ve been here ... Have I been the only one in the meat department today?”

“You got the entire Thanksgiving weekend off. I needed to give others some comp time.”

“Alone? You let me do this alone?”

“And from what I’ve seen, you’ve done a fine job.” I washed my knives and put the chops in the locker for Grandpa to pull and stuff later. He led me out in front of the coolers to inspect what was wrapped and ready. “It’s good to know that I can depend on you to do the work and understand the process. We have just the right amount on display and I can get the chops stuffed and the chicken breasts seasoned for the afternoon rush. This is what makes us different, Jett. SuperFoods doesn’t have a custom cut meat department like we do. Their cooler stock is delivered by truck from the warehouse each morning. They don’t do any Prime cuts. I don’t know how long we’ll be able to compete in this market, but this is our niche. You’re helping me maintain it. Now go home to your women and get some loving.” He slapped me on the back and I grabbed my coat to go home.

I was the only one home when I got there. That wasn’t unusual on Monday. It was my night to cook and everyone else had classes. The house was filled with the aroma of the turkey stock I’d put in the crockpot to simmer all day. I’d need to pick the carcass and cut the vegetables in a little bit. But first I took a detour through my studio.

The painting of Mary was on my easel and the living room had been cleaned up. There were still some fine details in the portrait that I needed to finish but I’d do those after dinner. I was filled with a sense of tenderness and pride when I looked at that painting. I was no more nor less in love with Mary than with Jas or Kelly or Sarah Lynn or Ariel or Charmaine. There was something about painting one of my lovers that was almost more intimate than making love. Of course, doing both was best!

What surprised me, though, was that I was still wrapped in the warm feeling of my grandpa’s words of praise. I didn’t think it was possible, but I was as proud of my work in the meat market as I was of my painting. I’d managed the department for a whole day and did it well. Not only was I an artist with paint but I also had a marketable skill.

Tomorrow, the feeling of pride and accomplishment would fade as I immersed myself back into the world of art and my passion. It might even be gone by the time we finished dinner tonight. But for now... I guess I’ll go finish the soup and get ready to feed my girls.

Merck was pleased with the painting. He was blown away when Mary came into our class, stripped off her clothes, and lay on the desk in front of the painting to pose.

“As a thing is more perfect, the more it feels of pleasure and of pain,” she said. She maintained the pose through a thunderous round of applause and then grabbed her clothes and ran out of the room.

“This is what we mean by the influence of Literature on the Arts,” Merck lectured. “It is not replicating a scene, but letting words flow through the artist to inspire artwork. Is Blackburn’s Inferno an illustration of Dante’s Inferno? How could you be so dense as to think that? It is an artwork inspired by a piece of literature. But not just the literature. This work was equally inspired by the model.” He was really on a roll.

“That inspiration comes in different forms. Look, for example, at Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine Women, two hundred years after Dante’s Divine Comedy. Did Giambologna read and interpret Dante’s work? Not likely. But the Florence of the Renaissance had been so profoundly influenced by the poet that a world of art had burst from it.”

He pointed at my painting and applauded, as did the rest of my class. It was a little embarrassing, but I was also really proud. Mary slipped back into the lecture hall fully dressed and all but unnoticed as she took my hand. This wasn’t her class, but she’d decided to join me on this Wednesday. We had drawing on Tuesday and Thursday, but no classes after this one on Wednesdays.

“As our last section in this course, we are going to take a look at the influence from the other direction. Our next subject is not an author or, in the strictest sense, an artist. We are going to look at the influence of a printer in Venice named Aldus Manutius and use as our example of his work, the book by Francesco Colonna named Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. We could, of course, have talked about Gutenberg and his various inventions that made the printed word a feasible medium. But Gutenberg was only the mechanics of reproduction. With Aldus we have the art of the book. The fifty-year span from Gutenberg’s invention to the innovations of Aldus are referred to as the Incunabula, or the cradle of printing. As Gutenberg’s Bible marks the beginning of that era, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili marks the end. You have a few reproduction pages in your text, but I want you to read the first chapter for discussion tomorrow. This is a short section describing the morning Poliphilus wakes up in his dream, but I assure you, reading this English translation from 1592 will challenge your interpretive ability as much as reading the Greek poets.”

“You didn’t!” Kelly squealed. “You just ran into the room and stripped? I can’t believe how brave you are!”

“I thought Merck would swallow his Vape,” I laughed. “Mary, you were—and are—spectacular! I’ll bet the janitors have come-stains all over the room to clean up tonight. Male and female.”

“It was just ... I had to do it. When I’m in front of that painting, I feel like I am becoming one,” she said.

“Wait! I thought the painting with you in front of it was all these flakes of you floating off into space,” Ariel said. “You’re becoming one with the universe?”

“That’s one way of looking at it, but...” She stood and stripped out of her bodystocking. The paint was beginning to fade but was still clear enough that we could easily see the image. “When I looked at the photos and video, I had a strange sense that all those particles weren’t floating off of me, but they were coalescing on me. I was being made whole from the fabric of the universe. I am not fading out of existence but fading into it. I’m solidifying. Becoming one.”

I had a term paper to write comparing a specific aspect of modernism with a counterpart in postmodernism and how it influenced my own work. Foundations of Contemporary Art was not my favorite class by a long stretch. It was almost impossible to self-analyze and suggest that my own art was more modernist or post-modernist. It was certainly influenced by both philosophies and the artists that were used as representatives.

One aspect that intrigued me, though, was the rise of performance art in the postmodern era. A few years ago, an artist named Marina Abramović had spent the entire length of her exhibition at MOMA in New York sitting in a chair across the table from another chair that visitors, one at a time, could sit quietly in. From all the reports I’d read, it was an intense experience for those who chose to sit across from her while those who chose to just walk past saw nothing significant. She sat a total of seven hundred thirty-six hours during exhibition opening times!

On the other hand, everyone knows and loves Bob Ross. He started in the eighties on Public Television, supposedly teaching people to paint. It’s true that you can learn a lot from him, but every lesson is truly a performance. Even more now that his performances have been transferred to YouTube. He was only active for about fifteen years, but because his performances were video-taped and digitized, he continues to instruct and entertain almost twenty-five years after his death.

I’d never considered it, but I was as much a performance artist as these two. I’d started painting publicly through Skype conversations with my friends while we chatted and I painted in my underwear. My most recent works had all been videoed and played in front of my classmates.

I set to work structuring my paper.

My 2D final project was to structure a surface composition that could be displayed in a gallery. This was very different than the wallpaper exercise at midterm. We needed to determine an object and draw, paint, or otherwise decorate it with two-dimensional art.

I laughed out loud when I thought about having one of my painted models on display. In a way, that was what I was doing with my Literature and the Arts projects. I was creating a 2D Design on a delightfully irregular surface. I couldn’t really exhibit one of my girlfriends, but I got to wondering if I could paint a manikin. I had a feeling that most of my classmates would go down to the local pottery shop and paint a vase. There’s a reason there are so many still lifes of vases with flowers. They hold still. Georgia O’Keeffe is said to have claimed that she preferred painting flowers to painting people because the flowers held still and didn’t talk back.