Rick Moody - The Diviners

One section of the diary, it should be said, was for the detectives kind of a page-turner. This portion of the diary particularly concerns the untimely death of an acquaintance of the victim. This acquaintance, notwithstanding the efforts of many in the peer group of the victim, drifted off into the “demimonde” of addiction, traveling in fast and more dangerous crowds in Manhattan, later adventuring in the crack houses of the outer boroughs, where a young gay man is likely to get into a lot of trouble. The victim describes the addicted young man in affectionate terminology, despite her exasperation at his relapses and his inability to show up for work at a competing gallery. He was, according to the diarist, “the most beautiful boy I’ve ever seen,” and he was given to thrift store clothes that impeccably mimicked the current designers. Still, he “drifted away like a helium balloon drifts away,” prompting some of the best writing in the diary. Who can understand why the scourge of relapse happens? asks the diarist. Who can understand self-destruction? For a time, an addict will seem as if he or she might make a go of life and then, inexplicably, just when things seem to be going better, just when “his boyfriend starts to like him again, then wham, ” the addict relapses. Which is something that the detectives have encountered many times themselves. It is a routine part of their job, and they are all but inured to it, this treachery and self-destruction. This inexplicable nature of relapse occurs to the diarist when the body of her friend is found in the Bronx, and his parents come from Durham, North Carolina, to his funeral, his parents, of whom the diarist observes that they “would never accept him for who he is.” Oddly, this body, too, was subjected to blunt force trauma, according to pathologists, and perhaps sexually violated. All of this is not “something to be learned,” reports the diarist. This is something to “accept the way you accept that winter will come.”

It’s interesting to the detectives, combing the diary for clues about the victim’s own assault, that the death of the friend in the Bronx was not recent. In fact, the death in the Bronx dates back almost eight months.

Other entries in the diary amount to notes about art that the victim was considering for her group show of work by contemporary African American artists. It is likely that some of these notes were in fact taken on the day of the attack, when the victim was visiting the library. The victim feels great solidarity with persons of color, perhaps owing to the fact that the victim’s parents are second-generation Chinese American. The victim observes that her interest in this art by African American artists is not “ghetto exotica,” as in the cases of graffiti artists invited into the art establishment through tokenism. Of African American artists attempting work inside the traditions of art history, the diarist writes that “pretty much no one gives a shit about them or their work, unless they are putting slave imagery into their paintings or something obvious that will reassure an elite white audience.” For the show planned by the diarist, she has assembled work by painters and sculptors and mixed-media artists who simply “happen to be African American”—artists who don’t shy from “symbology about African American experience” but who are also about “paint handling, texture, and luminosity.” She would include these painters, the diarist remarks, “because they’re good, because they’re moving, because they’re important, because they’re vital, energized, beautiful, lasting.”

A list of such painters and photographers and multimedia artists follows, none of whose names mean anything to the detectives on the case, who, at any rate, are reading through the diary in one sitting and are eating doughnuts at the same time, while also talking about the trade that sent Patrick Ewing to Seattle.

One of these artists, however, did come in for more attention than others. The name of the artist in question is Tyrone Duffy. Duffy, according to highlights from a curriculum vitae included in the journals, is known, to the extent he is known at all, for shows and artwork from the early 1980s. Shows at galleries associated with what the victim describes as the East Village gallery movement. After some brief success in this East Village environment, a success that the artist didn’t parlay into wider recognition, Tyrone Duffy, according to the diarist, decided to attempt to get an advanced degree in philosophy from the University of Minnesota, a degree he never completed, dropping out of the program in 1987, after which he moved to Hoboken. According to the diarist, Tyrone Duffy “falls off the edge of the world” in 1993.

What the victim likes about the early work of Duffy, which she first saw at the apartments of some friends, is that it manifests the “d.i.y. energy” of the work of the early 1980s, the violence, smarts, and sincerity of that time. What she likes is the desperation of the work, the sloppiness. What she likes, it seems, is the idea of Tyrone Duffy, an artist of some modest success who completely disappears, an artist who knew the art world legends of a certain period but who then vanished entirely. The idea only improves when the victim finds someone, a mutual friend, still in contact with Duffy. This friend reports that Duffy was diagnosed with bipolar disorder or some similar complaint. He was institutionalized on one occasion. He was not close with his family, who apparently lived in New England.

In late September, the diarist began to attempt to contact Duffy, having learned that he was now working in midtown as a bicycle messenger. The detectives take note of this sudden appearance in the diary of the apparent or alleged profession of the victim’s attacker, but they decide to continue to read into the diary before presuming that the two bicycle messengers are one and the same.

What they learn about next is so-called outsider art, very popular in some circles. And what outsider art is not, according to the diarist, “is art.” It is not like Michelangelos and Titians with their assistants and their papal commissions. Because art is a “discretionary choice” where “mimetic skill and distortions of mimetic skill” serve a higher purpose, that is, artistic vision. And outsider art, made largely by people in institutions and by shut-ins with paraphiliac inclinations, does not manifest “discretionary choice,” in part because the artists do not have “mimetic skill” in the first place and also because they can often be disabled in the perception of reality.

Much of this material seems to come from a book on imagery in the artwork of disturbed adolescents by Deborah Weller, PhD, for which the victim submitted call forms at local libraries on several occasions.

“Painting by bipolar patients in an inpatient environment,” according to Weller, as quoted by the victim:

is noteworthy for wildness of color, for flamboyance. But it is also restless and reflective of disordered thinking, more so than in the work of other adolescents, and as such it has a compensatory aspect, a reifying and ordering disorder, enough so that it’s hard, in all cases, to look at this work simply as art, as a commodity for aesthetic consumers. It is, therefore, devoid of aesthetic choice. The aesthetic strategies indicated in this work are, on the contrary, reflexive. Can art that is made reflexively still reside in the same category with art made according to discretionary choice?

Weller then speaks to the art of elephants in captivity, and gorillas. What do we know about the intentionality of these artists? Is intentionality a condition of front-brain function, Weller asks, unhindered by disorder of any kind? If so, art is rather limited in terms of its effects and strategies. Art by bipolar artists is noteworthy for connections being made between disparate agencies or entities, connections suggestive of conspiracy. Members of families, for example, are considered agents of foreign powers. Teachers or clergypersons are considered secret members of fraternities and possessed of Masonic insights into the workings of the world. For bipolar adolescents, according to Weller, the discovery of these conspiracies can even be joyful, as in the case of one adolescent painter who produced in a matter of weeks a number of diagrams, painted on very large canvases, detailing connections between multinational corporations and the regimes of twentieth-century despots like Pol Pot and Idi Amin. This painter was ecstatic about his output and slept little, if at all, during the period of its creation. As Weller states: