Fixture Read online

PART THREE

   

  FIXTURE

   

  So far we have discussed the early years of Darian Fark, and his progress through the dinosaur, the so-called Tree of Life, and the beginnings of the Fixture. But at some point along the line Darian changed, in a subtle way. And even now no one is quite sure just how to characterize his transformation. Outwardly, he appeared to be the same Darian Fark. Devoted to his work, seemingly oblivious to any other concerns, serious, sober, humorless, dry, a single-minded sculptor intent on fashioning his shapes in his own peculiar way.

  We do not know if fame and popular acclaim played any role in changing him. I doubt this very much. Instead, I believe, that he reached a certain age, and suddenly saw things differently. There is evidence to support this claim; the evidence of the work itself. We cannot help but doubt, when gazing upon its parts, that this is the creation of the earlier Darian Fark.

  Darian’s transition was quite sudden and noticeable by anyone who had been paying attention to the artist. There have been many theories concerning what may have transpired in his mind around this time. Some say that he gave up on human beings entirely, and instead of trying to teach them, he deliberately began to offend them. But this theory seems untenable, in light of the fact that he never seemed to pay attention to the citizens anyway. Neither was this change, as some suggest, a campaign of vendetta against the Fourth Fidelity.

  These theories do not reach the heart of the matter at hand. Which is that he was seeing different shapes, radically and wholly different kinds of forms. Darian no longer saw the perfect, abstract shapes that govern the world of science, math and art. He no longer saw the twisted, swollen, bloated, patchy, lumpy, tattered shapes that hitherto had characterized his vision of the world. He no longer saw connections, intersections, complicated weavings, as were evident in the Dinosaur, and in the Tree of Life. Darian had entered a new realm of perception, and in this realm the shapes he saw were shapes no one had ever seen before. The reason we still gape in awe and notice with bewilderment the formless forms that form the Fixture is that we have not yet learned to see these shapes. We can find no meaning to explain them, but Darian wasn't living in the world of meaning anymore, if indeed he ever was.

  I will start with the first two components of the Fixture, perhaps you will understand where Darian intended to go from this. On the corner of Turner and Fourier Street stands the first work. It is connected with the Tree by means of yellow ocher cables, wrapped around the street lights, sagging in some places, while in others riding impossibly high above the street’s buildings. Following the cables, we come to rest in an alley near the corner of the mentioned streets. At the entrance to the alley, there are yellow cobble stone steps, loosely placed so as to slip when you step on them, but they are definitely secure. Carefully we ascend, and soon come to the top, where a gap awaits us. The stairs are walled behind them, and there is a ten inch gap between this wall and the oozing, rising fixture. It is an orange thing, of corian and plaster, a tubelike totem rising thirty seven feet, squeezed between the narrow alley walls, and scribbled on, all over, by various punks and vandals. It is a long thin lump. It's sides are wary and uneven, a formless form. It doesn't look like anything at all. But from the top, some oily bluish grayish foamy gooey liquid stuff bubbles periodically over the edge, and oozes down the sides.

  The Madison Paper Plant, on Bleeker near Red Alley, is enshrouded in the second work, a tomb of plastic strings, forming an uneven, tangled netting stretching high above the factory. Strings whack against the windows, dangle in the parking lot; the overall effect more like a fishing net torn open by a school of killer whales than anything I can think of. The factory owner sued, and lost; the netting stayed, but now it's merely fragments of its former self, many strings pulled off by various people for all sorts of reasons down through the years, and once somebody even tried to set the whole big thing on fire, but succeeded only in burning down the factory, which is no longer there. The netting was originally made up of steel and petrifying trees. These are still in place since nobody can move them.

  These are only two examples. I will discuss each component of the Fixture in due time, but for the moment I have chosen these two to illustrate some points. People at the time had no idea what to make of these constructions. They went along with the media's description of Darian as a “trailblazing pioneer” and a “forerunner of the future generations”, but at the same time they suspected that the Fixture was going to be something more than art. Darian was taking some precautions that seemed out of line.

  Why was he sinking his foundations more than twenty-four feet deep?

  Why was he cementing at least one side of every piece to a large important building?

  Why was he attaching all these pieces to each other, sometimes by means of substances far more imposing than the works themselves?

