music performance. Now she can show a young generation that even a gifted musician can shock, and thus build a market for herself.”
“That’s so
“Where art and commerce intersect,” Jake said. “You make art, you sell it-to make a living, to get some validation-you make compromises with your art to make a living-why not go the whole way? Which isn’t to say she doesn’t believe as deeply in heavy metal as she does in early music.”
We had planned to leave before the Body Artist came onstage, but the lively arguments in our party- accompanied by the amount of beer and wine everyone was putting away-went on until the houselights were dimmed again for the evening’s main event.
Young men at tables around us gave catcalls and stomped their feet in anticipation. During the intermission, I’d been watching a table in the middle of the room. The five young men sitting there were all drinking heavily, but two in particular had been banging their beer bottles on the tabletop, demanding that the Body Artist get going. When the lights went down, theirs were the shrillest whistles in a noisy room.
We sat in the dark for perhaps thirty seconds. When the lights came back up, the Body Artist had appeared onstage.
She sat on a high stool, very still. She was naked except for an electron-sized thong, but cream-colored foundation covered her body, including her face. Only her brown hair, swept up from her neck in a jeweled clip, belonged to the world of the living.
The Artist was completely at ease, her bare legs crossed yoga style, her palms pressed together in front of her breasts. It was the audience that was disturbed: little rustlings, as people crossed and uncrossed legs or fiddled with zippers. Explosions of whispered laughter.
Behind the woman, photographs of body art appeared on a series of screens: a field of lilies grew out of a vagina, with the flowers blooming across the breasts. A face painted like a tiger, magnified so that each whisker, each stripe around the muzzle, was visible. The tiger was replaced by a jungle scene that covered the back: elephants trumpeted on the shoulder blades, a giraffe straddled the spinal column. The jungle was followed by a giant blue eye, lid lowered, on an abdomen, seeming to wink at the vulva below.
The slides changed in time to a sound track of Middle Eastern music. At the front of the stage, two figures clad in burkas gyrated in time to the music. I hadn’t noticed them at first, but the burkas somehow exaggerated the eroticism of the dancers’ movements and made them almost as disturbing as the body art itself.
I was as uncomfortable as the rest of the audience. The spotlight on the Artist’s breasts, the sense that this was a mannequin sitting there, not a woman, was both arousing and unpleasant, and I resented my body for responding to what my mind rejected. Jake Thibaut shifted away from me involuntarily, while Mr. Contreras said in a loud whisper, “This ain’t right. It just ain’t right!”
The Artist let the tension build until we were all ready to claw at each other, and then she lowered her hands, palms open toward us, in seeming invitation. “Art is in the hands of the maker, it’s in the eyes of the beholder, it’s in the air we breathe, the sunsets we admire, the dead bodies we wash and wrap in linens for burial. My body is my canvas, but tonight it’s yours as well. Tonight is a night to let your imagination run free and to paint, the way you used to paint in kindergarten before you started worrying what someone might say about your work, your art. I’m your canvas, your-bare-canvas.”
The five guys who’d been pounding their table, demanding the start of the Artist’s act, now whistled and called out. One of them shouted, “Take it all off, girl, take off that thong thing. Let’s see some pussy!”
I half turned to look at them. One of them was trying to signal for another round. All five were big guys, and the one shouting for the Body Artist to take off her thong had the kind of muscles you get from lifting heavy stuff all day long. The room was lit dimly, but I could make out a thicket of tattoos along his arms.
The woman on the stool smiled. Maybe she was used to drunken vulgarity. Maybe she enjoyed it.
“Can’t we get a drink here?” the tattooed man cried, slapping the table.
“Cool it, Chad,” one of his tablemates said.
I looked around for the bouncer and saw him at the back of the room, talking to the owner. They had their eye on the table and seemed to think the quintet didn’t need professional attention just yet, but as I watched, I saw the owner shake her head at the waitstaff: No drinks right now, at least not in Chad’s part of the room.
