Will Chancellor - A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall

This was the first time Owen had declared it publicly. The real artists he knew in high school never felt the need to declare anything, they just acknowledged they were artists — the way someone else might say, “I’m adopted.” Embarrassed blood pooled up.

— Are you with a gallery in Berlin?

The blush ran across his cheek, almost to his nose, and his ears turned red.

— You’re too young to be making work anyway. Once you put something into the world, you can never take it back. You’d have a hard time finding an artist who doesn’t want a pass on the first five years of his career.

The slight tremble in the man’s paternalism made Owen suppose he was talking with a professor. This was the tone Owen usually tuned out. But what he was about to hear, in front of a creased felt blanket, beside a chair made of fat, was real, not academic, and struck him dumb.

— This artist, Joseph Beuys, was in the Luftwaffe, you know. His plane was shot down over the Crimea in the thick of winter. He would have frozen to death had a group of Tartars not greased him up with lard and wrapped him in felt blankets. So it’s not as random as it might first appear that he makes a chair of fat or protects himself from a coyote, a totem of raw nature, with a felt blanket.

— Protecting yourself from a coyote is art?

— It is when you do it like a shaman. Beuys flew into New York in May of 1974. An ambulance met him at the airport and transported him directly to the René Block Gallery where he attempted to lift collective trauma by locking himself up with a wild coyote.

— What was it called?

— I Like America and America Likes Me .

— Good title.

— The materials are what you should be focusing on: felt blanket, shepherd’s staff, coyote, the Wall Street Journal spread out on the floor for it to piss on. There are only two questions for an artist: first, What do I exclude? A king is he who determines the state of exception. And every artist must be a king. The second question — How do I import the most meaning to what I include? — however, is why artists outlive kings. I wish contemporary artists focused more on achieving a sense of inevitability in their work, an elegance that borders on the mathematical. Blanket, staff, coyote. Beuys is Pythagoras, and everyone else is scribbling in sand.

After his discussion with this professor had percolated for a night, Owen saw the possibility of combining the two genres he was most interested in, Land Art and minimalism, into something he would call Laminalism. Thus far, Owen imagined his art pieces, laminates, would be an overlay of memories and moods onto landscape; he would light the world with the colors of the Gods and pin down his memories with minimalist shapes like rock cairns and runic tangles of twigs. He had a name for the work, but his new blend of art was still too inchoate and immaterial to justify fasting for studio space.

Still. In the distance he could see himself as a successful artist, selling Berlin to a young American romantic: “Here an artist can afford studio space and make a name for himself before he turns thirty.”

In the past two months he had overheard the same conversation dozens of times, in English, German, French, Danish, and Italian. People told him he was in the right place. Everyone here was jostling for a name. In that respect, Owen was common. He looked around at the turbid layer of young creatives floating above him. None of them had lost a name, which separated Owen, like sediment dropped out of suspension.

The Winerei, a wine bar near his hostel, served as library, living room, salon. Idiosyncrasy defined the bar in a way that reminded Owen of his childhood in a cave. Patrons borrowed glasses at the Winerei — technically nothing was bought or sold there, all payment was voluntary. For one euro, Owen was handed a glass and invited to fill it with any of the half dozen wines they chose to uncork that night. Before shambling off to his hostel, he dropped money, on his honor, into a glass jar. Owen, now broke, paid a rounded-down wholesale April estimate of his drinking, rather than the magnanimous estimates of March, and washed glasses when it got busy.

After a few drinks, the Winerei glowed cloudy pastis green and Owen became ensnared in the nets of candlelight bouncing off mantel mirrors and dispersing through the stems of all the playful glasses. Because the wine was free, glasses were handled with a light touch and gestures were wedding-reception wild, meaning there was always someone rubbing a paste of club soda and rock salt into the hem of her blouse. He had learned to wear a black shirt if he was going to stay past sundown.

Locals had their own spots. His was a salmon-colored armchair with a great wound sliced through the seat, spilling dried yellow foam that broke off like lemon cake and clogged the wells of his corduroy pants. He sat in the disintegrating chair and read Homer, glancing up several times a page to watch passersby walk vintage bikes with a slow spoke rhythm through the first sun of spring or strut by with purposeful hips that made him blink hard and consider the possibility of discos.

Early April, Owen was sitting in his crumbling chair, looking out the window of the Winerei with this very thought. He felt someone to his left, hovering at his blind side and eager to interrupt his reading. A stream of smoke fogged between his face and his book. He kept reading, but then a voice interrupted:

— That’s not gonna work here.

Owen raised an eyebrow, turned, and found legs braced in the chrome of a wheelchair, a wine bottle wedged in a crotch, and a bright blue flannel shirt unbuttoned aggressively. Beside the wheelchair, another young man swirled a glass and swept back the itch of hair at his forehead. Owen set his book on the table. Now the standing one spoke.

— Between the two of us, we’ve tried just about every conceivable way of picking up girls in a bar. But sitting alone and pretending to read in what, Greek? That’s new.

— Or really old.

— Let’s get real. They have the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue here somewhere. I bet we can find it if we look.

— My dad’s a professor, Owen responded. I grew up reading this kind of stuff.

— Does it work?

— Does what work?

The young man in the wheelchair put a hand in front of his friend’s chest.

— Hey. In all seriousness, tell me something.

— What?

— Where’s your parrot?

The two young men laughed. Both leaned in too close. The standing one sloshed his glass with a toasting Arrr! The one in the wheelchair put his hand on Owen’s leg. Owen suspected they were high.

Owen exhaled slowly and loudly.

— Why does everyone go for the pirate joke? Hannibal the Great had an eye patch. Why not “Where’s your elephant?” I hear a bad pirate joke every day. You guys are better than that. Assholes.

The guy in the wheelchair snapped back his hand.

— Testy!

They left Owen to scan his text and rub his temples. Over the course of the next week, they reappeared to deliver one-liners that made Owen think that his universe was both small and contracting.

Two weeks to the day after he called a disabled person an asshole, Owen saw the man’s picture on the cover of Die Welt . He learned that he had been mocked by Kurt Wagener, a twenty-seven-year-old artist with work in the Pompidou and a forthcoming exhibition at the Guggenheim Bilbao.

April 29, 2004. The Italian managing the hostel recognized Owen’s patter down the stairs and slid his computer monitor to the far end of the desk to confront Owen with the shocking image popping up all over the Internet.

Owen caught sight of something gruesome and possibly pornographic in his periphery. He decided to walk past the clerk and not mention it.