Fixture Page 4

  Part Four

   

  Beginning of the End

   

  At this point Darian appeared to be at his peak. He received a medal of honor from the mayor, and a commendation from the President. Renaissance fever was at full pitch.

  We know what he had in mind, for the Fixture is the living substance of his thought. He was fashioning his latest works, the mountains he was shortly to install behind the Merrimack Hotel. These mountains, with their velvety green surfaces, and purple liquid valleys, their cliffs and canyons, gorges and ravines, still seem so real, it's odd to think of them as made by one man and a crew of laborers. True, they only reach a hundred feet, but one can climb them like a real range, get lost among the artificial clouds, and rest beside their sparkling waterfalls. This was one instance where the owners of the property did not complain. Instead, they changed their name to the Mountainview Hotel, and raised their rates. But Darian did not stop to admire his handiwork.

  Darian had left these normal shapes behind.

  On a particularly windy day, during a severe winter storm, fortunately our weather records are quite precise, the huge inverted V, linking the Centahedron with the Tree of Life, collapsed. Fortunately it tumbled in the middle of the night, and nobody was injured, but the damage to the street and some parked autos was considerable indeed. In fact, the road was closed for several months, and a number of concerned citizens, organized the KEEP-OUR- STREETS-SECURE-FROM-FALLING-THINGS BRIGADE (or KOSSFFT for short) and filed a formal complaint with the city's Public Works Commission. There were no immediate results, but this was a warning sign, which Darian only slightly noticed since he immediately attempted to put his structure aright, this time with support from a number of power cables. No matter where he built, there was always some connection with the others, and even though some of these connections have been lost, the idea of them is central to an understanding of the work.

  Some contemporary critics tried to analyze his work, but they used dated concepts, and ultimately failed in the attempt. Julian Morana thought that Darian's grand work was all the infantile death wish of some primordial omnipotence, revealed most clearly in the diapers of a child. This is palpably absurd. Rene Pocussard determined from his careful observation that Darian was extrapolating fundamental principles of the post-hysterical world, that is, relief from global horror not unleashed as yet, and that the element of playful innocence was a symbol of the spiritual rebirth among the people in the aftermath of the World War, but we know Darian had no interest in that war, or any war, and was in fact oblivious to the ever-shifting manufactured public moods. David Betanchord considered that the Cone, with all its mutant pop-up beings, the Elevator Carousel with its living elements, the Centahedron and the Flaming Paperweight, the Alley Mold, the Multiple-Helix Tower, the BeSpiderWebbed Factory, the endless spiral bridge, the mountains, and the Artificial Cloud, and the Crawling Slime were all products of a 'magical mind' of obviously desperate escapoidism, idealism, anti-realism and reactionary sludge. But all the critics misled the point. Darian wasn't dealing in ideas - neither conscious nor unconscious ones.

  He was not an intellectual, nor did he even have a point of view. He was interested in living shapes, moving, breathing, undulating shapes. You can draw your own conclusions, but the Fixture was alive, its motions were perpetual despite its forms! Despite its superficial features! One thing was common to them all organic life!! Be it primitive or advanced, Darian saw life in every shape, and respected that above all else. In the case of humans, we might say that he respected their primal living essence in spite of everything else they were. He had no use for concepts. He had no use for anything. He was a lover of life, of life itself.

  Now I've got that off my chest, it's time to prove my above interpretation false; for what has been referred to as his negative work, the Pit was not alive. It did not move or breathe. It was not a shape. The Pit would become his most despised work and would break the spell his works had previously held upon the public.

  There was an area, called The Plains, located past the end of Hanson Street, between Janus Boulevard and Grove Street. For many years it served as everybody's training grounds. Baseball, football, soccer, every sort of amateur and neighborhood team practiced and played their matches in the Plains. It was a vast dirt area comprising more than seven city blocks in size. In every season, at whatever time of day, kids and grownups would be there, having fun, playing games, or just simply hanging out.

  But all that changed one day when Darian arrived with two bulldozers and several of his workers. Quite unannounced, they started digging up the grounds. Day after day, people gathered in horror and surprise to watch him devastate their field. Soon there was a yawning pit in the very center of the Plains. He wouldn't answer questions. His workers didn't know what he was planning either. Even when the Mayor appeared and asked him, Darian wouldn't say. The KOSSFFT became incensed and along with various other interest groups put pressure on the mayor to do something and do it immediately.

  And so the city filed suit, (not usually the quickest of responses) on behalf of everyone who lived in our fair city, against the perpetrator, Darian Fark. This was a major turning point in both Fark’s life and his work. The media now turned against him and the critics would soon have their way with Fark and his objects. Judge Harvest issued a ruling blocking any future work, not merely on the Plains, but everywhere.

