Gaslight

By Slava Korin

A darkly humorous jaunt into the contemporary, as seen through the dualistically tinged eyes of someone undefined. Steve Novick, a prosperous artist finds a higher ground and new friends, in a battle against oppression.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: BareBooks
• Release date: Sep 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9798985965841

Slava Korin

Slava Korin is an artist, designer and writer living in Brooklyn, NY.

Book preview

1

Romanticism

It was our sixth year living together. I moved in just after our fourth date. He became my dealer after the second date, which was actually a real date. The first date was just a studio visit, but we ended up at Veselka at midnight after finishing my bottle of whiskey, the night of his first appraisal of my work. He said that it was, Impressive. A bold move that would modify the fundamental direction of art. In your postmodernist appropriation of Suprematism, you are conjoining the organization required by the work with the sensibility needed to achieve the image. I see how you’ve taken from Malevich and found a metaphysical purpose for the various forms. Your shapes combine to divine an image, a meaning from thin air, it almost seems unintended. Completely nonself-referential. You’ve become the instrument and given the action of painting its own power. It looks like nothing and then pow, a form, a word from the beyond. That’s what he said, and I fell in love. I wasn’t a Suprematist then and I am not one still, nonetheless, Jakob Rosenberg became my new art dealer and boyfriend.

We just had another argument and I left, finding more comfort in my studio, where luckily, I have a sofa as well. I left because it’s his apartment. Every bit of it resounds with his taste and selection; over the glass dining table, a large colorful work still gets some attention during dinner parties and off to the side of the Roche Bobois patterned sofa, a smaller piece with shards of dark tones has a moment. In our bedroom where he hung his first selection from my earlier work, a painting with irregular squares forming the body of a man that could only be seen with some focus. My work has a place in his home, however, I’m not sure if I ever had one, which was disappointing to realize so late in our relationship. Better late than never. The fights began recently with what seemed like some grumpiness following a gathering at Phoebe’s apartment uptown. Phoebe is Jake’s partner in the gallery, they met while interning at Barry Moone gallery, years ago, and instantly became friends from what they told me and others, repeatedly. He loves her big hair and hutzpah, and she loves having a hopelessly gay male to suck on when her relationships go sour, being a self-proclaimed bachelorette, without any want of a husband or children. Lovers and boyfriends, as meaningless as possible, in every shape and color. The beau at this fete was a strapping young mixed-race man, Latino-Asian maybe; couldn’t be more than twenty-four, high buttocks and a short-cropped head of curly hair. Sven, that is his name (a Norwegian grandmother), was in the Benneton ad that rolled by me as I crossed ave A the other morning on my way to get a coffee. He was so excited that someone recognized him when I mentioned seeing him that we passed the better part of dinner chatting about the stress level of that photo shoot and art. I tried to explain my art to him, and we ended up discussing cartoons—for me they were early Sunday morning cartoons from childhood, his experience was mostly streaming. I remembered my middle school art history report, the one that delved into the origin of cartoons. I was an avid comics collector as a child and I shared what I could with my fellow enthusiast. What I learned from my research: the word cartoon actually meant a sketch during the Renaissance, referencing the pasteboard used as the surface for the drawing. DaVinci, in his studies did draw many caricatures of Florence’s citizens, noting chins and noses, with humor. Then Bosch’s demonic incarnations in The Garden of Earthly Delights chirped, gurgled and hooted as a new class of figurative forms, amusingly teasing the viewer, entreating an allowance into the art world that once existed in the anamorphic forms of Egyptian art. Centuries later, a newspaper in England took up the satirical cause by publishing humorist drawings of the royal family, leading into a weekly publication of cartoons known as Punch. The first were drawn out political assassinations in the form of caricature egging the upper strata with a socialist sensibility. These drawings recalled the momentum gained with the story, The Emperor’s New Clothes, in which an emperor is convinced to pretend at wearing exquisite new garments for fear that if he did realize there were no actual garments, he would be deemed stupid, as the purpose of the garments was to determine the stupidity of those who could not see them. Later, I continued, Toulouse-Lautrec was one of the first to study Japanese prints, which with their flat bold colors and definite outlines, frozen images with a sense of baroque influenced his own colloquial posters and with the development of Modern Art must have brought about the modern-day cartoon characters of animation; not as politically murderous, although still ripe with humor and satire depicting our flaws in archetypes, heroic and evil. Thundercats, Smurfs, when we reached He-Man —Sven rose from his seat, clasped his hands around an imaginary sword and cried out loud with an expressed childish vigor, By the power of GraySkull! I was forced to respond with, I have the power. Phoebe didn’t mind at all, I assumed, she had the rest of the evening into morning with Sven. Jake on the other hand was distraught and displayed his jealousy after we left the party with a choice comment in the car ride back downtown, surprising our driver to some extent, who snapped his head avoiding a turn.

