With our busy daily lives, most of us are merely trying to get enough hours of sleep. But at times, there is a feeling of being left out of the global party that is happening somewhere out there in the night. It’s spring, so let’s get up and go! Let’s find the spots where the nightlife is in full force, where clubs and entertainment venues are packed with booming crowds of the young and young at heart. Nightlife — it energizes with its sense of freedom, entices with its glamour and glitz, and is a prelude for love and romance. Even if its aftermath is disappointment and headaches in the morning, will we not regret it, will we have things to remember and talk about later if we don’t try? So dress up for the occasion and follow our quest around the world.

Venture with Yerevan Magazine into the night of artificial lights and synthesized sounds.

But somewhere, there is a quiet night. Let’s follow the path through Garni Gorge covered by tiny white snowdrop flowers peeking through the melting snow. The only sounds are the wind whistling through the stone arch of the bridge, the neighing of the wild horses grazing by the ancient fortress walls, and the spring night symphony of thousands of invisible birds and insects under the myriad of stars.

Whatever is your preference — partying through the night or gazing at stars, watching favorite movies or playing games with friends at home, dancing in a crowd or dining by candlelight — celebrate your life now, at this very moment.

— From the Editors of Yerevan Magazine, March/April 2012

The vignettes that make up Vishal Jugdeo’s Goods Carrier (2012) take place in a large colonial-era mansion overlooking Bombay. Playing as much of a role as the five characters who inhabit the video, the setting and city frame the interactions and conflicts that unfold between the actors, who are all Indian, with the exception of one male figure — an actor named Billy Wright whose shock of red hair and white skin always feel out of place. Wright’s character floats in and out of each scene, for the most part, an observer with little narrative intent other than that of an enigmatic foreign body double. The house, in turn, acts like an evacuated stage, an architectural fragment caught between forlorn disrepair and the timeless classicism of the colonial style.

Jugdeo’s videos often hinge on the intimate relationships he develops with his actors, but the Indian actors, the on-location domestic space, and the city of Bombay in this most recent production come to represent a shift toward geographic and cultural territories far less familiar. The breakdown of intimacy — of the ability to work comfortably with actors over extended periods of time in the comfort of a controlled studio environment — is evident throughout; a distinct subtext of foreignness permeates the work, perhaps most vividly evoked in the person of Wright, and reinforced by the fact that Jugdeo is an artist who has lived almost exclusively in North America despite being of Indo-Guyanese descent. Goods Carrier may be set in India, but it tells us very little about India as a place.

Born in Saskatchewan, Canada, Jugdeo is, for better or worse, victim to an attraction that has drawn countless artists and filmmakers to India. Perhaps especially in Los Angeles, where he’s currently based, the atmosphere of Prius-driving, buffed-out yogis and extreme forms of new-age spirituality further facilitates this mythology. “I’m in need of an ashram,” says the broken screenwriter at Buzz Coffee in Mid-City, while the recovering alcoholics that congregate outside of Café Tropical in Silver Lake tend to prefer the brand of yoga known as Bikram, for the drugged-out state it induces by temperatures exceeding a hundred-degrees Fahrenheit. The yogic tradition seems to be particularly resonant among the struggling filmmakers, actors, and writers who still gravitate to Los Angeles for potential stardom. The weight of India’s place in the cultural imagination of the entertainment industry is further underlined by the success of films like Slumdog Millionaire (2008). Of course, there have been occasions in which Jugdeo (tall, dark-skinned, handsome, cinematically exotic) has been taken for an Indian actor trying to make it big in Los Angeles, like many others.

Jugdeo, who moved from one filmmaking context to another — from Vancouver, also known as “Hollywood North,” to Hollywood proper — seems particularly well-suited for life in the industry. Jugdeo’s practice, like many who live in Los Angeles, is largely determined by the ubiquity of mainstream culture and modes of production so pervasive that almost every encounter is overwrought with performative pathos. There’s no shortage of available talent in most cinema cities — actors who will work for free in hopes of gathering material for their reels — and Bombay (that other filmmaking capital) offers the same privileges. Bombay, like any city whose film industry has become a global archetype, is caught between the idea of India-as-Bollywood, and more immediate, local forms of theatrical performance. And perhaps unlike other productions made by foreigners that have assembled massive Indian casts and crew for the purposes of conveying some other deep and distant world (think of Doug Aitken’s Into the Sun, 1999, or Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited, 2007), Jugdeo’s video employs minimal means to inhabit his own outsiderness.

In watching Goods Carrier, we’re repeatedly reminded of the remoteness of the setting, and of the seemingly unmediated picture of the world it attempts to offer. A sense of “production” imbues the images and their directed nature: Jugdeo performs the role of the mediator-auteur, even though his practice has been largely determined by the conditions made available to him in this foreign place. While the performers and setting play into a desire for Indian spirituality and sage-like wisdom, they defer and deflate any ability on the part of the viewer to elicit meaning. Goods Carrier is a work that relies as much on its occasionally hyperbolic script and constructed scenarios as it does on the improvised sense of time that emerges from the actors themselves. The resulting vignettes bear a stilted musical quality without succumbing to the more finished musical tropes of Bollywood.

More than with any other video the artist has produced to date (site or context-specific) in Vancouver or Los Angeles, Jugdeo is, in this case, subject to the conditions of his immediate context and the proficiency of a local production manager who served as his guide. His ability to navigate the particularities of filmmaking in India — of making an “art video” in the staunchly professional context of Bollywood cinema — informs and shapes the outcome of his final production, a video installation on display at the Hammer Museum as part of Made in LA, the museum’s first biennial of art from Los Angeles. In this context, separated by almost 9,000 miles from its point of origin, Goods Carrier bears the burdensome task of representing a far-off place, city, and culture.

Attempts to construct a “picture of the world” have long been at the center of Jugdeo’s practice. The works inhabit the placeless microcosm of theatrical stage sets made to resemble domestic spaces for talk-show scenarios; the world outside is only hinted at as something to be subtly transposed and introduced to the foreign and insular space of the place where they are exhibited. In Goods Carrier, the occasional appearance of windows or screens within the screen (think of the box that autonomously hovers above the left shoulder of the reporter on the nightly news) points to the strategies with which we attempt to frame our experience of the world. These non-diegetic pictures, snippets of real-life events, break the completeness of the video’s otherly context — its staged theatricality — and reveal the artist’s commitment to making images that underscore their own dichotomous relationship to fact and fiction.

I would like to think of us as magicians. We, you know, we do this and we make a picture of the world. It’s not completely made up either, it’s sort of halfway in between. You follow?

A “documentary-style” image appears in the right-hand corner of the frame at the moment these words are delivered by a male Indian actor in Goods Carrier; and with it we watch ourselves play witness to the outside world in the form of a picture. The actor’s quick outward breath summons a pixelated image of a motorcycle riding through Bombay. Just as soon as it appears, it disappears again and the scene carries on. At another point, an animated bird is directed to enter the frame, linger, and disappear again. And there’s always Billy Wright, the man with the incongruous red hair dipping in and out of scenes. Each interruption that appears in Goods Carrier seeks to both undermine and emphasize the staged nature of the exchange between performers, as well as the exchange between audience and artist, who has somehow been caught up in performing the task of mediator.

There is meaning that emerges from the poetic constructions Jugdeo uses to feed his actors as triggers — references that often point to the corruption of the outside world or the fallibility of an ailing body. But meaning, in the social sense, is fueled by the activity of working in a manner that is largely improvised. As made apparent by the diverse styles of performance that run throughout Goods Carrier, Jugdeo has adapted a directorial method that is rooted both in rigid formalism and improvisation, with an indebtedness to a history of cinema that bridges the disparity of names like Fassbinder, Cassavetes, Godard, Resnais, Altman, Mike Leigh, and Satyajit Ray. Jugdeo is able to poach from these cinematic icons, all the while developing a visual language and method of working that is entirely his own and caught, in the end, between truth and a lie.

The artist Rokni Haerizadeh has been known to depict weddings, funerals, banquets, and beheadings. The setting for these often overly elaborate and coded ceremonies has been, variously, decadent and corrupt nineteenth-century Iran, the dingy margins of the contemporary European city, or even the glittering metropolis of Dubai, where Haerizadeh has made his home since 2009.

For his latest project, the thirty-three-year-old artist turns his attentions to the pomp and gaudy gaiety of last spring’s British royal wedding, starring Prince William and his pretty field hockey-playing bride, Kate Middleton. Despite the royal family’s best attempts to suggest the event would be a democratic affair (they declared it the “people’s wedding” and invited some homeless people, too) the ceremony was, of course, a spectacle that brought the country to a screeching halt as millions turned to their televisions to witness the rich in their pyramids take part in an elaborately arcane, if not outright feudal tradition.

Haerizadeh, whose last animation work took as its subject another televised affair, the Iranian street demonstrations of 2009, filmed the wedding, all three hours of it, at home. After editing the already pixelated royal footage to a cut of roughly ten minutes, Haerizadeh broke up the ten minutes into thousands of frames (twelve thousand to be precise), printed each frame on A4 paper, and marked the surfaces with gesso, watercolor, and ink. When the sheets are all sewn together, the work will represent an unlikely, if not maudlin, take on this exploding piñata of privilege.

In one still from this work in progress, we see the familiar image of Mr. Middleton escorting his daughter in a grand procession. Her head is all but absent (so is his), and from her neck’s empty socket trails a set of little black balls that look like sex toys. The train of her bridal gown has morphed into an oversize human ear; and, from either side, what appears to be a river of blood emerges. In another still, a presiding priest’s entire face is absent, and has been replaced by a set of garish gaping jaws. Guards mounted atop horses are rendered as menacing centaurs. A state portrait of the royal family brings together a sad elephant, a horse, a toucan, a lion, and, of course, another headless apparition. That Mohammad-Reza Shajarian’s melancholy song “The Reign of Winter” — which narrates a man walking alone through the dead night of winter — is playing softly throughout, only adds to the creepy dissonance of what would otherwise be a carnival of good vibes.

This is not the first time that Haerizadeh has used animals in his work, as the anthropomorphic mode is a common one in many of his studies of human behavior — situations he sometimes refers to as “urban fairytales.” In Fictionville, exhibited at the Sharjah Biennial in 2011, televised images of heroic Iranian protests were modified to depict gazelles, giraffes, and other animals running hysterically through Tehran streets. Riot police were rendered as demons. Protesters were hapless clowns. The work’s title riffed on a storied Iranian avant-garde play written during the rule of the Shah, Shahre Ghese (or “City of Tales”), in which an allegorical animal land serves as a stand-in for some of the more trenchant political realities of the day.

Of course, you might say that Haerizadeh is interested in revisiting some of the more iconic moments of recent history. This is true. And yet still, these are intimate, absurd, and completely alternative readings of these histories. Psychological portraits are privileged over sweeping, official narratives. The trumpeter, the second cousin twice-removed, the accidental bystander — the real story resides in each of them. In this way, it is not entirely surprising that the artist was close to the late Iranian modernist sculptor Bahman Mohasses, who was similarly invested in the queer interior lives of people on the margins.

In conversation about the piece, Haerizadeh turns, somewhat surprisingly, to the storied Crystal Palace — erected to house marvels of the Industrial Revolution in London’s Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851. Assembled within the Palace’s bounds were endless markers of progress and travel: daguerreotypes, stereoscopes, a miniature scale model of New York City, a polar bear, dozens of dioramas, and all manner of manufacturing eclectica. Built improbably with endless sheets of glass and iron, the palace was hailed many times over as the very first manifestation of modern architecture in the world. Its blazing collapse some eighty-five years later, in 1936, marked a dramatic end to a structure that consolidated within its bounds the history of the British empire, the birth of global commercial culture, and the curious arc of bloated national aspirations.

Not unlike the shimmering Crystal Palace, the royal wedding shines like a beacon to the world, communicating, at best, history, sophistication, and tradition. Its choreography is a sort of architecture in and of itself, providing the scaffolding for the dissemination of beloved and berated national myths. And while it has not yet burned to the ground, Haerizadeh’s darkly comic and absurdly pixelated animation seems to point to a day in which yet another peculiar ritual might just crack into a million tragic pieces.

“I’d do anything… hug them, shout at them, beat them… Anything just so they’d win.”

The muffled voice trails over the image of a male body stretched out on a dormitory bed. His muscled back swoops down into an enviable cleft, crowned by a tuft of blonde hair only just visible under the elastic band of his swimsuit. A woman in a black spandex one-piece hovers over him, holding her torso just above his in a double odalisque. She sinks an elbow first into the spaces between his ribs, then along his spine. The cameras cut to her fingers, thick and glistening with oil, driving ridges of skin up his forearm or slipping around the backs of his heels.

The sequence is saturated with an erotic charge, but the intimacy of the exercise is undercut by the massage’s overt choreography. Even in his relaxed state, the man is aware of the camera, instructing the woman as to how to use her full weight when walking across his back: “Then you can see how it looks on camera.” She mounts him carefully, then pirouettes a big toe underneath his shoulder blade. He grunts in response: “Oh, that’s good… Oh, that’s very good…”

On the next mattress over, a young man, skinny and shirtless, turns off the television and burrows under his sheets, trying not to pay heed to the soft acrobatics in the bed beside him. He isn’t sure what to make of what’s going on in this dorm room.

This exchange constitutes the bulk of Jumana Manna’s The Umpire Whispers (2010). The fifteen-minute film follows the then-twenty-two-year-old artist as she visits her former swim coach “Dima,” five years after her last competition. By his own admission, the one-time Ukrainian champion would have done “anything” to help the teenage girls swim their best; this “anything” included post-swim full-body massages, which he considered essential to improved performance. This “anything” also seems to have included knowingly harnessing the spoils of adolescent sexuality, stirring up tension with the girls only to channel it into their competitive swimming. The film opens with an unseen conversation between Manna and her former teammate. Their voices jump up an octave as they reminisce about just how fervently they coveted their coach’s attention, how he made his swimmers feel more attractive and more desirable: “That’s the thing about him — it wouldn’t feel wrong. Like, literally, he could do whatever he wanted to me… and I was fine with it. I was happy for it.”

