Spiritus Ex Machina by LC von Hessen

Author:LC von Hessen [von Hessen, LC]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: StoryBundle
Published: 2021-08-07T04:00:00+00:00

THE MEDIUM AND THE MESSAGE

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts

H. Lee Upton, MFA Candidate

The problem of the Red Canvas began in the 1960s with a half-dozen unwitting Boston transit workers. During excavations for a subway expansion project in the city’s North End, an MBTA construction team drilling into a weathered brick wall unearthed a hollow passage not shown on the official map of the subterranean infrastructure. Venturing inside, they found a stone floor covered with fine bone fragments—described by the foreman on duty as sounding like “a carpet of seashells” when crushed under the soles of his work boots—alongside a few mummified rat carcasses and a rolled-up length of stiff material sagging against the far wall. Encrusted with four decades of black mold and rodent droppings, the bolt of fabric was about to be discarded with the rest of the detritus until one of the crew members, a former art student who had been forced to leave his studies during the Korean War, recognized the item as a painter’s canvas.

The canvas was hauled out to the nearest subway platform and unfurled by the team with care and trepidation. Measuring 18’ by 24’, it was wide enough to droop over the platform’s edges. Slowly, an image was revealed: a great field of intermingled reds in a mottled assemblage of scarlet, rust, and crimson. As the canvas was splayed open before them, its curious composition revealed to the open air for the first time in decades, some workers spoke of an overwhelming rancid odor or an unshakable ringing in their ears. One of the men reportedly had to lean over and vomit onto the tracks (Boston Herald, 1965).

On closer inspection, the canvas was shown to have the distinctive looping signature of artist Richard Pickman in its lower right-hand corner. Returned to Pickman’s surviving family, the painting was deemed Untitled (Red Canvas)[fig. 1]. It remained in storage for the next twenty years.

Renewed critical appraisal of Pickman’s work in the late 1980s led to an extensive restoration project including Untitled (Red Canvas), which made its debut at a retrospective of local artists at the Miskatonic University Museum in 1994. It encompassed an entire wall of the museum and was taken down after less than a month, as the painting’s exhibition was plagued with mystery and scandal throughout. Many patrons complained of dizziness, nausea, and general unease in the painting’s presence, such that the curator posted a vaguely-worded warning notice at the exhibit’s entrance by the end of the first week. Adjustments to the gallery’s lighting scheme seemed to make no difference.

Further bizarre—and tragic—events followed. A heavily pregnant woman complained of strange, pungent smells emitting from Red Canvas and was shortly thereafter rushed to the ER, where she went into premature labor. The body of her stillborn child was marked with extensive disfigurement that had somehow failed to register on the ultrasound. Days later, 52-year-old public relations director Gwendolyn Knapp—a library volunteer, philanthropist, and grandmother

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