Fidelman is an American sculptor who takes a rather heterodox approach to his art form: rather than “carving or assembling” his pieces, Fidelman crates his figures as “hollows in the earth”— perfectly square holes one to two arms deep.  While traveling through Italy, Fidelman searches for land upon which to perform and display his art, charging 10 lire to enter the exhibition. Once, in a small park in Naples exhibiting a freshly dug piece, Fidelman is approached by a young man who asks for a refund for having viewed the square holes out of curiosity and to hone his own artistic practice, to his own disappointment, pleading that the lire were needed to purchase bread for his poor family. Fidelman refuses the young man’s petition, but, in noting that the man is an aspiring artist, Fidelman explains the artistry behind his art, citing the metaphysical relation between up and down, something and nothing, how his art should necessarily be contextualized within the “Art, history, politics, [and] religion” of Italy. The young man fails to understand Fidelman’s meaning and insists that he be refunded to provide for his family, but he is turned away. 

Soon after, Fidelman is approached by a shadowy cloaked figure whose presence unsettles him. Claiming that he had been delayed in coming to see Fidelman’s work earlier in the day, he pays the ten lire to enter the exhibition and is bemused by the 2 empty wholes. The cloaked figure remarks that the 2 wholes where nothing and thusly not art to which Fidelman responds with an insight as to how nothing is an artistic form and that form “often is the content of Art.” The figure cryptically suggests that he is both the young man, now dead, that Fidelman had just earlier turned away, and the devil. He strikes Fidelman over the head with his shovel sending the sculptor “toppling as though dead” into the deeper of the two hollowed holes and buries him, remarking “So it’s a grave.”

A flow of Fidelman’s myriad impressions, thoughts and memories follow, all of which are tangentially related by a ritualistic renunciation of religious iconography where he destroys his canvases and brushes, citing the sinfulness of graven images, but heretically continues to paint religious motifs even after his Master instructs against it. All these thoughts—the exhibition in Naples, graven images, the betrayal of his masters wishes—precede Fidelman, back in the present moment, painting in a cave beneath his dying sister’s, Bessie, house. Having returned from his tour of Italy, and unbeknownst to Bessie, Fidelman takes up painting the walls of the cave poorly lit by a lightbulb. The lightbulb, in a moment almost biblically inspired, speaks to Fidelman and advises he go and see his sister upstairs before it is too late. Fidelman initially refuses, remarking that he would rather finish the cave paintings first to present to her, but the lightbulb says that it’ll be too late. Fidelman proceeds up the cave’s stairs into the house to say hello after which point, Bessie dies—contented.