The Body Artist held out her arms to the tattooed man so that her breasts drooped forward, hanging like fruit above her thighs. “You and I both like body art, don’t we? Come on up, I won’t bite. Draw your heart’s desire on my body.”
“Go on, Chad,” his buddies urged him, “go for it, do it. Like the lady says, she don’t bite. Or at least not in front of all these other people she won’t.”
The group began to laugh and pound each other, and the tension eased out of the room.
The Body Artist picked up a brush from a tray of open paint cans on a cart beside her and began painting on her leg. For a moment, we forgot the strangeness of her nudity and watched as she picked up different brushes. She worked quickly, talking the whole time, about the body art convention she’d just attended, about gallery shows around town, about her childhood cat, Basta.
As she painted, the two burka-clad figures posed on the stage, periodically shifting legs or arms into new positions that mimed pleasure or excitement in the Artist’s work.
After five minutes, the Body Artist stood, showing off her painting. Only people in the front of the club could see it, but they all clapped and cheered. The rest of us craned, and Chad and his friends got restive again. Before their complaints grew too loud, one of the burkaed figures picked up a camera from the cart that held the Artist’s paints and other supplies. The Artist beckoned a man from the table directly in front of the stage. He had the embarrassed exchange with her that people often do when they’re called up from the audience by the magician. After a moment, though, he joined her on the raised platform that served as Club Gouge’s stage.
One of the dancers handed the camera to the man, and the Artist directed him to point it at her leg. The image appeared on one of the screens: a cat, elongated, disdainful, in the Egyptian style. Underneath it, the Artist had written “Let’s see some pussy.”
The room roared with laughter. Everyone had been upset by the catcalls from Chad and his drunk friends and was delighted to see them put down. Chad’s face seemed to darken in the dim room, but his buddies kept their hands on his arms, and he didn’t try to get up from the table.
The Body Artist kidded and prodded the man who’d joined her onstage into taking up a paintbrush. He drew a red stripe down her left arm.
“Now your work will be internationally famous,” the Artist said. She handed the camera back to her dancers. One of them focused on her striped arm, which appeared on the middle of the three screens. “These go up in my picture gallery,” she said. “You can sign it, if you want, or just tell your friends what to look for.”
The man, who was as red as the stripe he’d painted, said he didn’t need all that recognition. “You’re the artist,” he said, “you get the credit.” He bowed to her awkwardly and left the platform, to another burst of applause.
After that, several other people felt bold enough to draw on the Artist. No one was able to match any of the elaborate paintings that kept flashing on the screens, but after a bit they’d covered her breasts with blue and green streaks, and someone had drawn a yellow smiley face on one of the Artist’s shoulder blades.
Mr. Contreras grew more disturbed as the painting progressed. He wanted to have it out with Petra, but Jake persuaded him that a noisy club wasn’t the place for an argument. Max, sizing up my neighbor’s agitation, said he had a meeting in the morning, and Lotty had an early surgery call: they were leaving; they would take Mr. Contreras with them.
The old man grudgingly agreed, much to my relief. The thought of riding home with him while he vented his frustration on me was a treat I hadn’t been looking forward to. I gave Lotty a grateful kiss, and returned to the table with Jake. Mr. Contreras tried to force Petra to leave with them, but she gave him her biggest, brightest smile and said she’d stay until the end of the act.
The Body Artist kept up a sort of patter while people painted on her. Occasionally, someone would say something that seemed to genuinely interest her, but most of her responses sounded aloof, almost amused at our expense, even while her words celebrated “the community of artists” in which we found ourselves.
One heavyset man walked up to the platform with a kind of rolling gait that made me think of a beat cop. In fact, as he bent to inspect the cans of paint I was pretty sure I could see the outline of his holster. I wondered for a moment if he was going to try to arrest the Artist for indecent exposure, but he dipped a brush into the can of red