For their reunion, Manna reconfigures the power dynamic by insisting that this time the massages be mutual. “I wanted to talk a little bit,” she begins, her tone slightly quavering. “In relation to you as a coach and me as a swimmer.” He curtly reminds her: “There is almost no talking involved in a massage.” There is in this one, however. The conversation flits ambiguously between instruction, flirtation, and confession, as in between grunts, Manna and her coach discuss the peculiarities of their intimacy. “We would obey anything you’d ask us to do,” she protests. “Yes, but that’s not exactly how it is,” he counters. He later confesses the danger of working with “younger girls,” admitting how easy it is “to make mistakes.” If he elaborates on this point, Manna doesn’t include it in the film.

The two-channel documentation of the massage contrasts with footage of a more conventional conversation on a couch. Manna is curled up coquettishly on one corner, her legs cocked and folded beneath her, while the coach sits back in his swimsuit, legs splayed, his arm draped over his lap. His body is bulky, with a tattoo around his forearm and a gold chain around his neck. The shots of this “clothed” conversation play out as a different type of courtship; Manna smiles reassuringly at him, her attempts at cultivating a feminine mystique undermined by the cloying girlishness of her voice. Dima bluntly tells her that she lacked a natural feel for the water, but that, to her credit, instead of talent, she had determination. She wanted it, and so he wanted it for her. The image switches to a swimmer working her way across the pool. Under the water, the body moves according to different rules; the swimmer pointedly makes her body available for the camera, her hips swiveling in a way that’s as much about sex as it is about sport.

The film’s title hails from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, in which the tennis-playing protagonist suffers from a recurring dream where he suddenly cannot understand the rules of the game that he knows best. Where there was once intimate mastery, there is only anxiety:

The court is about the size of a football field, though, maybe, it seems. It’s hard to tell. But mainly the court’s complex. The lines that bound and define play are on this court as complex and convolved as a sculpture of string. There are lines going every which way, and they run oblique or meet and form relationships and boxes and rivers and tributaries and systems inside systems: lines, corners, alleys, and angles deliquesce into a blur at the horizon of the distant net.

The protagonist stands stunned, at a loss of where to serve. At the umpire’s prodding, his body remembers what his mind cannot:

The umpire whispers “Please Play.”We sort of play. But it’s all hypothetical, somehow. Even the ‘we’ is theory: I never get quite to see the distant opponent, for all the apparatus of the game.

In understanding the apparatus of her games, Manna likewise returns to the gesture. Here, the touch of her swim coach’s hand can stand in for all the sexual slippage of a woman coming of age in water. The attention to male fingers at work is even more prominent in Blessed Blessed Oblivion (2010). In this piece, made at about the same time as The Umpire Whispers, the artist attempts to catalogue the thug culture of East Jerusalem by infiltrating its most sacred spaces — the car-body repair shop, the barbershop, the gym — with her camera. The twenty-three-minute video makes clear references to Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963), but departs occasionally into snatches of dialogue. Her leading men boast of mistreating the women who love them almost as proudly as they discuss the specifics of their car wash and its mysterious, better-than-wax finish. Here, as in The Umpire Whispers, Manna solicits confessions from the men by trading on her own half-formed femininity, affecting a sort of tomboyishness that structures the work even if Manna herself never appears. And so her subjects perform for her: from jokes about sex-starved old women and their toothy vaginas to sacred poems celebrating martyrdom to conspicuous bulges, resituating their tracksuits. In a nod to Anger, the various rituals — car waxes, close shaves, bicep curls — play out to a soundtrack of Syrian, Egyptian, and Lebanese pop music. Manna makes aggressive use of the camera, punctuating the images of hands at work with intrusions into the small spaces and overlooked nooks of the male body.

The erotic unpacking of constructions of masculinity is something of a ritual in itself for Manna. For her earlier body of photographs The Shabab Series (2006–2008), she snuck into boys’ bedrooms or lured them to her car window. But the artist isn’t interested in talking about this. As in, explicitly not interested. “I’m not just the girl who makes everything about masculinity and intimacy,” she argues (a claim which may or may not be influenced by her recent enrollment in the CalArts Master’s Program in Aesthetics and Politics.) “Right now, I’m actually really interested in history, in ideological narration, in finding those precise moments that alter the way we imagine things… You know?”

One of those moments just happens to revolve around another set of hand gestures from another set of men. The gestures in question derive from a widely disseminated photograph taken on September 13, 1993, in Washington, DC, on the occasion of the official signing of the Oslo Peace Accords. In the photo, Yitzhak Rabin reaches across the podium to grasp the hand of a beaming Yasser Arafat, while Bill Clinton stands in the background grinning, his arms goofily outstretched in imitation of achievement. The silliness of the staging is brought into relief by the (only recently revealed) history leading up to that moment. The agreement had not been the product of the long ongoing “official” sessions in Washington, DC, but rather, had been secretly negotiated over what political historian Deiniol Jones has famously called “the radical intimacy of the hearth,” in a secluded spot in Norway — what would become known as the Oslo Back Channel. Despite Clinton’s prominent positioning (“almost like a feudal king,” Manna muses), the United States had only been briefed on the negotiations a month or so before the signing. The picture-perfect presentation of “Peace in the Middle East” was actually just a photo-op for an interim agreement, largely symbolic.

Manna’s interest in the event was triggered by reading the articles of historian Hilde Henriksen Waage (author of articles such as “Norwegians? Who Needs Norwegians?” and — perhaps most pertinently — “How Norway Became One of Israel’s Best Friends”). The backstory to this symbolic agreement is as fraught with secrecies and insecurities as the confessions of The Umpire Whispers’s teenage swim team, with Norway trying to play BFF to Israel, the PLO, and the United States all at once.

“As a Palestinian-Israeli with American citizenship who has spent time living in Oslo, obviously this topic appeals to me on multiple levels,” Manna says. “But overall, I’ve been thinking about how you can deal with politics without just looking at the Other.”

Manna found a like-minded observer in a fellow CalArts student, the Norwegian artist Sille Storihle. Together the artists began to research the Back Channel, a particularly difficult undertaking given — as Waage discovered — most of the documentation of the proceedings has mysteriously vanished from the archives. Whatever it was that did happen, the Back Channel allowed Norway to rebrand itself as the world’s peacemaker. The artists use this idea as a starting point for a film currently in progress, which will attempt not so much to fill in the gaps around the Accords as to think through the manufacturing of a Norwegian national myth.

Prior to the Accords, Norway had existed on the fringe of the international consciousness, not just geographically, but as a generally self-sufficient nation (that pesky entanglement with the Swedes aside) without the ideological burden of a colonial past. The country had made nods toward peace activism with its Nobel Prize (though one should not forget that this award was endowed by the inventor of dynamite.) While clearly any small, independent country benefits from the peace of its neighbors, Waage also attributes the particular appeal of high-profile peacemaking to Norway’s deeper need for recognition, “a need to be actively involved in international affairs, which was built on a strong humanitarian tradition, a bulging wallet, and a self-image that cried, ‘Norway saves the world, therefore Norway exists.’”

To canonize its ideological affiliation with peace, in 1938, Norway commissioned Henrik Sørensen to create colorful commemorative murals all around Oslo’s City Hall, where the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded. These murals make a mediated appearance in Manna and Storihle’s film as the inspiration for the backdrops of a children’s play that the artists stage. In stills from the play, costumed kids pose in storied moments of state-building, pointing to the historical narratives that have recently been rewritten to cement Norway’s heroic role. These are spliced with scenes of the countryside — a` la Nordic nature porn — that silence the idea of “the State” and instead allow the country to speak for itself.

While this film is still in process, the interest in staging and ideological narration carries over into another collaborative project with a CalArts connection: this time, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory, by faculty member Norman Klein, which explores the social imaginary of the city. “Los Angeles is sort of the West of the West,” as Manna puts it. “A type of promised land.” In her research on the city, the artist has found some unlikely parallels with Jerusalem. “Before 1948, Jerusalem was a very different city — very cosmopolitan and multicultural. There was a bohemian and even hedonistic culture that’s all been lost.” Manna envisions the project taking the form of a script following a character who moves from Jerusalem to Los Angeles. “The starting point is looking at Los Angeles and Jerusalem as two of the most imagined and mythologized, but contrasting, cities in the world. I’m thinking, if these two cities had to meet, how would it be?”

After a moment’s pause, she adds: “I don’t just want to fetishize the lost details of history, though. Somehow, I want this to still investigate the present.” After another moment, she qualifies this statement: “But there are a lot of options I’m playing with at the moment.”

One thing is clear: Manna prefers her court complex. Please play?

It is said that there are 6,909 living languages in the world. I can attest to nine of them, because precisely that number was represented among our gathering of Christians at the evangelical Ichthus Church in Lewisham, southeast London. I myself spoke two of the languages and was just beginning on a third, English.

One night I joined several hundred people in a crowded basement on Greenwich South Street to experience the Toronto Blessing, some kind of spirit that was moving transcontinentally, like a flu that affected only born-again Christians. Everyone seemed to agree that it was important that I see it for myself. Perhaps I would catch it, too.

The upstairs hall where the church often held meetings wasn’t big enough for the occasion, and they removed the seats in the basement to allow more people in. It was hard to tell what was going on, the room was so dark. The visiting preacher was on a little stage with a powerful microphone. From the back of the room where I stood, all I could see was his bluey silhouette moving up and down.

He began calmly by encouraging us to open our hearts to this amazing blessing. He then led us in a hymn without any instruments. As soon as the song finished he exploded into a torrent of words, like an auctioneer who had lost control of the faculty of speech. The congregation responded with clapping and shouting.

Then the preacher spoke calmly again in English, only to begin his thundering crescendo of words again. He went on like that, alternating between loud and quiet, English and whatever it was. And the congregation responded. “Respond” does not really do justice to it. People were rolling on the floor and barking like dogs. Some wept, while others laughed. One woman near me was shaking her hands uncontrollably like she had just burned herself; this went on for an hour. People I liked and respected seemed beside themselves. One tall shy man seemed to be dancing to the words. Many seemed to be speaking back to the preacher in that same strange language, and at nearly the same volume.

The person next to me told me they were speaking in tongues. Tongues, I asked? She looked at me meaningfully. “It is a spiritual language that only God understands.”

The most confusing thing about tongues was that I understood it. Some of it. Amid the rising, falling tide of gobbledygook the preacher would suddenly start to shout in Somali, KEE RABA SEEYA (give it to him who wants it) and KUUR RABA (which one does he want).

At some point the preacher began blowing heavily into the microphone, which produced a vast, shocking echo. He neighed like a holy horse: “Hrr! Hrrrrr!” Suddenly I realized he was looking at me. He spoke then in a deep, awestruck, holy voice. “If there is anyone in this hall who cannot understand what is going on,” he said. “If there is anyone in this hall who is criticizing in their hearts... and who because they cannot understand are criticizing in their hearts…” He shook his head and neighed again, “HRRRR!” He paused and then continued speaking in capital letters, “WE ASK YOU TO OPEN YOUR HEART! OR LOVINGLY LEAVE. NOW!”

I was insulted, actually — how did he know I was not even then being blessed in some silent way? And if I was being spoken to in Somali, why was I am being addressed as a boy? I made a point of sticking around for another hour before leaving, around eleven at night, some three hours after I’d arrived, the basement still convulsing with ecstatic Christians.

In the Bible there is the story of the disciples speaking to a roomful of disparate foreigners who each hear the words in their own language. Somehow that notion had evolved into a language that can be understood by no one but God. Tongues is said to be the holy spirit spilling out of a person, the physical manifestation of being born again. I wondered whether tiny bits of all the world’s languages might have made their way in there.

This was around 1995. The Toronto Blessing was a worldwide phenomenon. It was even reported on the BBC.

I spoke to my adoptive father Toni in Pakistan, who had told me repeatedly how badly he wanted me to hear the Toronto Blessing for myself. “What did you think of it?” he asked excitedly, hoping that the spirit might have spilled onto me. He was disappointed by my answer. I told him that it was mass hysteria and nothing to do with God, so far as I could see. I’d felt like I was watching people possessed, like a voodoo cult in a movie. Or back in the asylum where my sister and I used to volunteer on Thursday afternoons after school, though at least in the asylum the inmates were supposed to be crazy.

“Let’s say it is from God,” I finally said. “Why? Why would God want us to behave in this way?” Toni got quite angry with me at that. He told me I was arrogant for wanting to understand everything. I suppose he was right.

How excruciating can nothingness be?

— Jack Kevorkian

O death, where is thy sting? O grave where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law.

— Handel’s Messiah III.3.50

The elderly woman behind the reception desk of the Armenian Library and Museum of America stabs her finger onto a copy of Yerevan: Magazine with an Accent and slowly traces a diagonal across the glossy cover. She’s showing me the route of the five hundred–mile death march her father took in 1915, from his village in Central Anatolia through mountains and deserts to seek refuge outside the city of Mardin. An unblinking Andre Agassi, Yerevan’s cover model, smiles back next to the headline “CONFESSION: Over 30,000 Turks Apologize to Armenians.” I soon find myself confessing too — that I’m not Armenian — and a puzzled look clouds the old woman’s face. She thrusts a pamphlet at me. It’s titled “We Share Our Pain,” and includes a list of genocides, from the Assyrian and Greek Anatolians to the Jews and Tibetans, Burundians, East Timorese, Kurds, and Rwandans — the list goes on. “Armenians were first,” she informs me. “I don’t know why.”

