Today I got a startling electronic-mail message from Ike Stow, presumably the same fellow from Stoke on Trent whose letters to the editor have appeared in Butterfly Nos. 3 and 5. That is, the same fellow who berated me in the latter letter for having messed with Sophie Calle. “I hope,” he wrote cheekily, “that Ranko finds someone his own size to pester next time around.” Anyhow, he had read my piece about the Last Art Show on the Culture Wars website (www.culturewars.org.uk), and he wished to let me know that he had actually been at the Last Art Show in Hyde Park on the Summer Solstice some two months ago. When I wrote him back that I assumed nothing had happened because of inclement weather, he responded that the wind was pretty bad, but that it was far from too bad. He claims he has a couple of photographs showing several paintings and drawings, pieces of sculpture, art books, and videotapes on fire. The fire in the pictures presumably shows that the wind was unusually strong that night. At any rate, Ike has failed to respond to my repeated messages asking him to send me the photographs and to tell me a bit more about what he has witnessed. Perhaps this is but a hoax?

Addendum (August 23, 2000)

After a long silence, I got another message from Ike. In the meanwhile, I kept pleading with him via electronic mail to send me the photographs that he had supposedly made during the stormy night of June 21 and 22. He did not even mention my pleas, let alone explain why he would not send me the pictures, but he did offer a few hints of their contents. “The blaze was intense because the wind was so strong that a lot of lighter fluid must have been used to get the fire going and to keep it up for a while,” he writes, “but I saw several small paintings with simple geometric patterns, all of which were painted on wood, many slim books printed on yellowish paper, a stout volume of many pages that seemed to be bound in leather, a couple of canvasses that could have been by late Mondrian, a thick folder with smallish drawings that were already unrecognizable by the time I saw them, and a bunch of partially melted video tapes, whose labels were charred beyond recognition.” As soon as I read this, I was convinced the whole thing was indeed a hoax, because the objects in the fire, with the exception of the tapes, fit the description of some of my own work, but the next sentence confused me once again: “The only other thing I saw, and photographed separately, was a large canvass in a flimsy frame showing a seated figure looking like a divinity or a saint, but it was so far gone that I could not tell whether it was a Christian, or Hindu, or perhaps a Buddhist religious image.” My machine crashed some ten or fifteen minutes after I received the message. I was dealing with an attachment to a message from a professional colleague from Cuba, of all places, and everything I got from Ike Stow was gone in a flash. I could not retrieve even Ike’s electronic-mail address, which I did not copy into my address-book beforehand. Luckily, I copied the above two sentences into another file in anticipation of another piece about the Last Art Show. God only knows whether or when Ike will try to get in touch with me again. I have waited for a few days, but to no avail.