Tyler: “I wrote a whole manifesto on it, early on. Richard Prince and Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons don’t make a single thing. They have assistants. This was exactly like that. It’s the exact same thing. Except that in those cases the labor is executed by someone interchangeable but the idea-machine remains the same, and what we were doing was the opposite of that.”

Marlin: “What was the labor? Was the labor the work itself, or was it the identity, the standing in the gallery, being small and blond, working-class and nonthreatening? Was the labor being the object of other people’s fantasies? Was it the emotional labor? Or was it the sculpture?”

Jack: “Carey got famous pretty fast. We were special by association. The galleries opened doors for us—residencies, institutions. We didn’t have to figure out how to sell work until after she died. I spent fourteen years making exactly what I wanted.”

Marlin: “I honestly believe that without our connection to Carey, we would not have had the careers we did. Especially me. I was a bisexual girl from the suburbs who liked to draw. There’s a million of me. My success was one hundred percent because of her.”

Jes, back in her studio: “I would have been fine in my career, but without the money we made from Carey Logan, we never would have been able to buy the place upstate. I got to spend a year cutting my last film. Millions of dollars changes things.”

Tyler: “I never would have figured myself out if it wasn’t for her.” He looks down, away from the camera, and his voice breaks. “Maria taught me how to be a person.”

There was footage from THE BURIAL PROJECT, that night on Grand Street. You could see me in the corner of the frame, standing in a line, scratching my arm awkwardly.

Tyler: “THE BURIAL PROJECT was great because it gave us forty-two fresh casts to work from, and all these people who had ‘seen’ her ‘work.’ After that we made whatever we felt like, and all Maria had to do was show up for studio visits and openings and stuff like that. That was easy because she was with us all the time, anyway.”

Jes, her face flat: “She was in love with Tyler. Absolutely, unequivocally. She didn’t want to share. Him, or her. They became a unit.”

Marlin: “Problems began to appear—tiny little cracks—things that were inevitable. Tyler and Maria had this intense relationship. Jack and I split off. Jes was left all alone. We fractured. We became afraid—of being accused of being dishonest, of stacking the deck, so to speak, with five minds pretending to be one. Of being fraudulent.”