The Armenian Library and Museum of America, or ALMA, is the biggest repository of Armenian artifacts outside of Armenia, with over 20,000 objects and 27,000 books in a collection that is steadily growing. In its Brutalist building on the corner of Main Street in Watertown, Massachusetts, a little outside of Boston, less than five percent of the collection is ever on display. The aged receptionist is nowhere near the end of her story — her mother, having escaped the Turks, has just arrived at a French convent school in 1920s Beirut — but I thank her and walk into the main gallery, where I am greeted by rare Bibles from the seventeenth century, elaborate wedding costumes on headless mannequins, and silver gelatin prints by Yousuf Karsh. An ancient flyswatter faces off with a baptismal dove, a warrior’s belt from 700 BC gives way to a spiked human dog-collar from the genocide years. There’s even a “Dental Oriental Rug” featuring a giant molar, woven by Armenian children in Lebanon in 1925 to encourage better oral hygiene in the orphanages. But the paintings I’ve come to see have been locked away in the vault.

A man in a coma lies on his back, with his bare, wrinkly feet sticking out of the bedcovers as he slides head first into the dark, gaping mouth of a blindingly white skeleton. On another canvas, a man reduced to raw sinews and bones is engulfed by flames, his eyes turned heavenward like Jesus on the cross. In a third, a kneeling man has had his brain and his spinal chord removed; they hang suspended by chains near him. Half his body has turned to limestone: his healthy right hand holds his shattered, dismembered left. His face — like the viewer’s — wears a shocked grimace.

The paintings are the work of none other than Jack Kevorkian, the late Armenian-American pathologist, philosopher, assisted suicide advocate, and convicted felon otherwise known as Dr. Death. They are strikingly well executed. Unlike the works of other improbable painters — Adolf Hitler’s multicolored bouquets and elegant nudes or Winston Churchill’s pastoral sceneries — Kevorkian’s canvases are markedly obvious and gruesomely, almost risibly, literal. And the man in the coma, the man on fire, and the man with the brains by his side look a lot like the auteur himself.

“They will not be orphaned,” ALMA’s former director Mariam Stepanyan announced at the opening of a Kevorkian exhibition in 2008. Those same sixteen paintings had appeared in The Doctor Is In, an ALMA show in 1999, which Kevorkian himself had to miss, having just been confined to the Thumb Correctional Facility in Lapeer, Michigan. After serving eight years on a second-degree murder conviction for euthanizing a patient on national television, Kevorkian was released for good behavior. ALMA restaged the exhibition in celebration, this time as The Doctor Is Out. When I visited the museum for the first time, in February 2011, the show was still up. It’s difficult to imagine how anyone could bear to look at Kevorkian’s macabre portraiture for so long. Yet not only was the show still going strong after three years; a few of the canvases had cloned themselves. (Replicas produced for the Al Pacino Kevorkian biopic, You Don’t Know Jack, now hung alongside the originals.) Kevorkian was a difficult figure — never married, without children or many friends, his health compromised by the hepatitis C he contracted while performing blood-transfusion experiments on himself in the late 1960s — but in the Watertown Armenian community, the Doctor had found an unlikely caretaker for his checkered legacy.

Quite at home in the museum, the severed head of a young woman dangles by her hair a few feet from the reception desk. Two hands are holding her aloft: one bears a cuff with an Ottoman crescent and the date “1915,” the other a Nazi swastika and “1945.” Kevorkian’s own blood drips from the head and spills onto the painting’s frame, which is ringed by barbed wire. In my pamphlet I read a section on “Lessons of Genocide,” and it’s as if it were written as an exegesis of the painting itself: “German military leaders were present in Turkey and saw the extermination of the Armenians take place without interceding. Hitler referred to the Armenian Genocide and said, ‘After all, who today remembers the Armenians?’ One could cynically conclude that Hitler was the only western governmental leader to learn a lesson from the Armenian Genocide.” Kevorkian in turn had titled the painting 1915 Genocide 1945, and on a plaque that hangs nearby writes of the need to commemorate the two catastrophes: “To fail to take but token interest in the whole ugly affair, to avoid making it almost hereditary memory, would be abdicating decent human responsibility and thereby assuring recurrence is happening at this very moment.”

It’s the fight against forgetting that both Kevorkian and the museum have taken up, with a slight penchant for one-upmanship. Kevorkian once told a reporter, “I wish my forefathers went through what the Jews did. The Jews were gassed. Armenians were killed in every conceivable way. Pregnant women were split open with bayonets and babies taken out. They were drowned, burned, heads were smashed in vices. They were chopped in half.” The Jews, according to Kevorkian, “had a lot of publicity, but they didn’t suffer as much.”

ALMA has a favorite quote, which it juxtaposes with majestic vistas of snowy Mount Ararat on its informational brochures: “Go ahead, destroy this race! Destroy Armenia; see if you can do it. Send them from their homes into the desert. Let them have neither bread nor water. Burn their homes and churches. Then see if they will not laugh again; see if they will not sing and pray again. For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a new Armenia.” The words belong to the bard of Fresno and apostle of Armenian-American letters, William Saroyan.

In the 1620s, the first two Armenians came to America. They were silkworm-breeding experts, invited by the governor of Virginia to join the Jamestown Colony. Yet it’s unknown to history whether they created more than just worms. It wasn’t until the mid-1890s, following a series of persecutions ordered by the Red Sultan, Abdülhamid II, that the first wave of immigration began, with around 25,000 Armenians settling in the United States. The agriculturally inclined made their way to the fertile fields of Fresno, California, while others went to work in the industrial mills outside Boston, Buffalo, and Detroit, opened shoe repair shops and groceries, and ran coffee houses that soon became the centers of Armenian community life. As the Sick Man of Europe, as the Ottoman Empire was known, lay dying, many thousands more made their way to America in the early 1910s. As those travelers crossed the map, they might have been buoyed by the words of the seventh-century Armenian geographer Anania Shirakatsi, who, presaging Saroyan, wrote, “The origin of anything is at the same time the beginning of its disintegration; the disintegration of harmless contradiction, the universe obtains its continuance.”

In 1912, twenty-one-year-old Levon Kevorkian migrated to Pontiac, Michigan, to work in the auto factories and send money back to his impoverished family in their village in northeast Anatolia. Three years later his family stopped writing back. That same year, Satenig Keshigian watched most of her family die before her eyes when the entire population of her village was uprooted and marched into the Syrian dessert. Eventually she and a brother made it to Pontiac, where she met Levon.

Jacob “Jack” Kevorkian was born to Levon and Satenig one snowy day in May 1928. (The couple also called him Murad, after an Armenian guerrilla fighter.) A precocious child, Jack loved to play war games, donning paper-maché helmets and wielding potato mashers as hand grenades. An empty lot across from the local hospital became his Belleau Woods, Vimy Ridge, and Verdun — battlefields of the Great War. And the newspapers his parents read religiously were his Armenia. As he would later remember, “Growing up, I saw the Hyrenik Amsagir (Fatherland Monthly) — that was home for me.” Levon and Satenig raised Jack and his two sisters to have everything that they had lost, and in their nightly stories they kept the old ghosts alive. When not in the trenches or on the death march, Jack memorized baseball statistics, drew cartoons, invented limericks, and taught himself German and then Japanese. He stripped wood from abandoned houses to build bonfires, where he roasted potatoes until hot, black peels of charcoal flaked off of them. It was a taste that would never leave him: in later years, when Kevorkian had no fixed address, friends who put him up would notice that he would often use their fireplaces to make his dinner. He was never happy until his food had a burnt carbon shell.

The child of the genocide was to become the patron saint of assisted suicide. As he went about his tasks as a young pathology intern at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Jack caught sight of a woman ravaged by cancer, her jaundiced skin hanging off her bones. Her face was frozen by pain into a sardonic smile. As he would later write in Prescription: Medicide, “It seemed as if she was pleading for help and death at the same time. Out of sheer empathy alone I could have helped her die with satisfaction.” Instead he shipped out to Seoul, where he served as an army medic in the Korean War. When not attending to injured combatants, Kevorkian would pass the time practicing Bach on his flute and teaching himself Latin and Greek.

Back in the States after the war, he found work as an autopsist at the University of Michigan Medical Center and began to pursue unorthodox research in his free time. Dr. Kevorkian would sit for hours staring into the eyes of the dead. When an electrocardiogram in the hospital ward signaled that a patient’s heart was about to stop, Kevorkian would tape open his or her eyes and snap photographs. With an almost painterly eye, the doctor captured the retina’s color over time as it shifted to a pale orange-red, then yellow, and finally gray. His findings — invaluable for medical examiners looking to determine time of death, after the fact — were published in a scholarly article in the American Journal of Pathology whose tone betrays an unnerving enthusiasm: “Let me emphasize one point: a drop or two of water or saline must be put on the exposed cornea before postmortem opthalmoscopy is ever attempted!… If this is done, one may observe leisurely and continuously for hours.”

Kevorkian’s colleagues soon took to calling him Dr. Death, though they largely ignored his bizarre if pioneering experiments. Yet if “autopsy,” from the Greek, means literally “to see for oneself,” Kevorkian was a true autopsist, obsessed with seeing Thanatos with his own eyes, and observing closely what happened in the liminal space between death and life. His research took him deep into the University of Michigan’s library, where he was thrilled to discover that thirteenth-century Armenian physicians had performed medical experiments on criminals condemned to execution. For Kevorkian, vivisection was no breach of medical ethics — on the contrary, the revelatory investigation of those condemned bodies furthered the development of medicines that would save lives in the future. In this way the convicts themselves had contributed enormously to the store of human knowledge; their deaths had not been meaningless.

Why shouldn’t criminals on death row be given the opportunity to give back to society? It wasn’t just the Armenians; Alexandrian doctors in the days of Ptolemy had performed similar experiments on sentenced criminals. Kevorkian became obsessed with the idea of adapting this ancient practice to the modern American penal system. He insisted that he was personally opposed to the death penalty, but that if the state was going to be in the business of taking human lives, costing taxpayers millions of dollars every year, those deaths ought to be in the service of life. Instead of the electric chair, the gas chamber, or the firing squad, a consenting convict on the day of execution would be put under. His body, particularly his brain, would be experimented upon; then his organs would be carefully harvested for transplant surgeries. Finally, he would be put to death by a lethal dose of anesthesia. Kevorkian invoked Ptolemaic doctors in support of the practice, but the notion carried other, less remote echoes — whispers that Turkish doctors had performed medical experiments on live Armenians, just as Nazi doctors had done to Jews.

Ever the empiricist, Kevorkian visited the Ohio Penitentiary to canvass a group of prisoners for their thoughts on his proposal. (Michigan had a moratorium on capital punishment.) Most inmates were appalled, but a few saw in his idea the possibility of atoning for the unforgivable mistakes they made. As the first man he interviewed later articulated in a letter, “It would help me think that I didn’t succeed in making a total mess of my life, that I may have helped someone, somewhere, sometime.” In 1958, Kevorkian presented his findings at a conference in Washington, DC, and was promptly fired by the University of Michigan.

The Doctor took a new job at his hometown hospital, Pontiac General, and soon resumed his quest to find ways to snatch life from death. His dreams were haunted by scenes of soldiers bleeding to death on his watch — an all-too-common event in Korea when military blood supplies ran short. Blood-bank donations were often unable to meet medical demands, at war and at home. And yet there was an alternative, especially on the battlefield: Soviet doctors, liberated from churchly taboos and inhibitions, had shown that blood from cadavers was perfectly safe for use in transfusions. Kevorkian and his friend Neal Nicol — a lab technician who would remain his lifelong sidekick and madcap medical collaborator — built upon Soviet experiments to develop a one-step process for transferring blood directly from a dead body to a patient. When the perfect test subject, a thirty-year old heart attack victim, turned up at the hospital, Neal volunteered to be Kevorkian’s guinea pig. He lay down on the floor next to the deceased while Kevorkian connected a syringe pump and a tube from the dead man’s jugular vein directly into Neal’s arm. After receiving 400cc of blood, Neal felt fine. Their next attempt went slightly awry, however. A female volunteer who received a transfusion directly from the heart of a mangled fourteen-year-old hit-and-run victim became dizzy and nauseous. It turned out the volunteer had effectively ingested a Jägerbomb — the teenager had been out drinking. On another occasion, Jack and Neal petitioned the hospital for funding to perform the first in-vitro fertilization of a man — by implanting a fetus in Neal’s belly.

Levon and Satenig loved to hear their son talk about his research, which they regarded as heroic. As Neal recalled of Levon, “He felt God saved him from the massacre to beget Jack. He escaped death to sire the death fighter.” And yet death retained its sting. Jack’s father died of a heart attack in 1960, and in the mid-sixties his mother was diagnosed with advanced abdominal cancer. Kevorkian watched as doctors simultaneously restricted the amount of morphine she received even as they fought to prolong her life. The pain, she protested, was inconceivable; her treatment amounted to torture. “It was as if she had never escaped the Turks in Armenia,” Neal would later say. Jack was overcome by grief at the loss of his parents, who often came to him at night in dreams. As a way of mourning, Kevorkian turned to oil painting, and enrolled in adult education classes at night. Ignoring the moldy still-lifes set up for the other students, Jack painted Death itself. He listened to Handel’s Messiah as he worked.

A greenish head sits on a dinner plate, a red apple in its mouth. A man’s headless torso holds a knife and fork at the ready, eager to consume his severed head. Also on the table are a pair of missile-shaped salt and pepper shakers, along with an overturned helmet that brims with metal crosses and Jewish stars. Peering excitedly over the cadaverous diner’s shoulder is the god Mars, dressed anything is in its turn the cause of a new beginning. And from this for battle in a cape and a golden shield. He too looks a lot like the young Jack Kevorkian.