  Darian was not permitted to work on any public or even private property. Citing all sorts of previous suits, disruptions he had caused, complaints, and public menaces like the V, the judge declared “the time has come”, “enough is enough” and “the pillage of this city has to end right now!”

  Darian was threatened with fines and even prison if he violated the court's decision. His work was thus effectively halted for a time. He would return, but by then the situation, local, national, and even international, was to be quite different, and the favorable conditions he'd enjoyed for six short years were gone, destined not to reappear. Thus one phase had ended, and the final, and ultimately decisive phase, had only just begun.

  The Seventh Renaissance was dead, officially declaring bankruptcy soon after Darian’s court ruling. Some of the movements it began still lingered on for about a decade and half, as these things tend to do. The artists who rose to prominence at that time remained, in dominance right through their middle age, and as for the post-Depression youth, well, they were a different breed entirely, disdainful of mass media, avoiding the limelight and the larger-scale, and in general returning to the local small-group anarchistic forms of art that suited their mostly isolated status.

  But this is not a book about the Manakin Culture, and it would be best to leave our biases aside, and continue to discuss the final remnants of the Fossil Culture, which precede our own.

  All major public works constructions stopped. All urban reclamations programs stopped. The Artists Supportive Program disappeared, and even work on the city itself came abruptly to a halt. This was no time for wasting any funds, for there were no funds remaining to be wasted.

  Popular opinion was recast overnight, and Darian Fark was no longer the city's local hero, but a kind of man-made pest, an artist-Frankenstein, who had to be restrained by every means available, and especially by the law. Editorials demanded the removal of many of his sculptures. But the government could not afford to do it. And the citizens were more concerned with their daily bread at the time. Instead, the press was satisfied that Darian would be prevented from committing any further acts of public display. But they underestimated him, in several different ways. In the first place, they hadn't counted on his legal expertise. Nor did they realize just how much money and materials he still had in his warehouse. And finally, they didn't reckon on the fact that in a time of general unemployment, Darian had a labor force that he could pick and choose from. Needless to say, of course, they also didn't know just how incredibly determined Darian was. They thought one victory in the courts would
be enough, but they were very wrong.

  Darian bought an abandoned Burger Joint at Winding Road and Fortune, and, blatantly flouting the court order, proceeded to demolish it. In September he began to build his most imposing structure yet. It was a replica of several bombed-out buildings, abstracted from a photograph of Dresden. He didn't build the edifices first and then demolish them. No, he built them as they were - already destroyed. In my own special field, this uncompleted work remains the most important architectural feat of that entire decade. He had a host of laborers, and the site was always swarming with activity, as hundreds of others waited at the gates, hoping to be hired. The Mayor brought the Zoning Commission to bear against him, but he ignored their orders. And then the city put pressure on the unions of the building trade until Darian’s workers were forced to strike.

  Darian immediately hired scabs, and went on with the work. There were fights and riots almost daily, as strikers hurled rocks and even dynamite at Darian and his crew. The police stood by and watched, as the intentionally demolished structure quickly became more demolished every day. If Darian ever had a sense of irony, it must have certainly struck him then. No one today can doubt that our city saw a war, and that mass of shell-like edifice was its end result. After about a month, the police began arresting Darian's non-union workers, and that was most effective in discouraging others to replace them. Soon after that, Darian himself was put in jail, on charges of obstructing justice and creating a public nuisance. No one could deny the justice of the latter charge, although some of us might say that art-as-public-nuisance was exactly what the situation called for.

  Darian spent two days in jail before authorities let his lawyer bail him out. He was ordered not to go on with the work, and this time he obeyed. Instead, Darian withdrew to his warehouse, now entirely alone, and began construction of his greatest projects. These would occupy the next twelve years of Darian's life, and would ultimately prove worthwhile. If he'd left them in his studios, to be discovered later on, perhaps the ending of his story would be very different. But Darian wanted them to be displayed, and within his lifetime, because of his conviction that his art was not finished product merely, but an essential part of his life and times, and of all of those around him.

  The Fixture was alive and like all living things, it had to struggle to exist.

  I will focus on the first four works of this phase for the moment. Then I will return to discuss the other contemporary events that accompanied their placements in the city. Of these, the aqueduct was the first that he constructed, and potentially the most important of them all. It was a rambling thing, made of rubber, plastics, woods and various soft stones, which eventually linked almost all the pieces of the Fixture in a network of sky sculpture, the likes of which does not exist on any planet anywhere. In his own time, the aqueduct was useless, but now we use it since the water from the river is most hopelessly polluted.

