Don Lee - The Collective

“I don’t know,” Jessica said.

We all stared at the two erections on the coffee table, which rested on the base of the scrotums and were sitting upright, glowing feebly. They had been attached to the mannequins with epoxy, and parts of the shafts and testicles were cracked and tattered. The labial folds on Suzie Wong in Gallery 57 were also chipped, marred.

“There’s a lot of damage,” Jessica said. “What it would mean is patching and doctoring them, and the whole point had been going for strict authenticity. But I don’t really have any other option at this point, do I? It’d take me at least twelve days to do them over. They’re not sculptures, you know. They’re replicas. They’re from molds of live models.”

Dekker glanced at her, then at Joshua and me. As he caught on, his face bloomed vermilion, and he twitched his head in aversion. “Well, why don’t you see what you can do.”

“That information does not leave this room,” I said.

He looked at me dully. “Of course,” he told me.

It started on Tuesday with a small article in the Harvard Crimson , recapping the previous day’s City Council meeting, headlined “Phallic Art Exhibit Gives Rise to Councilman’s Protest.” On Wednesday and Thursday, more newspaper articles appeared, the puns too inviting to resist: “Artwork Neutered by Politician,” “Dildo Sculpture Manhandled,” “Cambridge Mannequins Castrated.”

And in the articles, Vivaldo Barboza was talking. “The potholes are so bad in Cambridge, people can’t drive down the street without getting their wheels knocked out of alignment, yet the Arts Council decides to spend taxpayer money on this?” he said. “What’s this exhibit have anything to do with art? There’s a boundary between what’s art and what’s junk, and this is undeniably junk. It’s trash. There’s no redeeming social or artistic value to it at all. As an elected official, I had a civic responsibility to take action and protect my constituents from this kind of smut.”

Reporters called the house, but Jessica declined to give comment. She was too busy. She carefully restored the genitalia and managed to reattach the penises to the mannequins just in time for the exhibition to open on schedule on Friday at noon, with a line of people winding down the stairs — the biggest crowd to ever appear for a show at Gallery 57. Certainly a good number were lookie-loos, merely curious or seeking titillation, but many were serious arts patrons, far more than would have come to this particular venue without the attendant publicity, and they seemed appreciative. There were no snickers, no cries of outrage, no scowls of denunciation. And there was a rumor that among the crowd was a critic for the Boston Globe .

“Maybe,” Jessica said, ecstatic over the attention, “in a strange way this was the best thing that could have happened.”

“How about doing an interview, then?” Joshua asked. “This is exactly what the 3AC needs. There’s this chick who’s been calling. She’s Chinese American — fourth generation from New York.”

Meredith Yee worked for the Boston Record , a new alternative weekly that was trying to compete with the Phoenix . She came out to the Walker Street house on Saturday, and we fixed her a lunch of sesame noodles and salad. We told her about becoming friends at Mac as freshmen, then reuniting last year and forming the 3AC, about the shared purpose of the collective, to support one another as Asian American artists, gather and exchange ideas and experiences, subvert and provide a counternarrative to stereotypes — all the catchphrases that had survived the vetting of the mission statement.

“That’s what’s behind the exhibit,” Jessica said. “It’s not about sex or eroticism. It’s about identity, sexual identity, and how Asian Americans are affected by external tropes. Asian women are objectified, and Asian men are encumbered with these emasculating anxieties, like about penis size, which isn’t an accident, since the phallus is a symbol of male power.”

“Basically,” Joshua said, “Asian American men have been relegated as the eunuchs of the world.”

“So I wanted to provoke debate about all of this,” Jessica said. “What the councilman did was a violation of my constitutional rights, my civil rights. This is yet another hegemonic attempt to suppress the voice of Asian Americans.”

Meredith seemed receptive to everything discussed. She told us she had grappled with many of these issues herself, and was interested in attending a 3AC gathering sometime. But she was oddly, persistently nosy about our personal lives, saying, “I’m sure there’s been some pairing-off in the group, yes? That’s natural in any group dynamic. Have the three of you ever been involved? In any combination?”

We shook our heads no.

“Really?” she said. “In all these years? Never been tempted?”

Jessica refrained from delving into her sexual orientation.

Later, Meredith asked for a tour of the house, and as we led her around upstairs, she seemed to be absorbed with the sleeping arrangements. “So who’s got this room?” she asked, pointing to the master bedroom.

“Noklek,” Joshua said.

“Who’s Noklek?”

“She works with Jimmy at Pink Whistle,” he told her.

“She’s just crashing here temporarily,” I said.

A photographer arrived, and after he set up his lights and reflectors, Meredith arranged us on the couch, shifting us into different arrays, asking us to pose with our arms and hands here and there, to gaze forward, to the side, at one another and away. It all felt a bit silly, yet, succumbing to vanity, the three of us kept checking our hair and wondering if we should change clothes. “Is this going to be in color or black-and-white?” I asked.

At the potluck the next day, some 3AC members were less than thrilled hearing about the interview.

“Why didn’t you call the rest of us?” Annie asked. “If the article’s going to be on the 3AC, all of us should have been interviewed.”

“No one should’ve been excluded,” Phil said.

“It wasn’t intentional,” Jessica said. “It was all last-minute.”

“She interviewed me,” Jimmy said.

“She did?” I asked.

“I made the wigs, remember? She came over to the shop after she finished with you three.”

“Did she contact you about the costumes?” I asked Trudy. She told me no.

“A little starchy, that Meredith,” Jimmy said, “but kind of a babe, don’t you think?”

“Listen, we did the interview to promote the 3AC as an organization,” Joshua said. “It wasn’t about us, it wasn’t an ego thing.”

“Did you mention all of us by name and discipline?” Jay asked.

“Yeah, we did. Didn’t we?” Joshua asked me.

“Yeah,” I dissembled.

“At the very least,” Cindy said, “I wish we could’ve been part of the photo shoot, you know? That’s what I’m most disappointed about.”

Yet on Tuesday, when the Boston Record came out, the group quelled any objections they might have had, because it became apparent that Meredith Yee had been planning to sandbag us all along.

Her article was entitled “Slits and Eunuchs: A Most Unusual Collective.” She accurately described the aims of the 3AC and quoted us without error, but often out of context, and her tone was mocking throughout. She sketched us as a bunch of pretentious twentysomething layabouts with ample time for “almond-gazing,” as “wannabe Asian Panthers” whining about racial injustice while lolling, rather comfortably, in a tony Harvard Square house, where the bedroom assignments appeared to be “very fluid.” She profiled Jimmy individually in a sidebar, with a photo of him — shirt open, leather-panted legs spread wide — sitting in front of Pink Whistle, “in which ‘massages’ are offered by a Thai teenager who happens to be the kneader-in-residence on Walker Street.”