During his prison years, Kevorkian published an anthology called glimmerIQs: A Florilegium, which compiled his serial limericks, philosophical manifestos and scientific treaties, reproductions of his paintings, and even handwriting samples and a natal chart, in case anyone wished to analyze him astrologically. In a chapter called “On Art,” Kevorkian rhymes:

_The subjects of art should be more

Than the aspects of life we adore;Because dark sides abound,Surreal paintings profoundMay help change a few things we abhor._

Of the painting with the gruesome dinner scene, The Gourmet (On War), Kevorkian writes, “War is the bizarre perpetually periodic metamorphosis of human nature into absolute evil resulting in mind-boggling mass suicide with human kind devouring or trying to devour itself, all orchestrated by humanity’s only true and beloved pagan God, Mars. We will not settle for less than the ‘flower of evolution’ as the main course in this insane autophagy embellished by bountiful side dishes and fanciful shakers filled with the ‘fruits’ of our marvelous hands and big starving brains.” Yet painting The Gourmet — which bears an uneasy relationship to Kevorkian’s ideas on suicide and organ harvesting — seems a curious way to press for change.

Like many of the paintings featured in The Doctor Is Out, The Gourmet is actually a re-creation of a canvas from the late 1960s; all of the paintings he did in the first decade after his parents’ death were lost by a moving company when Kevorkian moved to California in 1976. Frustrated by the hospital bureaucracy that shunned and restricted his research, Kevorkian quit medicine, broke up with his first and last girlfriend, Jane, packed up his VW van, and drove to Los Angeles, where he put his life savings into making a film of Handel’s Messiah. Inspired by Christ’s perseverance in the face of martyrdom, Kevorkian saw his Messiah as his chance at redemption. Yet lacking any experience, producers, or distributors, and with a severely limited budget, his An Abridged Screen Adaptation of the Oratorio Messiah by George Frederic Handel ended up a disaster of stock footage and badly reenacted biblical scenes. In a reel that is now lost, surrealistic images of elated shepherds juxtapose with close-ups of blinking eyes and a young boy on crutches. Kevorkian had hoped that audiences, overwhelmed by Handel’s score, might not notice the terrible quality of the film’s visuals.

Broke, the Doctor slept out of his van and picked up the odd job as a substitute pathologist. He wrote a book of poems about dieting called Slimmericks, which advocated a “demi-diet” of always leaving half the food on your plate. Otherwise, “How your masses consumed/Maybe be fitly entombed/Will weigh heavily upon the mortician.” For the contemplation of loftier matters, Kevorkian had a show on Berkeley public access cable. In an early 1980s program called The Door, he played a professorial tour guide of the mind, complete with black turtleneck. Floating visions of his head flash across trippy neon patterns amid crashing thunder, as the Doctor on the green screen promised the viewer a trip into some “very hazy realms of human existence.” One episode ended with Kevorkian discussing multiple universes and asking solemnly, “For what forms of existence are we the amoebas?”

As the death penalty crept back into fashion in America, he fantasized once more about dissecting convicts for the greater good, envisioning the struggle as a kind of civil-disobedience campaign: “The pressure [would have] to well up from the cellar of society: from a lone doctor at the bottom rung of his calling, without authority, influence, or organizational support (and ultimately even without a job) combined with the absolute lowest of the low, the condemned criminals themselves…” The only venue that would publish his musings was an Israeli journal called Medicine and Law.

In the summer of 1987, the Doctor took a trip that would change his life, and his ideas about death. Kevorkian decamped for Amsterdam, having heard rumors of rogue doctors practicing euthanasia on thousands of terminally ill patients a year in the Netherlands. He was curious about the practicalities — his death penalty project would end in the killing of the condemned men, after all, and he was interested in studying the most humane techniques. In the Netherlands he met Dr. Pieter Admiraal, a leading anesthesiologist whose underground work would later lead to the legalization of voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands in 2000. Dr. Admiraal told Kevorkian flatly that experimenting on convicts was insane. Yet he also convinced him that the best way to cheat death was to help people take control of their own endings. Not long after, advertisements for death-counseling services began appearing in Detroit newspapers.

The greenish corpse of a man in a crucified position is draped with red and green tinsel. This human Christmas tree stands amid a mound of presents beside a fireplace hung with stockings. There is an infant in a manger in the fireplace, but Santa has come crashing down the chimney and crushed the baby with his big, black boot. Kevorkian titled it Fa La La La La, — La La, — La, — LA! The scene might have given the Grinch himself nightmares. Yet in the winter of 1992, Hugh Gale, a seventy-year-old man suffering from emphysema, told his wife that all he wanted for Christmas was a visit from Dr. Death.

A few years earlier, Kevorkian had come out of a Salvation Army depot with $30 of random parts. From a discarded Erector Set, various old toys, and bits of jewelry, he jury-rigged a machine he called the Thanatron. (Later he renamed it the Mercitron.) Three bottles were suspended from a rickety beam, one filled with a saline solution to open a patient’s veins, another with barbiturates for sedation, and a third with potassium chloride to stop the heart. After the Doctor connected the patient to an IV, he or she would pull a chain on the device to start the lethal medications flowing. He called it his “Rube Goldberg suicide device.” In an article published in the American Journal of Forensic Psychiatry, Kevorkian outlined guidelines for assisted suicide — eligibility limited to those who are mentally sound and unwavering, incurably ill and unbearably suffering — using placeholder names like “Wanda Endittal” and “Will B Reddy.” In June 1990, in the back of his VW van, the Doctor assisted his first patient, Janet Adkins, a fifty-four-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s who decided not to allow the disease that was robbing her of her mind to progress any farther.

Soon there were others. Kevorkian began receiving hundreds of inquiries from people desperate to end their lives. He had finally found his calling — a cause that people were not only willing to engage with but desperate to embrace. At first it was a Kevorkian family affair: his sisters, Flora and Margo, assisted him with the logistics. Until her own death in 1994, Margo acted as secretary, videographer, advocate, chauffeur, and nurse, often holding a patient’s hand through the procedure. Between 1990 and 1998, Kevorkian led over 130 terminally ill patients into the great beyond, often in state parks or vacant apartments. For each client, he tried to orchestrate a poignant, graceful passing. In the summer of 1993, Kevorkian assisted Thomas Hyde, a thirty-year-old man with advanced Lou Gehrig’s disease, in a particularly beautiful spot on Belle Isle, a wooded haven on the Detroit River. Hyde, who loved to hunt, wanted to die in the open air.

When Michigan revoked his medical license and he could no longer obtain barbiturates, he devised a second machine that used carbon monoxide. Arrested dozens of times, Kevorkian was tried repeatedly for murder. Yet he was always acquitted; his hawkish lawyer Geoffrey Fieger would play videotapes the Doctor had recorded of his consultations with desperate patients. Juries wept.

As he pressed on in his fight to legalize assisted suicide, Kevorkian again turned to art as a means to communicate his message, as a solace, and as a way to fund his crusade. He played smooth, spooky jazz on the flute with a group called the Morpheus Quintet, and produced an album called A Very Still Life. He hand-painted hundreds of novelty sun visors with the logos of major sports teams to sell at games. And he recreated his old paintings from memory, sometimes giving them new titles. (The Gourmet (On War) was a reworking of a late-sixties work called Genocide.) In perhaps his most harrowing canvas, a terrified, sickly man is sliding down a long, dark tunnel, scratching at the stone walls in a vain effort to slow his fall — his fingers worn down to ripped flesh and exposed bone. Below him, skeletal faces peer up out of the abyss. He titled it_ Nearer My God to Thee_.

“It really isn’t art,” Kevorkian said at the ALMA opening. “I call it pictorial philosophy.” In his exegesis of the painting, Kevorkian writes: “Most of us will do anything to thwart the inevitable victory of biological death… How forbidding that dark abyss. How stupendous the yearning to dodge its gaping orifice. How inevitable the engulfment. Yet, below are the disintegrating hulks of those who have gone before; they have made the insensible transition and wonder what the fuss is all about. After all, how excruciating can nothingness be?” It was like a dreamless sleep, Kevorkian surmised. (For the Doctor, whose dreams often kept him awake, this must have seemed a relief.) In a 1966 publication titled Beyond Any Kind of God, he writes, “Dreamless sleep entails absolute nothingness which we crave and know to be indispensable. It is an experience which affords us the unique opportunity to begin to ‘know’ the inscrutable essence of absolute nonexistence… which rules out any implication of transfer or transformation or transition from this world to any other world or to anywhere, anything, or anyone else. There could be no heaven, hell, purgatory, paradise, nirvana, moksha, or reincarnation — and no god.”

Kevorkian painted and repainted such works as Nearer My God to Thee in an attempt to shock the public into a new way of thinking. Death is an inevitable, natural nothingness. All humans should have the right to choose not to go on living if existence becomes unbearable. Everyone should have the right to die a “good death,” with dignity and planning. End-of-life treatment, hospice care, do-not-resuscitate orders — all should be openly discussed. And yet the Doctor’s death portraiture is so morbid that it seems to lead us away from the calm, dispassionate contemplation of death and into abject horror.

He may have been light years ahead of his time, but he was terrible at marketing. On one occasion Kevorkian harvested the kidneys from one of his assisted suicide patients and went on television, pleading for a transplant surgeon to take them and save a life. No one did. His house was constantly surrounded by angry bands of Right-to-Lifers chanting, confusingly, “Kill Kevorkian!” In 1999, he was convicted on second-degree murder charges after he euthanized a patient so paralyzed by Lou Gehrig’s disease that he was unable to start the Mercitron himself. Kevorkian filmed the death, mailed the tape to CBS, and dared the Supreme Court to charge him — to try to force the issue of assisted suicide onto the national stage. Yet the issue could never be disentangled from Kevorkian’s off-putting persona. On 60 Minutes, Mike Wallace asked a series of leading questions.

“You were engaged in a political, medical, macabre publicity venture, right?”

“Probably.”

“And in watching these tapes, I get the feeling there’s something almost ghoulish in your desire to see the deed done.”

“Well, that could be.”

In the debacle of a trial that ensued, Kevorkian fired his ace lawyer and insisted on representing himself. He was convicted after a day and a half.

From prison in 2004, Jack wrote, “Look at the forces against me — the government, the American Medical Association, pharmaceutical companies, and religion. Is there anything more powerful than these four?” In his cell, prisoner #284797 continued to write poetry and to compose minuets for flute and organ fughettas. He imagined an international, eBay-style auction site for organ trafficking, for which he bought the domain www.viscus.org. He worked on refining a new table of measurements for extremely small and extremely large magnitudes. (The number of atoms in all life on earth should be called a “Pynu or Pinu,” he wrote, without terribly much by way of explanation.) He plotted a campaign to run for Congress — and then, when he got out, ran as an independent in the 2008 elections. (He received 2.6% of the vote.) As he once told an interviewer, “I failed in securing my options for the choice [to die] for myself, but I succeeded in verifying the Dark Ages is still with us… When history looks back, it will prove what I’ll die knowing.”

In the fall of 2011, photographs began appearing on the internet of Ava Janus, Kevorkian’s niece and sole surviving heir, posing with the Mercitron. She was advertising an upcoming auction of Kevorkiana: empty prescription vials, a white bulletproof vest, a paintbox, his flute, the death machine. “There is no stop button,” Janus coyly told reporters. No one bought it. No one bought any of Kevorkian’s paintings, either, which Janus had offered for sale despite their presence in ALMA’s permanent collection. In a lawsuit that is yet unresolved, Janus disputes the claim that Kevorkian donated the works to the museum. At the auction, photographs of the paintings stood in for the originals, which are currently locked away in the first circle of ALMA’s vault.

In their place, the museum’s third-floor gallery features an exhibition commemorating Stalin’s Ukrainian victims, sponsored by the Connecticut Holodomor Awareness Committee. Visitors will find it curiously minimalist — there are no yellowing letters or relics of clothing, not a single artifact, just glossy Photoshopped posters of elderly, hunched-over peasants and emaciated children with eyewitness testimonials printed in bold, in-your-face type. And the headline, a hope dressed up like a promise — “We Must Not Forget!”

I turn back to my list of “Genocides that follow the Armenian Genocide.” Ukrainians were the third, after the Jews. The list ends with Darfur, and then an ominous “…Who Is Next?”

Perhaps it’s the silent question posed by all memorials, some more memorably than others. In the Spring 2010 issue of Yerevan — the one with Andre Agassi on the cover — there is a list of the top Armenian-genocide monuments worldwide, ranked by emotional impact. Number one is Tsitsernakaberd in Yerevan, a stele so tall and pointy it could make a kebab out of the moon. There are blank slates in Lyon, a skeleton of a church in Montebello California, an abstract winged creature in Cyprus, a modernist shrine in Sydney. Like the Doctor himself, the memorials at once deliver and soothe the sting of death. They are a sharp reminder to those who forgot and a salve to those who have always remembered, but need some surface onto which to draw the map of memory. The way they are photographed reminds me of a line from an Elizabeth Bishop poem, about an enigmatic monument: The view is geared (that is, the view’s perspective) so low there is no “far away,” and we are far away within the view.

It was only in his most delirious hours that Kevorkian linked his fight to legalize assisted suicide with redemption for Armenia. On one occasion in which he was incarcerated, pending an appeal, the Doctor went on hunger strike for eighteen days. He nearly died. In his cell, a hallucinating, disoriented Kevorkian told Hugh Gale’s widow, “I will not be a slave. My people were slaves, and they were slaughtered.” Moving beyond the commemoration of tragedy in its exceptionality, Kevorkian memorialized the universality of death itself. His monument was the fight for dignity and self-determination — in a world in which we are all just somebody else’s amoebas. After he was freed, his lawyer brought him a slice of apple pie, but Kevorkian refused it. Too much sugar, too much fat.

“Bet you never knew,” the Doctor once wrote, “that the swing tune ‘Celery Stalks at Midnight’ can always be counted on to make me smile.” It’s a Doris Day song, recorded during World War II. “Celery stalks at midnight/Looking at the moonlight/What’s this funny nightmare all about?”

Tucked away behind the gleaming showcases of the Metropolitan Museum’s recently renovated Islamic art galleries, a smaller space hosts a handful of contemporary Iranian artworks.

