"The Defiler"

The public washrooms adjacent to the Altarpiece Gallery in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs are rarely occupied in the mornings midweek, particularly in the offseason. These facilities are designed to offer stillness and tranquility, complementing the museum’s overall solemn and unfussy atmosphere. They’re well-maintained and always in good order, housing toilets of durable construction and reliable, brisk plumbing. The tiles are fresh, the mirrors clean.

And so, entering with one’s mind swirling from the dignified exhibitions and collections, the arabesques and parquetry and tapestries, the reproductions of eighteenth-century drawing rooms, one rightfully expects only silence, a quick reprieve, then a return to the day’s explorations. It’s jarring, then, as one’s eyes wander a stall’s interior, to discover an aberration, a vicious slash of red marring the wall’s pristine white.

In thick daubs of Estée Lauder lipstick, what was immaculate was now befouled: SADDAM HUSSEIN SWINGER LIFESTYLE.

Clarence once told me how as a child he’d been possessed by an energy so palpable, so overpowering, it had nearly killed him. As he told it, between the ages of eight and thirteen he’d suffered intermittent spells of what his stumped physicians variously diagnosed as dramatic hormonal spikes, hypomanic disorder, even prodromal schizophrenia. He’d go on these tears of destruction, laying waste to his bedroom and anything he could reach throughout his family’s house in Forest Hill. In those moments, the energy pulsating inside him would become irrepressible, eruptive, culminating in lengthy bouts of blindness—his vision wiped not to the negation of black but, as he described it, a blazing field of bright violet.

I became a thing of pure energy, he once told me. I was a giant star at the centre of a chaotic galaxy.

Only after he’d lost his virginity to one of his sister’s friends, a cataclysmic afterschool encounter in a tree-sheltered alcove behind the junior high gymnasium, did his sight fully return, the spells immediately abating. The energy itself hadn’t dimmed, he claimed; he’d only found a way to harness it. Everything he’d done and made since had sprung from that energy, what he called his pure vitality. And since then, he said, his vision was better than perfect. Clearer than clear.

He told me this years ago, when I was visiting him in Barcelona. We were sitting on the balcony of the pensión he’d rented, or really, his on-off girlfriend Agatha had rented. She’d accepted a job with a curator in L’Hospitalet, and Clarence, forever between places, between cities, had tagged along, or bullied his way there—much between them was unclear. The job had proven demanding, with Agatha enduring long hours at the office. Left alone, Clarence spent most of his days on the fire escape, drinking beer and shouting at passersby, mostly people he deemed ugly.

There’s a lot more ugly people in Barcelona than you’d think, he told me.

He was in a sour mood that day. A short review of a show by one of his art school foes had just appeared in Flash Art. In it, Clarence’s name had been dropped, describing him dismissively as a disreputable sloganeer-cum-satirist. He wasn’t particularly irked by his former rival’s success. What really set him off was any implication that his work would be taken as satirical.

Satire is weak, he growled. It’s pabulum. I slap it with my moist dick.

Across the street, a man in a bright-pink scarf pulled up on a bicycle, skipping off his seat with a springy finesse.

That dude has a face like a snail, Clarence said.

He leaned over the railing, hoisting aloft his half-empty beer bottle, readying to launch it. I said: wait, no, don’t. But it was too late; he’d found his target.

Hey snailface, he called. The man looked up, and Clarence wound the bottle back, quarterback-style, spilling suds onto himself. Again, I pleaded: don’t.

He did.

The footage of the televised segment, as archived online, appeared to have been shot off another computer screen by a mobile phone held in a jittery hand. The degenerative piling of these multiple layers of lenses and processing lent it a gauzy, distant aura, each broadcast another marker of time in the telling and retelling of this particular story, itself shrouded in multiple layers of uncertainty.

It was a local newscast, from Clarence’s hometown in Burnaby. An anchor at his desk introed the segment, describing a strange situation that had left many townsfolk angry and confused and looking for answers. The anchor cut to a reporter, live at the scene of the incident, a neighbourhood park, busy on a bright spring day. The reporter set up the scenario: the annual Easter egg hunt, a local tradition that kids, families, excitedly awaited each season. But when this year’s hunt began, the reporter said, and the kids leapt into action to scour the park’s bushes and collect the prizes, what they found was shocking.

Cut to a woman, a Mom-type in a Canucks jersey and capris, holding up the evidence for the camera: a bread roll, the generic supermarket variety, that had somehow been inscribed with a food-colouring doodle of Muammar al-Gadafi, along with a single word in all caps: EGG.

