Justine (6 page)

T
he paintings were there when I moved into the house two years ago. They stood in the garden shed on the shelves he'd built for them. Height, width and depth designed to fit the formats. I opened the shed and stepped into my grandfather's mind.

There were paintings from back before I was born. My grandmother was there. She was naked. She was dressed in blue. She glinted red.

Once upon a time she was a woman with friends and occupations, my Grandpa said. It was only after my mother was born that she changed. She began speaking in tongues at the onset of labor. The birth was long and it stalled several times. Each time the contractions returned, Grandpa said, my grandmother thought the devil had come to rip her guts out. Help me, kill him, she shrieked. Help me, kill him.

Grandpa's voice rose to a falsetto whenever he mimicked that terrible shriek.

Finally, she was so exhausted the doctors began to doubt she could have the baby, but then my mother came out, a prodigious child, blue-violet, almost five kilos.

Grandma looked pretty in the soft colors of the painting. That's how she looked, Grandpa said.

In the first months after the birth she slipped in and out of her fantasies. Finally, they engulfed her. She grew disinterested, Grandpa said, taken by a disease that had always dwelt within her body, but that had only emerged when she became a mother. My grandmother couldn't do it, so Grandpa was a mother to my mother. When my grandmother came home after three months in the hospital, he cared for her, too, as well as minding his own work.

Grandpa had explored the same color spectra over and over in his paintings—pink, and the way gray becomes green. I borrowed a cart and hauled the paintings to the bulk waste. The next day I retrieved them again. It was beginning to rain. They hung in the heat from the wood stove and reeked. They stood in a row along the wall, lay in a pile on the floor, and then were packed in bubble wrap with protective corners and placed in Ane's attic. All the self-portraits Grandpa did from the torso up, the cadaver paintings, and many, many studies of a child's skin went to the gallery in Odense on the condition that they transfer some money to me whenever anything sold.

T
he first time I took him to the academy was because we were going to see the school's June exhibition. The summer day was dry and hot with plenty of sun and ease. The neighborhood around Charlottenborg, a sixteenth-century palace, and the streets behind it frothed with activity as people swept back and forth with works meant for display.

Grandpa hobbled along. On the way up the stairs leading to the studios we were bowled over by a girl who then collapsed forward onto the pavement.

“She ate a pot brownie,” her boyfriend mumbled, glancing at Grandpa.

The girl pushed herself up and stumbled over to a gate and vomited.

“No, I'm not going in there,” Grandpa said and halted.

Finally, we succeeded in forcing our way through the people crowding the stairs. We'd nearly reached the top and stood at the entrance to a space created by tarpaulins from a surplus stock. Beneath the canopy were pillows and blankets.

“Come in, come in,” a young man called through the odor of incense. “There's just enough room for you here.”

Ravi Shankar's sitar thrummed from between the pillows.

“You're not going in there,” Grandpa said, grabbing my arm.

Farther back in the large apartment, on the other side of the chill-out space, Ane stood and waved with some of the others from our group. They were drinking red. A pair of girls squeezed past us, drawing Grandpa in with them.

The painting students had divvied up the place so that each person had his own space. The paintings hung in rows along the newly primed white walls and resembled something from an expensive gallery. Grandpa wandered the spaces and occasionally halted before a canvas. And then he rubbed his thumb over the surface or scratched at the paint.

“Acrylic,” he growled and it was a curse word.

“What do they want with all that junk?” he asked when we again stood out on the street.

He was an old man, one meter and sixty with his cane and a well-worn cardigan dating from the seventies, self-patched with large stitches.

“Nothing much.”

“I didn't mean you.”

“I'm not interested in what you meant.”

I took Grandpa down to Nyhavn and bought him a whisky, but somehow he'd become stuck in the pillow room, he simply couldn't leave it.

“It smelled strange. Didn't you think so, Justine? What were they doing in there? Do you think they were smoking weed?”

“How should I know? I never even went in.”