Parviz Tanavoli’s bronze Poet Turning Into Heech presides in phallic glory over a glittering constellation of familiar names: grande dames Shirin Neshat and Monir Farmanfarmaian and rising stars Ali Banisadr and Afruz Amighi are rounded out by Y Z Kami, a painter of quiet but steady repute. All of the works were made in the last two decades, but this seems to be the only thing they have in common; each work takes up a different medium, theme, and stylistic approach. The artists themselves share neither generational concerns nor, as implied by their location in the museum, religious references. And yet there is another, unremarked, commonality to the works of these highly acclaimed artists — the obliqueness of their relationship to the country whose history and traditions they take up in their work.

Tanavoli, a major figure in Iran since the 1960s, became an international name when a monumental 1975 bronze sculpture broke auction house records at Christie’s Dubai in 2008 (to the tune of $2.8 million); he has lived in Vancouver since 1989. Farmanfarmaian, who first moved to New York in the 1950s, has been between continents ever since (more so in the past decade, after the rediscovery of her work by the new Middle Eastern art markets). Kami, Banisadr, Amighi, and Neshat all live and exhibit in New York. Neshat is arguably the most visible Iranian representative of what we might call the Imaginary Elsewhere. Her work was central to the Museum of Modern Art’s 2006 show Without Boundary, one of the first major attempts to assemble a canon of Middle Eastern contemporary art. The Asia Society, currently planning a large exhibition of Iranian art, inaugurated the project with a lecture each by Farmanfarmaian and Tanavoli.

Shows of this sort may do little to reconfigure the way we think of Middle Eastern art: the mainstream art press duly registers their tokenistic praise, sending out ripples of envy and/or contempt among artists not included, and pats on the backs of those involved. But these shows and their high-gloss museum catalogs are, in the long run, the authors of art’s history. All the hopes pinned on new Arab museums, plucky journals, and gallery monographs notwithstanding, institutions like the Met and the MoMA have inherited institutional privileges that could take several generations to unseat. They are the aristocracy of the art world: dignified, antiquated, conservative, and imbued with generations of legitimacy. Their high-powered exhibitions of “non-Western” art conveniently erase the tangle of class, education, and circumstance that is the peculiar if common predicament of living in a cultural diaspora.

Consider, by way of contrast, the 2009 exhibition Modernism and Iraq — a carefully curated and thoughtfully presented show of painting, sculpture, assemblage, and even video from twentieth-century Iraq, organized at Columbia University by two established historians of ancient and modern Iraqi art. The work on view was idiosyncratic, vibrant, and occasionally dreadful; it was, in any case, unconcerned with explaining itself to the viewer. It spoke to local themes and pedagogic lineages. Some of the (living) artists were still based in Iraq, but not many of them would have been capable of representing Elsewhere in the manner of the artists at the Met; their work was simply too insular. Heroically itself, Modernism and Iraq slipped seamlessly from view, and few of its artists have turned up in New York galleries or museum collections since. For an artist to make it into a museum, her work must anticipate its ambassadorial function, representing whatever is happening Over There — say, in the region situated in gold lettering above the Met’s gallery entrance as “The Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia.” (Just don’t call it Islamic.)

The situation is a familiar one for the Bidoun reader. Much ink has been spilled scrutinizing the problems inherent in representing difference (or… anything at all) in museum settings. We love to complain about the potholes and dead ends of this road paved with good intentions. We’ve called it neo-colonialism, ethnic marketing, postmodernism or cosmopolitanism or hybridity, bourgeois-ethno-chic, opportunism. We have attributed this system of value to the commercial imperatives of auction houses and galleries. Despite routine protestations, we seem incapable of changing the terms of the conversation, and the backstage dynamics remain invisible to all but privy insiders with critical leanings.

But what is being rendered invisible here is more than institutional opportunism or fortuitous professional circumstances. For the diaspora artist — I use the term the way I would use “disappearing artist” or “trapeze artist” — the conditions of living or belonging Elsewhere have been skillfully translated into the poetics of representation. Hers is a distanced, self-conscious yet self-effacing belonging. Identity becomes emphasized because it is never a given. Not only must she construct her point of reference, she also needs to evoke a community that is too dispersed to be easily recognized. What the work of the diaspora artist represents is primarily its own diasporic condition. It performs public gestures of belonging, staging its loss so as to overcome it through visual pleasure. The diasporic artwork brings out the viewer’s deep desires — for roots, for poetic depth, for historic and political relevance — and then resolves the traumatic backstory with a neat visual twist. Its self-fulfilling premise and very public narcissism are precisely what appeals to collectors, curators, and museum audiences (and authors of art history textbooks).

The success of a diaspora artist depends less on subject matter than on the accessibility of their work. The true diasporic artwork can’t be too complicated. The sensory experience it invites must be available to all kinds of viewers. Allusions to biography, current events, or mystic philosophy are always good. Tanavoli enshrines “nothing” (the literal translation of heech); Farmanfarmaian shatters the viewer’s self-image with fragments of artisanal mirrorwork; Amighi gives us flitting shadows of abstract pattern to “represent… her native country’s turmoil.” Neshat simply gives us an icon: the chador-clad woman with a gun. Her black and white photographs are also self-portraits, though the artist herself does not wear a chador (nor, it seems safe to say, pray with a gun by her side). Neshat’s Woman of Allah is less an emblem of “Iranian women’s involvement in the Iran-Iraq war” than it is a rehearsal of viewerly expectations, partaking of stereotypes (or better yet, anti-stereotypes) of an Elsewhere that is more mysterious and relevant that our banal Here and Now. More importantly, the work stages the fulfillment of the diaspora artist’s wishes — for belonging and for cultural and political relevance.

This is not an attempt to draw lines in the sand between those who “authentically” belong and those who lack some essential cultural rootedness. True, the diaspora artist is often driven by the desire to reunite with, speak for, support, and/or extend the cultural Imaginary of the homeland. (In contrast, say, to the scores of young artists lined up outside European embassies in Tehran, Dubai, and Damascus who will only look back to the deep poetry of their homeland once they are safely ensconced in an MFA program abroad.) In fact, the diaspora artist often protests her representative status quite vehemently, sometimes parlaying it productively into the work itself (as with Emily Jacir’s 2001–03 Where We Come From, where the Palestinian artist uses her American passport to traverse borders otherwise closed to her.) I wish rather to introduce a new basis for understanding what I am calling the diasporic artwork: our deep attraction to the psychological pleasures of a substitute belonging.

Of course, there is already a word in our critical terminology for this pathological process: the fetish. In Fetishism (1927), Freud described the mechanism by which we ward off loss and protect ourselves from future trauma through fetish objects. “The subject’s interest comes to a halt halfway,” he wrote. “[I]t is as though the last impression before the uncanny and traumatic one is retained as a fetish.” Think of the cottage industry of tragic autobiographies by Middle Eastern women “in exile.” (Farmanfarmaian’s own charming tome, A Mirror Garden, is one of the better examples.) Child psychologist Donald Winnicott’s “transitional object” is another apt take on the diasporic artwork: it produces an illusion of the satisfaction that used to be provided by the now-absent mother (or motherland). Nineteenth-century psychologist Alfred Binet, one of the first to use the term “fetish” in a sexual context, liked to distinguish between “normal love” and “plastic love,” the latter consisting of a devotion to objects rather than people, to the part rather than the whole. “The love of the perverted is a play in which a minor character steps into the limelight and takes the place of the main character.” The story of loss is perverted and subverted in order to ward off future loss and give satisfaction through what Freud called “disavowal.”

Of course, “fetishism” is usually taken to be pejorative. And yet a fetish is also one of the most powerful examples of a social object, a material occasion for an individual to relate to the values of a collective Imaginary in a deeply personal way. Historian William Pietz gives an inventory of such occasions: “a flag, monument, or landmark; a talisman, medicine-bundle, or sacramental object; an earring, tattoo, or cockade; a city, village, or nation; a shoe, lock of hair, or phallus; a Giacometti sculpture or Duchamp’s Large Glass.” Our diaspora artist is in good company. Her fetish objects use personal disavowals as tools to create figures of collective history out of chaos and contingency. While there is some sleight of hand in what she does, in the best tradition of the historic fetish object — the Portuguese word feitiçio meant “magical practice” or “witchcraft” — there is also a great deal of personal truth.

Acknowledging that the Elsewhere we encounter in the work of the diaspora artist is a complicated personal construction restores long-hidden nuances to their work. Talk of the fetish sweeps aside the dignified rhetoric that reigns in the thickly carpeted precincts of museums the world over. Parviz Tanavoli is celebrated for his bronze walls of illegible calligraphy — soaring monoliths of a lost culture, complete with high-cultural references and a twinge of pathos — which would fit in nicely in most any corporate lobby. But in the late 1950s, the young Tanavoli rebelled against both his conservative artistic training in Iran and the precious lessons of a residency at Carrara’s marble studios. He returned from trips to Europe and America — his first encounter with Elsewhere and its representation — ready to go it alone, using bits of scrap metal to make perverse robotic couples rife with sexual allusions, genitalia that curved out as spigots, and scatological references that summoned all the crude force of south Tehran. He is certainly worthy of inclusion in the both local and global canons — just not as a banal sculptor of decorative bronzes. Tanavoli recognized the logic of the fetish early on, and his monumental phallic bronzes need to be understood in relation to the larger iconoclasm legible in his whole body of work.

The diaspora artist produces a kind of collective statement that is even more valuable if understood for what it is: artwork that emerges primarily out of the conflict of individual desires. Art must be uncoupled from journalism: the Elsewhere the artist engages within her work is not a real geographical location; it is an imaginary place. The political import of these works has less to do with representation than with the pleasures and perils of storytelling, the effort to recast the everyday into mythical structures that speak to universal desires.

“They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.” The epigraph of Edward Said’s Orientalism (a regrettable quote from Marx) springs to mind here, not only because the temporary exhibitions room at the Met is located near a small gallery of Orientalist paintings — dark-skinned men, bazaar and kitchen scenes, the occasional tiger in the wild — but also because Said’s ghost seems to be pacing these hallways, not quite sure of what to make of the turn of events. These exhibitions seem to offer a long-awaited shift in the power dynamic, as though the subjects of the paintings have emerged to speak for themselves. To denigrate their ability to represent their own reality would seem to be complicit with age-old histories written by the imperialist victors. Is it not time that “they represent themselves?” That is precisely my point here. If the Orient was a European construct, the subjects in Orientalist paintings mere imaginary screens for the projection of European desires, then turning the tapestries will result in portraits no less imaginary or constructed. And it is precisely this artificial, fantastical quality that needs to be discerned, and presented, clearing the way for a less coherent set of voices to emerge amid the museum hush.

Two Clarkes walk onto the roof of the Chelsea Hotel with a laser: it sounds like the start of a bad joke, and in a sense it was: a cosmic joke, a stoned prank, a sad story, really, with not many laughs. But if you’re looking for laughter, Shirley and Arthur on the roof with the laser beam may be your last chance.

Shirley Clarke was an indie film auteur and video trickster who ran something called the TeePee Video Space Troupe out of her home at the Chelsea, a trial run for what she called “the Pleasure Palace Theaters of the Future,” labyrinthine multimedia spaces that would be both liberated and liberating. The Chelsea Hotel was the prototype: the whole building was wired. The Troupe’s preferred medium was video, but they didn’t make tapes. They held rituals, live, in front of flickering effigies made of video monitors as dawn broke over the city; they communed in the pyramidal structure that Shirley called the TeePee, and spread out through the elevators and hallways, intent on Rimbauldian derangements of the senses.

It wasn’t the kind of scene that left very much behind, anything except stories, like the night the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke showed up at the TeePee with a long rectangular box containing a laser beam projector loaned to him by a techie fan of 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Shirley and Arthur giggled like kids phoning in bogus pizza orders,” DeeDee Halleck, a Trouper and media activist who went on to found Paper Tiger Television, remembers. Arthur was an irregular but welcome presence at Shirley’s rooftop salon-cum-laboratory, which convened more or less continuously from 1971 to 1975; video held a utopian appeal for him, too, as a herald of the new technological epoch just around the corner, along with orbital satellites, robots, and manned spaceships. At the Chelsea, the technofuturist and the performance-art prankster came together — not for the first time — to bedevil the man and woman on the street. Passersby kept trying to pick up the bright red object on the ground, and “both Clarkes roared with laughter as they made it jump five feet out of reach.”

But it would never have happened without Shridhar.

This first-generation laser pointer was too bulky, too heavy, to be wielded by hand, particularly the hands of the TeePee’s regulars. Shridhar improvised a mount out of a tripod, then fixed the tripod to the roof ’s edge, allowing the laser beam to swing freely according to the whims of the Clarkes. Shridhar Bapat was Shirley’s assistant, the tech guy at the pleasure palace; he’d joined the Troupe after leaving The Kitchen, where his official position was Director (if you believe the paperwork) and unofficial position was factotum and dogsbody. He was an expert at managing what they used to call Spaghetti City — the mess of wires that connected cameras to monitors, early video synthesizers and recorders, tape to reel. It wasn’t easy in the first place, and almost everyone was stoned, anyway. But Shridhar could keep the video cameras from jamming, the tapes from spooling off the open reels; he could rig up monitors and cameras into complex machines for the production of video feedback.

Even Shirley Clarke is almost forgotten now, and Shridhar doubly so, way more than five feet out of reach. But back then he was always there, behind the scenes, making things work. John Hanhardt, senior curator for media arts at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, put it to me like this: “He was a major player. How many people have worked with the range of artists he worked with?” Nam June Paik’s tremendous grasp of television’s potential as an art medium required technically adept assistants like Shridhar, who worked for him off-and-on for a decade. He helped Shirley Clarke realize her most far-fetched ideas — and Woody and Steina Vasulka, and Al Robbins, and every other major videographer east of the Mississippi. Sound artist Liz Phillips, whose first show at The Kitchen included a complex multimedia piece called “TV Dinner,” remembers that Shridhar made it possible. “He was really, really good. Before I knew it he was taking the image from the table and bouncing it all over the room. He had the sense of how to take what we were doing and turn it into a viable installation.”

He could even manage just fine when he was drunk.

