We looked out at the light of a half-moon on the Tyrrhenian Sea and had our thoughts. I thought of Madelon.
“There’s someone I’d like you to do,” I said. “A woman. A very special woman.”
“Not right now,” he said. “Perhaps later. I have several commissions that I want to do.”
“Keep me in mind when you have time. She’s a very unusual woman.”
He glanced at me and tossed a pebble down the hill. “I’m sure she is,” he said.
“You like to do women, don’t you?” I asked.
He smiled in the moonlight and said, “You figured that out from one cube?”
“No. I bought the three small ones you did before.”
He looked at me sharply. “How did you know they even existed? I hadn’t told anyone.”
“Something as good as the Snowdragon cube couldn’t come out of nowhere. There had to be something earlier. I hunted down the owners and bought them.”
“The old lady is my grandmother,” he said. “I’m a little sorry I sold it, but I needed money.” I made a mental note to have it sent back to him.
“Yes, I like doing women,” he said softly, leaning back against the pale column. “Artists have always liked doing women. To . . . to capture that elusive shadow of a flicker of a glimpse of a moment . . . in paint, in stone, in clay, or in wood, or on film . . . or with molecular constructs.”
“Rubens saw them plump and gay,” I said. “Lautrec saw them depraved and real.”
“To Da Vinci they were mysterious,” he said. “Matisse saw them idle and voluptuous. Michelangelo hardly saw them at all. Picasso saw them in endless mad variety.”
“Gauguin . . . sensuality,” I commented. “Henry Moore saw them as abstracts, a starting point for form. Van Gogh’s women reflected his own mad genius brain.”
“Cezanne saw them as placid cows,” Mike laughed. “Fellini saw them as multifaceted creatures that were part angel, part beast. In the photographs of Andre de Dienes the women are realistic fantasies, erotic and strange.”
“Tennessee Williams saw them as insane cannibals, fascinatingly repulsive. Steinberg’s women were unreal, harsh, dramatic,” I said.
“Clayton’s females were predatory fiends.”
“Jason sees them as angels, slightly confused,” Mike said, delighted with the little game. “Coogan saw them as motherly monsters.”
“And you?” I asked.
He stopped and the smile faded. After a long moment he answered. “As illusions, I suppose.”
He rolled a fragment of stone from the time of Caesar in his fingers and spoke softly, almost to himself.
“They . . . aren’t quite real, somehow. The critics say I created a masterpiece of erotic realism, a milestone in figurative art. But . . . they’re
. . . wisps. They’re incredibly real for only an instant . . . fantastically shadowy another. Women are never the same from moment to moment. Perhaps that’s why they fascinate me.”
I didn’t see Mike for some time after that, though we kept in touch. He did a portrait of Princess Helga of the Netherlands, quite modestly clad, the cube filled with its famous dozen golden sculptures and the vibrations of love and peace.
For the monks at Wells, on Mars, Mike did a large cube of Buddha, and it quickly became a tourist attraction. Repro cubes made a small fortune for the monastery.
Anything Mike chose to do was quickly bought and commissions flowed in from individuals, companies and foundations, even from movements. What he did was a simple nude of his mistress of the moment. It was erotic enough in pose, but powerfully pornographic in vibrations, and after Mike left her she received a Universal-Metro contract. The young Shah of Iran bought the cube to install in his long-abuilding Gardens of Babylon.
For his use of alpha, beta, and gamma wave projectors, as well as advances in differentiated sonics, Mike was the subject of an entire issue of Modern Electronics.
Mike had paid his dues to art, for while studying at Cal Tech he had worked on the Skyshield Project, a systems approach to electronic defense against low energy particles to use on the space stations. After graduation he had gone to work at the Bell lab in their brain-wave complex on Long Island. He quit when he got a Guggenheim grant for his art.
From his “Pleasurewoman” cube General Electric picked up some of Mike’s modifications for their new multilayer image projectors and beta wave generators. For the artists that use models or three-dimensional objects to record the basic image cycle—such as breathing, running water, or repeating events—Nakamura, Ltd. brought out a new camera design in circular pattern distribution that contained many of Mike’s suggestions. For the artist working in original abstractions, Mike built his own ultra-fine electron brush and an image generator linked with a graphics computer that produced an almost infinite number of variables. Mike Cilento was proving himself as an innovator and engineer as well as artist, an unusual combination. I met Mike again at the opening of his “Solar System” series in the Grand Museum in Athens. The ten cubes hung from the ceiling, each with its nonliteral interpretation of the sun and planets, from the powerball of Sol to the hard, shiny ballbearing of Pluto.
Mike seemed caged, a tiger in a trap, but very happy to see me. He was a volunteer kidnapee as I spirited him away to my apartment in the old part of town.
He sighed as we entered, tossed his jacket into a Lifestyle chair and strolled out onto the balcony. I picked up two glasses and a bottle of Cretan wine and joined him.
He sighed again, sank into the chair, and sipped the wine. I chuckled and said, “Fame getting too much for you?”
He grunted at me. “Why do they always want the artist at openings? The art speaks for itself.”
“Public relations. To touch the hem of creativity. Maybe some of it will rub off on them.” He grunted again, and we lapsed into comfortable silence, looking out at the Parthenon, high up and night-lit. At last he spoke. “Being an artist is all I ever wanted to be, like kids growing up to be astronauts or ball players. It’s an honor to be able to do it, whatever it is. I’ve painted and I’ve sculpted. I’ve done light mosaics and glow dot patterns. I even tried music for awhile. None of them really seemed to be it. But I think molecular constructs are the closest.”
“Because of the extreme realism?”
“That’s part of it. Abstraction, realism, expressionism—they’re just labels. What matters is what is, the thoughts and emotions that you transmit. The sensatron units are fairly good tools. You can work almost directly on the emotions. When GE gets the new ones ready, I think it will be possible to get even more subtle shadings with the alpha waves. And, of course, with more units you can get more complex.”
“You are as much an engineer as you are an artist,” I said. He smiled and sipped his wine. “Every medium, every technique has those who find that area their particular feast. Look at actors. Once there was only the play, from start to finish, no retakes and live. Then came film and tape and events shot out of sequence. No emotional line to follow from start to finish. It takes a particular kind of actor who can discipline himself to those flashbacks and flashforwards. In the days of mime there were probably superb actors lost because their art was in their voice.”