《渺小一生》:走出门，进入一个没人认识他、他可以成为任何人的世界。
“Mark my words: that kid is going places,” or “It’s so rare to meet someone who’s going to be a truly self-made star at the start of their career,” his father would often announce to Malcolm and his mother after talking to Jude, looking pleased with himself, as if he was somehow responsible for Jude’s genius, and in those moments Malcolm would have to avoid looking at his mother’s face and the consoling expression he knew it wore.
“记住我的话：那个小子前途无量。”或者“能在一个白手起家的大人物事业的起点就认识他，真是太难得了。”他父亲常常在跟裘德谈话后，这么跟马尔科姆和他母亲宣布，一脸得意，好像裘德的才华他也有功劳，而那些时刻，马尔科姆都得避免看他母亲的脸，心知她脸上一定是安慰的表情。
Things would also be easier if Flora were still around. When she was preparing to leave, Malcolm had tried to suggest that he should be her roommate in her new two-bedroom apartment on Bethune Street, but she either genuinely didn’t understand his numerous hints or simply chose not to understand them. Flora had not seemed to mind the excessive amount of time their parents demanded from them, which had meant that he could spend more time in his room working on his model houses and less time downstairs in the den, fidgeting through one of his father’s interminable Ozu film festivals. When he was younger, Malcolm had been hurt by and resentful of his father’s preference for Flora, which was so obvious that family friends had commented on it. “Fabulous Flora,” his father called her (or, at various points of her adolescence, “Feisty Flora,” “Ferocious Flora,” or “Fierce Flora,” though always with approval), and even today—even though Flora was practically thirty—he still took a special pleasure in her. “Fabulous said the wittiest thing today,” he’d say at dinner, as if Malcolm and his mother did not themselves talk to Flora on a regular basis, or, after a brunch downtown near Flora’s apartment, “Why did Fabulous have to move so far from us?” even though she was only a fifteen-minute car ride away. (Malcolm found this particularly galling, as his father was always telling him brocaded stories about how he had moved from the Grenadines to Queens as a child and how he had forever after felt like a man trapped between two countries, and someday Malcolm too should go be an expat somewhere because it would really enrich him as a person and give him some much-needed perspective, etc., etc. And yet if Flora ever dared move off the island, much less to another country, Malcolm had no doubt that his father would fall apart.)
如果弗洛拉还住家里，他也会轻松一点。当初她在贝休恩街租下一间两室公寓、准备搬出去时，马尔科姆曾想过要当她的室友，但她若不是真的听不懂他的百般暗示，就是根本在装傻。弗洛拉似乎不介意父母硬要占用掉他们太多的时间，这表示他就有更多待在自己的房间弄模型屋的时间，而不用在楼下的休息室陪他父亲看那些没完没了的小津安二郎的电影。小时候，马尔科姆曾因为父亲比较疼爱弗洛拉而伤心怨恨，那实在太明显了，连一些世交朋友都会说他偏心。“非凡弗洛拉。”他的父亲这么喊她（或是在青少年的不同时期，喊她“强悍的弗洛拉”“凶猛的弗洛拉”或“犀利的弗洛拉”，不过总是带着赞许的意思），即使现在弗洛拉都30岁了，还是特别能得到他的欢心。“非凡弗洛拉今天说了一件超聪明的事情。”他会在晚餐桌上这么说，好像马尔科姆和他母亲平常都没在跟弗洛拉讲话似的；或者，在弗洛拉公寓附近的闹市区吃过早午餐后说：“非凡弗洛拉为什么要搬得这么远？”即使只有十五分钟车程而已（这件事尤其令马尔科姆火大，因为他老爸总爱讲起他小时候如何从格林纳丁斯群岛移居到皇后区的种种精彩故事，说从此他总觉得自己像是被困在两个国家之间，还说有朝一日马尔科姆也该移居到国外哪个国家，因为那真的可以让他整个人变得更丰富，给予他一些迫切需要形成的观点，等等，等等。但换了弗洛拉，别说要搬离这个国家，只要她敢搬出曼哈顿，马尔科姆都很确定他父亲非崩溃不可）。
Malcolm himself had no nickname. Occasionally his father called him by other famous Malcolms’ last names—“X,” or “McLaren,” or “McDowell,” or “Muggeridge,” the last for whom Malcolm was supposedly named—but it always felt less like an affectionate gesture and more like a rebuke, a reminder of what Malcolm should be but clearly was not.
