Fixture

 FIXTURE

  Copyright 1982 by Tom Lichtenberg

  Edited 2010 by Benhamish Allen

  operativewords@gmail.com

   

  PART ONE

   

  THE EARLY YEARS

  It's hard to imagine a time before the Fixture. Yet for a period, it existed only in the mind of its illustrious creator Darian Sebastian Fark. Memories exist from those before the Fixture. But those memories are few and faulty and we have trouble interpreting their feelings of the absence.

  In those pre-Fixture days, progress had begun its Seventh Renaissance. There was new construction everywhere. New offices, new houses, new factories, new everything. The quality of life was improving. And to go along with all of this advancement, Fourth Fidelity Bank decided to promote the arts, as they occasionally still do. They were expecting an increase of their visibility on the world stage in return.

  After some consideration, Fourth Fidelity selected Darian Fark, to build the centerpiece of their new headquarters. But we are getting ahead of ourselves already. This is not the beginning of the story, although when thinking of the Fixture it is hard to imagine a beginning at all. We can however begin with Darian, the artist, the creator. But we would be remiss if we neglected to mention his forebears.

  His mother, Mary Alice Simpson Fark taught a kindergarten class. She specialized in finger-paints and brown paper bag animal masks. She seems to have been the major influence on the youthful Darian. Her philosophy of “leaving kids alone to do what they will” resulted in his being left quite alone throughout his formative years. She was often to be found squatting in her special corner of the small Fark house, playing alone and conversing with her dolls, especially Sandra Mae, her favorite.

  Jasper Louis Fark, the father, was a wandering salesman of the metaphysical variety and a collector of peculiar artifacts. The Fark abode was literally stuffed with sacred things, and Darian grew up in a world where art was more than commonly abundant. Jasper Fark was not a friendly man, to say the least. He had little fondness for his only son, his only child, Darian, and Darian despised him, or so he later claimed.

  We know Jasper mostly through his legal record, which was a lengthy one. He was first charged as a teenager, for loitering. According to his statement he was merely “waiting for a sign and failed to observe the one that said no trespassing” We next hear of him a year later through court documents filed when he married Mary Alice Simpson.

  Shortly thereafter, Jasper embarked on a husband-only honeymoon. He abandoned his bride and set off on a course which can still be clearly followed by a rather hefty collection of police reports. The jurisdictions vary but the charges are the same. Public nuisance, vagrancy, loitering, trespassing, minor theft, indecent exposure, and intent to flee. At some point during this period, Jasper Fark remembered he was married and returned to his wife. About a year after Jasper returned, Darian was born. Jaspar never left off wandering, but as he aged, arrests were steadily less frequent. He continued to preach the word of, whosever word it was that he was preaching. Some saw it was a combination of orgiastic Sufism and penitential scourging. Others recall he used the phrase 'His terrible swift sword' an awful lot.

  One thing is clear, wherever Jasper went, whatever he said and did, he always returned home loaded down with animistic objects. The Fark house was a small one, with a single bedroom, a living room, a kitchen with a pantry, a basement and the tiny attic.

  For awhile Jasper stored his finds in the basement, but they later became so numerous that the entire house was cluttered save for the kitchen, the only rooms off limits to his collection. The kitchen was filled with Mrs. Fark's own artistic works.

  Jasper Fark was not an art dealer, though. He never sold a single thing, and never parted with any of his treasures. Once he had his objects safely stored, he seems to have forgotten all about them.

  The attic was Darian’s room, accessible only by a rope which dangled from the window. Darian undoubtedly ascended it at night, and descended in the morning. His father's artifacts had found their way up there, mostly through the help of Darian. And he was literally surrounded with these objects day and night.

  Darian was a shy and lonely boy, living in a world of private fantasy. That's easily said, but perhaps the implications are more subtle. We humans always live in fantasy. Those of us called sane merely share a common social fantasy, while the insane simply have a fantasy all their own. Darian never saw the need for believing in the collective social myth, or perhaps he was trying to create a new one starting with himself. We may never know. But we do know he spent his earliest years in the utmost isolation. His only friends were his father's dogs and his parents never reared him to be a member of the mass.

  Later, when he went to school, he preferred to play with clay and mud and stones, rather than with the other children. Their games never seemed to interest him. Some of these children taunted him. None of these children ever entered Darian's home. In truth, they didn't even know him, despite their later claims.

