The Caress

The Caress

Greg Egan

So I called an on-line Britannica, and said “Lindhquistism”.

Andreas Lindhquist, 1961-2030, was a Swiss performance artist, with the distinct financial advantage of being heir to a massive pharmaceutical empire. Up until 2011, he engaged in a wide variety of activities of a bioartistic nature, progressing from generation sounds and images by computer processing of physiological signals (ECG, EEG, skin conductivity, hormonal levels continuously monitored by immunoelectric probes), to subjecting himself to surgery in a sterile, transparent cocoon in the middle of a packed auditorium, once to have them swapped back (he publicized a more ambitious version, in which he claimed every organ in his torso would be removed and reinserted facing backwards, but was unable to find a team of surgeons who considered this anatomically plausible).

In 2011, he developed a new obsession. He projected slides of classical paintings in which the figures had been blacked out, and had models in appropriate costumes and make-up strike poses in front of the screen, filling in the gaps.

Why? In his own words (or perhaps a translation): The great artists are afforded glimpses into a separate, transcendental, timeless world. Does that world exist? Can we travel to it? No! We must force it into being around us! We must take these fragmentary glimpses and make them solid and tangible, make them live and breathe and walk amongst us, we must import art into reality, and by doing so transform our world into the world of the artists’ vision.

The Caress. Photo by Elena

I wondered what ARIA would have made of that.

Over the next ten years, he moved away from projected slides. He began hiring move set designers and landscape architects to recreate in three dimensions the backgrounds of the paintings he chose. He discarded the use of make-up to alter the appearance of the models, and, when he found it impossible to find perfect lookalikes, he employed only those who, for sufficient payment, were willing to undergo cosmetic surgery.

His interest in biology hadn’t entirely vanished; in 2021, on his sixtieth birthday, he had two tubes implanted in his skull, allowing him to constantly monitor, and alter, the precise neurochemical content of his brain ventricular fluid. After this, his requirements became even more stringent. The “cheating” techniques of movie sets were forbidden – a house, or a church, or a lake, or a mountain, glimpsed in the corner of the painting being “realized”. Had to be there, full scale and complete in every detail. Houses, churches and small lakes were created; mountains he had to seek out – though he did transplant or destroy thousands of hectares of vegetation to alter their color and texture. His models were required to spend months before and after the “realization”, scrupulously “living their roles”, following complex rules and scenarios that Lindhquist devised, based on his interpretation of the painting’s “characters”. This aspect grew increasingly important to him:

The precise realization of the appearance – the surface, I call it, however three-dimensional – is only the most rudimentary beginning. It is the network of relationships between the subjects, and between the subjects and their setting, that constitutes the challenge for the generation that follows me.

At first, it struck me as astonishing that I’d never even heard of this maniac, his sheer extravagance must have earned him a certain notoriety. But there are millions of eccentrics in the world, and thousands of extremely wealthy ones – and I was only five when Lindhquist died of a heart attack in 2030, leaving his fortune to a nine-year-old son.

(Excerpt from The Year’s Best Science Fiction, eighth annual collection, edited by Gardner Dozois, 2008)