what the cost of admission to Private Viewing was (it ranged from $20,000 to $50,000, as you can see in the “Admission” column of Table 1),
that the performance would last anywhere from a few minutes to sixteen hours, and the duration was totally up to the viewer-participant, and
Boyle would explain that the invitation was not an exclusive invitation, but was pretty close because Private Viewing would be performed for only one person at a time, and just once a month.
According to Boyle, every single person he approached accepted the invitation. It is impossible, for obvious reasons, to corroborate that information, but Boyle was and is definitely famous for his talents as a gallerist and salesperson, and even though hundreds of people have untruthfully bragged that they attended a performance of Private Viewing, not even one person has ever said that he turned down an invitation to attend a performance of Private Viewing (at least not that I could find) because that is how ridiculous it would be to even imagine that if Boyle chose to approach you with an invitation to experience near-exclusive art you would not take him up on that invitation.
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Each of the nine performances took place in a different luxury hotel suite in Manhattan, usually on a weeknight—it depended on the viewer/participant’s schedule. Boyle and Henry would arrive at the hotel an hour before each performance. Henry would put on makeup and lingerie and etcetera, and get herself acquainted with the suite while Boyle would arrange a nice spread of food and liquor and Curios and formulae and condoms, then return to the bar in the lobby to wait for the viewer-participant to show up. When the v-p showed up, Boyle would give him the key to the suite and wait in the lobby for the performance to end, on call to provide any “extras” the v-p might want.
The shortest performance lasted an hour. The next-shortest one lasted three hours. The rest of them lasted between fifteen and sixteen hours, til checkout time the following day.
When the viewer-participant entered the bedroom of the suite, Henry would start to deliver her monologue (see Appendix). The monologue was written so that it wouldn’t seem like it had been written. It was written so it seemed like Henry was spontaneously talking to the viewer-participant about herself. To make the spontaneity seem real, she used what is called “an elliptical style”*2 which means that she would go off on tangents a lot but always come back around to what she was originally saying. I happen to know from lots of firsthand experience that Henry pretty much always does this elliptical style thing when she is talking to people, and also when she is teaching class, but what is interesting to me is that she does not really do it in her books at all. She is a very organized writer, usually. Her arguments move in very straight lines. (That is one of the reasons she is such a respected writer and thinker, I believe.) Anyway, she told me that the monologue was very easy for her to write and remember because she basically just wrote it the way she would tell it if she was telling it to someone she liked talking to, plus everything she said in the monologue was actually true, so she didn’t have to be more clever than usual.
In seven of the performances she finished the monologue before any kind of sex was had. In the other two performances, some sex was had right at the beginning, and then she finished the monologue, and some more sex was had. All the viewer-participants asked questions while she gave her monologue, some of them told stories of their own, and she would listen to their stories and answer their questions, but she would always make sure to get back to the monologue right at the part where she left off before she got interrupted.
I’m not going to get into all the different kinds of sex that was had because doing that would make me uncomfortable. I don’t mean it makes me uncomfortable that Henry had sex with people as part of the performance, but just that the picturing of her having sex, for me, is not comfortable because she is my stepmom. It is easy for me to know that she had lots of different kinds of sex without picturing it, and it is even easy for me to read about the different kinds of sex she had without picturing it. I don’t know how, but when I read the words, I don’t make the pictures in my head. What I worry about is that if I start to describe the sex then it might not be so easy not to picture it, and also maybe it would be a little creepy for you to read a stepson’s description of his stepmom having sex, and I don’t want this paper to dishonor the important artwork that Henry did by distracting you into thinking about me as a person writing about his stepmom having sex. I want the paper to make you think about the artwork itself, and also about how I think of it as artwork. Plus you can read a lot of descriptions of the sex in Lamborgina C(unt)ock and, if you know French, also in the interview she did with the author Michel Houellebecq for the magazine Les Inrockuptibles, which are both cited on the “Sources Consulted” page.
Three of the viewer-participants wanted extras. One of them wanted a bottle of Hennessy Richard cognac to drink with Henry and then take home; one of them wanted to watch Henry “overload on a three-year-old-or-older BullyKing-PerFormulized purple hobunk while it abused two nascent Curios with a matchstick, but before it spilled blood”*3; and one of them wanted “to eat and watch [Henry] eat some kind of $100 house-special burger from the hotel’s restaurant that was made of dry-aged Kobe beef, and topped with shaved truffles, pule, and, I don’t know, pulverized centaur hoof or something like that.”*4 When requests for these extras were made by the viewer-participants, Henry called down to the lobby for Boyle, and he would relay the requests to the maître d’, who would charge them to the suite, have them delivered to Boyle in the bar/lobby, and then Boyle himself would bring them up to the room. The costs of these extras are recorded in the “Extras” column in Table 1, and all of them were recouped from the viewer-participants after the performance.
Impact
I was only one to three years old during the important period of art and non-art history that was caused by Private Viewing, so even though I was (barely) standing next to the main hero of it for a lot of the time, I don’t actually remember any of it. That is probably for the better, in terms of me having a good childhood that I remember as being happy and full of love, but maybe it is for the worse in terms of writing this paper, because maybe knowing who I am would cause a reader to hope I’ll give them a special insider’s perspective on what it was like to be there, next to the hero, and I just want to take a moment here, at the beginning of this section on the impact of Private Viewing, to warn them to stop hoping for that if they are hoping for that, because if they don’t stop, then they will be disappointed.
(I realize I probably should have made that warning/disclaimer at the beginning of the paper, but the paper is already late and I don’t have time to go back and rework the whole introduction. I apologize for that to any future readers of this paper, and also to you, Mr. Hickey, who have been such a great mentor for me during this January Short Term. Also, Mr. Hickey, I apologize if my going over the page limit turns out to be really annoying, and once again I am sorry the paper is so late. We are moving to a suburb of Chicago in a couple months, where I will attend a public high school in order to better understand how more average kinds of Americans are so that I can become a more well-rounded and effective artist and thinker, and the public high school there doesn’t do January Short Terms or independent studies, and they definitely don’t have visiting thinkers and artists of your caliber, and they might not even have any kinds of visiting mentors/faculty, so I really wanted to make my last JST count by writing a paper of the highest quality that I could and that I believed in and that I would hopefully not be ashamed to have people read as my apprentice work or juvenilia one day if and when I become known for artmaking and people get interested in my intellectual history and my early development as an artist, and the paper is already almost the length we agreed on, and I haven’t even gotten into the main part of it yet. I will stop delaying getting to the main part in just one more moment, but before I do that I just want to say thank you for mentoring me through this process of understanding and discovery. I feel a million times more educated than I did a month ago, and closer to my parents than ever, and I will always cherish these past few weeks and the conversations we had during them as important and productive, and I just hope it will be okay if I write you a letter once in a while to stay in touch. Thank you.)