Cut to Jack, in his studio, sitting on an apple box against the wall. “Marlin and I hand-built the bones, the legs, the skin, the shapes; Tyler painted the decay. When we were done, it was good. We knew it was good. But it wasn’t what we wanted to do with our careers.”

Tyler: “I don’t remember which one of us thought of it.”

Marlin: “I know that it happened at the Half King, at one of the outside tables, because in those days we all smoked. It was October, months after graduation, when we shared the living room of our apartment as a studio. Jes, we’d met earlier that year. She was living with us by then.”

Jes, sitting alone on the black stage of her theater: “Everybody was telling us to be smart. Galleries were rejecting the same work we were praised for in school—Marlin’s prints, my music and films, Tyler and Jack’s installations—telling us that they weren’t salable. We were told, again and again, that the market needed an easy conversation.”

Tyler: “The first months outside of school, in the cold hard world where nobody cared, were a shock. Jes got rejected from one gallery after three months of studio visits and talks about a show. I lost like five bartending gigs. Jack started doing drugs pretty hard. We were going nowhere fast.”

Jes: “We tried to talk to one of Jack’s professor friends about it. He said that it was a great-looking sculpture, but nobody was going to be impressed by four young rich kids who wanted to romanticize death. He talked about Rachel Whiteread, how House got torn down right away because people were so insulted that some privileged elite artist wanted to fetishize other people’s pain.”

Jack: “He asked me about it years later. I said he must have misremembered.”

Jes: “We were pissed off. We thought that the whole world was our enemy. We wanted to turn it upside down.”

Marlin: “We entered HARD BODY (7 TIMES A DAY) into the Young Foundation show, with a made-up backstory and a fake person, the whole thing. If it got any press, we were going to say right then and there that it was a hoax.”

Jack: “It was Jes’s idea to give it this, like, political dimension.”

Jes: “It was the ’90s. Everyone loved stories about women suffering. The history of art is littered with the bodies of dead women. That’s always been true. Think about Paris in the last century. L’Inconnue de la Seine. Every artist had this woman’s death mask on their wall, like it meant something that she looked happy when she drowned.” She sniffs. “But it didn’t mean anything.”

Jack: “We felt that our class position was holding us back. Class was a construction, we told ourselves.”