I don’t know even know what to make of this, the woman said. You wonder what kind of person does such a thing.

The reporter nodded gravely, asking: and how did your kids feel? The concerned woman shrugged. Well, we’re mostly just happy to get them out of the house for a change.

An old acquaintance from way back had emailed the clip to me, having rediscovered it among some unknown uploader’s collection of weird findings. I passed it along to Clarence, thinking he’d get a kick out of it, or at least want it for his own archives. He never replied.

For one summer in those early two thousands one couldn’t walk around the Lower East Side without seeing those stickers: the sternly sleepy face of Ali Hassan Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti, a.k.a. “Chemical Ali,” in a scuffed-looking rendering with accompanying text in a shaky, almost childlike scrawl, FRIENDHSIP. A toss-off, the misspell intentional, a medium-funny joke. The first batch of stickers had been about five hundred, printed on label paper at Kinko’s. A larger run soon followed, printed at an actual shop. For months, you saw them everywhere: mailboxes, urinals, skateboard decks. Reports came of them showing up on the west coast, in Berlin, in Mexico City. T-shirts appeared, posters, none of Clarence’s making. And soon enough came the parodies and ripoffs.

How it’d gotten around so fast, so widely, was as much a mystery as its meaning. But this was before everything was so comprehensively networked, so indiscriminately proliferated and instantly annulled. What he did had no strategy, no range. It simply occurred.

Around that time, Clarence was interviewed on public access television, a well-intentioned but dorky program shot in a community arts facility in East Harlem. Another obscure artifact, since archived and uploaded by someone somewhere. To see it now is to see Clarence half-there: glassy-eyed, cokey, evasive. To the nervous host’s prompts, he offers mostly grunts and sniffs. Images of his most recent canvases were shown, detailed collages consisting mostly of young women hoisting up their shirts and sticking out their tongues, spattered with clots of spraypaint. But about a minute into this torturous non-interview, some internal shift occurs, and he comes to life. He looks at the camera dead-on, to some unwitting accomplice.

There’s a forest, he says, a huge and sprawling forest of huge trees. We experience it. We feel all the magnificence. The timeless wonder. The roots under the soil, digging and spreading. The branches, reaching for the sky. Then, hey, here comes me. With a chainsaw.

We never talked about money back then. Some of us had it; most of us didn’t. Some of us worked jobs, while others didn’t. Most of us fell somewhere in between: by daytime we did what had to be done to get by, then spoke little of such things by nighttime.

Clarence’s father was the co-founder and chief investment officer of Delaware Capital, later The DAC Group, pioneers in risk parity, currency overlay—one of those hedge funds that occasionally made the news, usually in the most reviled terms. His mother had staked a considerable claim of her own in publishing, championing several lauded prizewinners during a long editorial tenure with an imprint of FSG, serving prominently on the board of a Stockholm-based humanitarian organization. These were people with names, of names.

All this was known. Clarence never hid or denied his family’s affluence. To the contrary, this upbringing seemed to only spur him to unseemlier lows, grislier misconduct, more drastic instigations. Unlike other, lesser, upstarts, he embraced what he opposed. It meant more coming from him—or so went the thinking. The very premise of privilege was more fuel to be burned; all was defiance, lowliness, butchery. Questioning where all that energy might go wasn’t worth the bother. Intent was the thing. Thrust. Fire. Vitality.

Sometime around the decade’s turn, Clarence was awarded a generous project grant by the Canada Council. Over the years he’d submitted countless applications, to no avail. Maybe the juries hadn’t recognized any value in his lewd, always unforgiving, output. Maybe his proposals—forever last-minute, frenzied, rife with typos—were simply too sloppily conceived to persuade anyone of his worthiness. Either way, for too long he’d watched his contemporaries infiltrate that particular inner sanctum of public funding and mainstream approval while he slithered on the margins.

When the notice of approval came in, he was elated. Not for the money, which he certainly didn’t need, though he was glad to take it. And not because it might suggest he’d been bestowed legitimacy, accepted into some imagined world of respectability. Mostly he was happy because he’d managed, as put it, to dupe those self-appointed custodians into opening their wallets. It was all a joke, and we were all its butt.

On the day the cheque came in, Clarence took a bunch of us out for drinks at the Hooters on Adelaide, his favourite spot when back in Toronto. He was in rowdy spirits, ordering us trays of tequila shots and spicy wings. His mania was infectious, unbridled. Some of us had commitments beyond that moment—newborns at home, next-morning meetings, dietary pledges. But we went along with it, in honour of our friend, in honour of his hunger.