  Perhaps Darian foresaw this eventuality, for the aqueduct was so constructed as to form an integral portion of each piece which it connected. It could not be used at all, if it were severed from the various works. It's much too complicated for me to attempt a thorough description, and several plumbing experts still insist the damned thing cannot work at all, and yet it does, for which we are most grateful.

  The Colossus of Seventh Avenue is a giant lump on three legs straddling the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Morrisey, every side is polished, shaped and zinced to reflect sunlight completely, an infinitely complex eternal show of lights shine around the thousand sides of this odd thing, while on the legs, the trademarked Darian slimes ooze up and down, circling between the 'toes' and rising to the 'waist' of the giant.

  The Forest covers a large part of Blue Highway next to Bank Street. Made exclusively of wood, these bent, denuded, artificial trees rise sixty feet into the air, and take up an acre and a half, where a parking lot for the Fairgrounds used to be. Darian planted them with lead-filled ceradium shafts into an undersurface grid of intersecting iron bars. It turns out that this closely meshed grid serves as unintentional protection against the rising toxin-filled marsh waters underneath, which are forced back downward to the river. On the surface, though, the Forest is impenetrable. Not even the smallest children can squeeze through the narrow gaps between the trees. Instead, a variety of mechanical proto-beings roam around inside, occasionally peeking out, or swinging from the trees, but usually invisible to humans. The upper branches are in fact sophisticated windmills, which power everything inside. They were recently used as a model for a major urban power plant, patent proceeds going to the Fark Memorial Museum, located in what was Darian's warehouse.

  And then there is the Desert. This is an empty lot, filled with sand and precious little else. This has become a no man’s land because, for reasons forever unknown, the temperature of the surface is so hot that humans cannot stand it. Curiously, none of this heat  escapes from the perimeter of the Desert, and none rises more than seventy feet high, and no one can explain this either. Indeed, we all know it's impossible.

  We can see by now that Darian was imagineering a thoroughly other worldly landscape, within the confines of a modern, temporal city. This was not, as many critics suggest, just another futuristic pipe dream, nor even a kind of alternate reality. It was neither science fiction nor utopian fantasy.

  We must not forget that this was Darian's vision of the existing world, as he saw it. This calls for some interpretation. And fortunately, at this point, we can do more than merely guess. For Darian left some notes behind about this very subject. Let me quote from them at length,

  "They don't know where things come from, but they accept them all. They think they are entitled. They don't know how things work, but they use them just the same, and think that they enjoy them. They take whatever comes to them, and accept any explanation as the truth."

  "Here is a living gadget, with no visible means of support or energy source. Yet, who can deny, it lives?" Many commentators have seized on this as proof of Darian's fundamentally religious inspiration. Yet he's clearly talking of a gadget, that is, a manmade thing, not man as made by God.

  "Somewhere, a common link. But no, the link is everywhere, is everything."

  “It's impossible to just sit down and do something all at once and get it over with. It would be easier that way, but there's always something else to do, someone else intruding, you never know what's next. Sometimes it seems unthinkable that anything ever gets done at all.”

  “It'll be done in no time. Now, you and I know it isn't true, but you can tell them anything. They believe what they want to believe. Doesn't everyone? It might be right in front of your nose but you won't see it till you believe in it.”

  These quotes might help explain the final portions of the Fixture, final in the sense that they were Darian’s last works. This period of work takes us through the Greater Depression and beyond. They took so long to construct because Darian was working practically alone, building everything, operating all the trucks, machines and cranes. He could only do them one step at a time, and during all his efforts he was actively harassed and even hindered.

  Darian was variously hit by hurled objects, battered and bruised, assaulted in the night; once his leg was broken and his head was smashed with glass. Through it all he labored, more determined, perhaps, than ever before. The media editorialized against him, while barely stopping short of condoning these attacks. The police would not protect him. He was warned  “Don't go outside, and if you do, don't bring your garbage with you. No one really understood this hate campaign, but even children screamed obscenities at him as he passed by, while their parents chuckled and encouraged them.

  He was left without a friend, if he ever had one. His lawyer ran away, with an undisclosed amount of cash. His previous admirers turned into active detractors. He was no longer honored, or even welcomed, in the homes of various important persons. Darian didn't seem to mind. He did not complain. He didn't talk to anyone. He persevered, as only D
arian knew how, and built the forest, tree by tree, and built the desert, truckload at a time. He built the aqueduct at night, and the Colossus was installed in several pieces during the course of one Memorial Day weekend. People jeered him as he worked, and threw anything they could find. His sites were always picketed by unions, who claimed that he was violating the law by doing everything himself. Darian worked steadily, and was deaf to all harassment.