马尔科姆没有小名。偶尔父亲会用另一个也叫马尔科姆（Malcolm）的名人姓氏喊他——“X”，或是“麦克拉伦”“麦克道尔”“马格瑞基”。马尔科姆的名字应该就源于马格瑞基，但感觉这样喊他不是出于关爱，而像是一种指责，提醒他马尔科姆该是什么样，而显然他没做到。
Sometimes—often—it seemed to Malcolm that it was silly for him to still worry, much less mope, about the fact that his father didn’t seem to like him very much. Even his mother said so. “You know Daddy doesn’t mean anything by it,” she’d say once in a while, after his father had delivered one of his soliloquies on Flora’s general superiority, and Malcolm—wanting to believe her, though also noting with irritation that his mother still referred to his father as “Daddy”—would grunt or mumble something to show her that he didn’t care one way or another. And sometimes—again, increasingly often—he would grow irritated that he spent so much time thinking about his parents at all. Was this normal? Wasn’t there something just a bit pathetic about it? He was twenty-seven, after all! Was this what happened when you lived at home? Or was it just him? Surely this was the best possible argument for moving out: so he’d somehow cease to be such a child. At night, as beneath him his parents completed their routines, the banging of the old pipes as they washed their faces and the sudden thunk into silence as they turned down the living-room radiators better than any clock at indicating that it was eleven, eleven thirty, midnight, he made lists of what he needed to resolve, and fast, in the following year: his work (at a standstill), his love life (nonexistent), his sexuality (unresolved), his future (uncertain). The four items were always the same, although sometimes their order of priority changed. Also consistent was his ability to precisely diagnose their status, coupled with his utter inability to provide any solutions.
有时候，应该说经常，他担心父亲似乎不太喜欢他，甚至为此郁闷，这让马尔科姆觉得很蠢，就连他母亲也这么觉得。“你知道爹地说那些话没恶意的。”每次父亲又在赞叹弗洛拉的种种优越之后，她便这么说。而马尔科姆总是哼一声或咕哝两句，表示有没有恶意他根本不在乎——他很想相信她，但也很不高兴地注意到，母亲跟他提到父亲时，还是叫他“爹地”。有时候，越来越频繁地，他对自己花那么多时间去想父母亲的事很火大。这样正常吗？这样不会有点可悲吗？毕竟他27岁了！住家里就会发生这种事吗？还是只有他会这样？当然，这是搬出去最主要的理由：他就不用再那么幼稚了。到了夜晚，当楼下的父母亲进行睡前的例行程序时（洗脸时老旧水管发出的砰砰声，关掉客厅暖气时发出空洞的闷响以及接下来的一片安静，比任何时钟都更清楚地显示那是11点、11点半还是12点），他会列出他明年必须赶紧解决的事项：他的工作（陷入停顿状态）、他的爱情（不存在）、他的性取向（悬而未决）、他的未来（不确定）。总是这四项，虽然有时先后次序会改变。同样一致的是，他有能力精确诊断自己的状态，但毫无能力提出任何解决方案。
The next morning he’d wake determined: today he was going to move out and tell his parents to leave him alone. But when he’d get downstairs, there would be his mother, making him breakfast (his father long gone for work) and telling him that she was buying the tickets for their annual trip to St. Barts today, and could he let her know how many days he wanted to join them for? (His parents still paid for his vacations. He knew better than to ever mention this to his friends.)
次日早晨醒来时，他会下定决心：今天他就要搬出去，叫爸妈不要来烦他。但等到他下楼，碰到母亲在帮他做早餐（他父亲早就出门去上班了），母亲说她今天要买他们年度旅行的机票，到圣巴泰勒米岛玩，问他能不能晚些时候跟她说要加入几天（他都不敢跟朋友说，他跟父母出门度假时，还是由他们出钱）。
“Yes, Ma,” he’d say. And then he’d eat his breakfast and leave for the day, stepping out into the world in which no one knew him, and in which he could be anyone.
“好的，妈。”他说。然后他会吃完早餐，走出门，进入一个没人认识他、他可以成为任何人的世界。
2
AT FIVE P.M. every weekday and at eleven a.m. every weekend, JB got on the subway and headed for his studio in Long Island City. The weekday journey was his favorite: He’d board at Canal and watch the train fill and empty at each stop with an ever-shifting mix of different peoples and ethnicities, the car’s population reconstituting itself every ten blocks or so into provocative and improbable constellations of Poles, Chinese, Koreans, Senegalese; Senegalese, Dominicans, Indians, Pakistanis; Pakistanis, Irish, Salvadorans, Mexicans; Mexicans, Sri Lankans, Nigerians, and Tibetans—the only thing uniting them being their newness to America and their identical expressions of exhaustion, that blend of determination and resignation that only the immigrant possesses.