1. The Aleph

I am a cybernetic guerilla fighting perceptual imperialism… VT is not TV. Video tape is TV flipped into itself… [Tape is metatheater…] Tape is feedback.

— Chloe Aaron, “The Video Underground,” Art in America May/June 1971

People remember Shridhar Bapat fondly because they remember themselves fondly, remember those years fondly, when the first flowers of the videotape underground bloomed in the smoky air of Lower Manhattan, in burnt-out basements and moldering once-grand hotels, in unheated lofts and screening rooms. They were by turns infantile, mind-bending, self-obsessed and eerily prescient, a motley tribe of longhairs and losers, communitarians and Uptown-gallery poseurs, attended by a coterie of tech-heads armed with duct tape, Q-tips, and obscure expertise acquired the hard way. And they were busy: recording hipsters and their sidewalk raps and Hells Angels chopping their bikes before a big ride; Panthers brooding and women’s libbers on the march; fabulously furry freaks fucking, stoned, on quilts, illuminated by the strobing low-fi emissions of a wall of TV sets. But the recording wasn’t the point, not yet; they thought they were laying the foundations for a better global village, peopled by citizen-transmitters and citizen-receivers. In the new “media ecology,” the art world would soon cease to exist, along with the banking system, broadcast television, rent, antiperspirant, and the military-industrial complex.

The revolutionary weapon that made all of this possible was the Sony Portapak, a Japanese invention that arrived on American shores in 1967. Eleven hundred dollars would get you a bulky open-reel videotape recorder, a separate camera unit with a built-in mic, a battery pack, and a power adapter. A twenty-minute reel of tape set you back fifteen bucks — and unlike film, required no further developing or processing. It could be played back right away, or you could just erase it and start over. With the Portapak, suddenly the first generation raised on broadcast television had acquired the means to create stations of their own.

For Shridhar and for scores of others, this medium that barely existed became a way of life. He’d learned the basics of video at the New School, in a class taught by Global Village, the first of the city’s video collectives. Its name derived from Marshall McLuhan, whose thinking about media and consciousness made an outsized impression on the video scene, and who’d arrived in New York in 1967 to teach at Fordham University. His students included Paul Ryan, cofounder of another collective, the Raindance Corporation (a riff on the RAND Corporation, itself an acronym for Research ANd Development), and its offshoot journal Radical Software. A third group that called itself Videofreex would go on to launch the world’s first pirate TV station. By 1971, videotapes, including Shridhar’s, were being shown at the Whitney and at The (brand-new) Kitchen, and the number of videotape auteurs went from dozens to thousands. Collectives and alternative distribution systems, ’zines and screening rooms, sprang up across the globe.

It was a milieu in which the old media seemed exhausted, wrung dry after two decades of successive -isms and movements. In the first edition of the influential Video Art: An Anthology, published in 1976, Hermine Freed described how video had arrived “just when pure formalism had run its course; just when it became politically embarrassing to make objects, but ludicrous to make nothing; just when many artists were doing performance works but had nowhere to perform, or felt the need to keep a record of their performances.” At a time when the status of the art object was an open question as never before, the process-orientation and the immediacy of the low-fi videotape felt like the answer.

But the immediate target of the early video activists wasn’t the art gallery or the museum — it was the mass media, especially television. In his influential Expanded Cinema, first published in 1970, Buckminster Fuller acolyte Gene Youngblood called television “a powerful extension of man’s central nervous system. Just as the human nervous system is the analogue of the brain, television in symbiosis with the computer becomes the analogue of the total brain of world man.” The new age, the cybernetic age, would combine “the primitive potential associated with Paleolithic” with the “transcendental integrities” of the Cybernetic, producing a new man, an ideal figure whom Youngblood envisaged as “a hairy, buckskinned, barefooted atomic physicist with a brain full of mescaline and logarithms, working out the heuristics of computer-generated holograms or krypton laser interferometry. It’s the dawn of man: for the first time in history we’ll soon be free enough to discover who we are.” Gnostic truth and feedback loops: the visual analogue of the sound of Hendrix at Woodstock was the tripped-out pattern made by a camera turned back in on itself. Woody Vasulka says that when he first saw video feedback, “I knew I had seen the cave fire.”

Early video exploited video feedback both as a tool for creating utopian communications systems and as a source for psychedelic pattern-making. In the most influential early multi-monitor video installations, you could watch yourself watching yourself; cameras could be pointed at each other, at monitors, generating pure electronic signals in the tube, a videospace pulsing with feedback’s overflow and excess. This was Shridhar’s element. He boasted to his friend Bob Harris that he was “the best feedback camera turner” in New York. A night watching — or making — videotapes with Shridhar was a trip to the other side. The titles in a handbill advertising a “video mix” by Shridhar Bapat at The Kitchen in 1971 hint at the cocktail of noisy electronic abstraction and metaphysics that intrepid viewers could expect to take in:

Om

SerendipityR.f.House of the Horizontal SynchStar Drive

Shridhar’s early videotapes are invisible now, like so much else, the only copies sequestered, unseen and unseeable in Northwestern University’s Special Collections. (Early videotapes are extremely fragile; the policy at many collections, including Northwestern’s, is that a tape cannot be screened even once until it is digitized.) The one I’d love to see is Aleph Null, a tape inspired, I take it, by Jorge Luis Borges’s 1945 short story “El Aleph.” Shridhar, for all his love of the image, was rarely seen without a book.

“El Aleph” is the story of a writer — also named Borges — who finds himself flat on his back in a cramped Buenos Aires cellar, staring into the darkness and contemplating whether his nemesis, the fatuous poet Carlos Argentino Daneri, might have buried him alive to prevent him from disclosing the madness at the heart of Daneri’s megalomaniacal project: a complete description of the world and everything in it, in verse. Daneri lured him there with talk of an otherworldly object, part secret weapon, part muse: an Aleph, “the only place on earth where all places are — seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending.” As Borges lies in a panic, convinced of his doom, the Aleph suddenly appears to him, and what it reveals seems very much like the realization of video’s spectacular promises:

I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realized that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror’s face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe.

Overwhelmed by the desire to describe the endless simultaneity before him — this infinite, recursive net of self-reflecting mirrors — Borges’s sense of time and space collapse, abandoning him to a mock-epic catalog of things, a spaghetti city of words, the ranting of a subterranean, self-loathing Whitman manqué. At last the Aleph’s technological sublime blows his mind like a four-faced God in heavy, holy spate:

I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon — the unimaginable universe.I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity.

2. Infinite Wonder

“He was the first and only salaried person at The Kitchen,” Steina Vasulka told me. She spoke to me on a video chat from the home she shares with her husband Woody Vasulka in New Mexico, remembering The Kitchen’s earliest days, from 1971 to 1973, when it was still located in the former kitchen of the Broadway Central Hotel, in the Mercer Arts Center. “He had hair that I thought was too long. He had these eyes, this dark brown color, and kind of a beautiful, interesting face. A very low voice that he never raised.”

At one point some French video artists came wanting to do a show at The Kitchen but they spoke only French. “Shridhar was there working in the back in his quiet way. He came out and said, ‘Maybe I can help.’ That was how we found out that he went to the finest schools in Switzerland… this tiny Brahmin who spoke perfect French.” The trajectory that had brought Shridhar to the new medium was unique, but so was most everybody’s. Steina and Woody Vasulka had come to New York from Iceland and what is now the Czech Republic, respectively; Shigeko Kubota from Japan; Nam June Paik from Seoul via Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Darmstadt. Their milieu — the whole New York avant-garde at the time, really — was full of outsiders and expatriates.

Shridhar’s journey had begun in India, sometime around 1948. He may not have been one of Rushdie’s “midnight children,” born during Nehru’s famous speech marking India’s independence from Britain at the stroke of midnight, August 14, 1947, but Shridhar was definitely a child of the morning after. His father, Shriram C. Bapat, was a high-ranking diplomat in Nehru’s government, and the family left India for Japan as part of a UN delegation sent to assess the long-term effects of the atomic bomb. Shridhar was two. Soon thereafter they moved to New York, where his father was a key member of India’s delegation to the UN. Shridhar spent most of his childhood in suburban Westchester. He was a small, slight kid who liked to play in the parks, learning to speak with what his high-school friend Bob Lewis called a “New York cadence” — a boy invested with all the bright prospects of an elite Indian family, swimming at the high-water mark of an optimistic age.

His Westchester idyll came to an end in 1962 when his father was transferred to Ghana. They sent Shridhar to Geneva, to the bilingual Ecole Internationale du Genève. Better known as Ecolint, it is the oldest operating “international school” in the world, a deeply cosmopolitan institution with students from across the globe, many of them from diplomatic families like the Bapats. Nehru’s own daughter, the future Prime Minister of India Indira Gandhi, had attended Ecolint for a year in 1926.

Shridhar graduated from Ecolint in 1968. According to his yearbook page, Shridhar Bapat, India (“not one for apathy”) had risen to the rank of Head Monitor (“that Indian guy”), Intern Senior Prefect, President of the Finance Committee, United States delegate to the school’s model UN, chairman of the Political Seminar, Bridge Club member; a student whose “fond souvenir” consisted of “growing up in L’internat, Genève.” A handwritten note on Bob Lewis’s yearbook reads: “Louieee: Zo, ve haf reached the end of the Ecolint milk run. As I go out into the big bad world, leaving behind me this womb to beat all wombs, I wish you success in whatever you end up doing. Fate, mystical inner knowledge et al. Ciao.” Shridar’s plans were twofold: “University in England; Career in govt.; to plumb the depths of human conceit.” With hindsight, we might say he got it about half right.

1968 was either a great year to arrive at the London School of Economics or a terrible one, depending on your ambitions. It was a hotbed for highly factionalized ultra-Left politics: fired up by the antiwar protest-turned-riot in front of the American embassy on Grosvenor Square in March of that year, stoked by Paris’s revolutionary month of May, and abetted by charismatic student leaders like Tariq Ali and radical chic icons like Vanessa Redgrave, some three thousand students at the LSE occupied its administration buildings in October of that year. When the dust finally settled, many were expelled, Shridhar among them. From London he made it back to New York and somehow found his way downtown, quickly becoming the quintessential video scenester.

I first encountered Shridhar’s name while looking through archived documents from The Kitchen’s earliest days for traces of another of New York’s avant-garde Indians, Pandit Pran Nath. “Shridhar Bapat” was listed everywhere, as director of video programming, as program director, as curator. Seeing him there next to names that were famous (or at least, recognizable), I wondered who he was and why I had never heard of him. I thought at first that it might have been some kind of prank, a “Mahatma Kane Jeeves” buried in the paperwork. But I asked around, and before long my inbox was inundated with emails, solicited and not, from artists and TV people, public-access activists and professors, all of whom wanted me to know something about Shridhar.

I spent the next year interviewing dozens of them. But even then, his story was full of holes — lies, too — and it ended in the biggest, blackest hole of them all. His history was itself a kind of cipher, an almost imperceptible gap in the now-accepted narrative of video history, one that opened up onto an alternate recension of that history. Last year, when The Kitchen celebrated its fortieth anniversary with The View from a Volcano, an exhibition of artifacts and photographs documenting its development, Shridhar appeared just once, a small face in a group shot on a wall near the door, hardly visible amid all the famous lava bombs going off in the other parts of the room.

His years at The Kitchen were the high point of Shridhar’s professional life. He was part of the first generation there in 1971, along with his friend Susan Milano, another young long-hair named Dimitri Devyatkin, and Rhys Chatham, the seventeen-year-old director of music programming. Video artist Shalom Gorewitz, who wrote a monthly column about video for a magazine called Changes in the Arts and was at The Kitchen “practically every night” in those days, saw Shridhar “as the glue that held all the things there together.” When he was there, Shalom told me, things ran smoothly; when he was not, things fell apart.

He was a highly effective curator — though in those days they disdained the term, with its exclusivist connotations. With Milano he organized the first Women’s Video Festival at The Kitchen in 1972. Many of video’s earliest and most enthusiastic adopters were artists associated with the feminist movement. (By Steina Vasulka’s estimate at least a third of the people making video in the early seventies in New York were women.) It’s no small measure of Shridhar’s diplomatic instincts that he was intimately involved in creating a visionary feminist institution at a moment when the culture wars around women’s rights were erupting in full force.

It helped that Shridhar was more at home behind the scenes — more interested in rigging the equipment, setting up screenings, and soliciting others to contribute than in putting himself forward as an artist or figurehead. He played a similar role for Charlotte Moorman’s New York Avant Garde Festival from 1971 until at least 1977, including the 1972 festival, held on a Hudson River excursion boat, its wheelhouse transformed by Shirley Clarke into a futuristic I Ching fortune booth. Liz Phillips served spaghetti on an amplified tabletop while Yoko and John circulated among the artists, asking questions. (Liz claims she answered a few of John’s, thought they were very intelligent questions, and then asked him who he was.) Elsewhere visitors took turns on Nam June Paik’s TV Bed, a sculpture comprising a mattress made from six television sets facing up and covered with glass, with two more sets making up the headboard. A camera above the bed captured and transmitted the face of anyone who lay down on it to all the TVs. It’s safe to say that the intricate tech work required to pull all this off was Shridhar’s.

These were tumultuous, formative years. His parents had left for India, leaving him an apartment on West 103rd Street that he shared with an old high-school friend named Conrad Sheff. He transferred from the New School to Columbia and then flunked out, losing his student visa in the process. He managed to get a clerical job at the UN with his parents’ connections, but when that went south he became, technically, an illegal immigrant; to get a new visa he would have to go to India and begin the immigration process from there. Shridhar never made the trip. Then one late night in October 1971 he was mugged on his way back uptown and severely beaten. Sometime afterward Shridhar lost or left his place on 103rd and moved to an apartment in the Village, from which he was evicted — he told friends for health code violations — and eventually wound up sharing yet another apartment with Conrad Sheff, this time on the Bowery.