  One person in Darian’s childhood who did care was Hildegard Brennan, the school principal where Darian’s mother taught. Hildegard noticed something special about Darian early on. She recalled him as an abnormally small boy, very thin, with nearly invisible straw-colored hair, terrible eyesight, and tenth generation clothes.

  Ms. Brennan once recalled a meeting she had with the young artist. She asked him if he was happy. He said “Yes, he was.” “What?” she asked, “What are you happy about?” “The world,” he said, “is full of shapes.”

  We receive a sense of concentration and focus, an almost hypnotic quality about the boy. She asked him, “What about the shapes?” He answered, “There are many of them.”

  Besides the quotes about the shapes, she didn't have much else to say about the artist. The kids at school were mean to him, but what could she do? In other words, she left him alone as well. I'm sure Darian didn't mind. He was used to doing things his way, and any interference would have been unwelcome. He seems to have spent most of his time observing, observing shapes, no doubt. He watched the passing clouds, the patterns in the parched or soaked red earth, the shapes of natural and man-made things and creatures, and, most of all, imaginary shapes existing only in his mind.

  Life for Darian continued this way until Darian was about ten years old. No longer content to merely observe the shapes of the world, he began to create some shapes himself. His parents apparently had no objections to his work, but as usual they did nothing to encourage him. And it seems certain that during this formative period of his life, he was simply experimenting with the possibilities.

  I will attempt a description of some of these very early objects but I believe it would take an entirely different language than ours, symbolic as it is, to describe the works of Darian Fark. This does not stop us from attempting descriptions however, even if they bear little resemblance to reality.

  A few pieces from this early period are in the memorial museum. Two are approximately seventeen inches high, while the other rises to a full two feet. One piece appears to be some kind of swollen worm, basking in a rounded, net-like leaf, suspended on a rope over a waterfall of lumpy mud. Others may see it differently, of course. The other statuette is actually cut from stone, and looks more like a leaky, lidless, casket filled with porridge. The worm piece is much more complicated, and interesting.

  Darian was producing sculptures constantly during this period and not showing them to anyone. He showed little interest in his classes, and his grades were very bad. He had no use for spelling, grammar, history or math, and the only subject that seemed to interest him at all was science. His science teacher recalls that Darian would frequently interrupt to ask all sorts of questions stemming from a class the day or week before. He seems to hav
e tried to puzzle things out on his own before he turned for help.

  Darian had no social life in his early teenage years. He had no interests or hobbies that he felt the need to share with others.  Perhaps he felt no need of friends or companions during these years. He was probably seen as unusual by his peers, but so were his parents by theirs and his odd behavior must have been expected. Had Jasper and Mary Alice turned out a normal son, the community would have been shocked.

  Whenever Jasper came home from one of his missionary ventures, he became the town pariah as long as he remained. He never did preach within the town limits, nor would he have been allowed to if he tried.

  Jasper considered the town damned to all eternity, and claimed he only lived there as a witness, like Jonah in Nineveh, or Jesus in Jerusalem. But he was highly active in the larger cities, the great urban centers where the “real sin was to be found.”

  When Jasper was at home, he merely exhorted his wife to go on producing visible works for the greater glory of God. According to Jasper, “God created man to do things, and therefore everything we do belongs to God.” 

  These are the kind of people who see nothing but symbols in everything, and see everything in nothing.

  Harriet Bridges Washington was the town librarian where Darian grew up. A modest, unassuming woman, it was she who was the first to stumble upon the work of our artist.

  Harriet was preparing to open a permanent children's exhibition room in the lobby of the library. She contacted Mrs. Fark through the school and arranged a visit to see the classroom’s art works.

  One of the things Harriet admired most was not by one of the students, though. It was a brown paper bag mask made by Mrs. Fark herself. Harriet wanted it anyway, and asked if she could see some of Mary Alice's other works.

  She soon found herself in the kitchen of the Fark house, and watched Mary Alice rummage through her pantry, looking for more of her work. Harriet turned and looked through the window. A young child was playing in the mud. “Is that Little Darian?” She said. Indeed it was. “What's he doing?” Harriet asked. “Whatever he wants to,” Mrs. Fark replied. Harriet was not content with this response and stepped outside to ask the boy himself.

  She introduced herself, but Darian did not turn from his task. She asked him what he was doing, and he merely grunted “Work”. “What kind of work?” she asked. Darian sighed, then stared her in the face and said, “I'm examining the texture and consistency of this material. Then, considering the nature and the circumstance involved, I will determine the proper form conducive to the ultimate expression of this matter”.

