Brave explorer on the frontiers of art. Born: January 12, 1924. Died: April 3, 2057, in Coffeeneck, New Jersey of a heart attack brought on by morbid obesity, age 133.
The mainstreaming of starvation killed The Hunger Artist.
The Hunger Artist had survived African famines. "They are amateurs," he commented, "not true artists." The Hunger Artist had survived anorexic film stars. "They starve for fame and riches," he pointed out, "not for the art of the act." The Hunger Artist would not even dignify the proliferation of diet books and programmes with a sneering dismissal.
What The Hunger Artist could not survive was science.
The first step leading to The Hunger Artist's demise occurred when researchers found that the human immune system could be rebooted (literally: kicked a second time) to target the body's own weight gain. We all remember the YouTube video of the immune system, portrayed as a muscle-bound beach bum, sitting on a chair under a large umbrella drinking a fruity beverage while fat cells, portrayed as Arabs, start harassing citizens. After a couple of minutes to let the unsubtle metaphors sink in, a scientist, portrayed as a man in a white lab coat with a clipboard in hand and a stethoscope around his neck, enters the picture and kicks sand in the immune system's face. Woken up to the dangers of large amounts of destructive fat, the immune system gets all Rambo on the Arabs and saves the innocent healthy body cells.
Okay, the editing of the action sequence was incomprehensible. Perhaps the producers of the public service announcement should not have assigned the Michael Baybbletron 2112 to direct it. Nonetheless, the point was clear: with just the slightest tweaking, the human body's own immune system could fight an exciting and ultimately triumphant battle against Arab fat.
The Hunger Artist watched warily as researchers experimented with a number of possible treatments based on their finding. Early results were not encouraging: patients' noses grew until they reached the floor and their ears grew until they were larger than their heads. Not only that, but they couldn't be allowed outside, for fear that they would flap their humungous ears and fly away.
However, eventually, inevitably, a pill was developed that kicked sand in the face of the immune system and got it to start attacking terrorist fat cells. Soon, The Hunger Artist was surrounded by ordinary men and women who were as thin as he was. But, unlike The Hunger Artist, who achieved his scarily scarecrowed physique by not eating, the people around him ate as they pleased and never showed it! "It's like watching a pitcher on steroids," The Hunger Artist sadly commented. "The pleasure of seeing somebody who looks like they are starving is diminished by the knowledge that the effect has been achieved by drugs."
That was the moment The Hunger Artist realized that he could no longer sustain his act. When everybody looks like they are starving, true starvation becomes kitsch. But, The Hunger Artist had, by that time, already devoted over 100 years of his life to the art of starvation. What was an artiste provocateur to do?
The Hunger Artist gained weight. Fifty pounds. If everybody was painfully thin, The Hunger Artist would show them themselves by becoming painfully fat. A hundred pounds. At first, The Hunger Artist's body, not used to all the calories, rejected partially digested food out of all possible orifices, including his ears. Two hundred pounds. But, The Hunger Artist persevered. Three hundred pounds. His dedication to the extremes of the art of body sculpture was...well, extreme. Four hundred pounds.
When he weighed over 600 pounds, The Hunger Artist, who now called himself The Obesity Artist, although the name never really stuck, toured America. It wasn't exactly a triumphal return; crowds were half or less what The Hunger Artist could have expected at the height of his fame. Americans appeared to have a "been there, done that" attitude towards obesity; the now fattened Hunger Artist evoked a melancholy sort of nostalgia for those who did attend his shows.
Halfway through his first and final "Fat of the Land" tour, The Hunger Artist collapsed on the stage, much to the consternation of many in the crowd who were uncertain about whether it would be appropriate to continue to mock him. (Most did.) "Do you admire my eating?" he asked the supervisor of the show. "Honestly, no, I do not," the supervisor told him. "You should," The Hunger Artist told him. "Okay, then," the supervisor said, I admire your eating." After a pause, the supervisor asked, "And, why should I admire your eating?" "Because," The Hunger Artist told him, "I couldn't find a food which tasted good to me."
Trixie Lackawannadixie
Trixie Lackawannadixie was, for many years, the Alternate Reality News Service's hunger beat reporter. She is now the Executive Director of the Northwest Tallahassee Branch of Bigots Without Borders/Bigots Sans Frontieres.