Still Lives(10)
I watch Janis Rocque lean across the table and start interrogating him, which is the conversational equivalent of being whipped around in the locked jaw of a pit bull. I have witnessed Bas being berated by her through the glass door of his office, and Greg now has the same eye bulge, as if he is forgetting, second by second, how to breathe. Dark-haired J. Ro—with her masculine suits, enormous cash flow, and abrupt, decisive manner—is CEO, patron saint, and mercurial monarch of the L.A. art world. She is greatly beloved by many and feared by more. Although the Rocque is just one of her projects, it’s been the core of her vision since the 1980s—that L.A. will not play second fiddle to New York, with its entrenched and historic art scene, but will seize the future by taking risks, supporting art that surprises people and forces them to self-examine. Those of us who love the Rocque believe that if we fail, it’s not just the museum that will go under but also the potential of our city and what it could become.
Regardless of the Rocque’s fate, J. Ro’s public censure could be a big blow to Greg’s gallery. Before I feel sorry for him, however, I remind myself that he chose this fate, this attempt at life among the ultrarich. You can’t succeed in art dealing without such effort.
After a few minutes, Greg stares down at the table, silent and rigid. J. Ro yanks out her phone and wanders away to make a call.
“You guys hungry?”
I look up to see Kevin standing over us, holding three dinner plates. Why am I blushing? I duck my chin and stare at the ink stain on one of my fingers.
“Half the paparazzi are heading out,” he says. “Apparently there’s a premiere in Hollywood.”
“Thank God,” Yegina says. “Sit down.”
I don’t think I am hungry, but when Kevin slides the plate in front of me, I eat the salmon and asparagus gratefully, ignoring Yegina’s raised eyebrow.
“Hey, so have you met the artist?” I hear him ask. “What’s she really like?”
5
The first time I saw Kim Lord, she was a picture in a New York magazine. My mother had sent me the magazine in a care package to Thailand, and, even more than the little jar of crunchy peanut butter and packets of Oreos, the glossy pages made me miss America. I missed our messy, mixed-up country, and I missed our media, the blustery way we talked about one another, our constant cultural introspection. I must have read the issue twenty times: the brief newsy dispatches about Dolly the Sheep and The English Patient’s odds for Best Picture, the music and book reviews, and four long articles, full of a bustling culture far away from my decrepit teak house in the Thai countryside. One of the long pieces was a profile of Kim Lord. It featured a photo of one of her paintings—which was actually the painting of a photo she had destroyed. The writer made much of this esoteric process from photograph to self-portrait, which I found mostly befuddling at the time. Instead, I was moved by the figure: a young man smirking in a cutoff T-shirt, tattoos, his neck hung with chains, a cold, evaluating look in his eye. “Pimp #1,” he was called. He was also Kim Lord.
The article said that Kim Lord was born to a wealthy Toronto family, a child of private schooling, piano lessons, and high teas. She spoke perfect French. She won a poetry recitation contest for performing Portia’s mercy speech from memory. Then she broke away from bourgeois life in her teens and went hitchhiking and train-hopping around the United States, and was accepted to art school at the Cooper Union. She spent a year among New York prostitutes and pimps, and then moved into a studio for two weeks and wore disguises and took photos of herself until she got the exact poses she wanted.
With her own self-portraits as subjects, she started the paintings, sometimes capturing herself with exacting realism, sometimes with expressionistic techniques that washed her blurry and indistinct. The day all the paintings were done, she destroyed the studio photos, erasing the only record of herself as a living subject. In the early years, she burned her films and negatives, but once photography went digital, she put all the images on a flash drive and smashed it with a hammer. She emphasized the importance of this last ritual, likening it to a kind of honor sacrifice.
“I don’t want that record to exist,” she said in the article. “It links the work to me, and I am not painting myself.”
This statement lodged in my mind when I first read it, riding an air-conditioned bus through durian plantations to visit Greg. I am not painting myself. It was a curious thing to say when your entire oeuvre was some variation on the self-portrait. I talked about it with Greg on our lazy vacation in Ko Samui. We were side by side on beach towels, me on my belly, Greg sitting up, reading the magazine. Beyond us, turquoise water lapped white sand and boats droned, carrying tourists to snorkel over dying coral reefs. The heat was making my bones melt. I loved it, yet I still missed America. Greg flipped a page.
“Doesn’t it make you homesick?” I mumbled into my bare arm.
“Some of it,” he said. “Kim Lord’s painting is the best thing in here.”
His admiration rankled me. I propped myself up on my elbows. “She claims she’s not painting herself. But isn’t she?”
“No. She’s painting a subject.”
“A gorgeous subject.” I gestured at Kim’s narrow, girlish body, visible somehow through the male clothes, the posture. “Would her art be so famous if she was ugly? Or poor?”