  “Oh, I see” She said. "Oh yeah?" Darian retorted "what do you see?" She replied that she'd like to watch him work. But Darian responded with, “I only work alone”. Then she asked if she could see some of the things he'd done, and finally he relented, and said, okay, why not ?

  Darian walked over to his shed, opened the door and then sat down cross-legged in the corner, among his works. Harriet was astonished and bewildered by the things. She knew, she later claimed, that she was in the presence of a genius.

  Finally, she asked him what they were, and he said, in his customary fashion, "Shapes." She asked, “Shapes of what?" and he seemed puzzled by the question.

  Darian agreed to let her take some things and put them in the library, and she chose the oddest and most complicated pieces from the lot. They were an immediate sensation. Parents from all over town demanded their removal. Harriet saw nothing wrong with the objects and defied the critics to spell out their objections. This left them rather baffled, for none of them could say exactly what they felt was wrong with them. They only had a “feeling”. They were “creepy”. One informant said, “you got the strangest feeling that they were going to reach right out and strangle you.” “They were almost alive” another said, “alive and very hungry.” Most of the townsfolk agreed that the things were about things that were eating other things.

  What the “things” were, no one could say, but they didn't like them, and they had to go. Harriet fought to preserve these aspects of the local culture, but after several days she lost, and the statues were returned to Darian, who calmly put them back where they had been before.

  "You have real talent", Harriet told him, and he only nodded. But this experience opened up a whole new world of ideas to the budding Fark. He realized, for the first time in his life, that these pieces could evoke responses from other people, that his was essentially a social form of work.

  He later said of this event that, “The whole thing had given me a thrill. I really got those assholes up in arms. They were furious. I loved it. It never had occurred to me before that simple forms could cause such aggravation. It made me want to learn just what it was about these shapes that caused such responses.”

  For the first time, other people's notions of reality started to interest him. Before this, he had assumed that everybody saw the same things in the same world. But some of what they said about his work made Darian realize that everyone was crazy in their own way. His work wasn't merely one activity out of many possible for all, but a unique phenomenon, available only to himself, that no one else could imitate, or even understand. He was wrong about this, of course. There has been no shortage of Fark imitators since he rose to his great fame. Schools were founded on his principles, but they found it hard to teach what Darian himself only barely understood.

  He began to read about art theory, encouraged by Harriet. He read the history of art, the lives of various artists, and accompanied Harriet on numerous trips to museums, where the young Darian would frequently spend all day studying a single piece of art.

  At home his work progressed. And for the next few years he experimented with all sorts of shapes. He occasionally would place one of his works outside of City hall to test how people would react to his shape. Each of these objects was destroyed by the town’s constituents soon after it appeared. He listened to people’s comments, and puzzled over what was meant by “ludicrous”, “insane”, “obscene”, and “just plain gross”. He wondered what was wrong with them - with the people, not the pieces - that made them all react the way they did.

  Now, Darian was still in school throughout this period in his life, and it got tougher every year - not just the schoolwork, which he never could keep up with, but the kids, who ridiculed him mercilessly. At the age of sixteen and a half, Darian completed the 11th grade, and decided that was enough. He did not return to school again, and nobody, with the exception of Harriet Washington, gave a damn. And it's at this point in our story where he meets Mr. Jones, the spectrum showman who would become his first confidant and possibly his only friend.

  Seraphim Jones was a minstrel of the Seventh Renaissance. He was several years ahead of his time, and he knew it too. When the Sixth Renaissance was over, Seraphim found himself out of a job, like many other people at that. He was laid off from the Academy of Tools, and there was nothing else for him to do but pack his bags and head out on the road, performing the odd laser show over here and over there, dazzling his audiences, and scraping up a meal.

  Mr. Jones believed in the theory of “creative evolution”, or, to use the proper term, “indeterminate determinism”. He was convinced that the future, although it is composed of finite possibilities, nevertheless remains wide open to the inevitability of unpredictable and thoroughly random mutations. This was only one of the many ideas he introduced our artist to, during the years of the sojourn together as a wandering freak show/minstrel team. You will recall the fact that Seraphim was a traveling artist, a musician, tinkerer, explorer, and most of all, a man of many and varied words. He was fascinated with the shapes of sound, as recorded and produced by the several weighty high-tech gadgets he carried with him everywhere. These were invisible shapes made visible by the power of computer simulation, an art of which he was a certified master.

