It was late in the morning of a warm spring day a few years back, right after I’d finished my morning class. I was settling in to do a little paperwork before taking a noon-hour stroll to grab some lunch and check out the new buds on campus. One of my hipper, but more laid-back colleagues tapped lightly on my office door.
Would I be willing, he asked, to come hear a lecture by an Italian conceptual artist he’d invited to speak on campus that day? Forgetting to advertise the event (like I said, he’s laid-back), he was afraid no one would show up. Now he was trying to scare up enough warm bodies to make the auditorium look something better than empty.
“Sure,” I said, silently kicking myself for having been snared so easily. I followed him out into the hall to join a quietly shuffling group consisting of a couple of other hapless professors who also couldn’t say no, and forty or so students dragooned into attending by their teachers.
As we filed into the auditorium, I sized up our lecturer. A tall, fairly attractive woman, she stood shyly to the side of the lectern. Her dark hair was wrapped inside a checkered bandana and she wore a black leather jacket festooned with meaningless silver grommets and a pair of tight jeans. After a brief introduction, in which my colleague explained that the artist lived and worked in Rome and, for a reason not explained, was extremely famous in the Czech Republic, the lights went low and a slide popped up on the screen: a close-up shot of a pile of dog poop. The lecturer began speaking in an oddly agitated voice that was barely above a whisper, in heavily accented, absolutely wretched English.
“In America,” she began, “You very much must now learn that…” and then I lost her. The next couple of blurry images depicted some sort of small sewage treatment plant either in or near Rome. Or maybe it was Sicily. Or the Czech Republic. Or possibly even in New York, since America seemed to have something to do with it. Here and there I was hearing words such as “capitalist Americans” or “vile American imperialists.” I couldn’t, however, manage to catch any verb telling me what, exactly, we vile Americans were doing with sewage that was bothering her so much.
I was trying hard, listening with all ears and scanning her images for clues. But for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what this woman was talking about. Somewhere along the way, she showed a photograph of the interior of an artist’s studio—hers, I think, although even that wasn’t clear. Inside the studio were a couple of chairs and a few rolled up drawings stacked in the corner, along with a flag of the Czech Republic. The lecturing artist said nothing, moving quickly along to, “Next I show you…”—and there we were, back to sewage plants again. This time, we were treated to close-up shots of water running in large, open gutters.
“What the hell is she talking about?” I finally whispered into the ear of one of the other shanghai’d professors. “Damned if I know,” he whispered back.
Images of parks, buildings, sewage plants, flags of Italy and the United States, smiling people, more sewage plants, excrement, dogs, and cats all succeeded one another in quick succession. With each image, the lecturing artist would say, “This means that…” and then tail off into incoherence. And it wasn’t just her accent. She was getting more and more upset, gesticulating wildly. What had possessed me to sit up front? Why hadn’t I thought to grab a seat on the aisle, or better yet, in the back, close to the exit? Meanwhile, in the seats behind me, students were fidgeting noisily in their chairs.
We were deep into the lecture, but still no signs of a wrap. But the artist’s agitation, her frenzied passion about something bad that Americans were doing to the world on account of—well, shit—told me this woman wasn’t finishing up anytime soon. Between each image and her inevitable words, “This picture shows that…,” the door to the auditorium was starting to open and close quickly. The students were sneaking out, first one at a time, then a stampede. Me, I was doomed. Why hadn’t I hidden under my desk when I heard that knock on my office door?
“I am so sorry that…”—this time she seemed to be talking slowly. Maybe she’d finally run out of images! But no! My god, I couldn’t believe it: More! An image of a park with some old people sitting on a bench elicited another garbled sentence, although I heard the word “excrement” clearly embedded in it. Then came the images of the cats, dogs and gutters of water all over again.
In the dim light, I could still manage to make out the time on my watch: She’d been going at it an hour and 15 minutes. The second hand was now the death of a thousand cuts, the minute hand a thumbscrew. The lecture had slipped into eternity, or else I’d turned into a bit actor in Groundhog Day. Images of sewage, excrement, and strange man-made waterways would stream endlessly, long past the final death throes of the universe. My stomach ached, knowing it was not only going to miss lunch, but had probably lost its chance at even a Coke. The lecturer said, “I want now to show…”—and on came an image of her earlier work, back when she was young. I put my head in my hands and thought briefly of charging the lectern, shoving her aside and ripping the microphone out of her grasp.
Finally, somehow—maybe she just plain pooped out—the stream of words ceased. Bliss arrived in the form of the conceptual artist from Rome, famous in the Czech Republic, possessed by a fixation on the evils of capitalism, America, and doo-doo, saying—obviously quite pleased with herself—“Thank you.”
