Art is mysterious, but selling art may be even more mysterious. The object itself is bought and sold, handed from one person to another, and yet countless factors are at work within the transaction. In order to grow in value, a work of art requires a particular psychological climate. At that moment, SoHo provided exactly the right amount of mental heat for art to thrive and for prices to soar. Expensive work from every period must be impregnated by the intangible—an idea of worth. This idea has the paradoxical effect of detaching the name of the artist from the thing, and the name becomes the commodity that is bought and sold. The object merely trails after the name as its solid proof. Of course, the artist himself or herself has little to do with any of it. But in those years, whenever I went for groceries or stood in line at the post office, I heard the names. Schnabel, Salle, Fischl, Sherman were magic words then, like the ones in the fairy tales I read to Matt every night. They opened sealed doors and filled empty pouches with gold. The name Wechsler wasn't fated for full-blown enchantment then, but after Bernie's show, it was whispered here and there, and I sensed that slowly Bill too might lose his name to the strange weather that hung over SoHo for a number of years before it stopped, suddenly, on another October day in 1987.
In August, Erica and I were invited to look at three of the finished hysteria pieces on the Bowery. Dozens of smaller works on the same theme, paintings, drawings, and little constructions, were still under way. When we entered the room, I saw three huge shallow boxes—each ten feet high, seven feet wide, and a foot deep—standing in the middle of the room. Canvas had been stretched across their frames, and the material glowed, lit by electric lights sealed inside the boxes. At first, all I noticed were their surfaces: hallways, stairs, windows, and doors painted in muted colors—browns, ochers, deep greens, and blues. Steps led to a ceiling with no access to another floor. Windows opened onto brick walls. Doors lay on their sides or were tilted at impossible angles. A fire escape seemed to crawl through a hole from a painted outside to a painted inside, bringing a long cluster of ivy with it.
A covering that reminded me of Saran Wrap was pulled tightly over the fronts of the three painted boxes. Texts and images had been impressed into the plastic, leaving an imprint but no color. The effect of these words and pictures was more subliminal than anything else, because they were hard to make out. Near the bottom of the right-hand corner of the third box was a three-dimensional man, about six inches tall, dressed in a top hat and a long coat. He was pushing on a door that appeared to be ajar. Looking closer, I saw that the door was real. It opened on a hinge, and through the crack I could see a street that looked like ours—Greene Street between Canal and Grand.
Erica found a door in the first box and opened it. Drawing close to her, I peeked into a small room, harshly lit by a miniature ceiling lamp that shone on an old black-and-white photograph that had been pasted to the far wall. It showed a woman's head and torso from behind. The word SATAN had been written in large letters on the skin between her shoulder blades. In front of the photo was the image of another woman kneeling on the ground. She had been painted on heavy canvas and then cut out. For her exposed back and arms, Bill had used pearly, idealized flesh tones reminiscent of Titian. The nightgown she had pulled down over her shoulders was the palest of blues. The third figure in the room was a man, a small wax sculpture. He stood over the cutout woman with a pointer, like the ones used in geography classes, and seemed to be tracing something onto her skin—a crude landscape of a tree, a house, and a cloud.
Erica withdrew her head and said to Violet, "Dermagraphism."
"Yes, they wrote on them," Bill said to me. "The doctors traced their bodies with a blunt instrument and the words or pictures would appear on their skin. Then they took photographs of the writing."
Bill opened another door, and I looked into a second room in the same box. Its back wall was covered with the painted image of a woman looking out a window. Her long dark hair had been pulled to one side to bare her shoulders. The style of the painting was straight from seventeenth-century Holland, but Bill had complicated the image by lightly drawing over it in black. The drawing was of the same woman, but the style of the rendering was different, and the sketch on top of the painting made me feel that the woman was standing with her own ghost. Written twice on her arm, once with red paint and once with black crayon, was: T. BARTHÉLÉMY. The letters appeared to be bleeding.
"Didi-Huberman mentions Barthélémy," Violet said. "He was a doctor somewhere in France who wrote his name on a woman, and then commanded her to bleed from the letters at four o'clock the same afternoon. She bled, and according to the report, the name remained visible for three months." I continued to look into the small illuminated room. On the floor in front of the painting of Augustine were tiny articles of clothing—a petticoat, a miniature corset, stockings and tiny boots.
Violet pulled open a third door. This all-white room was lit from above by a small electric chandelier. A tiny painting in an ornate gold frame had been propped against the back wall. The canvas showed a fully dressed man and a naked woman in what appeared to be a hallway. You couldn't see the woman's face, but her body reminded me of Violet's. She was lying on the floor as the young man straddled her back. Gripping a large pen in his left hand, he appeared to be writing vigorously on one of her buttocks.
The middle box had two doors. Behind the first was a small doll who made me think of Goldilocks—long blond curls, checkered dress, and white pinafore. The little figure was having a tantrum. Her eyes were screwed shut and her mouth was stretched wide in a silent scream as she clamped her arms around a pole that divided the little room in half. In her fit she had contorted her body to one side so that her dress had twisted up around her waist, and when I scrutinized her little face more closely, I saw that a long bloody scratch ran down one of her cheeks. On the walls that surrounded her, Bill had painted ten shadowy male figures in black and white. Each man was holding a book and had turned his gray eyes toward the howling girl.
The second door in the middle box contained a black-and-white painting that resembled a photograph from the Salpêtrière. Bill had used one of the photographs of a woman in a crucifixion pose to render his version of Geneviève, a young woman whose medical ordeals had mimicked the trials of saints—paralysis, seizures, and stigmata. Four Barbie dolls were lying face-up on the floor in front of the photo-painting. Blindfolds had been tied around their eyes and their mouths were taped. As I studied the dolls, I noticed that words had been printed on the mouth tapes of the three first dolls: HYSTERIA, ANOREXIA NERVOSA, and EXQUISITE MUTILATION. The fourth tape was blank.
The third box, with its lone figure at the bottom pushing open a door, contained two other well-hidden doors. I found the first one, its knob disguised among a dozen others that had been painted in a trompe l'oeil style. I looked into a brightly lit room that was much smaller than the others. On its floor lay a miniature wooden coffin. That was all. Erica opened the last door to reveal another nearly empty room. It had nothing in it except a dirty, ragged piece of paper with the word key written on it in a tiny cursive hand.
Erica bent down to examine the little sculpture of the man in the top hat walking out the door to Greene Street. "Is he a real person, too?" she said.
"She," Violet said. "Look closely."
* *
I crouched down beside Erica. I could see the figure's breasts underneath the jacket. The suit looked large. It bagged at her ankles.