BONE WHITE DEATH
Natalija Grgorinic and Ognjen Raden

Venerable Xoratio Rey is very ill now and there is no hope the man will be able to live out his dream. That is why I am certain he will not resent me divulging the things that I am about to come open with at this point. We all respected his work, but most of us realized too little about Xoratio’s actual labor to be able to value it in the manner it deserved. Those rare few, among whom I had the great honor to be, knew that Xoratio Rey is maybe the only true artist we would ever have the good fortune to meet.

Blue7

Although born some time before, as an artist he was born when, a boy of ten or twelve, he fell off a bicycle and broke an arm. This is an adventure Xoratio would gladly tell you about, as well as the only adventure from his life he would tell anything about, which is why those several interviews that were ever made with him are so uninteresting. The adventure itself, however, is not anything if not remarkable.

Upon the accident the caring parents had brought the boy immediately to the local emergency room. That was Xoratio’s first encounter with the strange, new, unknown, mysterious, terrible, beautiful and monstrous outside world. In the manner of young prince Siddhartha, who stole away from the palace of his birth to be educated about the pain and suffering that are life in just one night, only to become the benevolent Buddha, young Xoratio learned, in the emergency room, that it is possible to draw life with blood on white ceramic tiles, when a young man, injured in a car crash, bled to death in front of him.

But the peak of that enlightening episode came when the boy Xoratio visited the radiology room. There a doctor, clad in a heavy rubber apron, undressed Xoratio to his waist, placed the hurt arm upon a cold metal table, then left the room to watch Xoratio through a window, together with the boy’s concerned parents. At that moment Xoratio experienced several different, powerful emotions.

First thing that became clear to him was that the pain as such is not particularly painful. In fact, pain is nothing but a fruit of our expectations, Xoratio later often recounted, a product of our desires. A man free of any want is a man forever free of pain.

Simultaneously he realized that he himself was essentially alone, detached, bestowed with the part of the observer, recorder, which was in itself both a punishment and a reward for being special.

And death, death is always at an arm’s reach, like a faithful dog, death, man’s best friend, making one work, work the best one can, and the worst.

And art is a skill of transplanting life. Good art produces sprouts, which are able to grow their own roots, but most of them wither and die, which is why any art mostly resembles an herbarium.

Because the heart is the organ of life, but a man’s heart equally consists of what is within him, and what is around him.

Only years later did those emotions take shape of thoughts, but during the course of time their intensity did not subside.

The boy was feeling them while he, after taking the X-ray, sat in the waiting room of the surgery ward, in his lap a piece of black foil on which there was transparent the broken bone of the left arm. Few months later, Xoratio received a blow to the head, in a skirmish on the top of the school stairs. Again he ended up in the radiology room, there again felt those same wonderful emotions, which, by his own confession, sealed his faith as an artist.

As a young man Xoratio studied art, but very early witnessed that it is not possible to transfer that unique spark of life by conventional techniques. Canvases and oil became a pleasant pastime for idle middle-aged ladies and seasonal portraitists on the Riviera. No one chose to put pain in paint anymore, mix blood with turpentine, or mix spit with clay, or even vine, or honey, or an egg. Xoratio looked at hundreds and hundreds of works done by the old masters, but none of those moved him nearly as much as did the X-ray of his broken arm.

Then he came to his revolutionary idea, and I am sure it is not my place to reveal it, because it is a secret, not the kind of secret someone bestowed upon me, but more of a truth that no one dared to articulate. Nevertheless, you will learn about it.

Xoratio leaves his art studies. With great effort he starts the study of medicine. The effort was indeed great, for it was a torture for an artistic soul to submit itself to the laws of mathematics, physics or biology, to penetrate all those hard, cold layers of science only to reach the hot, pulsating heart of art. What Xoratio sought were X-rays of broken, dislocated limbs, bones disfigured by tuberculosis and cancers, vertebra eaten by osteoporosis, screws twisted deep in the marrow of life, portraits of human pain and suffering, landscapes of death.

In the medical school archives he discovers pictures of children with glass bones and people with elephant heads; his first work carries that youthful desire to shock, the taste for rebellion, an invitation to a revolution, impertinent intention to confront the world with all dark depths of existence and fear; primitive, direct energy that strikes like a sledge hammer and leaves no bone unbroken.