  During this period, sabotage was probably Darian's greatest problem. No portion of the Fixture remained unscathed. Some of the vandals were children having fun, while some were merely restless youth, roaming through the city on the summer holidays. But the vast majority of them were fully responsible adults who took no real pleasure in their actions, except a sort of moral righteousness, and the stupid pride of doing a necessary job. We know that nobody was ever arrested or prosecuted for tampering with the works. It was a conspiracy from the highest level, a thing impossible to understand without a study of mass politics and propaganda techniques.

  As the renaissance itself was sponsored by the men and women in power, so too the anti-renaissance followed their directions. Darian became a target for every sort of group that desired an enemy. From the left, the middle and the right, the highbrow and the low, the pro and anti this and that and every sort of faction, Darian was subject to attack and personal vilification. It is clear that little of this had anything to do with Darian himself, and everything to do with everybody else.

  Everyone who ever sued him sued again. It was officially open season on the artist. Everyone whose property he'd built on or near to sued, everyone who'd ever worked for him, or had relatives who had, everybody who had ever had any dealings of any kind with him, or knew someone who did, sued Darian Fark, and won. Among these suitors was the Fourth Fidelity, and eventually, the courts ruled that Darian's initial contract was illegal, specifically the clause that pegged his income to the historical inflation rate, and therefore Darian owed the Fidelity ninety seven billion dollars. Darian lost one court case after another, until he owed a trillion dollars to a thousand different plaintiffs. This seems ludicrous from afar but we can never fully understand the times that past citizens live in, how they were affected by the environment they existed in. The courts impounded his warehouse, and Secured it with armed guards. It looked like everything was over, but Darian wasn't finished yet.

  Darian had to move into the Mountainview Hotel. All of the decade’s event had finally caught up to him. Darian’s neighbors at the hotel are our only connection to the artist during this period. Our only reflection, however distorted, of Darian’s thoughts, his state of mind. Many of his neighbors report that Darian seemed “sad”, “preoccupied” and “burdened”.

  My own guess is that he thought most frequently about the way to get things going again, running through the possibilities in his mind, and considering courses of action. He was treated deferentially by his neighbors in the building, who spared him all the pains of having to go outside and face the hostile world. For one particularly sentimental account of these years, see "My Idol, My Guest", by Marion Berkenstein, of room seven twenty one. There is no surviving correspondence, since Darian didn't write letters, and no records of the occasional visits he must have had from international admirers. In fact, aside from the memoirs of these fellow residents, we have no evidence at all that Darian Fark was even alive during this time. If he did work at all, nothing of his efforts have survived. I find it difficult to imagine an idle Fark, but all reports suggest that Darian did nothing during those years.

  Of all the phases in his life, this one is the most impossible for me to understand. I cannot reconcile the Darian Fark I’ve come to know with this vision of a beaten man, alone in exile in a hotel room, staring at the walls, or watching television, or nurturing a pet canary like Mrs. Berkenstein reveals he did. I can only think that outwardly he seemed like that, while deep within the wheels were slowly turning, preparing Darian for yet another round of active life.

  As a biographer, I guess I'm not much help. Since I can't know who he was in that critical period, I'm afraid I really can't explain the rest too well, for there really isn't very much left to tell. Darian made a comeback eventually after a few years in the hotel. What made this possible was a legal trick, allowing him to visit his warehouse once again, during which visit he arranged to steal whatever was left of his materials and tools. It is a sordid story of bribery and corruption, and does not make anyone look good. Nevertheless, he made off with the goods, and for the next few years he did whatever he could, despite persistent illnesses, periodic court injunctions, more legal suits, more sabotage, more personal attacks.

  Darian's glory years were long since over, and even seemed remote by then they were almost entirely forgotten, as was the Seventh Renaissance.

  It was almost as if he was operating by instinct at this point. He had most definitely aged. More than forty now, he looked more like seventy. He still had his strength, born from his inhumanly resolve, but his face was stern and shrinking, his eyes were dull and fading. His hair was mostly gray by then, and his voice was never heard above a whisper. I can describe these things, but who can say what such a life was like?

  Who can feel the things he felt?

  Who can get inside another human being and really tell that story?

  In his last days, Darian occupied himself by filling in the spaces. The Fixture covers sixty-four square blocks, and even where there is no major piece, there are still connections, links, and smaller pieces, which I have not described. The pieces of this final period were the final links, and as such they weren't nearly as impressive as the other, earlier, more inspired portions.