每个工作日的下午5点，以及周末的早上11点，杰比都会搭地铁去他位于长岛市的工作室。工作日的这趟路程是他最喜欢的：他在卡纳尔上车，看着列车在每一站被填满又被清空，乘客族裔与人种的混合也不断变化，每隔十个街区，车厢里的乘客结构就会重组，变成各种刺激而荒谬的组合：波兰人、中国人、韩国人、塞内加尔人；塞内加尔人、多米尼加人、印度人、巴基斯坦人；巴基斯坦人、爱尔兰人、萨尔瓦多人、墨西哥人；墨西哥人、斯里兰卡人、尼日利亚人。他们唯一的共同点，就是都刚到美国，而且一副精疲力竭的样子，只有移民才会有那样混合了疲倦、坚决和认命的表情。
In these moments, he was both grateful for his own luck and sentimental about his city, neither of which he felt very often. He was not someone who celebrated his hometown as a glorious mosaic, and he made fun of people who did. But he admired—how could you not?—the collective amount of labor, real labor, that his trainmates had no doubt accomplished that day. And yet instead of feeling ashamed of his relative indolence, he was relieved.
在这些时刻，杰比会很庆幸自己运气好，同时也会为自己的城市感伤，而这两种感觉，对他来说都是少有的。他不是那种会歌颂纽约是一幅灿烂的马赛克镶嵌画的人，而且他会取笑那些歌颂者。但他欣赏（怎么可能不呢）这些同车的乘客辛劳一天必然会达成的劳动量，真正的劳动。相对而言，他的日子可就过得太安逸了，但他并不引以为耻，反倒松了口气。
The only other person he had ever discussed this sensation with, however elliptically, was Asian Henry Young. They had been riding out to Long Island City—it had been Henry who’d found him space in the studio, actually—when a Chinese man, slight and tendony and carrying a persimmon-red plastic bag that sagged heavily from the crook of the last joint of his right index finger, as if he had no strength or will left to carry it any more declaratively, stepped on and slumped into the seat across from them, crossing his legs and folding his arms around himself and falling asleep at once. Henry, whom he’d known since high school and was, like him, a scholarship kid, and was the son of a seamstress in Chinatown, had looked at JB and mouthed, “There but for the grace of god,” and JB had understood exactly the particular mix of guilt and pleasure he felt.
这个感觉，他只和亚裔亨利·杨讨论过，只不过所谓的“讨论”极其简略。当时他们一起搭地铁去长岛市（其实，当初就是亨利帮他找到这个工作室的），看到一个精瘦的华裔男子，右手食指最后一个指节吊着一个沉重的柿红色塑料袋，好像他再也没有力气或意愿提得更牢了。他走过来，跨坐在他们对面的座位上，双腿交叉、双臂交抱，立刻睡着了。他跟亨利从高中时代就认识，他父亲是唐人街的裁缝，两人都常拿奖学金。那一刻，亨利看着杰比，用嘴型无声地跟他说：“要不是上帝恩典，我们也会一样的。”杰比完全懂得那种罪恶又高兴的感受。
The other aspect of those weekday-evening trips he loved was the light itself, how it filled the train like something living as the cars rattled across the bridge, how it washed the weariness from his seat-mates’ faces and revealed them as they were when they first came to the country, when they were young and America seemed conquerable. He’d watch that kind light suffuse the car like syrup, watch it smudge furrows from foreheads, slick gray hairs into gold, gentle the aggressive shine from cheap fabrics into something lustrous and fine. And then the sun would drift, the car rattling uncaringly away from it, and the world would return to its normal sad shapes and colors, the people to their normal sad state, a shift as cruel and abrupt as if it had been made by a sorcerer’s wand.
