The Fifth Wall. Rachel Nagelberg
as an aesthetic experience—that we’re still blind to the real life possibility of our own instantaneous deaths?
I think of the camera I’ve mounted in front of the deconstruction, surveilling 24/7 the dismantling of my childhood home—this window I’ve opened onto this dreadful process.
Perhaps it’s not that we romanticize our own destruction, but that we have to fantasize about it in order to understand it. That in this world now dominated by screens and images, we must stage massive fictions in order to live.
Light pours into the conference room from four floor-to-ceiling length windows, spreads a sheerness over a central oblong granite table, leather executive axis chairs. Seven of us fill the seats with an unfocused mid-afternoon Monday energy, slumped and yawning in front of to-go paper coffee cups amidst a scattered arrangement of recyclable cardboard sleeves. A handful of others line the walls behind us, a slight murmur filling the room.
On the far wall, Robby projects a video of Richard Serra’s Band in its initial exhibit at the New York MoMA in 2006. The sculpture looms before us, a gigantic and endless plane of movement, its form a twisted anatomy of a chocolatey-casted, weather-proof steel. Rising about twelve-and-a-half feet high and almost seventy-two feet in diameter, the surrealistic, slithering ribbon is a contorted rectangular strip on its side, an undulating band of one curvaceous body. From below, the camera focuses on Band’s concave façade, which appears windswept; it gives the illusion of an unfixed medium, like cotton, canvas, or felt. It defies any natural or architectural shape.
Robby has one of those soft, malleable faces where the skin around the edges hangs loosely from bone. He has a relatively thin frame—small arms and legs, though a bit of a protruding stomach. He carries himself with a sophisticated clarity, has what I’ve come to associate as a strictly European-American trait: the ability to transform physical imperfections into attractive characteristics—knobby elbows, elongated torso, crooked teeth—though he dresses in faded cotton tees and loose, ripped jeans. Style versus comfort: an artist-technician conundrum. I’ve known Robby since my birth, he and my father having attended Stanford together, and both part of some elite intellectual boys club that met once a month over drinks and cigars to discuss critical theory and the state of postmodernism. My father, a budding dramatist, and Robby, then, a painter, both now living out the aftermaths of academic idealism with working class jobs and cirrhotic livers.
“As you can probably tell, there is no way in fuck that thing’s coming in here in one piece. There will be a series of loading trucks carrying sections we’ll unload into the lower atrium through the two forty-foot garage doors, each piece weighing about twenty tons total.” Robby pauses the video and points to a loose map of the building drawn onto a dry-erase board, his beady blue eyes lit and bulging from some portion of his daily ten cups of gunpowder green tea. He traces the path of assembly with his finger.
“There is, unfortunately, always an issue setting up Serra’s sculptures.” Robby crosses his arms. “One that I wanted to discuss in the sculptural curator’s presence, but considering she’s running a little late,” he studies his watch again for obvious effect, “I might as well go ahead and start.”
Legs shake. Fingers tap. Somebody sneezes.
“Richard Serra,” Robby says, slowly weaving his fingers together, “is a dick.”
A tired communal chuckle erupts from the half of us who know this spiel already—one of Robby’s infamous “insert notorious artist” cautionary tales.
“And I’ll tell you why,” Robby says, sitting down and crossing his legs. “A few years back at the Legion of Honor, my close buddy Phil, one of the ranking techs at Atthowe Fine Art Services, was hired to rig and install Serra’s House of Cards, which if you don’t know already, but should, is a balancing box-structure of four very heavy, lead antimony plates.” He crosses his legs and leans back, places his hands atop his belly. The chair croons. “Now, after analyzing the situation, Phil decided that for safety reasons, the piece needed invisible spot welds tacked in the upper corners of the plates. However, this apparently incensed the collector, who demanded that Phil remove them immediately. And Phil, being a hard-working and highly intelligent technician told the fucker absolutely not, and excused himself from the project. The deputy director then ordered a bunch of interns to remove the bracing, and can you guess what happened?”
“Human sandwich,” I say.
“Try human vegetable,” says Robby, and my chest tightens. “Of course, one of the plates isn’t balanced correctly and falls on the poor kid, who hits his head on the floor and is in a coma for three months before the parents pull the fucking plug.”
“Spoken quite candidly,” a woman scoffs behind me.
Robby holds out his hands, shrugs comically. “The man is a psychopath. But fuck, is his art brilliant.” He then passes out contracts that depict an agreement between us and the collector that we can abide by all the safety procedures that Robby and Derek, the head tech for Atthowe they’re bringing in to help set up, tell us to perform. We all sign amidst buzzing, restless bodies preparing to disperse.
After the meeting, Robby and I walk to the break room in search of free pastries he’d heard rumored earlier that day. He asks how I’m doing. He attended the funeral, which is where I’d asked him with sudden desperation about a job. He’d talked HR into letting me return as a preparator, but with some extra roles only if I want them—some kind of optional managerial status. Job descriptions in the art world are always sort of vague. He’d kept in touch with my mother even after the divorce. I tell him that I’m fine, considering that he knows nothing about the house, and I want it to stay that way.
“I talked to your father over the weekend—he asked after you. I told him you were my right-hand lady. How good it is to have you back.” He pats me lightly on the shoulder. We stand in the sunlight holding paper plates piled with pastry remnants.
I nod. I tell him I haven’t even seen my dad since the funeral. And he’s never been much of a phone talker. He did send me a used copy of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy in the mail—what I took as a thoughtful gesture, but of course wholly missing the point. Living on that sailboat has brought his isolation to a new level.
Robby sighs. He isn’t naive about my dad’s reclusive tendencies. “You know I’m here if you ever need anyone to talk to.” I smile and nod. We munch the overly sweetened bread in silence.
The television show was called Impossible Joe. It aired on NBC in 1959 and ran only one season. My dad played “Impossible Joe,” the sitcom’s protagonist, a troublemaking nine-year-old in rural California who, in each episode, was faced with solving a mystery in his town all by himself, since no adult would take him seriously. Each black and white episode ranged from twenty to thirty minutes, and always ended with the phrase, “Oh, Joe—you’re impossible!” which was then followed by my father’s signature smirk at the camera, forever binding his secret honor with the audience. There were thirty-six episodes in total, all of which Caleb and I watched dozens of times as kids, reciting lines to each other, telling all our friends. When the show’s contract failed to renew, my dad took a few commercial gigs and a brief role as the voice of a talking gazelle in a popular children’s cartoon, but soon he—in his own words—grew bored with the limitations of intellect as an actor, and decided to pursue playwriting instead, a decision that my grandfather (a big name in radio, who’d gotten my father into the movie business as early as possible, and who, before he died, lectured me on the stupidity of my father’s backwards career move and told me I was following in his footsteps with a fine art degree), never fully got over.
Growing up, I always had my father’s support for my pursuit of art, though it was inversely shown through either personal criticism, or lack of interest. Regularly he would criticize me for having thin walls. I’ve always been sensitive to places. I can feel energies, charges, blockages, commotion. I can only be in public gatherings for so long, until the intense emotional exhaustion hits, abruptly like a kind of violence. Though I’ve never quite figured out how to navigate it. I always went home after school to unwind;