The success of the early work did not come without certain consequences.

First was that Xoratio felt ashamed of his work. Realizing that instead of an artist he became a scavenger, tomb raider, pervert, that his art was reduced to a morbid obsession, a bizarre freak show he abandoned the medical school. Or maybe he was kicked out when the professors discovered their student’s true ambitions, along with the fact that he never even passed a single exam. But with success came financial benefits, large enough to enable Xoratio to buy a private radiology office, along with the accompanying equipment, and to turn it into his atelier.

That allowed for the maturation of the real Xoratio Rey. In the solitude of his new hiding place he picks up a ten pound hammer, and with all the force crushes the bones of his own fist out of which comes a brand new cycle named “Fistful of Stars”. Yet another success.

It is this success that makes Xoratio, as soon as his wounds healed up, break new bones and create new work - triple fractures of both legs, simultaneous fractures of both arms and both legs, dislocation of every dislodgeable joint of his body, swallowing of metal balls, bolts and scissors, even an amputation of a finger - Xoratio Rey creates with intensity that shortens his life.

He keeps breaking his bones, keeps exposing himself to X-rays. What’s leading him is a vision of an improved humanity, and a plan that, after his death, all his work gets exhibited in one single museum where his original skeleton would serve as a centerpiece.

Around that time, I was finishing my treatise “On the Deconstruction of Color in Avant-garde Art”, nervous, and completely out of focus, since it was the second time that I had moved the dead-line for the article, which made me a victim of the constant, day and night harassment by the magazine’s editor who kept spitting his orders at me like an army general: Finish it! Do it!

Then came an unexpected call from the Modern Art Museum. I could feel myself returning to the land of living and free. New opportunity lifted my spirits and filled me with vigor and pride. Immediately I discarded my essay and ran to meet my museum appointment. A couple of months ago I had sent them a sample of my work, but had already lost all hope of ever being noticed. Regularly, at a certain time of day, especially at dusk of a too short day, in the promise of another night with no plans, I would try to accustom myself to the thought I might never become an artist. By this mental exercise I managed to discover certain advantages of a mediocre life not dedicated to art and noble enterprises, even convince myself that such an everyday life, with all its panem et circenses type of everyday concerns, actually would not prove so bad. But upon receiving the invitation to contact the museum’s curator, my ambition returned fresh, with blushing cheeks of a mistress, filling my soul with deceitful kisses.

The curator turned to be a dry middle-aged little woman, with a page haircut, and an enormous golden may bug on her collar, who greeted me with just a wave of her bony hand and took me, in complete silence, to the museum’s storage area. While we walked through a cold corridor her flat heels made a squeaking noise like a pair of little animals not used to being stepped on.

She then found a light switch behind a thick door she opened before me.

“Here, choose what you like from this lot!” She instructed me with a freezing voice that might belong to a women’s concentration camp warden.

Just one look across the room convinced me that none of my work was to be found here, and none of it ever will.

“I followed your writing in magazines.” Her purple eyes lit up with a trace of compassion, but I might have been mistaken. “All things considered, I think you would be just the man to make a selection between these works, all done by authors of your generation… find me something provocative, something new… The exhibition opens in two weeks, right after the Rey retrospective.”

Before she left me, she added:

“I’ll be back in an hour to check up on you!”

Blue7

And there, on the concrete floor, were two piles of paintings, mostly oils and collages. I immediately discarded the left one. It consisted of a dozen or so uninventive, saccharine works by young Academy graduates, full of mathematical games, lines and clean surfaces, technically very polished, but without a trace of any soul or spirit. I recognized almost every work in the right pile. They were done mostly by the people from our crowd. All prostrate there, before me, each revealing innermost intimate emotions, most wonderful dreams, open, vulnerable - waiting for my betrayal.

The storage area was so spacious I remember thinking it was a crying shame it had been left empty and deprived of use. I started to pull out works from the right pile placing them all along the walls to create an exhibition of my own. I tried to find comfort in the thought that it was just about that one exhibition; after all, what’s a little rejection to a good artist? I, also, in panic, tried not to answer this question.

