Henry, who is my stepmom, published the monologue she recited at the start of each performance in her second critical masterwork, Lamborgina C(unt)ock (see Appendix), and Ronson Boyle, who was her gallerist/impresario, kept a simple ledger detailing Private Viewing’s earnings and expenditures (see Table 1, below) that he published in his memoir, Procurer: My Life as a Gallerist, but except for those two documents, there is no documentation of any of the performances.
Because of so little documentation, there are people who still to this day insist none of the performances ever really happened. It was all some kind of prank, they think. I don’t know what to say about that except that those people are in the minority, and even though the idea that it was all a prank does seem kind of interesting, especially because of all the stuff that Private Viewing set in motion, which I will talk about soon and below, I really think the performances happened. If they didn’t, then my parents have lied straight to my face a lot. Which I know they haven’t, even though I can’t prove it. How do you prove something like that? It isn’t possible to prove that to someone.
Very little is known about any of the viewer-participants, except for Jonny “Jonboat” Pellmore-Jason, who is my father, and who, according to himself, Henry, and Ronson Boyle, was the last person to participate in/view one of the performances (in February 2000). Henry and Boyle refuse to name the first eight and they swear to protect their privacy forever, but they admit the following information about them: all of them were men, and all of them had net worths of ten million dollars or more.
Over the last number of years, dozens of people have said to the press that they themselves were one of the other eight viewer-participants, and who knows how many people have said it to their friends at parties and other social gatherings and so on? but Boyle and Henry both refuse to comment on any of those people’s claims except for my father’s. Most people believe that the other eight viewer-participants were, like my father, longtime, trusted clients of Boyle’s who’d bought high-end art from him in the past, and that would make a lot of sense, but there is no evidence for it. I don’t think it matters who exactly they were. I don’t think it ever did. I think all that matters is they were rich and they were either paying for art by or sex with Fondajane Henry or for both art by and sex with Fondajane Henry at the turn of the millennium when it wasn’t legal to pay for any kind of sex yet.
Still, a lot of people would like to know who the other eight viewer-participants were, so I will talk about that a little right here and then be done with it. People have always been interested in that from the beginning. Originally, they were interested for gossip-scandal kinds of reasons (like “I heard half of the participants were married with children!” or “I heard one of the participants was a famous televangelist!”), or conspiracy kinds of reasons (like “I heard three of the eight were congressmen who helped draft the bill that legalized prostitution in 2001!”), but now that Private Viewing is considered as important as it is considered, people are more interested to know who was smart enough or privileged enough or just cool enough to become involved in such an important art-historical moment.
Anyway, since there is barely any documentation of Private Viewing, my description of it in the Description of the Artwork section below is based on interviews I conducted with Fondajane Henry, Ronson Boyle, and my father, as well as from public statements they’ve made in the press, things Henry wrote about Private Viewing in her memoirs and critical treatises, and things Boyle wrote about it in his memoir (all cited on the Sources Consulted page):
Description of the Artwork
It is possible to think of the performance of Private Viewing as beginning way before the viewer-participants ever got into the same room as Fondajane Henry, and I will think of it that way. So, to begin with, Ronson Boyle would approach someone and show them a Polaroid photograph of Fondajane Henry giving a lecture to a class she was teaching at New York University, and explain who she was in case the person didn’t know, or had only just heard of her (she was a little famous already). He would explain that she was the twenty-three-year-old intersex author of the critical masterwork Flesh-and-Bone Robots You Think Are Your Friends (FABRYTAYF), which she got a PhD for writing when she was only twenty-two, and which was not nearly as popular yet as it is today, but was definitely getting a lot of attention in certain academic circles, and was controversial because its main argument that punishing men (or women) for paying for sex was not only bad for women but that allowing women to charge money for sex was good for women not just because it was their body and therefore their choice and so it should be their right and people deserved to be able to exercise their rights by definition of what rights are, but also because it was a way women could have real earning power to make up for how they barely had any earning power compared to men which is unjust and keeps women down in a big way because earning power is the main power behind almost every other kind of civilian power in our American society because your earning power can be turned into spending power, and spending power is the main thing that keeps you safe and respected and free (even though it wouldn’t be the main thing in a perfect world), so it shouldn’t just be that women were safe from being prosecuted from selling sex (which is how it was already when FABRYTAYF came out—prostitution was partly decriminalized about a year earlier) but that men (and women) should be safe from being prosecuted for buying sex, since that would lead to more men (and women) buying sex, which would transform more men’s earning/spending power into more women’s earning/spending power, and once that happened it would not be hard for people to get over their superstitions and religious stuff against sex work, just like how most people were almost completely over that same kind of stuff when it came to people being gay, or like how pretty much all people had been completely over that stuff for years when it came to Curios and the things people liked to do to Curios, which they got over inside just a few months of Curios first being sold to consumers—people would get over their nonsense against legalized prostitution because it wouldn’t just be for an ideal of justice and human rights, it would also be practical, so getting over it would be the path of least resistance, so everyone would just get used to it.
Then after Boyle showed the Polaroid while explaining who Henry was, he would say that she was doing a new kind of very limited performance that he thought the person he was talking to would be more than happy to pay for, and that the performance would, in Boyle’s opinion as a famous gallerist and world-renowned curator of this or that show at this or that museum, be not only an important performance in the history of art but a performance that the person Boyle was inviting to view it would specifically find to be extremely enjoyable. The person would ask what was involved, and Boyle would say he could not describe the whole performance itself because “art is as it does, not as it’s described,”*1 but he could (and he did) tell the person
that Fondajane Henry, as a central part of the performance, would have sex with the person if the person wanted to, which they would probably want to because Henry was obviously beautiful, plus her anatomy was very special,