For what would be her final performance piece before the cancer claimed her life, the artist slathered her hairless body with the darkest substance on earth, a highly-toxic, ultra-black paint comprised of carbon nanotubes. Once the paint had dried, she slipped on a pair of dollar-store sunglasses and walked naked through the streets of her Brooklyn neighborhood, her paint-glazed skin absorbing 99.96% of the light it came in contact with.
During the brunch hour, diners held up their phones and tried to take pictures of the knife-slash black hole that was the artist’s body. But she walked on without a word, crisscrossing Brooklyn for hours, ignoring the cacophonous noise of the bustling city in which she had cried and smoked and fucked for the past forty-eight and a half years.
At sunset her legs went numb and she experienced the sensation of floating above the pavement like a spirit, the sharp October cold chilling the fibrous ligaments linking her bones. But on she walked, staring into the depthless voids of her feet, her body slowly dissolving into the blue-black darkness of the encroaching night.
In the morning, bars of gold sunlight sliced between the buildings and stretched across the sidewalk. Speed-walking pedestrians sucked fruit-flavored smoke from electronic cigarettes. A pair of dollar-store sunglasses lay unscratched in the center of the street. The artist’s body was never found.