Finally, feeling tired and sick to my stomach, I managed to make a selection of twelve works, just a moment before Ms. Maybug showed up.

“Oh, but what’s this!” She shrieked. “This is too much, this is far too much… you missed my point completely, I’ll be needing just a couple of those, it couldn’t have been that difficult.”

I must have given her no sign of comprehension, for she herself went to that right pile, and without any undue deliberation picked out two collages.

“This will do!” She concluded placing them on the left, clearly inferior pile.

“But why would you want to mix them up?” I was troubled and utterly confused.

“Why, these are the works for the exhibition, you only had to add a few more.” Her hair bobbed impatiently. “I’m surprised at you, one would think, considering you are well-versed in these matters, you’d be able to recognize the work of young Miss Valentine…”

“… daughter of the Minister of Culture.” I felt a sudden surge of nausea. “And this one is by the son of the renowned painter, Mister M…”

I could not stand it any longer. I bolted out of there deciding I needed a drink, dropping anchor at the first bar terrace I stumbled upon. It happened to be a place where the tables were scattered around all over the sidewalk. I drank my first beer in a single gulp, and was beginning to feel the sickness oozing out of me in drops of heavy sweat, when something hit the chair I was sitting on.

I turned annoyed - a little fight would be just what the doctor ordered.

“Pardon me, please, excuse me!” Uttered the man in the wheel chair trying to wheel himself out of a stalemate.

My rage melted in an instant, I stood up clearing the way for him.

As I hovered there waiting for him to move, I took a better look at his face. Pallid skin, heavy rings under the eyes, thin, unkempt hair… it was…

“Xoratio!”

For a moment it seemed he resented me recognizing him. He squeezed out a courteous smile with great pain and effort, but accepted my invitation for a drink. When the waiter arrived with a glass of plain lemonade, red and white striped straw protruding out of it, Xoratio appeared somewhat more animated. He inquired about my career. I congratulated him on the forthcoming retrospective.

But he merely waved his hand at it, moved closer to the glass, bit the straw, and started sucking his drink. He kept as it until the air gargled at the bottom.

“It’s no good. It’s no good at all. I’m afraid for my work.” His voice revealed utter depression.

I observed his undernourished little body, all coiled up in wheel chair. He rolled his eyes timidly trying to detect if someone was listening in on our conversation, before adding: “My bones don’t abide by me anymore.” He announced and watched me for a moment studying my reaction.

“I know, I know, you’ll say it was only to be expected…” There was a trace of irony in his gaze.

“And you may well be right… You see I’m bound to this goddamn chair. And my bones refuse to coalesce lately, they only break more easily…”

He let out a weary sigh.

“There’s no more pain, just a gaping wound, the state of constant decay.”

His lips spread in a sort of a smile.

“I’m changing my physical condition, from solid to liquid, like a comic book hero. I’m the Rubber Man, elusive, elastic acrobat, nothing can hold me down.” He paused, then continued as if it were some sort of a jest. “Do you ask yourself if you could have made different choices in life?”

I shrugged in surrender - after all, everybody wonders what would have become of them if they were born in a different city, or why they never learned to operate a locomotive.

“I really hate myself intensely.” He whispered. “Not even able to think about any other possibility in my life. I’m so limited! Can you imagine, I have never regretted being me! Ever. Can you imagine how stupid that must be? Just like a horse put to a carriage, with blind caps on my eyes, able to see only one way, only one path… Silly, aren’t I?”

But before I could answer that, a tall, chubby young man joined us. Rey introduced him as his assistant. The boy didn’t want anything to drink, so I bid them both farewell, and watched them as they went down the street; young man’s broad shoulders leaning as he pushed along the wheel-chair, until they disappeared in the crowd. The young man and the invisible man.

Next few days were spent in one of the twilight moods searching for my evening star to show me the way from day to night. And as if my life hadn’t been complicated enough, I found not one, but two stars, two warm, seductive, possessive Venuses. At dawn I would flee from one, only to run to the other in my lunch break. My famous stews and seafood salads were my ransom. Which made them both deliciously round, and consequently produced a considerable strain on my lower abdomen. Both of them were emancipated enough to find it a pleasant change, this carnival trade of masks, as well as a source of additional excitement. In short, they wore me down to the very limits of my stamina. I was their toy, in two shifts, in two almost identical velvet bathrobes, without any hope of relief.