In December of 1971, Shridhar’s Aleph Null was shown as part of the second night of video programming ever done at the Whitney, a Special Videotape Show curated by David Bienstock as part of his influential New American Filmmaker Series. Roger Greenspun, in a review in the New York Times, described it as “visually stunning,” but complained that it didn’t “escape the tendency toward trivia that characteristically haunts attempts to confer actual movement upon forms that, if still, would suggest nothing so much as the potential for movement… for all their vigorous ingenuity, the tapes seem to channel rather than to free ways of seeing.”

Greenspun’s comment sticks in my mind when I think about Shridhar at The Kitchen: the tape’s failure to live up to its own aspirations seems like a reflection of other sets of contradictions that were taking shape around Shridhar, and a harbinger for more failures to come. Among Shridhar’s close friends from that period there is a lingering sense that, for all of his indispensability, Shridhar was being exploited. Dimitri Devyatkin thinks that “he was beloved, but he was also used. People took advantage of him.” He was the kind of guy who would work all night and didn’t care about money — a good guy to have around. “In the two years I worked at The Kitchen,” Dimitri told me, “I saw a real change. We were getting overpowered by artists and people who could get grants. There turned out to be a lot of egos in that anti-ego culture.” Bob Lewis, a friend of Shridhar’s from Ecolint in Geneva who had reconnected with him in New York pushes back against any nostalgia: “I left the scene because I was fed up with the culture. I found it massively distasteful, self-regarding, self-involved… at some point the focus on fine art became its death-knell.” Another of Shridhar’s old friends, Victor Han, agrees: “there was a lot of infighting, people started splintering.” But Shridhar “was like this magical cog. Well respected, well liked.”

He may have been well liked, but he wasn’t well remembered. In 1973 The Kitchen moved to Wooster Street in SoHo, with an accompanying upgrade in style. After the Vasulkas left for teaching gigs in Buffalo in 1974, Carlotta Schoolman took over video programming. The locks were changed, Shridhar was gone, and for many of The Kitchen’s earliest habitués, so was its charm — its informality and open-endedness, its anti-curatorial ethos and focus on process over product. Shridhar went to work with Shirley Clarke and the TeePee Video Space Troupe, and his seminal role in establishing The Kitchen was forgotten. Or was it erased? DeeDee Halleck was convinced that Woody and Steina Vasulka had wronged him. When I spoke with her by phone, she was still angry, saying that she had confronted the Vasulkas about Shridhar some years ago, at a presentation about The Kitchen’s early days, accusing them of disappearing Shridhar from the institution’s history. At the time, she says, she sensed “a racism that was palpable.”

It wasn’t palpable any longer, at least in my own conversation with Steina Vasulka. She remembered him with great fondness, tinged with a sense of failure. “We started to find bottles here and there. That’s how we figured out slowly that he was drinking. Now I know exactly what it means, then I didn’t…”

One of the few completely uncontroversial things you can say about Shridhar: the man loved to drink. By the mid-1970s, it was becoming a big problem.

Was it the booze that made him lose his footing? Did the Portapak invent video art?

These are not dissimilar questions.

3. Infinite Pity

People remember Shridhar with regret because that’s how they remember themselves — their disillusionments and disappointments, their selling out or failing to sell, their settling down and surviving. That whole electro-cybernetic loop and its magic? The salvific promise of feedback? Long since gone. In an instantly famous essay for the inaugural issue of October, published in the spring of 1976, Rosalind Krauss argued that video would save no one. “Reflexiveness in modern art,” she wrote, “is a doubling back in order to locate the object,” whereas the “mirror-reflection of absolute feedback is a process of bracketing out the object.” Video depicted “a psychological situation, the very terms of which are to withdraw attention from an external object — an Other — and invest it in the Self.” The real “medium of video is narcissism.” In the well-looped prison of self-surveillance, the ghost in the machine is Narcissus, with his infinite self-regard; the snake eating its own tail is Onan.

Dear Alex,Before you build up too much expectation, be prepared for a sad story, with little to show. The devils that tormented Shridhar included his upper-class diplomat parents, their plans for Shridhar, his revolt against his family, his battle with alcohol, loneliness, homelessness, the art world, the gallery and foundation world. There is not much to glorify. I would question what it is you really expect to find and what your motivation is in writing this article. I expect readers to wonder why you decide to write about him. I send you my warmest wishes and hopes for success.All the best,Dimitri

At Northwestern University’s McCormick Library I met Scott Krafft, curator of special collections, to look for evidence of Shridhar’s life and movements in the library’s Charlotte Moorman Archive. Moorman, the performer and model for Nam June Paik’s 1969 TV Bra for Living Sculpture, was a cellist, performance artist, and impresario; Shridhar was deeply involved with her New York Avant Garde Festival in the 1970s. There were all sorts of scraps, notes, and postcards with his name on them in the archive. One caught my eye immediately: an unopened letter from the alcoholism clinic at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village, postmarked December 1975, addressed to Shridhar care of Moorman. From the documents at Northwestern it is clear that he was doing a lot of couch surfing, crashing intermittently at Moorman’s apartment up on West 46th Street, sometimes staying with friends.

Krafft suggested we open the letter and see what’s inside, though it’s easy enough to guess — it’s a letter from St. Vincent’s asking him why he’s been missing appointments. There are many notes to Charlotte: promises to clean up, to stop hurting people, to “be better.” His handwriting varies dramatically. There is a hastily scrawled message on the back of a flyer advertising a midnight screening of Ben Hayeem’s The Black Banana: “Finally got my money and am getting a room on a weekly basis. Will give you the no. when I find it out. Thank god this week is almost over! Sorry about all those weird messages.” Another letter, written in an extremely precise hand and arrayed in bullet points, mentions that he is going to Alcoholics Anonymous and apologizes for his role in a “psychodrama” at Charlotte’s house. “I am trying to change,” he says, thanking her for having “helped me in some pretty dicey times… Excuse all the cliches, but sometimes they are true, and I am grateful for everything from the bottom of my heart. I hope I can continue to help with the Festival in any way you find appropriate in the coming year.”

One letter from September 1977 lays out his whereabouts for the next week and how to reach him, including an answering machine and a “live human who pretends that it is my ‘office’ during business hours only.”

Shridhar was a legendary drinker and prone to binges. He got high too, although in the early days that wasn’t really his thing. Leanne Mella, a public-access television activist and frequent visitor to the Whitney’s film and video department in the seventies, remembered a drunken Shridhar falling off a radiator at a party there. Almost everyone I talked to had a story about him getting wasted or getting them wasted or both. “One night Shridhar took me on a tour of where to drink on the Bowery, and how to drink,” Liz Phillips recalled. “I think it was 1973. I would never drink that much again in my life.” Shridhar’s high-school friend Victor Han remembers that he “was the first guy to take me to CBGB. He knew the Village better than anyone I ever knew. He knew the bars, the cheap restaurants.”

1975 was an especially bad year. A world away, Indira Gandhi declared the Emergency and India fell into darkness; Shridhar’s family became unreachable. He had already fallen into a state of emergency of his own, with his closest friends leaving New York or already long gone, taking jobs at television networks or universities. That year Shirley Clarke took a teaching job at UCLA, and disbanded the TeePee Video Space Troupe before she left. The rag-tag, free-spirited atmosphere of the early video scene was professionalizing and institutionalizing.

At a certain point, Liz Phillips told me, “Shridhar started to live in places where he wasn’t easy to find.”

One such place was Anthology Film Archives on Wooster Street, which had finally established a video department and hired Shigeko Kubota to run it. (Anthology founder Jonas Mekas was famously dismissive of video.) Shridhar worked there part-time and sometimes slept in the basement. His mastery of early video machines was becoming obsolete as the technology changed, and his always fragile career was increasingly hitched to Kubota’s star, and that of her husband Nam June Paik. Shridhar made common cause with Bob Harris, a buddy who remained close to him — as close as anyone could be — for the rest of his life, and with another once-ubiquitous video scenester and East Village rambler, the irascible dreadlocked poet, drunk, and video-shaman Al Robbins.

In a posthumous tribute, Paul Ryan celebrated Al Robbins as “a warrior artist… a samurai.” He was a violently bad-tempered man with a penchant for droney, druggy landscapes, complexly interlocking prismatic multi-monitor installations, and glitchy in-camera edits that lent his now-forgotten videos a Brechtian edge. “For Al the beauty of the video signal was its lack of stability,” Bob Harris told me, which goes some way toward explaining what he looked for in people, as well.

Al and Shridhar loved to talk video, and there was more than ever to talk about. The counter-culture that had grooved on the first Portapak transmissions had “enrolled in graduate school,” as historian Jon Burris puts it, and “video history” was being written as a triumphant march of major artists, with a lot of bit players dragging along behind. The canonization had begun with 1976’s Video Art: An Anthology, accelerated with the Bronx Museum’s 1981 Video Classics show (featuring works by Vito Acconci, Dan Graham, Shigeko Kubota, and Nam June Paik), and culminated in the Whitney’s retrospective of Nam June Paik, “the first video artist,” in 1982, which Shridhar was still around to help with. Robert Haller called Shridhar and Al Robbins “dinosaurs.” At the very least, no one could accuse them of selling out.

The two of them were often seen together, hanging out, making video, arguing, drinking, and fighting — not necessarily in that order. “They were both kind of bipolar,” Bob Harris remembers. “Shridhar would be yelling at Al” — the janky edits Robbins favored used to drive Shridhar crazy — “and it would be like a cartoon, except it was tragicomic.” Shridhar and Al sometimes rolled on the floor in half-serious drunken wrestling matches, and it seems like they remained interlocked in that way up to the point that Shridhar’s trail becomes nearly impossible to track.

Conrad Sheff moved to Massachusetts for med school in 1978. “I rarely saw him after I moved to Boston,” he wrote in an email. “He owed everyone, talked crazy so everything he said had only the value of background noise, and he was in and out of Bellevue Hospital for cirrhosis and non-compliant treatment of resistant tuberculosis.” Shridhar had become “a pathological liar.” By the early eighties he was homeless, hopelessly addicted, pissing off his friends, living in the streets. He was spotted here and there, a wino on the East Side, just north of the UN. He leaves the barest of traces: a handbill advertising a screening of Aleph Null at the Mudd Club in the early eighties; another thanking him for assisting on a series of Al Robbins video installations at Anthology and the Brooklyn Museum.

Then he went underground.

4. Null

The giving up of activities that are based on material desire is what great learned men call the renounced order of life [sannyasa]. And giving up the results of all activities is what the wise call renunciation [tyaga].

— Bhagavad Gita, 18.2

“Burma Road” is the name given — no one knows by whom — to a wide tunnel beneath Grand Central Terminal, where a labyrinth of steam pipes created an artificially warm, humid atmosphere. Before Grand Central’s renovations began in 1994, it was one of New York City’s best-known refuges for homeless people.

What they called Burma Road was a disused track beneath Grand Central’s lower level, formerly used for baggage. A 1980 article in the New York Times profiled one man who had had been living there on-and-off for thirty years, whenever things got tight. Times were tight then, what with rising rents and unemployment, and more and more people were sleeping on subways or in homeless shelters, or taking their chances living rough in jerry-rigged tunnel spaces. “To tell you the truth, you know, you get on a drunk and things happen,” one underground man told the reporter.

We don’t know exactly when Shridhar went below. We don’t know how long he lived down there, or when precisely he got sick. We know that the steam pipes that made Burma Road and non-places like it attractive to homeless people during New York winters were insulated with asbestos, and that fans installed to mitigate the heat for maintenance workers ensured that the air in the tunnels was shot through with asbestos particles. (Pipefitters who worked in the tunnels were known as “the Snowmen of Grand Central” because of the white powdery dust that adhered to their clothing.) Burma Road may have been a refuge, but it was no place to live.

Leanne Mella had known Shridhar from film and video screenings in the 1970s. They fell out of touch when she left the city, but she saw him once more, in the mid-1980s, when she was back and working at the Whitney. Shigeko Kubota told her that Shridhar was in the hospital. She found him in the psych ward at Roosevelt Hospital on 9th Avenue. He looked awful, but there was something about him that made her believe him, despite his reputation for tall tales and outright lies. “He had an astonishing clarity about him,” she told me, “an immense self-awareness.” He said that he had been drinking heavily and that he had become involved with a woman who made it seem not only plausible but even preferable to live on the streets. So he became homeless, and then he moved in with this woman who lived beneath Grand Central. And there he stayed, for years. Then one day he got sick or hurt or both and had to resurface. That Leanne was there at his bedside at all was a kind of miracle — when he arrived at the hospital he’d told them, “Nam June Paik. Nam June will pay,” and by pure chance the social worker assigned to him was Peggy Gorewitz, whose husband Shalom was a video artist from The Kitchen’s heyday. She called Paik, and he and Shigeko called people like Leanne. It was not easy to see him, or for him to be seen. Shalom Gorewitz went to see Shridhar at Roosevelt, too, and remembered that “he seemed ashamed.”

Shridhar’s homelessness was a product of his drinking. It was result of the booze in the same way that video art was the result of the Portapak. Both are easy to explain yet difficult to understand, and both have a kind of prehistory, as well: scrying aids like crystal balls, magic lanterns, Merlin’s universal mirror, Maya Deren; nirgranthis and anagarikas, sannyasins and aghorins, a host of Indian holy wanderers, dreadful un-dreadfuls living outside society, and beneath it.

At the risk of romanticizing something with very little room for it, it seems to me that Shridhar’s homelessness and his contrarianism, his assiduous avoidance of gainful employment and his unshakeable anomie, amount to a kind of sadsack postmodern sannyasa. In the dharmasastra texts it is a duty of the twice-born — of Brahmins like Shridhar, who mentioned his caste background often — to end their lives with an act of renunciation and a period of wandering. Sannyasins abandon their hearth-fires, perform their own death-ceremonies, and renounce the world. Shridhar was proud to be a Brahmin, and the storybook ending of a Brahmin’s life is homelessness.