杰比喜欢这些工作日傍晚的地铁之旅的另一个原因就是光。列车隆隆驶过大桥时，阳光就像某种活物般充满车厢，把乘客们脸上的倦意一洗而尽，让他们仿佛回到初抵这个国家的时刻，那时他们还年轻，觉得自己可以征服美国。杰比看着那样的光像糖浆般充满车厢，在乘客的额头染出沟纹，替白发髹上一层金，把廉价衣料的刺目炫亮抚平为一种光辉而细致的色泽。然后太阳移动位置，列车毫不留情地隆隆行驶，把太阳甩在后头，于是整个世界又恢复了平常的那种凄惨色调，乘客们也回到平常的凄惨状态，那转变残忍又突然，简直像是魔法师变出来的。
He liked to pretend he was one of them, but he knew he was not. Sometimes there would be Haitians on the train, and he—his hearing, suddenly wolflike, distinguishing from the murmur around him the slurpy, singy sound of their Creole—would find himself looking toward them, to the two men with round faces like his father’s, or to the two women with soft snubbed noses like his mother’s. He always hoped that he might be presented with a completely organic reason to speak to them—maybe they’d be arguing about directions somewhere, and he might be able to insert himself and provide the answer—but there never was. Sometimes they would let their eyes scan across the seats, still talking to each other, and he would tense, ready his face to smile, but they never seemed to recognize him as one of their own.
杰比喜欢假装自己也是他们中的一个，但他知道自己不是。有时车上会有海地人，这时他的听力会忽然变得像狼一般灵敏，从周围的低语中辨识出克里奥语中那种稀里呼噜、唱歌似的声音，然后他会不自觉地望向他们，看着那两个跟他父亲一样生着圆脸的男子，或者那两个像他母亲一样有着平坦阔鼻的女人。他总希望自己能碰到一个极其自然的原因，好跟他们讲话（或许他们正在争辩某个地方该怎么走，这样他就可以插嘴告诉他们答案），但从来没有过。有时他们一边交谈，一边用目光扫视周围的座位，杰比就会很紧张，准备露出微笑，但他们好像从来没认出他也是他们中的一分子。
Which he wasn’t, of course. Even he knew he had more in common with Asian Henry Young, with Malcolm, with Willem, or even with Jude, than he had with them. Just look at him: at Court Square he disembarked and walked the three blocks to the former bottle factory where he now shared studio space with three other people. Did real Haitians have studio space? Would it even occur to real Haitians to leave their large rent-free apartment, where they could have theoretically carved out their own corner to paint and doodle, only to get on a subway and travel half an hour (think how much work could be accomplished in those thirty minutes!) to a sunny dirty space? No, of course not. To conceive of such a luxury, you needed an American mind.
当然，本来就不是。就连他也知道，他跟亚裔亨利·杨、马尔科姆、威廉，甚至跟裘德的共同点，都比跟眼前这些人要多。看看他：他在法院广场站下车，走三个街区到以前的玻璃瓶制造厂，那里现在是他和其他三个艺术家合租的工作室。真正的海地人会有工作室吗？真正的海地人可曾想过要离开他们宽敞的、理论上可以在里头画画或闲晃的免费公寓，只为了搭半个小时地铁（想想这三十分钟可以完成多少工作），到一个有阳光的肮脏空间？不，当然不会。要领略这样的奢侈，你就要有一颗美国人的心。
The loft, which was on the third floor and accessed by a metal staircase that made bell-like rings whenever you stepped on it, was white-walled and white-floored, though the floors were so extravagantly splintered that in areas it looked like a shag rug had been laid down. There were tall old-fashioned casement windows punctuating every side, and these at least the four of them kept clean—each tenant was assigned one wall as his personal responsibility—because the light was too good to squander to dirt and was in fact the whole point of the space. There was a bathroom (unspeakable) and a kitchen (slightly less horrifying) and, standing in the exact center of the loft, a large slab of a table made from a piece of inferior marble placed atop three sawhorses. This was a common area, which anyone could use to work on a project that needed a little extra space, and over the months the marble had been streaked lilac and marigold and dropped with dots of precious cadmium red. Today the table was covered with long strips of various-colored hand-dyed organza, weighted down at either end with paperbacks, their tips fluttering in the ceiling fan’s whisk. A tented card stood at its center: DRYING. DO NOT MOVE. WILL CLEAN UP FIRST THING TOM’W P.M. TX 4 PATIENCE, H.Y.
