"I’m gonna live forever. ... Baby remember my name." Irene Cara’s infectious anthem to fame — the theme song for both the eponymous 1980 Alan Parker film and the television series and musical that followed — seemed mirrored nowhere more vividly than in the smile of Leroy, the young African-American dancer played by Gene Anthony Ray. He attended the actual New York High School of the Performing Arts as a teenager before being expelled, and his breakaway performance updated the American dream into the stuff of reality, even as the cogs of Reaganomics began to quash the upward mobility of precisely his Harlem demographic. By the time Gene Anthony Ray died, in 2003 from a stroke complicated by his illness from AIDS (an acronym that Reagan himself failed to utter publicly in eight years of office), hardly anyone in America appeared to remember his name.

That a young artist on the other side of the Atlantic found in Ray’s misfortune an allegory of celebrity and its vicissitudes would seem, at best, fodder for a tale of ingenuous empathy, or, at worst, the facile patronization of a fallen star by a rising one. Instead, Marco Papa’s (born 1973) multimedia, multiyear project Dancing on the Verge (2001-2006), which involved Ray himself before his untimely demise, combined ambition and self-consciousness in a mix worthy of its subject. Following the decline of his career, Ray moved to Italy, drifting between various cities in a state of destitution, stirring up a buzz with his appearances in the most unlikely places. Here was the incarnation of fabled (and distinctively American) success, turning up like a latter-day Wandering Jew in real time, exiled from the stardom he had so charismatically personified. Ray’s intermittent residence in Papa’s native Milan, Naples, and even a small village in Calabria reduced — for Papa and his Italian contemporaries — the epic magnitude of "fame" (in all its senses) to more mundane dimensions. Papa embarked on a quest to find Ray and engage him in a series of works that would thematize his fitful trajectory as an artist and individual. What began as an aesthetic experiment led to a close friendship, as well as a kind of social intervention, as Papa used the project to raise awareness and money for Ray’s increasingly abject predicament. At no point, however, did Papa’s venture exploit the bathos of Ray’s tribulations, nor indulge in blind hero worship.

Evolving in time, space, and concept, Dancing on the Verge (for which Papa won the Casoli Prize for Contemporary Art in 2007) involved meticulous drawings, written documentation, and site- specific installations, including a requiem mass held in Trapani, Sicily, using a sculptured chalice-trophy designed by Papa. The project culminated in a synergy of sculpture, performance, and collective labor titled Black Gene Performance (2006), in which numerous individuals pulled together on a rope — passed through a mirrored wall — to hoist up a black granite sculpture of Gene/Leroy. Comprising 11 separate blocks of black granite threaded by a steel cable, the sculpture figured the dancer in the legendary Fame split when pulled taut. As the crowd pulled the rope, they could not see the sculpture as it ascended, but rather only their own reflection in the mirror. The effigy of success and failure rising and falling on the other side remained out of sight. Once the act of collective suspension concluded, the sculpture crumpled to the warehouse floor, its limbs disarticulated. Though its developments have been recorded in an absorbing book-journal (Charta, Milan; 2006), Dancing on the Verge is more than the sum of its (organizational, formal, and temporal) parts. In its revisitation and attempted resuscitation of Ray’s livelihood, the project unfurls an attendant commentary on the art market, its mercurial and mercenary addiction to celebrity, and Papa’s (and our) own implication in this system of unrelenting codependencies.