Nearing last call, Clarence climbed atop a barstool and shouted for our attention.

From this moment forward, he announced, raising his glass, I deem myself the deliverer of a greater glory. I hereby dedicate my life to the emancipation of mankind’s soul.

Blood, denim, asphalt, tempera. Acrylic gouache, guitar strings, plaster, pubic hair, aerosol paint. Stainless steel, menses, terracotta, glass shards, spandex. Polypropylene suture, aluminum glitter, alizarine ink, oil pastel. Vomit on linoleum, vomit on brick, vomit on flesh.

In our younger days, our contempt was boundless. No matter how fuzzy our goals, how inarticulate our claims—we could flourish, it was felt, by the very rawness of our ire. Energy alone was enough.

But time did what time did. Our hairlines abandoned us; our waistlines warped. We skirtingly engaged with our loathed enemies. We purchased property and reproduced, just as we’d seen so many chumps before us do.

Eventually, tossed around by experience, we viewed our plight with greater clarity, something like nuance. We knew more; we had better vocabularies. Where once we’d sneered at the wrongness of the infernal system, in the humdrum softening of our forties we capitulated to its demands. However resentfully, we came to believe compromise was just part of getting by.

That once-teeming energy dwindled. Weighing what it would take to dethrone our foes, we found we simply didn’t have it in us.

By some metrics, we’d caved; by others, we’d bought in. But these were old paradigms, the vexations of an era passed. Pranklike stunts and staged confrontations were now commonplace. Nothing had been truly shocking in quite some time. The badness of the world was a contourless monstrosity, and to simply sneer at it all no longer helped in lighting a path forward.

But as we doubted and fretted, Clarence kept churning out work, jabbing his ashy thumb in the monster’s eye. Forever the hoodlum, the trickster, the punk. Every joule of his internal force, that pure vitality, drove him to defy what the rest of us had accepted as incontrovertible, even as fewer and fewer of his enemies noticed.

In a profile that ran in Juxtapoz, its writer described visiting Clarence’s studio as like heading into a job interview, only to realize with sinking dread that you’d been roofied. Heading in from the alley behind an auto shop on Geary Street, everything appeared clean, crisply sterile. Industrial-grey metal doors, a foyer with keypad entry, floors lined with bulk polyester carpets.

Passing through another set of doors, one was swept into something between a circus and a slaughterhouse. Floors to ceilings slathered in spewing thicknesses of monochromatic paints, scathing floodlights and twists of neon tubing, mirrored glass at all angles. Exposed plumbing blasted in Krylon, heaps of paper and foam and rubber. Everywhere, abandoned sculptures, ravaged canvases, mayhem of metal scrap and medical apparatus. A place stripped of shadows, dimensionless.

And at its epicenter: Clarence himself, stripped to his briefs, wielding a bright-pink Ibanez electric guitar plugged into a squealing fifteen-watt Silvertone amplifier. The writer described waiting as he shredded Van Halen riffs at deafening volume without acknowledging her presence. Only when his B-string snapped did he stop playing, pitching the guitar into a pile of corrugated cardboard discards. Even then, lying prone on the cement floor, he refused to answer any questions until the writer fetched them a Family Feast meal from Popeyes Chicken. Of course, she’d agreed.

At the time of this profile, Clarence hadn’t shown any work publicly in almost four years. The few images that had trickled out in the interim suggested an emphasis on studio work, large-scale graphics and canvases. Less performance, no stunts. The Juxtapoz article was intended to run in advance of a highly anticipated show about to open at Regen Projects. It proved an excruciating read, Clarence alternately self-lacerating and pumped up on braggadocio that came across as forced.

My shit offers solutions to all the world’s problems, he was quoted, but it requires interpretation. And everyone’s too sniveling and cowardly to recognize what’s right in front of them. Or maybe just too stupid.

The piece concluded with the writer confessing to a mix of admiration and disquiet on leaving the studio. Clarence was clearly in a stage of reinvention, but whether he had any control over this invention was yet to be seen.

The show was well-attended, widely written about. The general consensus was it demonstrated a new depth of technique, a heretofore unseen commitment to traditional forms. But this, some said, came at the expense of the insolence that had once made Clarence so magnetic. Lost was any trace of that impudent bravado; silliness was off the menu. Where before his work offered the vision of a self-absorbed but effervescent mythmaker, now it was entirely about defacement, defilement, desecration. No more Polaroid hard-ons, no bodily fluids, no needles chunked with residue. Now it was all abstract slashes and slayings, vitiated prisms, charred lines, ruins. Paul Klee at the end of a ketamine binge, one critic said.