  A consensus was reached that Darian only meant to have his pieces stand the test of time. But Darian wasn't worried about the tests of time. And he wasn't protecting his Fixture against the elements, but against the very people he was supposedly building it for. Darian took advantage of his popularity. Indeed, it was his popularity that allowed him to construct. But he sensed somehow that this popularity wouldn’t last As to whether he understood the full extent of what was yet to come, I doubt it very much. He was prepared for the inevitable, but against the unthinkably impossible, there can be no such prevention and no cure.

  One of Darian's most popular pieces of the time was behind the Jolly Supermarket on the 700 block of Elbert Street. It was popular because the pundits claimed it to be. The Jolly after all was the market for the middle class and a parking lot was not a proper site for a classic work of art. We know differently now of course. When Darian began to dig up the middle of the lot the owner of the Jolly took a legal interest in the matter. But the courts at this time were still ruling in favor of Darian, in favor of expression. Huge steel girders were sunk into the ground below the lot. These beams rose twenty feet above the ground, and were bracketed together by means of chain link fences. Beneath the surface was a generator, powered by solar panels on the top of the Fixture itself. The generator pumped a number of leather and rubber cords up and down the height of the structure. Attached to these were various lumps of rock and multicolored plastics. Weaving in and out among the elevator-ropes were miniature fossils traveling in a series of elliptic spirals, and flashing little lights like fireflies. The structure looked more like a delivery shaft filled with misplaced geological specimens than anything else that anyone could ever think of.

  Between the C-D Restaurant and the Happee Bar'n'Grill, Darian installed a mound of crystalline tangeleum. Within the clear transparent walls, various lumps and waves with prong-like claws were frozen still, except that every hour the entire thing was jolted from beneath, and a shower of red and orange sparks appeared to set the things on fire. This lasted for a minute, during which time a muffled whistle could be heard like the sound of a suffocated train.

  Darian's fixtures live, and this is the essential point. Even One Hundred Centahedrons supported a small colony of metallic centipedes, which still scurry in and out of all the myriad openings unstoppably and unceasingly.

  On Rambler Street, near Elbert, above the Morewell Condo Complex, Darian suspended a sort of artificial cloud, which changes shape and color depending on the weather. Within the cloud, a host of little clouds also dance and metamorphose to no apparent rhythm. Thunder and lightning storms are regular events up there, constantly deceiving and consequently annoying all the residents. No one is sure how he did it, and scientists still regularly make measurements and calculate the probabilities of this thing being possible. Darian himself refused to comment on the project.

  Around this time, the great inflation began. This proceeded to the Greater Depression itself, because private industries collapsed before the central government did. I am not an economist and I must look at events through the distortion as you do, so I cannot
pretend to explain it all to you. Prices soared, the value of the market plummeted, businesses went down, supplies were scarce, and Darian Fark would suddenly become rich beyond all normal comprehension. He had just one hundred thousand dollars left when the depression began, but the foresight he showed in his initial negotiations with Fourth Fidelity ballooned his worth exponentially. And The Fidelity was forced to pay, the courts would not exempt the Fidelity from its obligations. But the courts would look into the matter and determine the contract’s meaning in this new and possibly devastated economy.

  These developments were both very good and very bad for Darian. On the one hand, he could now accomplish all the things he wanted to. On the other hand, the changing situation was also bound to change official attitudes towards the Seventh Renaissance, and towards Darian Fark himself. The Fixture would soon become a wasteful luxury, and the avid Fark would be the most visibly wasteful artist of his time. But Darian took advantage of the situation, and immediately bought a warehouse, and a huge supply of tools, materials, machines, and parts. He hired a warehouse crew, and set himself up as a private enterprise. Thus, his reliance on the Fourth Fidelity funds was at an end. He became a businessman, and proceeded about his business.

  He built the twenty-story tall, left handed quadruple helix tower in first year of the Greater Depression. To many it was his greatest work, if only because it is visible from every part of town, and even from the suburbs several miles away. Made of lead-filled tyrognesium and chrome, the helixes intercoil around a central shaft of liquid fire. The effect is of a million prisms twisted, glowing, reflecting all the light of sun and stars.

  Darian always worked on several projects simultaneously, and ignored the other, irrelevant events of the day. He was busy all the time. He had no telephone now, and nobody could talk to him, unless he initiated the conversation. He lived entirely in his own world of awe-inspiring shapes, and viewed the city as his private playpen. He did not ask anyone's permission to use their property, nor did he apologize to them. He let his lawyer handle everything, and his lawyer always won. This is not the place to question his lawyer’s methods. The Seventh Renaissance was still in operation as a dominating social myth, and the powers that be were favoring the artist every time.