B
efore I applied to the school, I went around and saw some studio spaces together with Anders Balle, a guy I barely knew. He'd entered the academy of arts the previous year. The first half year he couldn't produce anything, he said. That happened to a lot of people, but now the floodgates were obviously open and things were gushing with vigor.

We headed to Charlottenborg a Saturday evening when we were certain to be alone. All the students were gone, but their works had been left behind in the large rooms with wood floors, high panel-walls, and windows facing Nyhavn on one side and the inner courtyard on the other.

“So. Have a look around and we'll meet up again in an hour,” Anders said as he disappeared around a corner.

I took a kind of running start and sprang out, or maybe in.

The first space was filled with thread. Yarn and fabric were suspended from the lofts, were stretched between the walls, creeping between the various planes like cobwebs. Sacks of clothes lay spread across the floor. There were glue gobs, there were boxes and an old loom. In another room someone was in the process of making an air balloon from some gray stuff that stank.

I tried to find the door from which I'd entered, for some reason I just really wanted to see it, and suddenly there were two doors. I opened one and stepped into a new room where walls, windows, posts, chair, and table were covered in spray paint. In a corner were three paint buckets and some jam jars. Beneath a sink there was a box of jam jars. In the sink were some jars without lids.

I was reminded of the girl who won admission to the school after sitting for a couple of days in a large wooden box among all the submitted work. Her box sojourn was itself the work. It lasted until she was up before the admissions committee. Then she stepped out of the box and read aloud from a diary she'd kept. The girl had pissed and shit in some jam jars. She left them standing behind.

I stuck as many of the jars into my bag as would fit. I hated the fucking place. And all the fucking, jar-shitting artists.

I
didn't hate them. I loved them. No. That's not how it was. I hated the ones I loved. I also wanted to be just like that right there. In that exact spot.

I
t was cold when I began to create my work. The cold stood right outside the windows. On the floor the paper stretched and readied itself. I wrote in sprawling letters. In Greenlandic. Burned the letters into the paper with a spirit marker and drowned them in lacquer. The alkyd flayed the letters to dun. Everything snarled and sweat stood out on my skin. I removed my clothes and opened the windows. The panes broke. The lacquer was yellow and smelled like piss. First the surface received a coat, then the deeper layers. The wallpaper disintegrated and curled and dropped off. The wind started in. In February it snowed on the floor. I drank whiskey from jam jars and tossed them out the open windows. I turned on the video camera and made a song. I moved my body in dance. I delivered the pictures, the song, and the dance to the listed address.

G
randpa took it in stride when I told him I was going to attend the academy. Actually, he didn't react. But then he heard about Ane.

“What did she do?” he asked.

“She filmed herself kicking a goat.”

“Ane?”

“Yeah.”

“A video? But what did she kick a goat for? Never mind. And she taped it?”

Grandpa looked disgusted.

“It was no big deal, Grandpa. She borrowed a goat from one of the other families. Then she tied it to a tree, so it couldn't escape. Then she took the video camera and filmed while she kicked it, I mean, kicked, that's not really what she did, she just poked it a little, you know: tap, tap. It didn't take ten seconds. No one could come and say it was animal abuse, Grandpa. The goat's fine.”

“But can't you see it for yourself, Justine?” Grandpa asked. “That's a damned insane thing to do. Kicking a goat? That's never been art.”

“Grandpa, trust me. That's art. I could try and explain it to you, but I don't think it would help much. You'd still think it was ridiculous.”

“You can damn well try. In fact, that's the least you can do. You can't just say it's art, and that's that. Tell me, Justine. What is it that makes kicking a goat a work of art?”

“Mainly because Ane says that it's art. And because she's going to the academy, of course.”

“But how did she get in?”

“With the goat, Grandpa . . .”

“That's completely absurd. Can't you see that? It reminds me of those idiotic videos where people film each other in all sorts of stupid situations, like when they fall on their ass or get their pants soaked or something. That's just as idiotic,” said Grandpa. “But you don't make things like that, right?”

