The atrocity exhibition Read Online Free Page B

own self-constructed persona. One can mechanically spin sexual fantasies around all three, but the imagination soon flags. Unlike Taylor, they radiate no light.
    A kind of banalisation of celebrity has occurred: we are now offered an instant, ready-to-mix fame as nutritious as packet soup. Warhol’s screen-prints show the process at work. His portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy drain the tragedy from the lives of these desperate women, while his day-glo palette returns them to the innocent world of the child’s colouring book.
     

CHAPTER TWO
THE UNIVERSITY OF DEATH
    The Conceptual Death . By now these seminars had become a daily inquisition into Talbot’s growing distress and uncertainty. A disturbing aspect was the conscious complicity of the class in his long anticipated breakdown. Dr Nathan paused in the doorway of the lecture theatre, debating whether to end this unique but unsavoury experiment. The students waited as Talbot stared at the photographs of himself arranged in sequence on the blackboard, his attention distracted by the elegant but severe figure of Catherine Austin watching from the empty seats beside the film projector. The simulated newsreels of auto-crashes and Vietnam atrocities (an apt commentary on her own destructive sexuality) illustrated the scenario of World War III on which the students were ostensibly engaged. However, as Dr Nathan realized, its real focus lay elsewhere. An unexpected figure now dominated the climax of the scenario. Using the identity of their own lecturer, the students had devised the first conceptual death.
    Auto-erotic . As he rested in Catherine Austin’s bedroom, Talbot listened to the helicopters flying along the motorway from the airport. Symbols in a machine apocalypse, they seeded the cores of unknown memories in the furniture of the apartment, the gestures of unspoken affections. He lowered his eyes from the window. Catherine Austin sat on the bed beside him. Her naked body was held forward like a bizarre exhibit, its anatomy a junction of sterile cleft and flaccid mons. He placed his palm against the mud-coloured areola of her left nipple. The concrete landscape of underpass and overpass mediated a more real presence, the geometry of a neural interval, the identity latent within his own musculature.
    Obscene Mannequin. ‘Shall I lie down with you?’ Ignoring her question, Talbot studied her broad hips, with their now empty contours of touch and feeling. Already she had the texture of a rubber mannequin fitted with explicit vents, an obscene masturbatory appliance. As he stood up he saw the diaphragm in her handbag, useless cache-sexe . He listened to the helicopters. They seemed to alight on an invisible landing zone in the margins of his mind. On the garage roof stood the sculpture he had laboriously built during the past month; antennae of metal aerials holding glass faces to the sun, the slides of diseased spinal levels he had taken from the laboratory. All night he watched the sky, listening to the time-music of the quasars.
    Left Orbit and Temple . Below the window a thickset young man, wearing the black military overcoat affected by the students, was loading a large display billboard into a truck outside the Neurology department, a photo reproduction of Talbot’s left orbit and temple. He stared up at the sculpture on the roof. His sallow, bearded face had pursued Talbot for the past weeks during the conception of the scenario. It was at Koester’s instigation that the class were now devising the optimum death of World War III’s first casualty, a wound profile more and more clearly revealed as Talbot’s. A marked physical hostility existed between them, a compound of sexual rivalry over Catherine Austin and homo-erotic jealousy.
    A Sophisticated Entertainment . Dr Nathan gazed at the display photographs of terminal syphilitics in the cinema foyer. Already members of the public were leaving. Despite the scandal that would ensue he had