The hospital is deliberately made to outlast us, to still be standing when we’re gone. There is a clear critique of the ephemerality of people, the way they reliably perish. The hospital would seem to gloat; not in the personified sense. Can a piece like this be faulted for its desire to feel more lifelike than we do? One pleasing feature of the piece is that you can reach into the space surrounding the bed. You cannot touch the bed itself, for some reason. The bed is off-limits. But you can handle the space around the bed, digging your fingers into the cloth where the patient’s loved ones are hiding their faces. With practice and focus, you can feel the faces inside the cloth, and they seem to actually respond to your touch. One has one’s hand kissed. One feels tears against one’s palm.
Years later, as the piece ages, the room and the bed and the cloth are gone. We do not see them removed, they never appear to decay. But they do not survive the passage of time. What remains of the piece are the lifelike bodies—living bodies, one surmises—hovering in space. The floor is gone. What remains of the hospital is too little to remark on. It would seem that the entire hospital has been removed with surgical precision. The area where the hospital was is brighter than what surrounds it, as if a piece of furniture has been moved across a wood floor, exposing an unlived area just waiting to catch up to the rest of the world.
In the piece, the man who once wore the doctor’s costume but is now incomplete (“naked” would seem to be the wrong word, since he lacks finer detail) approaches the patient who, years ago, because of his bedclothes, was not visible whatsoever. Now we can see him and the effect is terrible. The patient’s loved ones, no longer hidden in cloth, but not naked either—unborn is how they also seem, their mouths unfinished, their hair not quite resolved—exist in a tangle on the side of the patient’s bed. The hospital and its host island are gone. The nearby island, tethered to a possible continent, is gone, and the extreme distance yields nothing to the observer. All that remains are the few people in what was once a room but is now nothing, even as these people begin to fade and soon leave just pale shapes, themselves dissolving slowly into nothing that can be named.
The hospital recalls a time when the entire world was referred to as Potter’s Island. A certain era is evoked when we lived on the graveyard. The hospital suggests that it is a myth that there are zones of earth in which bodies are not buried. It is a myth that some areas of the world are graveyards while some are not. One might accidentally, and infrequently, walk across a plot of earth in which, upon which, people have not been smeared away, hidden in soil once their time finished, but the chances are small. The chances may be nonexistent. The dead are beneath us, but the air contains the dead as well.
One strains not to be too judgmental of such work. While the project is ambitious, it is deeply imperfect. It celebrates the sorrow of knowing nothing. It revels in bafflement. It asks us to admit that we might not really be living. It seems to invite us to die without understanding even the most basic principles.
Perhaps we might be more sympathetic to the creator. Water is so hard to get right. It is difficult to do shorelines. The horizon is next to impossible. Horizons have never been done well. They cannot be forced, but so often they are forced, and then they are disgraceful. Hospitals are tricky, but not just hospitals. The people in them. The people outside them. People, in or out of buildings, on the ground, floating, at rest. People conjoined, people alone. Such a disgrace when they are not done right and they have never been done right. They are done badly, all the time, and then soon that is simply the way people are always done—with bodies and eyes, with feelings, so finally conventional, so deeply unimaginative—and something disgraceful becomes the norm. The norm is the hospital. The norm is people on their beds, having trouble breathing. Not breathing, in truth, is the norm. If a true norm must be spoken of, it would have to be not breathing, not moving, no longer living. Taking into consideration all the people who have ever lived. The norm would be to be dead. One must admit that being dead has become the norm.
A vacant hospital might have been easier for this artist, set in a vacant lot, itself situated in an empty space free of obstacles, a space so pure that no one could enter it. Perhaps no one could even know about it. A smaller, contained project, through which this creator could test out ideas more safely. Vacant vehicles to flow in and out of the empty hospital, across transparent roads, discharging vacancy, creating no impact whatsoever on the surroundings, which has never been achieved. That might have been a better apprentice work. Or simply the hospital itself, without a lot, without a site, absent a landscape. A real hospital for today, satisfying all of today’s true needs, if that’s not too much to ask. A hospital twisting in space. Less complicated. But space is hard. Rarely has depth been done well, for instance. Ever? Often it seems so melodramatic. One cannot recall a time when space has been done well. Sometimes evening is believable. Sometimes. Should one—one must ask—stop desiring what has never been achieved? Is this hospital, in its near miss of authenticity, meant to remind us how finally unreal everything will always feel, or is such an effect simply too old-fashioned to commend?
One thing this piece does impeccably well is to use wind to create feeling. On the island a wind, created in the usual way, travels around objects, cooling them, but that’s not all. The wind is not created with any special technique. It is as technologically simple as it ever was, but this creator has a special feel for the use of wind. This creator is, without question, a genius in the use of wind in spaces both outdoors and in, a wind that follows one home from the hospital, across the realistic waterway, back to the adjacent island, itself so deeply real one feels an enduring confusion, a confusion one must now conclude is wind caused. This creator has fashioned a wind that does not leave you alone, even as you enter your home, which was created especially for this project, and even as you crawl into your highly vivid, full-scale bed made of real materials, this wind follows you, encircling you, holding you rather coldly as you wait, perhaps forever, for more understanding. Even if one will never arrive at this fuller understanding, this wind makes one certain that such an understanding is out there, however finally unavailable to people like us.
Lotion
A child was sick in Kansas. He had fever. His father prodded him awake, dressed him, led him outside in the dark morning for chores. The child slumped and the father raised him upright, propped him on the machine. When the father turned away the child fell, seemed to die. The father drove the child to water and sank him at the head, lowering his body into the cold lake, but the child sputtered and cried. Back at the house, in the front yard, the father warmed the child’s body in the sunshine, shook him to rouse him. The father slapped the child, as he’d seen done to other children who would not respond, and the child sat up and cried, looking at his father with fear. The child’s sister came and struck her father, climbed on his back. She was too small and could not stop her father and yet he stepped away. He was afraid now.
The doctor came in the evening and measured the child’s temperature, tested his limbs for heat, for bloat, drew a vial of blood. There was a fever, but no infection, no mistakes heard in the child’s cavity. The boy was tired and should rest. Yet something other was afoul. Had the child, the doctor asked, been down a well or in a cave by the lake, or had the child tasted something dead. What is this, the doctor asked, scraping something from the child’s body. The doctor wiped the child’s mouth with a rag, then sniffed the rag. He questioned the child and the child grew soft and loose in his arms. There was no indication of poison’s nine signs but there was the listlessness of the child, its cold body. There was the unidentifiable paste the doctor had removed from the child, a whitish glue, a tacky gum. Had something been scraped on the child or pierced him or had the child been operating any of the yard machines without his mask, breathing too much of their smokes and fumes? The father did not think so but he agreed with the doctor that they would treat the child as though he’d been harmed from the outside. They took him to his room and they waited each day for the child to rise as ever, to commence his day’s chores, but the child kept to his bed and took no food and allowed himself only enough water to soothe his mouth. He would not read and he no longer sang in the morning, before his family had woken. When his family visited his room, the child did not look at them. He no longer spoke. At times, from downstairs, they thought they could hear him speaking, in the voice of an older man, calm and mature, but when they arrived in his room the child was silent and perfectly still, staring at the wall, hardly breathing.