As soon as the show closed, Clarence announced he was shuttering his Toronto studio, but gave no indication of where he might relocate. Stuck at my teaching job in New York and unable to attend the show, I tried repeatedly to get in touch with him, just to see how he was doing. But he was unreachable.

Everything was digital now, but Clarence remained doggedly analog. He was no luddite; he was the avid user of a vast suite of dating apps—one likely reason why Agatha and all the other women in his life eventually gave up on him.

No, his distaste for technology came from the particular remoteness the online world provided. The daintiness of it. Everything on the internet either stuck around too long or was too swiftly erased, and no one was forced to own up to anything. The kind of messes he liked to make had to be scrubbed away by hand.

And yet, after a lengthy spell of laying low, he unexpectedly emerged as an energetic and prolific online presence. At first he mostly shared closeups of works in progress, nonsequitur jpegs, reposts of vintage Powell-Peralta clips. Tributes to graffiti artists and troublemakers he’d grown up with, many who hadn’t made it out of their thirties. Then came daily videos of himself, usually puffing a joint, riffing on pseudoscientific theories and alarmist invectives on mass surveillance. As the ranks of his followers, mostly young men, swelled, he met their demands by posting with increasing frequency. The posts quickly devolved into damning tirades on immigration, reproductive rights, the very notion of equality.

Those of us who’d known Clarence from the early days recognized his bratty, contrarian ways, and assumed these latest moves to be just another incarnation of that impulse. He was just stirring up static, we assumed. That was what he did.

But the fiery polemic raged on, morphing further into accusation, paranoia. Nemeses were everywhere. He condemned the commercial art world as a playground for pedophiles. He praised despicable Hungarian despots and mocked trans comedians. And the crueler his taunts, the more his popularity increased; he was hailed by his commenters as a no-fucks beast god.

Yes: time did what time did.

Snowstorms had pummeled northern New Brunswick in recent weeks. But then came warmer days, spring’s thaw, and with it, flood advisories. I’d checked the reports in advance, but still wasn’t prepared for the resistance I faced navigating the deluged backroads along the Tobique River, toward Oxbow. Fighting the slushy water, the tires spinning at each trench, I worried if the rental Sentra would even make it.

But I pushed on, further into the forest, eventually arriving at the address I’d been given, a barely discernible driveway leading uphill to a bright-yellow farmhouse. I parked at the driveway’s end and walked up, passing a rusted late-seventies Mercedes, buried to the headlights in a half-melted snowbank. It looked like some sort of creature might have made its nest in the back seat.

Clarence came out to meet my arrival. He moved slowly, with a noticeable limp, but appeared pleased to see me. I was taken aback at how much weight he’d gained; when he took me in for a vigorous hug, his embrace was full, sort of over-encompassing. It felt good.

The farmhouse was a simple three-room bungalow, built, Clarence told me, in the fifties. Clapboard, exposed rafters, plank floors, a wood stove. In the front room, Davi sat reclined on a couch under blankets, watching something on a laptop. A grey-white terrier mutt lay curled next to her. When Clarence introduced me, Davi welcomed me with a smile that seemed sincere, then immediately returned to her screen. Clarence gave the dog a firm scratch on the crown of its skull.

This is Old Jim, Clarence said. Came crawling half-dead out of the woods and now he’s my best friend. What a dope.

In the kitchen, he pulled a flat of tallboys out from a lower shelf, palmed two, then exchanged them for two cold ones from the fridge. We sat at a table overlooking the front yard, both of us drinking our beers maybe too quickly, and soon we were each opening a third.

The farmhouse had been left to Davi and her sister by their grandparents, he explained, but until recently she’d barely ever been out here, and the place had sat neglected. For years she and Clarence had both lived transiently, drifting wherever circumstance led. Then she’d received her diagnosis, and living that way was no longer possible. It made sense to move here, to sack down and stay level, as he put it. To their mutual surprise, they’d found deep satisfaction in making a home for themselves like this. Patching it up, clearing the land, coaxing the ancient well back to life—it was a new kind of insanity, he told me, an obsession like art, except you had something nice to show for it all other than blood in your piss and self-loathing. Plus, wait times at the hospitals out east were half those in the bigger cities.