这是LOFT改装的工作室，在三楼，上楼要经过一道金属楼梯，只要有人踏上楼梯，总会发出敲钟般的叮咚声响。工作室里白墙白地板，不过地板碎裂得太严重了，于是有些地方看起来像是铺了粗毛地毯。室内四面都有高高的老式双扇窗，他们四人各自负责保持一面墙上窗子的干净，因为光线太好了，不能让灰尘糟蹋掉，何况租这里当工作室主要就是因为采光。这层楼有一间浴室（脏到难以形容）和一个厨房（稍微没那么恐怖），而楼的正中央是一块劣质大理石放在三个锯木架上所组成的大桌子。这是共享区，哪个人若是手上正在进行的计划需要额外的空间，就可以使用。过去几个月来，这张桌子上沾了一条条粉紫色和铬黄色的颜料，还滴了珍贵的镉红色颜料。今天桌子上罩着几条各种颜色的手染透明硬纱，两端用平装书压着，硬纱的边缘在吊扇的微风中颤抖着。中央倒放着一张对折的卡片：干燥中，勿移动。明天下午会清理掉。请包涵，谢谢。亨利·杨。
There were no walls subdividing the space, but it had been split into four equal sections of five hundred square feet each by electrical tape, the blue lines demarcating not just the floor but also the walls and ceiling above each artist’s space. Everyone was hypervigilant about respecting one another’s territory; you pretended not to hear what was going on in someone else’s quarter, even if he was hissing to his girlfriend on his phone and you could of course hear every last word, and when you wanted to cross into someone’s space, you stood at the edge of the blue tape and called his name once, softly, and then only if you saw that he wasn’t deep in the zone, before asking permission to come over.
这个空间没有隔间，不过他们用防水胶带把它均分为四等分，每块五百平方英尺[1]。那蓝色胶带隔开的不光是地板，也包括墙面和天花板。每个人都会异常警惕，尊重别人的领域：你会假装没听到别人的空间里发生了什么事，即使他正在跟女朋友轻声讲电话，而你每个字都听得一清二楚；如果你要进入别人的空间，会先站在蓝胶带边缘，轻喊一声那人的名字，等到你看出他不是处在深入忘我的状态，才开口问他能不能进去。
At five thirty, the light was perfect: buttery and dense and fat somehow, swelling the room as it had the train into something expansive and hopeful. He was the only one there. Richard, whose space was next to his, tended bar at nights and so spent his time at the studio in the morning, as did Ali, whose area he faced. That left Henry, whose space was diagonal from his and who usually arrived at seven, after he left his day job at the gallery. He took off his jacket, which he threw into his corner, uncovered his canvas, and sat on the stool before it, sighing.
此时5点半，光线非常完美：奶油黄的阳光稠密油亮，充满整个楼面，仿佛列车载着他来到了一个昂贵而充满希望的地方。工作室里只有他一个人。他旁边空间的理查德晚上有酒保的工作，上午才会待在工作室，对面空间的阿里也一样。而空间在他斜对角的亨利，白天在画廊工作，下班后到这里通常是7点。杰比脱掉外套，扔在角落里，然后打开画布，坐在画布前的凳子上，叹了口气。
This was JB’s fifth month in the studio, and he loved it, loved it more than he thought he would. He liked the fact that his studiomates were all real, serious artists; he could never have worked in Ezra’s place, not only because he believed what his favorite professor had once told him—that you should never paint where you fucked—but because to work in Ezra’s was to be constantly surrounded and interrupted by dilettantes. There, art was something that was just an accessory to a lifestyle. You painted or sculpted or made crappy installation pieces because it justified a wardrobe of washed-soft T-shirts and dirty jeans and a diet of ironic cheap American beers and ironic expensive hand-rolled American cigarettes. Here, however, you made art because it was the only thing you’d ever been good at, the only thing, really, you thought about between shorter bursts of thinking about the things everyone thought about: sex and food and sleep and friends and money and fame. But somewhere inside you, whether you were making out with someone in a bar or having dinner with your friends, was always your canvas, its shapes and possibilities floating embryonically behind your pupils. There was a period—or at least you hoped there was—with every painting or project when the life of that painting became more real to you than your everyday life, when you sat wherever you were and thought only of returning to the studio, when you were barely conscious that you had tapped out a hill of salt onto the dinner table and in it were drawing your plots and patterns and plans, the white grains moving under your fingertip like silt.
