The first time Paul came to the gallery, he brought a sample of his work. They always do. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have looked at anything in front of him, since it’s a position you don’t want to be in. React to an artist’s work too little, or a shade negatively, and you risk crushing a soul; react too positively and you end up with a house pet.
Paul loaded the tape into the VHS player in the back office, an alcove lined with art books. The screen ran blue for a few seconds, then suddenly bloomed into a series of downtown images—shots from clubs, bars, and galleries, with conversational voiceover and occasional spurts of visual narrative. Barbara Gladstone’s director talked about a young artist who had just made a tremendous New York debut with Vaseline sculptures and a nude performance in which he worked his way, rock-climber-fashion, across the gallery ceiling. A transvestite hooker from the Chelsea piers enthused about a sex slave at the Vault who crawled from table to table kissing feet, but only those clad in Italian shoes. A writer for Arts magazine, leaning on the bar at Boom, riffed on the “posthuman” import of a new-media survey at Cooper Union.
I asked Paul how and when he got into video.
“It was a real fluke,” he said. “After I finished NYU undergrad, people I knew started going off to, like, Prague or Berlin to hang out and make a start. Those were supposed to be the cool scenes. I wanted something different. Then I met Cao Fang, and she took me to Shanghai. For two years it was heaven.”
“For a guy like you, it had to be.”
“You know China, man?”
“That’s a long story. A sad one.”
“Yeah, so what can I say? Fang’s friends liked my style. I liked what they had to offer.”
“What was that?”
“Anything I wanted. Cheap.”
On the monitor, Wigstock contestants sang Motown tunes from a stage in Tompkins Square Park.
“And that led you to a career in performance art and video?” I asked.
The monitor shifted to shots of police rousting homeless people from their cardboard shelters under the trees.
“I developed some specialized tastes in China.”
That sly dance again. Something told me that Paul wasn’t talking about a penchant for roasted duck tongues or shrimp plucked live from a bowl of spiced broth.
“The place will do that to you,” I said.
“You travel, you learn,” Paul smiled. “I discovered that weird things become a lot more respectable when you rename them art.”
“More lucrative, too,” I said. “It’s one of the keys to my success.”
“You know Zheng Bao? He’s one far-out artist. You could find his performances on pirated tapes on the streets—eating the flesh of a live pig, spending three days locked in a bank vault with a thin breathing tube. I met him at the triennial in Guangzhou. ‘An act recorded,’ he said, ‘becomes strong like a dream.’ ”
Judging from the work I’d seen at P.S.1, my guess was that Paul’s dreams ran like a foul ditch through Neverland. The Viking’s account of his attentiveness to Anna suggested just how treacherous they might be. To test my hunch, I’d laid out a volume on Balthus’s paintings before Paul came to the gallery. When the tape ended, I switched on a table lamp, its light falling softly on the cover image of a young girl splayed across the lap of another female, slightly older, who was lifting the child’s skirt. I saw Paul’s eyes go to the book, and dart away.
“Where did you train?” I asked him.
“Back in the States, at Cal Arts.”
“You didn’t opt for film school?”
“I thought about it, but they don’t really teach my specialty there. So instead I came to New York and slogged around the gallery circuit for three years. Begging for shows, basically. You know the drill. A regular artist—a sculptor—goes into a gallery, they might hold his slides up to the light for thirty seconds before they say, ‘Nice work, but not for us.’ Those guys are the lucky ones. Just try to get a dealer to look at a twenty-minute performance video on a Tuesday afternoon. No way. Finally, I decided to wise up and start my own production company. Let other people squirm for the camera, I thought. I’ll do the editing.”
“You could make a hell of a lot more in commercial work. Music videos, TV ads.”
“Not my interest. Even a whore doesn’t take every john.”
“But you clearly have a penchant for—what should I call it?—a certain degree of luxury.”
“Sure. We all need a few goodies to get us through the night. Mine are minor.”
The pun was like a secret knock, a handshake of brotherhood in the gathering dark.
“In that case,” I said, “you might like to meet a few of my friends. We have an informal discussion group—and an occasional boys’ night out—with pictures and a bit of amateur philosophizing. We call it the Balthus Club.”
“Sounds promising,” Paul said, still being cagey. “I like that old perv’s work, even though he’s just a painter.”
“Take a look over here.” I led him to the book I knew he’d been dying to open. We went through the pages slowly, lovingly. A fake count’s rapt images of languid and sensuous female adolescents. Girls, half nude, stretching like cats in rooms filled with slant sunlight. Girls in shorts, hiking among the overwhelming rocks of an Alpine pass.
“Righteous,” Paul said. “Really well done. But I’m more of a photo guy, myself.”
“Who do you like?”
“Let’s look at some Bellmer next time.”
That was the thought he left me with. Hans Bellmer’s life-size female doll, headless, bound and jammed into a staircase or hung inverted from a tree. The work of an artist, spurned by the Nazis, who depicted his human lover, an eventual suicide, bent double and wrapped in flesh-creasing cords like some infernal unopened gift.