I hadn’t known Davi before then, but I’d seen her photos online: flipping the bird in front of her colossal murals in Santiago and San Francisco, competing in kung fu tournaments, puffing oversized spliffs in elevators. A life’s highlights, shoved into the world in vibrance, in fun. But those pictures were all from before.

These doctors are all corrupt, Clarence said. I thought science was supposed to be open-minded. But to them, every idea’s a bad idea unless it’s their idea. Cervical cancer’s one hundred percent defeatable, but you have to have courage and do your own research. These pussy-ass experts, all they care about’s putting patios on their cottages in Muskoka. The whole thing’s antilife.

Davi was on bevacizumab, alongside a minor dosage of olaparib. I knew nothing about such things, but according to Clarence it was all very expensive, and with Davi an American, and for so long at no fixed address, she’d been deemed ineligible for coverage. Thankfully, her mother, an anthropology professor in Missouri, was working things with her own plan to keep costs low, at least for now. Still, bills were mounting, and more treatment lay ahead.

I wondered why, given Clarence’s own family’s vast wealth, they were living such a precarious existence. Then I recalled one of his videos, one of the few I’d been able to stick with for more than a few minutes, in which he’d described at length his family’s excommunication. His family was terrified of the truths he’d chosen to expose, he told his viewers, severing all ties with him for having the principles to decry the system that had provided them such bounty for so long.

Old Jim came sauntering into the kitchen, blinking sleepily. I leaned over and scratched his head as Clarence had. Old Jim leaned into my fingers’ crawl, his black eyes narrowing with pleasure. It had been a long time since I’d hung out with a nice dog. Like the hug, like the beer, it felt good.

Clarence went on for a while about the spruce forests, their untamed abundance, and how he’d recently taken up one of Davi’s grandfather’s compound bows to hunt jackrabbits and weasels, so far to zero result. I wanted to ask him about the current status of his art: what he’d been doing lately, if anything. I wanted to ask whether he ever gave any thought to his older work, that impudent formative stuff, where it’d all ended up and how he felt about it now. I wanted to know if he’d ever bothered to watch that video of the Easter egg hunt, a moment still so great because there was really nothing to get, it was just pure provocation, even though no one—even him, I
imagined—knew precisely what was being provoked. Maybe he’d disowned all those old hijackings and onslaughts. Or maybe re-experiencing it now, degraded by reproduction, by time, by isolation from the whens or wheres, would be antithetical to what he’d first intended to do: to boggle minds, to force a confrontation with something happening at the moment of its happening, to transform an ordinary moment into an emergency.

I wanted explanations for the notoriety he’d since cultivated, to understand what was really behind all the abhorrent garbage he’d been disseminating. I wanted to know what he truly believed in—now, and ever. I wanted him to tell me why I’d been so eager to travel all that way just to get a light afternoon beer-buzz with him in his kitchen. I wanted him to explain to me why I, and many others, still paid him any attention.

But seeing him measuring out Davi’s medications, helping her to sit up and holding her tremoring hands as she swallowed palmfuls of pills with a mug of watermelon juice, whisking mascara crumbles from her cheeks then easing her back onto the couch—I didn’t ask anything. I finished my beer and prepared to leave; it was already dark, a long drive back lay ahead, and it didn’t seem like I’d be invited to stay.

As he walked me to my car, Old Jim trailing close behind, Clarence caught me noticing his limp.

All those years of skating and fucking around, he explained. Permanent damage to the tibialis posterior. I get these spasms down my calves at night, drives me bonkers. Getting old blows.

Only later, after I’d flown back on the same tiny commuter plane that had taken me from LaGuardia to Edmundston, after I’d returned to my own home and family and all my exasperations and tedium, did I try to connect this present incarnation of Clarence to what he’d once said about the force that had driven him so, the uncurtailable energy, the self-proclaimed pure vitality that he’d said would emancipate mankind’s soul. What a strange thing to say about one’s self.

Weeks later, I received a package in the mail. Rectangular, about 7” x 10”, no return address. I opened it to find a small painting, a cheap cotton canvas slapped with acrylics. What it depicted was a beach. White sands, viewed at a distance from an indistinct point above, the sky a smear of radiant violet. On this beach, a dog stood at the shoreline, looking out at a hazy, waveless ocean, its jaws wide. Across the upper third of the painting, hovering above the water, were traces of something written, some text in blocky characters. But whatever it said had been painted over,  rendering it to ghostly remnants. All that was left for the dog to bark at was a smooth and clear horizon.