I went out into the parking lot with two papier maché puppets on my hands (his and hers). I found the dog panting in the back seat of the convertible. I tried to pet her, but couldn’t due to the over size puppet heads and then the flies showed up and I was thinking that the dog must’ve crapped in the back of the car. The flies circled the dog’s head and landed in her ears and there were suddenly a lot of them and they crawled into her ears and down into her head and you could see her skin buckle and shift as the insects crawled deeper and in greater numbers into her sweet, innocent head.
The dog promptly threw up on me and her vomit was the color of an oil slick, which is to say no color at all, but every color. When I looked closer I could see that she’d vomited little chips and electronic devices that looked like enlarged viruses. I had to go back into the museum.
It had been built in the shape of a large metallic cow dropping… the Swiss-Indian architect from Texas had meant it as a joke on “Sacred Cows”. It had been controversial and was oddly beautiful and there were no hard edges after the door. It was a completely biologically (scatologically) shaped building. However, the art inside was an installation which painfully reproduced a Victorian library (They’d built a classical building inside the enormous turd dome) complete with classical busts, leather chairs, wooden tables and leather bound books on the shelves and one of those ladders on tracks to reach the books high up in the stacks. The art consisted of a team of performers sitting around the library reading and shooshing anyone who talked. They were dressed more or less like a bunch of Princeton students circa. 1953. The only thing odd was that one guy was all tricked out in green body makeup with a red afro and posthetic makeup that made him look quite freaky with bulging eyes. he was spinning records with two turntables, but he was listening to it with headphones,so the library remained dead silent.
I spent the better part of the show trying to get the performers to break character and talk to me. They were like British Royal Guards. I kept insisting that there was no point in doing a show like this unless the audience could participate and I was playing the crazy unwashed guy who talks to himself at the library and demands conflict. “I want to know what’s going on here,” I kept insisting. Eventually I pissed them off so much that they all relented and we started talking about art and drinking wine and having a good time. I don’t know what happened to the dog.