  Everywhere Seraphim went he introduced the masses to the possibilities of a glimpse into the temporal and the infinite. His m
ission was poorly paid, but he survived, and traveled the length and breadth of the country dazzling the public with his displays.

  He would arrive in a small town and find the main drag or a parking lot at the local shopping mall, unpack his goods, convince someone to let him tap into their power source, wait until dusk, and begin his work. Crowds gathered, people oohed and aahed, the merchants complained, the police arrived, and he'd be asked to leave. People cheered, they offered him extension cords, they told everyone about him, and they contributed some quarters or a dollar bill.

  One of the people most impressed with him was our wandering preacher Jasper Fark, who lost his own small crowd to the general excitement caused by Mr. Jones. Despite his ambivalence toward his own son, Jasper quite admired Mr. Jones.

  Jasper followed Seraphim for a while before approaching him. Both of them were talkers, and loved an audience. Jasper first offered the use of his truck to Seraphim, and the duo spent a few months on the road together. Jasper Fark returned to his home one day with his illustrious guest.

  Darian was immediately enthralled with the performer. Seraphim took a liking to the kid, and showed him his machines. Jasper also sat in on these lessons, convinced that he was witnessing the ultimate testament to the glory of his God - the invisible made real, the ether illumined in color, the heavens made manifest through the power of Jones' wizardry. But Darian's interest was in the actual shapes themselves, and he had found his first true friend, the only kindred spirit he had ever yet encountered and perhaps the only one he ever would.

  During his stay in the Fark house, Seraphim became as impressed with Darian's work as Darian was with his. And so, when Seraphim was making preparations to leave he asked if Darian would like to travel with him. Our subject immediately agreed and the two snuck off together in the middle of the night. They started their journey on foot. Darian would never see his parents again. Soon after Darian left his mother died and Jasper Louis Fark began to wander again, continuing to preach his own modified version of someone else’s gospel.

  If anyone is interested in a day by day account of their travels which lasted a few years, I recommend you read the memoirs of Seraphim Jones, especially the volumes entitled “The Darian Years.” Seraphim's books are suspect, as are all recorded accounts. They are high on self-promotion, and rather low on facts, but reading them might give an insight into the life of the artist.

  I’d like to introduce some general themes and personal essentials that will help explain the Fixture, Darian’s most important work. For this purpose, some insight into the character of the artist might be useful. I have found, during my extensive research, many quite contradictory portraits of his nature. Seraphim Jones insists that Darian was an obsessive and brooding man, who would occasionally fall into inexplicable fits of black depression. He says that Darian had an aversion to the public bordering on allergy. On the other hand, he states that Darian's was an unparalleled artistic genius, and that he seemed to have an almost extraterrestrial power of vision.

  Darian would spend many long hours in the middle of the night, experimenting with the Jones machines, and by morning he would have a host of new designs and applications ready to be installed. With Darian's assistance, Jones was able to construct a number of quite unthinkable gadgets and devices, which extended his performances far beyond their original extent, from mere light displays to intricate, highly mathematical exercises in incomprehensibility.

  There is every reason to doubt that Darian's aptitude was as magical as Seraphim makes it seem, and his books read more like travel adventure than a true and thorough account of the events that actually transpired. On the other hand, we do know that by the time they went their separate ways, Darian had learned an incredible amount about machinery, electronics and construction, knowledge that would later become synthesized into the Fixture. We cannot say with any certainty how this expertise was acquired, but we do know that is was.

  Darian was a boy when he and Seraphim joined up. His departure from home and his many travels were perhaps born from a craving for novelty or independence. Darian matured on the road, adventuring, learning new things. He still observed how his art affected those who experienced it. Indeed, that might have been his sole concern at the time.

  Darian Fark never seems to have been a genuine adolescent. He viewed these travels as a necessary preparation for the work he knew that he was going to do someday. He was seriously committed to this endeavor and never gave doubt much thought.

  I think we can conclude that the artist was a sober, thoughtful youth. People who knew him have remarked that he rarely smiled but I can guess that this was due to his constant thinking.

  He must have made a curious counterpart to the effervescent loudmouth Jones, and people wondered what the two had in common. But it was a genuine artist's bond. During their time together, the shows evolved from simple laser fireworks to amazing sky wide works of art. They made light stand still in the atmosphere for up to half an hour, while they added on new pieces and new strands, until they had an ever changing color sculpture living and breathing in the air. These towers of light were accompanied by a dazzling array of other shorter rays and sparks, shooting up and spinning around to the sounds of light created by the synthesizer recorders.