The genealogy of Shridhar’s destitution has the sannyasin on one side and Duchamp on the other. In a famous lecture called “Where Do We Go From Here,” delivered to a symposium at the Philadelphia Museum College of Art in March 1961, Duchamp predicted that the “artist of the future,” in order to mount a real rebellion against the status quo, would be forced “underground,” rejecting the economic, the mediocre, and the bourgeois “exoteric” in pursuit of more difficult esoteric truths. Shridhar was, at his best, most charitably, a failed Duchampian underground man, a video sannyasin without fixed address, income, or family ties. He was all process and no product, abiding in an oneiric videospace, in the “vast ventriloquism / Of sleep’s faded papier-mâché,” somewhere in the video-aleph’s radical simultaneity of worlds. Borges’s short story ends with the author’s opinion that for all of its spectacular power, Daneri’s Aleph was false. So was Shridhar’s. It wasn’t the Aleph any more than Shirley Clarke’s wired-up Chelsea Hotel — its rooms labeled “Paris,” “Tokyo,” “New York” — was the global village. And Shridhar’s trip into the subway catacombs, while on some level voluntary, was the falsest Aleph of all: the deadly dream of a drunkard cut off from history, trapped in a lonesome and recursive hall of black mirrors, a landscape of dripping drainpipes, drugs, diseases, and beatings: the Aleph Null. Rosalind Krauss had decried video’s “prison of the collapsed present.”

“Everyone tried to save him.” “Everyone failed him.” “There was nothing anyone could do.” Tragic choruses never sing new songs. Following Shridhar through the 1980s, through the tunnels, is impossible: a succession of sightings, awkward chance meetings, glimpses of him picking up cans on the Lower East Side, “skulking about” near the UN building where his father once worked, riding the subways on cold days in winter, sometimes coming up to crash-land on a sofa, to try and clean up, to sort out his immigration status, to get a job — at one point he entered a training program to become a copier repairman — and then disappearing again. By 1990, he was dead.

Nam June Paik arranged a memorial service for him at Anthology Film Archives, in the room named for Maya Deren — another Ecolint alum, and an artist Shridhar was obsessed with. Victor Han remembers there being about forty people there. Nam June asked everyone to come up and say a few words, and afterward, his ashes were scattered in a park in Westchester where he liked to play as a child.

“Single channel is the easy way to write video history,” Andrew Gurian told me, pointedly. He was referring to Electronic Arts Intermix’s early decision to archive only single-channel video pieces, eschewing the complex installations and multi-channel works that were considered, at the beginning, the state of the art. But he may as well have been talking about the ease with which Shridhar was elided from that history.

“He was a beautiful person,” Shigeko Kubota told me by phone from Florida, where she spends most of her time now. “But he could not control his mind. I think of him a lot. I miss him.”

Whenever I met Abu Hamza at the immigration detention center in Lukavica, on the outskirts of Sarajevo, he carried a brown diary with him, filled with notes neatly inked in Arabic and the language formerly known as Serbo-Croatian. One day, as we sat in a small meeting room with the door open, I noticed that he had written “THE ABYSS” in English across the top of one of the pages of his diary.

Perhaps he was rehearsing some new human-rights slogan to raise awareness about the plight of people like himself, Islamists from the Arab world who had fought alongside the Sarajevo government during the 1992–1995 Bosnian war. Or maybe it was a sardonic reference to his ongoing predicament: being indefinitely detained without charge as a “threat to national security,” backed up only by secret evidence. It turned out to be simpler than all that. The Abyss, James Cameron’s 1989 sci-fi disaster thriller about a deep-sea alien encounter, had been playing on the TV in the rec room the other night. It intrigued him. “I love fantasy films,” he said. “As a believer, I know that we are not alone in the universe. There must be other forms of life.”

Abu Hamza’s interest in fantasy films wasn’t terribly surprising. Over the years, he and I had talked regularly about miraculous happenings during the war: bodies of martyrs that smelled of musk, angels intervening on the side of the Muslim bodies of martyrs that smelled of musk, angels intervening on the side of the Muslims. During a mujahid assault on a Serb-held hilltop, the opposing forces inexplicably aimed their artillery upward and fired into the sky. In captivity, the Serbs reportedly told the mujahideen that they had been shooting at horsemen in white attacking them from the air. The Balkan landscape lent itself to some enchantment: even mujahideen with little time for miracle tales were enthralled by the white-capped mountains and lush forests; one Saudi journalist titled a wartime travelogue “The Journey of Fire and Ice.”

At the end of the war, most of the Arab mujahideen — seen as mythical figures by some, reviled as monsters by others — left Bosnia. Many returned to ordinary lives, some pursued jihad in other besieged Muslim lands, while others turned against Arab regimes and their superpower sponsor. In contrast, Abu Hamza and a few dozen of his mujahid brothers took Bosnian wives and settled in a formerly Serb village called Bočinja, where they tried to create a proper Islamic community. Many of the Arab volunteers, especially those from the Gulf, had been disappointed by the discovery of openly pork-eating, alcohol-drinking Bosnian Muslims. So Bočinja was intended to be an oasis of sorts, a self-sufficient, right-living polity, with a health clinic, a radio station, and a mosque of its own, outside the country’s official Islamic institutions. They even experimented with communal agricultural work. Many families were started.

There were tensions, of course — not only among the Serbs left in the village, but also among the Muslims. Relations between one Egyptian ex-fighter and his German convert wife broke down after he took an Albanian woman as a second spouse in hopes of conceiving a child. The ensuing drama was the talk of the town. Both the man and his ex-wife are back in Germany now. He was interrogated by the CIA in Indonesia on suspicions of Al Qaeda ties but never charged; she published a tell-all memoir about being married to a mujahid.

There was also the battle of the satellite dish. Abu Hamza possessed the only private satellite dish in the community. Some of the brothers questioned why he got to have something expressly forbidden to the rest of them. But Abu Hamza insisted that his case was special. Unlike most of the others, Abu Hamza spoke the local language fluently; the satellite dish was important for knowing what was being said about them in the media and to expose his children to the wider world. In the end, he had to put his foot down: “It’s either me or the satellite dish.”

It turned out that what was being said about them was largely hostile. Debate, such as it was, centered on whether this odd Islamic commune was a terrorist training camp or merely a backward fundamentalist enclave. Bosnia may have a Muslim plurality, but after decades of socialism, Islam is as much an identity as a prescription for religious practice. And in any case, postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina is officially a multi-ethnic state with a labyrinthine and redundant set of governors and institutions — presidents, prime ministers, parliaments, ministries — representing the nation’s Bosniak (Muslim), Croat, and Serb populations. It is all supervised by a mélange of Euro-American acronyms (NATO, the EU, the OSCE, OHR, EUFOR, and more). One of the supposed bright spots in this dismal scene has been the hope of one day being welcomed into Europe, as neighboring Slovenia and Croatia have. The existence of Bočinja, full of men with huge beards and prayer caps and women in niqabs, did not seem likely to enhance those prospects.

In the summer of 2000, NATO peacekeepers evicted nearly all the mujahideen from the village, returning their homes to the original owners. The Arabs of Bočinja scattered. Some left the country while others, like Abu Hamza, found new homes and girded themselves for the struggles to come. (As a prominent ex-mujahid, Abu Hamza would have been imprisoned and tortured if he returned to Syria.) September 11 came not too long after, and the campaign against Arabs intensified. Another Egyptian, the self-styled mufti of Bočinja, was arrested and shipped off to Hosni Mubarak’s torture chambers. Six Algerians were sent to Guantánamo even after a Bosnian court cleared them of charges of plotting to attack the US and UK embassies. (The famous US Supreme Court decision granting habeas corpus to Guantánamo detainees bears one of their names, Boumediene.)

Abu Hamza became an internationally famous symbol of “radicalism” lurking in Bosnia. In 2008, the State Department’s annual terrorism report claimed he was on a UN list of Al Qaeda and Taliban affiliates, though it turned out they had confused him with another Abu Hamza, a convicted Egyptian terrorist in the UK (who, unlike the Syrian Abu Hamza, is missing two hands and one eye). The facts were off, but no matter: Washington’s preferences were clear. Within months, Bosnia’s highest court upheld a decision stripping Abu Hamza of his Bosnian citizenship. The immigration police took him away two days later.

Abu Hamza was the very first inmate at Lukavica. He was already in custody when the prison had its official ribbon-cutting ceremony. Soon he was joined by others, some of them people he knew from Bočinja or from the mujahideen battalion; others were Arabs who had never fought. None of the long-term inmates had come to the Bosnian war directly from their home countries, so their itineraries were more telling than their origins. One Algerian I met had made the hajj to Saudi Arabia in the early nineties to flee the civil war in his country, then overstayed his visa and found work with Islamic charities. His job took him to Peshawar and then to the Balkans, where he was compelled to quit (something about money and his Saudi bosses) and ended up joining the Bosnian army. Foreigners in the army could easily obtain citizenship — but as with Abu Hamza, a special multinational commission working from secret evidence revoked his citizenship. A few months after we met in the detention center, a court restored the Algerian’s citizenship and he left the prison. Refugee turned pilgrim turned humanitarian turned mujahid turned prisoner — by now we should just call him an immigrant, right? His story was hardly atypical.

As far as Bosnia and its Western sponsors were concerned, the detention center was supposed to be a last pit stop on the Arabs’ way back home. But human rights groups, citing the likelihood that the Arabs would experience imprisonment and torture (or worse) upon returning, have fought the efforts to deport these men and challenged their indefinite detention. Abu Hamza has spent more than three and a half years behind bars. Despite winning his case in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg in February, no end appears in sight.

To dramatize his plight, Abu Hamza took to wearing a long jalabiya and a baseball cap, both dyed bright jumpsuit-orange and both emblazoned with the word “Bosnatanamo” — an odd mash-up of Bosnia and Guantánamo. During the 2010 elections, his family released a photo of him in full Bosnatanamo regalia, captioned: “After two years in prison in the immigration center, we have nothing to say: THE PEOPLE KNOW!” “The people know” was the campaign slogan of the SDA, the largest Bosnian Muslim nationalist party; Abu Hamza’s family spun the trite phrase into an uncomfortable reminder of debts unpaid, suggesting that the selling out of the Arab mujahideen who helped Bosnia during the war would be remembered, and perhaps punished, by the Bosnian electorate.

The response to the Bosnatanamo campaign — and to the plight of the Arab detainees generally — has been a collective shrug. Even for Bosnian Muslim nationalists, the issue has dragged on for so long and seems so trifling in comparison with the country’s problems that it’s hard to muster anything more than vague sympathy. Abu Hamza and his comrades are a reminder of a time when Europe turned a blind eye as Bosnians were slaughtered, when Muslims of conscience came to fight on their behalf. But that was nearly two decades ago, and in light of everything that has happened since, it’s a memory many Bosnians would prefer to leave behind.

It so happens that Abu Hamza is an inconvenient reminder of more than one ideological era. Born Imad al-Husin in Damascus in 1963 (everyone calls him Abu Hamza, after Hamza, his first-born son), he arrived in 1983 to study medicine at the University of Belgrade, one of thousands of such students from young postcolonial states who flocked to what was still one of the great capitals of the Non-Aligned Movement. The most famous of them was the writer Abdelrahman Munif, whose Cities of Salt quintet charted the rise of the contemporary petrostate; Munif did a doctorate in economics on a Ba’ath party scholarship in the late 1950s. Decades later, the Ba’ath party had branches in nearly every university town in Yugoslavia. Abu Hamza remembers an “election” organized by the Ba’ath for a few dozen Syrian students in the Adriatic port city of Rijeka that resulted in a defeat for Hafez al-Assad; the stunned embassy in Belgrade immediately dispatched an official to reeducate them.

Marshal Josip Broz Tito died in 1980, but the nation he had championed remained a beacon for international students until 1991, when Yugoslavia fell apart and the world of Non-Alignment was turned inside out. While pursuing the project of a greater Serbia, Slobodan Milošević continued to claim the mantle of Yugoslav internationalism, making common cause with Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi. Yet it was bilingual students from socialist-leaning Arab states like Abu Hamza who played crucial roles as translators and intermediaries for Islamist aid workers and volunteer fighters arriving from the Middle East. These old Non-Aligned ties never totally vanished: during last year’s uprising in Libya, ex-Yugoslav workers flooded out of the country, only to be replaced by the arrival of ex-Yugoslav mercenaries to fight in Qaddafi’s forces. As NATO bombs fell on Libya, a right-wing Serbian nationalist party held a rally in Belgrade to show its support for its erstwhile ally.

Banners like Non-Alignment and Islam can be taken down and rolled up as circumstances dictate, but people often get left behind. “Foreigners” have been playing increasingly prominent roles in many of the post-socialist states. Bosnia’s first ambassador to Japan was a Ghanaian doctor; in 2010, a Palestinian ran for parliament on the ticket of media tycoon and political upstart Fahrudin Radončić’s party. Two half-Palestinian brothers play for one of Croatia’s top football clubs. In the streets of Bucharest earlier this year, protesters chanted, “Arafat!” — not Yasser but Raed, a Romanian doctor of Palestinian birth who led the opposition to efforts to privatize the country’s healthcare system.

All this history — spliced and remixed into strangely labeled eras like “post–Cold War,” “post–9/11,” and now “pre–Arab Spring” — may now seem as quaint and disorienting as reruns of old fantasy films on TV. As Abu Hamza languishes in prison, the world seems to have moved on; just look at how much satellite television has changed. Years after Abu Hamza put up his dish in Bočinja, one of his daughters got a job with Al Jazeera’s new Balkan channel. The Qatari media juggernaut is all about regional integration: its multi-ethnic staff is drawn from across most of the former Yugoslavia and broadcasts to more than sixteen million people who share the same language — or, as we are required to say so as not to offend nationalist sensibilities, three different languages that happen to be mutually intelligible. It’s not exactly a brave new world, but it is at least more interesting and unpredictable than a future filled with new James Cameron films and all the other blandishments of finally belonging to the West.