Were you expecting to fuck Phoebe’s boy toy? Was what he said to me.

Not at all, we were just making conversation. He’s very sweet. I think she found a good one, I replied and pushed the button to lower the window a few inches and let in a breeze.

You would think that. Jakob turned to face me directly peering through his black-rimmed glasses.

Are you talking about our parent’s tax brackets again?

Never mind, I just wanted you to give me a little more attention this evening. We’re planning another group show—we would both love one of your works in the show.

I thought you wanted me to work on a solo presentation?

We have this group show programmed first, he said and turned away to face out of his window.

That was that. My show was moved out until a later date. That was about six months before the hospital, near the end of spring. I remember because the evening air coming through the opening in the window already had a warmth and sweetness.

This fight, the one that led me to the studio sofa was even more stupid and obviously turned out worse. I came home late is what happened. Too late for his cooking, homemade ravioli. He had attempted to time the occasion perfectly; he had only made ravioli twice before. I lost track of time at the studio while stretching a new canvas; when I finally arrived, the pasta was already hard and stuck together, less disappointing than the look on Jake’s face, hard as well and contorted into a new type of dreadful.

How dare you? he said and I responded, I think you’re overreacting, it’s just pasta.

It wasn’t just pasta to him. As he explained it, he only made the ravioli on the anniversary of my first sold out exhibition, unfortunately not my first show at the gallery, rather my second. A momentous occasion for my art dealer, I understood, who found me at a discreet graduate school show, my final project, and raised me to an established Lower Eastside gallery. His gallery with Phoebe…the somewhat acclaimed Negative Space, known for snatching the finest Yale, Cornell and NYU have to offer of the young American artist. I am his discovery. I’m sure I might have otherwise found a different gallery to call home. Jake offered a smooth ride out of academia and up into the clouds with other well-known artists. He was a stickler for punctuality, and I forgot the time. It caused a fight that lasted the better part of the evening, as I stood and watched him uncurl his face with each word of the scolding. He sat at the dining table, the most perfect bouquet of peonies and lavender stealing my attention from his disappearing scowl, with the now grayish-yellow ravioli plated under his face and another plate at my usual place at the corner of the table. The bottle he opened shown a dark shadow of the remaining wine through the green glass, half full. I couldn’t smother his tirade as he continued to berate me in a sloshing, yet eloquent way, denouncing my sense of timing and respectability, not only as a part of that relationship, also as a person sadly. Untrue, as I usually attempt an agreeable comportment, sincere in my fraternal outreach. I apprehended this event as an exaggeration, which simply called for a new box of pasta to be opened; I assumed the sauce was still good. He finished off with,I don’t know why you bothered to come back at all. I responded wordlessly by leaving the apartment and returning to the studio, from where I ordered a pizza pie and fell asleep covered by the extra plaid I kept.

***

Hey Jake, it’s me again. You’re already fifteen minutes late. Should I order? Should I leave? Why aren’t you answering?

I pressed end on the phone and placed it softly on the table right next to my unrolled cloth napkin, empty plates, filled water glasses and a breadbasket, a tin of bread, semolina, rustica and mini baguettes. I’m surprised they even sat me without him.