T
he new students gathered with the old in the academy's banquet hall with its gold chandeliers and antique plaster friezes. The rector talked about art's necessity and about the great masters whose steps had graced the courtyard's cobblestones. It was a great honor and a great responsibility to be a student in the castle. We were already becoming a part of history.

Grandpa thought it was all a lot of snobbery, he couldn't care less about the overblown place, he said. Nothing good would ever come out of it. But we who were released into the castle's corridors hurried to find the place that would be ours. I had nothing on me but some India ink, and I wrote my name on a piece of paper and stuck it to a wall. A moment later Ane appeared and staked out a spot next to me. In reality, she said, she'd mostly done drawings and watercolors before applying to the school, but when she was working on the application piece she'd talked to one of the academy's professors a friend of a friend had put her in touch with. The professor had said she shouldn't apply with her paintings. They were too emotive, he thought, and way, way too nice. They lacked bite, distance, that something that gave them artistic legitimacy. Ane thought she'd fooled him, and she enjoyed the fact that she was now free to drop goats and videos and continue with the paintings she'd always done.

We flowed together. The whole studio flowed together. Things whirled around. They entered through doors and windows. Boxes, tables, chairs, more boxes, buckets, pots, jam jars, lamps, paints, stands. It wasn't too long before the janitorial staff could no longer tell the difference between what was trash and what was important.

“T
he difference between whoever made this piece and you is that you want people to experience something in particular. They just want to make you aware of the fact that you're experiencing,” I said.

“I never wanted people to experience any particular thing,” Grandpa said. “They can think and feel whatever they want.”

“I don't know how to respond to that, Grandpa. I actually think it has to do with the fact that at some point the brain simply stops trying to understand.”

“What the hell do you mean by that, kid?”

I slammed the door so that the window rattled in its frame. A moment later he came out into the garden. He took the deck chair from the shed and opened it next to the chopping block.

“There's enough wood for plenty of winters, Justine.”

“Do you plan on moving any?”

“Remember that I've got to be able to stack it.”

“I'm not a child, Grandpa.”

Grandpa sank heavily into the chair.

“No, I'm well aware of that, Justine. I'm well aware. It's just that I'm getting a little fucking old.”

“That's what I've been saying all along.”

“But no one is going to fucking come along and tell me that my senses aren't intact.”

“All you're missing is the metasense, Grandpa.”

“What kind of sense?”

A
nders Balle was with me when I created my
   
piniartorsuaq
, my great hunter, a woman named Inngili. Inngili was me, and I was her, and it was great, we could simply inhabit the same body.

Inngili and I accompanied Balle to Nordsøcentret in Hirtshals. We wanted to take some shots with animals, preferably seals. I'd arranged things with the aquarium's head, and Balle had rented some camera equipment for seventy thousand kroner from Zentropa, where he had a contact. We were well prepared. Balle would take the photographs so that I could exclusively concentrate on Inngili and the animals. Bear skin trousers and a white anorak. I didn't just look it, I was a real hunter.

The seals reclined on the artificial rocks, there were quite a few of them, at least twenty. It was like the olden days, said Inngili, back when there were seals all over the ice. Lounging. Distending. I wondered if I would be able to instill life in those that were dozing, but then a pair of the seals glided into the water after all and frolicked about, barking. Back on land Balle got the camera equipment in place, and I climbed up to the highest rock and surveyed the landscape. A hefty sea dog yelped, rolled over to one side, and fell asleep again. Anders stood behind the camera's eye and yelled that I should play a hunter on the way home with my catch.

Ahh. I turned my weather-beaten face to the sun. It had been a bountiful day. In a pool surrounded by ice, the water still seethed with animals. On the ice, a bearded seal flock lay gliding along in the afternoon sun. Time to set for home before it got too dark and cold. The dogs jumped for glee at the sight of the catch and pulled impatiently at the sled's traces, they knew they would get a share of the spoils, but they had to wait until they'd delivered it safely home. I tied the three seals securely to the sled. In the distance a snowstorm was brewing. Time to be off.