Jack O'Connell - The Skin Palace

This week’s mailbag brought yet another attempt at subterfuge by one more dim-bulbed prankster with too much time on his or her hands and access to a camera. I’m forced once again to beseech and admonish the faithful regarding the lending of Underexposed. Clearly, back issues have fallen into the hands of some barbarians who have no hope for conversion. I can’t waste my time worrying about their loss of primal sensuality. I’m neck deep in the evolution of my own carnal sensibilities. So I ask you once again to guard the magazine and when you’re done reading, either destroy it or keep it under lock and key.

I don’t want to have to spend another morning like last Thursday when someone other than my letter carrier deposited a plain brown manila mailer through my door slot. There were no markings on the packet and though I attempted to prevent myself from feeling that rush of dizziness at even the remotest chance that contact had been made, my heart surged with both longing and fear as I ran my letter opener along the seal and extracted the contents: a single Polaroid photograph, taken, I’m quite sure, by a Spectra model.

I stared at the image until my eyes went weak. A very simple composition. A portrait. An upper-body shot of an individual posed before the brick wall background. The sex of the subject is undeterminable. S/he is dressed in what appears to be a medieval jester’s costume. The head is encased in a shiny silver fright wig. The face is decorated with oversized red wax lips with two enormous faux buckteeth extending down toward the chin. The eyes and nose are covered with a brand of “Groucho Marx” eyeglasses and mustache. The cheeks are rouged into a clown’s apple-red caricature. A white-gloved hand is in the forefront of the shot, held up and partially obscuring the chestal area. The hand is bent into an obscene salute, the middle finger thrust skyward and directed, unmistakably, at the viewer. Some miniature graffiti was noticeable but unintelligible on the brick background until Wilhelm and the boys down at Duyfhuizen Labs blew me up an 11 × 14 study shot which allowed me to decode the doggerel

I’m an absentee artist

which fills you with strife

but you’ll never possess me

so go get a life

Charming. I’m not sure of the prankster’s intention this time around. Did S/he expect me to swoon and blow the trumpet, announce to my people that Propp has touched down, has deemed to send us a communiqué no matter how seemingly cruel, has consented to show his face, no matter how grotesquely distorted? I have no way of deciphering the buffoon’s designs. But let the hoaxster know this if they happen to appropriate yet another issue of Underexposed: I’ve spent a good bit of this lifetime studying the work of a singular genius named Terrence Propp. I have spent the majority of my waking hours immersing myself in study of the master since that first day when, at age thirty-three, I chanced to view Infant & Mother: Deep Sleep & Dark Shadow hanging in the men’s room of Orsi’s Rib Room. I have been a devout apostle. I have honed my skills. I have tracked every lead, however ephemeral, catalogued every confirmed and unconfirmed piece of work, and assembled the first group on the planet to zealously pursue the ways and means of Proppiana. And so know, without doubt, that it is a waste of both time and effort to attempt to make a fool out of me. If and when Terry Propp chooses to return home, I will know with an unflinching certainty that will confirm the worth of my faith that he has breached the silence, that he has reached out finally and definitively.

Until that day comes, I will happily endure the nonsense of overindulged children who are somehow aroused by adolescent pranksterism. Take off your clown suit, Imposter. No one is buying. And let me use this incident to remind my colleagues that our only assurance of purity in ferreting out all things Proppian is evidence from the official record: that which can be confirmed with physical documentation and counterchecked by secondary material. And so, as the title of my column says, let us review what we know so far.

Terrence Propp was born either in Mollusk Cove, New York, or Quinsigamond, Massachusetts, in either 1937 or 1929. It is almost certain that he derives from some arm of the fairly prominent Propp family who had arrived in America at least by 1694, settling in and around the area of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in the shadow of Mount Greylock, though there is a dissenting opinion that Propp’s ancestors moved south almost immediately after their arrival in the New World and began a pattern of nomadism that eventually brought them to Mexico by the early 1800s, where they established either a string of homeopathic hospitals or a museum to catalog and house native Mexican artwork. I, personally, find this school of thought quite unlikely, based for the most part on far-flung conjecture and self-styled theory.

As a side note, I will mention that we are fairly certain that Propp’s maternal great-great-granduncle was one Balthus Nixford, a once notorious and now, sadly, forgotten painter who in 1837 was charged, according to documents kept in Quinsigamond’s own Center for Historical Bibliography, with “the creation and dissemination of lewd, obscene, indecent, and un-Christian pictures designed to incite wicked and lacivious yearnings into the minds of the populace.” All of Nixford’s work was burned in the “October Bonfire of ’38” and the artist was driven from the city and banished “for the duration of his natural life.” And so we see, apostles, history, that relentless nightmare, repeats itself with a tasteless vengeance. And now, all these years later, we have been given a new artist to drive underground with the abundance of our ignorance and intolerance.

The source of Terrence Propp’s primary education is lost to us, but we believe his undergraduate years were spent, at least partially, either locally here at the College of St. Ignatius, or at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. There is one recently bandied theory that he pursued a now-defunct correspondence school whose application materials were once offered on the flaps of matchbooks dispensed at Orsi’s Rib Room Diner. Transcripts at both St. Ignatius and Cornell are either sealed or missing.

There is conjecture, sponsored by the presence of a series of five Southern Pacific landscape pieces, that Propp served in the navy as a signalman shortly before or after his undergraduate education. I should point out that there is also a small pocket of vehement protest that the “Melmoth Island Shots,” as they have come to be known, are talented forgeries. Propp finished his formal education sometime in the late 1950s and either remained in (or came to settle in) Quinsigamond. It is possible, some would say likely, that for a time during this period he supported himself by selling balloons to children in Salisbury Park.

Certainly, it is during this time, in the early sixties, when his work began appearing in local galleries such as f.46 and the Riis. Before his death, gallery owner Nigel “Naggy” Moholy, in an interview, recounted that he never actually met Propp face-to-face and that the artist insisted on an elaborate scheme for the delivery of his work. Moholy said he would receive a phone call, at times in the middle of the night, and the caller would simply declare, “Say Cheese!”, and Moholy would then have to hurry down to Gompers Train Station, walk to a specific trash can and reach inside where he would find Propp’s latest offerings wrapped in “a kind of white wax paper, like the kind they use in the butcher shops for wrapping meat and fish.”

As the years went on, however, the late-night phone calls grew less and less frequent and, ironically, as Propp’s work began to receive more, and more acclaim and attention, his output, or, we should say, his publicly presented output, became minimal in number if not quality. There has been no confirmed sighting of work by Terrence Propp for over a decade now. There has been no confirmed sighting of or communication with the man himself in at least that long.