杰比租下这个工作室超过四个月了，他很爱这里，比原先预想的更爱。其他三个共享这个工作室的人，都是非常踏实、非常认真的艺术家，这一点让他很满意；他在埃兹拉的那层楼里绝对没办法工作，不光是因为他相信自己最敬爱的教授有回跟他说的“你绝对不能在你打炮的地方画画”，也因为在埃兹拉的那层楼里工作的话，周围总是有一堆半吊子艺术家，不时会来打扰你。在那里，艺术只是某种生活方式的配件。你画画、雕塑或搞一些很逊的装置艺术，是因为这样就可以名正言顺地穿着旧T恤和脏牛仔裤，很讽刺地喝廉价美国啤酒、抽昂贵的手卷美国香烟。然而在这里，做艺术是因为你这辈子真正擅长的只有这个。平常，除了一些短暂的时刻，你心里想的事情跟其他人没有两样：性爱、食物、睡觉、朋友、金钱和名声，可是在内心深处，无论你是在酒馆里跟某人亲热，或是跟朋友吃晚餐，你总想着你的画布，各种形状和可能性像胚胎般在你脑子里漂浮。每幅画或每件作品都会有一段时间（或者至少你希望有）让你觉得，那幅画的生命变得比你的日常生活更真实；不管你人在哪里，只想回到工作室；你会不知不觉在餐桌上倒出一堆盐，在上头画出你的布局、样式或图面，白色盐粒有如粉砂般在你的指尖下移动。
He liked too the specific and unexpected companionability of the place. There were times on the weekends when everyone was there at the same time, and at moments, he would emerge from the fog of his painting and sense that all of them were breathing in rhythm, panting almost, from the effort of concentrating. He could feel, then, the collective energy they were expending filling the air like gas, flammable and sweet, and would wish he could bottle it so that he might be able to draw from it when he was feeling uninspired, for the days in which he would sit in front of the canvas for literally hours, as though if he stared long enough, it might explode into something brilliant and charged. He liked the ceremony of waiting at the edge of the blue tape and clearing his throat in Richard’s direction, and then crossing over the boundary to look at his work, the two of them standing before it in silence, needing to exchange only the fewest of words yet understanding exactly what the other meant. You spent so much time explaining yourself, your work, to others—what it meant, what you were trying to accomplish, why you were trying to accomplish it, why you had chosen the colors and subject matter and materials and application and technique that you had—that it was a relief to simply be with another person to whom you didn’t have to explain anything: you could just look and look, and when you asked questions, they were usually blunt and technical and literal. You could be discussing engines, or plumbing: a matter both mechanical and straightforward, for which there were only one or two possible answers.
他也喜欢工作室里那种明确、意想不到的友好气氛。有时周末刚好每个人都在，在其中的某些时刻，他会从他画中的浓雾里走出来，感觉到所有人因努力专注而呼吸急促，近乎喘息。然后他可以感觉到空气中充满他们散发出来的集体能量，像瓦斯，可燃烧且带着甜味，让他恨不得把这些气体装瓶，等到他觉得没灵感的时候（他会呆坐在画布前好几小时，好像只要盯得够久，画布就会自己变出某种明亮而充满能量的东西），就可以从里头吸几口。他喜欢完成等在蓝胶带前、朝理查德的方向清清嗓子的仪式，然后再跨过边线去看他的作品，两个人沉默地站在作品前，只需交换寥寥数语，就能完全明白对方的意思。你以往花了那么多时间向别人解释你自己、你的作品（作品的含义，你试图达到的目标，为什么你想要达到，为什么你选择这些颜色、主题、材料、手法和技巧），一旦碰到一个完全不必解释的人，真是一大解脱。你只要耐心看作品就好，等你提出问题时，它们通常是坦率、专业、没有弦外之音的，就像在讨论发动机或铺设水管——很具技术性且直截了当，只有一两个可能的答案。
They all worked in different mediums, so there was no competition, no fear of one video artist finding representation before his studiomate, and less fear that a curator would come in to look at your work and fall in love with your neighbor’s instead. And yet—and this was important—he respected everyone else’s work as well. Henry made what he called deconstructed sculptures, strange and elaborate ikebana arrangements of flowers and branches fashioned from various kinds of silk. After he’d finish a piece, though, he’d remove its chicken-wire buttressing, so that the sculpture fell to the ground as a flat object and appeared as an abstract puddle of colors—only Henry knew what it looked like as a three-dimensional object.
他们四个人的表现方式都不同，所以彼此间没有竞争，一个录像艺术家不必烦恼自己比工作室的室友先找到代理画廊，也不必担心某位策展人来看你的作品，结果却爱上了你邻居的。然而，有一点很重要，大家也尊重其他每个人的作品。亨利做的是他所谓的解构式雕塑，用各种丝制品塑造出奇异而精致的日式插花。不过他每完成一件作品，就会拿掉支撑的铁丝网，于是雕塑摔到地上，变成一个平面对象，像是一摊抽象的色彩——只有亨利知道原先立体的模样。