  They were no longer confined to shopping malls and parking lots. A few years after Darian left home the duo were performing in cathedrals, theaters and museums. Their shows were becoming legendary. They no longer lived in empty lots, but stayed in fine hotels, and in the houses of important dignitaries of the art world. They referred to their collective works as “Graven Images”. Seraphim, as usual, had grandiose theories and ideas connected with the work, and used to give long speeches before and after their shows expounding on these ideas to the crowds.

  Darian seems to have dismissed all that as quite beside the point, and following his lead, I shall do likewise. You can read Jones' books if you're interested in such ideas.

  We have said that Darian was cautious, thorough, meditative, intuitive and quiet. As he was in those years, so he remained until his death. He doesn't seem to have changed much, despite events and changing circumstances. When he split with Seraphim Jones, he rented out a small studio and devoted himself to the furtherance of his art.

  He lived alone, but he wasn't left alone. Eventually Darian would command an audience the size of the world, but in his small studio he only had room for the occasional friend or acquaintance stopping by on their way through town. In the summers he would exhibit his work, either on the street or in a museum. Space never mattered to Darian. Each of his shows was more successful than his last. Why he always chose the summertime to display his creations we might never know.

  The influence of Seraphim Jones in Darian’s work during this period seems to have vanished utterly. His pieces weren't painted. There were no bright colors. There was no accompanying musical score. His pieces still sat alone at this point, athough later the connections between them would become central to his work. It is difficult to describe these structures, but I shall make an attempt, however feeble it might seem.

  In terms of my own field architectural mythology, Darian’s early shows were full of meaning. The basic pre-war attributes were there; cramped, fixated resistance to artificial limitations, rootless upward movement, clutching, all-embracing selfish firmness, full serious absurdity, and finally, the firm conviction of the shell that must save its hollowness from intrusions. All these points have many implications, most of which I touch on in my lectures concerning Darian and his work.

  The critics of his day didn't know what they were witnessing of course. But they were suitably impressed. He gained a bit of notoriety and one of his summer exhibits was shown at several museums in major cities all around the world. The audience which anticipated this display with exaggerated zeal was oddly disappointed with its presence.

  The show consisted of twenty seven pieces, varying in size from the minuscule to the gargantuan. The tiny pieces we
re of clay and zinc, lumpy, unappealing shapes, reminiscent of the melted girder beams seen nightly from Amman during the World War then taking place. Other pieces were also images of destruction and decay. People didn't want to be reminded that then President Harper was threatening to exterminate the planet to safeguard essential national interests. They wanted some divertissement, some appealing, thought absorbing stimuli, but only in one piece did Darian gratify this wish.

  This statue was destined to become his second most famous work. It was twenty-four feet high, and forty-two feet wide around the widest part. Although it was untitled, as are all of Darian’s works, the public placed a title on it presumably because they felt they needed to. It became known as the Dinosaur. Unlike the beasts, it had no distinguishable limbs, or rather, too many of them. The head might be the tail, or the other way around. It was a massive skeleton, made up of almost innumerable little bones.

  Exhaustive study later exposed that the Dinosaur consisted of seven thousand five hundred eighty seven separate pieces, and these “bones” were made of everything and anything. From clocks to vinyl steering wheels and Barbie doll feet. The whole was huge, but each piece was minuscule, and the overall effect was awesome. The Dinosaur spoke to people and secretly told them that their culture was inevitably doomed to utter extinction. No one admitted what they really felt in the work’s presence of course, that would be a bit too gloomy.

  Although disappointed with the other works in the show, the public liked the Dinosaur so much that it was more than enough to ensure Darian's everlasting fame. The Dinosaur was never moved. It has remained right where it was initially exhibited unto this very day.

  Darian did not travel with his work. He seems to have forgotten about it entirely, busy in his studio, cluttering up the place with every kind of useless thing that he could find. For several months, while his art travelled the globe, he devoted his time to incomprehensible experimentation concerning form and shape. He seems to have confided in absolutely no one during this period, and we can only guess that Darian was preparing himself in some way for his enormous future task.

  Darian was world-renowned, materially secure, well-respected, and yet almost entirely unknown in any personal sense. An enigma, a successful one at that. Just the kind of artist that society loves to fawn on. But society didn't know what it was getting into when it picked on Darian Fark to be the avatar of its Renaissance. Some men express the essence of their age. What Darian Fark expressed was something else entirely.