GINGER. Let your soul sway gently in the void.

When I finally debuted the piano project at the end of the term, I delivered a manifesto I had prepared to accompany it. I wrote it very quickly, in two or three nights, deep into the dark morning. I still have it on my computer, tucked with embarrassment into some dusty folder, like a letter from an ex. The thing is called “Apocalypse Manifesto: Towards a Radioactive Art.” It’s intentionally messy: a thicket of mismatched fonts, upside-down text, collaged black-and-white images. Grand statements about artistic practice are punctuated by weird sexual outbursts. (“Oh god dick give it to me baby,” I write, a baffling reference to Fluxus artist Dick Higgins.) Andy Warhol makes two appearances, or at least his work does: first, a Marilyn Monroe silk-screen, turned on its side and covered in text, with the words mass culture above it (I know); then, the album art for The Velvet Underground & Nico, duplicated severally, each banana sloppily pasted over the next—another clever dick joke, I must have thought. I was obsessed with Allan Kaprow’s 1986 essay “Art Which Can’t Be Art.” I reproduced a big chunk of it in my manifesto:

I decided to pay attention to brushing my teeth, to watch my elbow moving. I would be alone in my bathroom, without art spectators. There would be no gallery, no critic to judge, no publicity. This was the crucial shift that removed the performance of everyday life from all but the memory of art. I could, of course, have said to myself, “Now I’m making art!!” But in actual practice, I didn’t think much about it.

Sentiments like these soothed me. I was stridently anti-institution in those days. “There are no museums which are not history museums,” I crack in a footnote. In the final pages, I point out that every manifesto is an apocalypse, in the original sense of both words: revelation. True art, I thought, would become coterminous with life itself. True art would be nothing at all.

As I was writing this book, I was invited to give a talk at a film festival in the Midwest. Not a “talk,” exactly—the programmer who spoke to me referred to it as a Provocation, a brief, challenging performance intended to force the audience into wrestling with a difficult or strange idea. Casting about for an idea, I began to imagine something akin to Cut Piece, which artist Yoko Ono famously performed at Carnegie Hall in 1965, not far from the hotel in Chelsea where Valerie was then putting the finishing touches on Up Your Ass. You can find videos of Cut Piece on YouTube. During the performance, Ono sits onstage with her legs tucked under her, wearing a long-sleeved black blouse and a black skirt. Her hair is in a short, clean bun; her face is impassive. On the floor next to her, there are some long silver scissors. You can hear audience members moving around, chatting, giggling. One by one, participants male and female approach her and cut into her clothing with the long silver scissors that sit beside her. Some are modest, others forceful, still others amused. About seven minutes in, her blouse is gone, and a young man in a puffy white shift gleefully appoints himself the one who will cut off her camisole, and then her bra. When he cuts her bra straps, she holds the cups in place with crossed hands. Ono breaks character briefly here to roll her eyes at him. The audience laughs, because it’s funny, and it’s also horrifying. The term “death drive” is too strong to describe what’s going on in Cut Piece; it’s more of a death drift, limp and aimless. Yoko isn’t doing anything, after all; that’s the whole point. She’s being done to. She hasn’t given her consent so much as given up consenting.

I performed six times at the film festival, each time before a documentary about an evasive stage magician. I began by announcing that I had in my hand a small remote control, and I needed a volunteer to hold on to it for me. The remote had a button with an arrow on it, and I invited the volunteer to press that button as many times as she liked for the remainder of the performance. (Five times out of six, the volunteer was a woman.) I explained that I was a writer who tended to write about gender and sexuality, and that I also had recently purchased a new vagina—by which I meant, I had paid a plastic surgeon to rearrange my old bits into some new bits. “So I got to thinking,” I would say, letting my gaze wander toward the ceiling. “What if I came out onstage with a vibrator inserted into my vagina, and what if I solicited a volunteer and gave them a remote control, and what if that remote control had a button on it which, when pressed, turned the vibrator on, and what if I gave my consent, in front of everyone, for the volunteer to press that button as many times as they liked for the duration of the performance, and just let everyone watch?”

By this point, the audience was laughing—as much, I hoped, from suspicion and scandal as humor. I told them about Cut Piece and why I admired it. I told them, as a friend of a friend had suggested to me, that we might call my hypothetical performance Cunt Piece. I suggested to the audience that this would be a private show, between me and one other person. “The rest of you wouldn’t actually be watching the performance, you’d be watching yourself fail to watch it,” I told them. “Maybe you’d be listening to see if you could hear the vibrator, maybe you’d be watching my face to see if I betrayed any signs that the vibrator was on, but at the end of the day you probably wouldn’t be able to see the volunteer, to see if she was actually pressing the button, and even if you could see, you wouldn’t be able to tell if the remote was working, and even if it was working, you simply couldn’t be sure whether I actually did have a vibrator inside me, or whether I even had a vagina at all, or whether I had just made the whole thing up just to fuck with you.”

And that was it. For the most part, I was telling the truth. I had, in fact, recently undergone vaginoplasty. I did, in fact, have a vibrator on my person, but it was a small clitoral vibrator, not an insertable one, and it didn’t have the size or power to genuinely arouse me. I would have liked it to, actually: it would have created more risk on my part, instead of the mere illusion of risk. But I could, in fact, feel it every time the volunteer pressed the button on the remote, which most of them did—even after learning that by doing so they might have been having sex with me at a distance. A few even seemed to become emboldened by this possibility, pressing the button over and over with gusto.

At no point did I mention Valerie. The performance was too brief to describe my attraction to her, my obsession with her work. It was exactly the kind of sexual stunt that Valerie both loved and loved to hate: unreadable, vaguely hostile, but also weirdly passive, right at the nexus of SCUM and Daddy’s Girl, where most women, including Valerie, lived. Perhaps I also felt possessive. It was a private show after all, but its audience of one had died thirty years before, probably from emphysema, kneeling on the floor of her room at the Bristol Hotel in San Francisco. Praying, I suppose, to no one.