  The so-called 'Leaping Leopards' are brightly spotted mounds, bounding on invisible springs, perpetually in motion over on Bleeker Street, near May 6th Avenue.

  The Mirror Lake on Elbert is a product of his landscape, a pool of artificial water rippling in a variable mechanical breeze. 'Flagpole Junction' is a criss-cross of remnant twisted metal poles, stacked on angles in a teepee pile. The 'Infinite Raindrop' falls perpetually from atop a brick and mortar column, always slipping, falling over the edge, but never managing to fall completely off.

  'Twister' is a miniature dust tornado, created by the vacuum cause by three small walls at narrow, intrusive angles. 'Rising', a ball of liquid wax seems to climb a leaning tower of concrete blocks, but inch by inch, it always seems to rise, and yet it never makes it to the top. No one has ever seen it moving down. 'Dead Pendulum’ is a minor work, one of Darian's last, which completely contradicts the law of gravity, and disproves centuries' worth of science. A block of ice exists on March and Bank, and never melts. Above, below, and in between them all, a final, complex, intricate webbing network forms a sky wide shield of thoroughly transparent stuff. The Fixture was finally completed, at least as finished as it could be, and Darian stopped at last, after sealing the final web strand to the exit sign on the highway leading out of town.

  The last connections, the strands connecting each piece of the Fixture to every other piece were strengthened. Their bonds meant to last for ages.

   

  FIXTURE

   

  EPILOGUE

  Darian seems to have internalized one main belief and then somewhere along his life rejected it. Darian quite often remarked, “If God wants something done, why doesn't he do it himself, and leave our things alone.”

  Mrs. Fark may have had the most profound impact on the lad, whose earliest experiments must have been attempts to figure out just what the hell his mom was trying to do with those paper bags. Mrs. Simon believes that Darian failed to ever answer this his earliest and most important question. His own life was thoroughly confused with this pursuit, and his obsessive artwork was more an exploration of his mother's hidden self than a conscious expression of his own.

  Darin's need to create was explosive, uncontainable, and contagious. He could not have resisted this internal demand, even had he tried. He wa
s forced not only to create, but to create only what he had to, and to display his works to the largest possible audience.

  The effects of Darian's works were magical and subtle, and usually misunderstood, and were also strangely irresistible. His was a public art, but he was essentially a private man, and the conflict stemming from these facts were to complicate his life, and cause his greatest failures.

  The Fixture covers the city. It spreads out upon the waters and the highway and the streets, on every corner and on every road in the downtown area of our city. What began with one mere Tree has spread to cover everything. Darian's achievement is unparalleled in history, and yet, when he completed it, he was a villain, a pariah, scorned, despised and ridiculed, a symbol of contempt. And that is all there is to say about the life of Darian Sebastian Fark. He spent his last days in his room, with a very large collection of plain brown paper bags, folding them into shapes of nonexistent-animal masks. Mrs. Berkenstein had to feed him after he had a stroke, and soon after that, Darian passed away. He left behind him, in his room, more than a thousand sculpted paper bags, and on his bathroom walls, a tiny finger-painted fresco, of swirling colors, complicated forms and layered textures, a masterpiece of mindless art that only Darian's mother could have ever hoped to understand. Mrs. Berkenstein recalls his final words were "Let them try, I'd like to see them try". He smiled, he closed his eyes, he died.

  Darian was one of those rare human beings who know exactly who they are, and can never, under any circumstances, allow themselves to be somebody else.

  Interpreter’s Remarks

   

  I'd like to talk about the work. In terms of modern architectural mythology, nothing comes close to the ultimate transcendence expressed in the Fixture as a whole. Darian's genius was not just ahead of his time, but possibly ahead of all time, as far as humans are concerned. Buildings never meant for occupants, natures inhospitable to life, and yet supporting it, the ultimate control, yet ultimately uncontrollable.

  Darian presents us with the world we have made. I do not intend to now interpret every work, nor even offer you a final version of my theory of his vision. You should be left with things to think about, and I only want to give a final prompt. One man, materializing his own visions, managed to impose a set of wholly alien concepts upon an alternately welcoming and hostile world. Despite his temporal affairs, Darian Fark succeeded in doing something everyone can ultimately succeed in. He lived his life the only way he could, he did only what he could, and everything he could. Generations come and go. The Seventh Renaissance is now long since past, and we, the people of today, are subject to the standards and the pressures of our present world. Among these standards is the celebration of the possible, which recognizes nothing alien or outcast, which embraces every style, and admires everything of courage and endurance, I believe that Darian Fark, in ways perhaps he couldn’t even understand, helped us realize this.

   

  THE END