Now and then I would manage to round up some of our old gang for a drink, but mostly I kept to myself. There was no news to share. We all hid in our bedrooms and studios. Nothing worthy of interest, except pieces of usual gossip and information about new therapists in town. Rey was the only one who managed to challenge our imagination. Somebody, and that somebody was an utterly unreliable colleague of ours, who had heard the whole story from somebody else whom we all knew as a person susceptible to weekend acid trips, well that first somebody told us a story that the other somebody witnessed about Xoratio Rey being run over by an automobile. We argued that none of this was ever in the papers, and Rey had just opened an exhibition in Amsterdam, but this somebody explained that Rey wasn’t hurt in the accident at all. The story was that the car had hit him at the moment he was wheeling himself across the street. There was some sudden braking, some people screaming, the chair flew through the air, and the car drove straight across Xoratio’s body. The lady driver, after managing to stop the vehicle some fifty meters down the road, came out crying and immediately ran to the victim. There laid old Rey, on the asphalt, as if he was smeared on it with a butter knife, like melted clay, or a paint spill. The lady screamed and made signs of a cross across her voluminous breasts, but then Rey’s voice was heard, and he was pretty angry:

“How could you be so careless? Haven’t you notice the speed limit? Oh, c’mon, c’mon, there’s no point in crying now, just get the chair and pick me up.”

Unbelievable, our witness was stupefied, the run-down Ray soon found himself back in his chair, wheeling towards his house. I tell you, as if he was made of rubber!

After that, my life continued to drag on like a sleepy Sunday afternoon. In the meantime I finished my essay, even received a handsome fee. But my Venuses had had enough of me, and, they have said, the seafood was of poor quality too, so I wound up on the street again, an abandoned dandy. Who knows what my end would have been like if it weren’t for her, my little match girl, my good fairy, my little mermaid. Eight months after we had met, she dragged me to the city hall where I swore to her my everlasting obedience. As I nodded the “I do”, she placed my hand on her most conspicuous stomach from which came a light, but unmistakable karate kick. I knew then it would not be easy from there on. But the strangest thing was I didn’t want to have it easy, ever again.

Only three days after the world became forever a better place for me, I received sad news. Xoratio Rey had died. Silently, peacefully, in the manner in which he lived.

For the first time since I had run from there in panic, I visited the Modern Art Museum which decided to repeat the Rey retrospective complete with his last few works. The place was packed, as could have been imagined. People like burying other people. They especially like burying artists. It gives them a sense of final victory and a confirmation that they had chosen the right path, which, in any case leads to a few meals and few hangover-mornings more.

The black poster for the exhibition was enough of an indication. Though it revealed absolutely nothing, I could feel Rey’s penetrating eyes watching me. And I knew, as soon as I stepped in the first exhibition hall that his dream had not been realized.

Upon scanning the entire show I was left without a doubt - his skeleton was not there. And never will be. Only the museum lights remained reflected on the surface of the completely dark last X-ray foils, confusing the visitors, from time to time.

 

- FIN -

NATALIJA GRGORINIC AND OGNJEN RADEN: the two of us were born in 1974& 1975 in croatia (pula & slavonski brod), and have been writing exclusively together for the past ten years (read our manifesto). also worked as: journalists, radio hosts and reporters, photographers, car wash employees, au pairs, game arcade proprietors, holiday retreat managers, web designers, freshmen english instructors... after croatia and a two-year stint in los angeles, ca, we're now living in cleveland, oh. Grgorinic and Raden publish a collaborative literature and art zine at http://www.admit2.net. BLUE7. Musician, filmmaker, sculptor, painter and illustrator. Blue made films and music in Hollywood for 14 years. He directed, produced and wrote the music score for his own film 'Girl With a Tail' which can be seen at ifilm.com. Now in Krakow, Blue's creating a multi-media experience called the URBAN-JELLEN TEST. It features a 'Dada Ballet', a unique presentation of many talents such as music, projections of art and photography, drama and strange and beautiful ideas. And all of it with a heart as big as the universe. Transcendence into an artful mind. Blue has a degree in Illustration and Painting from California State University.