Marcus Eubanks
the artist
The artist is an angry young medical student. He is idealistic, a
hopeless romantic, and more than a little touched with cynicism. He
is incredibly cash-poor, and the cumulative debt at the end of his
basic medical training would buy the better part of three Ferarri
Testarrossas.
the art
The young medical student writes. Nothing terribly flashy, just
glowing amber letters on a dark computer screen. His matter is not
terribly inspired, for he shamelessly steals from day-to-day events in
a large inner-city hospital. Narrative. Short and sweet.
"Here, people, is what happens in a hospital. People die or live,
depending on why they're there, and the success of our efforts to
repair broken bodies, or bodies turned against themselves."
He sends these narratives to his family and friends. Sometimes he
sends them off to be published. Email. Comes home from eight hours
of trying desperately with the rest of the team to keep a patient from
crashing. Failure. So he sits down and pounds out these narratives
on his obsolete computer and sends them away.
The young man also likes to prepare canvases with sparse abstract
paintings and give them ludicrous, pretentious titles. He likes to
affix little plaques below them, like you'd see in a gallery, and
attibute them to a fictional artist who would have been in his prime
from the late 1950's to the early '70's. He then hangs these on his
wall and marvels at how impressed his guests are that he manages to
afford original art on a student's budget. He also wanders around his
apartment putting those little plaques under light-switches,
breaker-boxes and other day-to-day items. Complete with contrived
title, date, media, and artist's name. Sometimes his friends even
figure out the joke.
the beret
The artist's beret changes from case to case. Sometimes it is
a blue buffant-cap or green paper surgeon's cap. This is so bits of
hair and dandruff and the like don't fall off of the artist's head
into big open holes in the patient. At other times, if the artist
*had* a beret, it would probably be your basic black wool felt with
worn leather trim. It would have a cadduces pin on it. You know, the
little staff-and-snakes thing that medical-types seem to be so
enamoured of. The artist also imagines that it would have a button on
it that said, "Trust me, I'm a doctor," but is of the mind that such a
thing would scare patients unneccessarilly, so he'd probably have to
forgoe it. He'd even more like to put his old yellow `frowny-face'
button on it, with the logo below it reading, `Shit!' -but he *knows*
that would be misunderstood, so he tries to avoid speculations along
those lines.
Submitted by Marcus Eubanks (eubanks@astro.ocis.temple.edu), on Tuesday, April 26, 1994, from Philadelphia, PA