The video opened on a woman at a breakfast table eating cereal with the barrel of her gun. The scene unfolded so slowly it was almost obscene: Brenae held the handle, dipped the gun’s tip into the flakes and milk, lifted them, slopping and dripping. She sucked the tip with her lips. Then over again. The gun in her fist, her jaw grinding. Milk dribbled down her chin, white and glistening.

“It can’t be loaded,” someone beside me muttered, and someone else insisted it was. Brenae had had other students check her gun throughout the day.

As Brenae Brasil drove around L.A. with the weapon on her lap, shopped for mangoes with the gun tucked in the back of her pants, and brushed her teeth with the red toothbrush stuck in the barrel, her comic charisma overtook the screen. Her slow gestures made every action seem full of wonder and newness, as if she were just noticing for the first time the gun in her fist, the curves of metal, the drips of milk. When she walked, she strolled. She cupped the mangoes in her palms and sniffed them. She dozed on her bed with a little half smile, the gun on her pillow, her fingers brushing the barrel. She had elegant, tapered hands.

Despite the violence implied in every frame, I couldn’t imagine this woman wanting to die. Art schools in the United States welcomed more than ten thousand hopeful MFA students a year, and only a few dozen would make any international waves before they graduated. According to Lynne’s remarks, Brenae had already been hailed by one critic as “the next generation’s Marina Abramović” for her inclusion in a notable world-traveling group show. With two or three more breakthrough moments, she might have launched a major solo career.

I looked at the faces of the crowd and registered awe and sadness at the video, as well as flickers of frustration and regret. Ray’s foursome had sunk into impassive silence.

The movie ended with Brenae in bed, cradling the gun next to her cheek. As the screen went black, the crowd clapped and burst into conversation again, but in the fresh dark, their voices sounded restless. People began milling around, blocking my view of Ray. I wanted to see his face, his reaction. I pushed my way through so fast that a girl hissed to her friend, “There’s waaaay too many L.A. bitches here.” When I reached the place Ray had been standing, he was gone. The foursome he had been observing had vanished, too. The space seemed scrubbed of any evidence of them, the ground scattered with cigarette butts and crumpled maps to the other installation sites. I picked up the maps, refolded them, and set them on a nearby table. A band started jangling on the stage.