The Fat Artist And Other Stories - Plot & Excerpts
This is a modus of being quite distinct from “fat person.” Obviously, I am that as well; at my peak weight I believe, though unfortunately I cannot prove, that I was the heaviest (such is the admittedly crude rubric/analogue I have necessitated to adopt to read: “fattest”) person alive, moreover, possibly ever to have lived. While fat person indeed I may be, in my anomalous case, that of the Fat Artist, the adjective fat, applied to the noun artist, modifies not so much the man as the art. Fat is not (not just) a descriptor of the matter contained within my corporeal boundaries (i.e., my body—what in the quaintly benighted days of mind-body dualism would have been called on the gravestone I do not at this late stage hope to have, “ ‘all that [was] mortal’ of Tristan Hurt”). I am an artist, and fat is the medium in which I work. I have made my body into an art object.I certainly do not presume to suggest my project is an unprecedented one.I (I bore myself with the usual mentions: Abramovic, Acconci, Finley, Burden, Orlan, et al.) However, I shall maintain unto my death, which—as I sit here on this rooftop, unable to move, without food or water, alone and naked (as opposed to nudeII), abandoned, forgotten and forsaken by the world—I presume is imminent, that I have suffered uniquely and (if I may so flatter myself) more terminally than other artists who have adopted their own bodies as their primary medium.I am thirty-three years old (please, should there be any gloss of the messianic over the age of my death, know that it is entirely accidental) and I am about to die.• • •When I was young—and at thirty-three I am young yet, although (Nos morituri te salutamus) I am about to die—I was a handsome man.
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