Ménage

Ménage

Pronunciation: Ma’nazh

Function: Noun

Etymology: French, from Old French –
mesnage
, dwelling; from Vulgar Latin –
mansionaticum

A domestic establishment; Household;
also Housekeeping

See
Ménage à trois

THE NINE WORKS
here form an intrinsic part of the iconography of what came to be known as the Young British Artist (YBA) scene, a period that started in 1992 and endured for almost fifteen years. Many of the artists from this ‘movement’ are now represented in major international art collections, with their works commanding impressive sums. As the movement has received institutional acceptance, however, it has inevitably fallen into decline.
^fn1
Dorothy Shears is one of the few key artists to have survived the collapse of the YBA brand and to have consolidated her status.

The typical image of the YBA was that of grungy cockney post-punks living in squats, making thrown-together streetwise art in rebellion against Thatcherism and Consumerism.
^fn2
Shears does not fit that prescriptive schema, being from a different class background, but her work shares many common features with her peers. Being made with ‘cheap throwaway materials’, in her case domestic home video, it crosses over into the realms of installation and performance art, and was originally made for exhibition in backstreet Dockland and East End warehouses.
^fn3
Graduating from Goldsmiths College within a few years of Hirst at the time of what was to become Britpop,
^fn4
the hype machine was quick to pull her into its orbit.

Some claim that Shears’s initial success was a product of ‘Van Gogh syndrome’,
^fn5
with much tabloid hype being made out of the speculated history of her mental health. But unlike several of her peers, Shears has carefully protected her past from the public eye.
^fn6
Against the ironic zeitgeist of her time, Shears created intimate, personal works that were in
many
ways a record of her own artistic ‘becoming’ in a secret coded visual language. As such, her work survives beyond explanation and plagiarist reproduction in the many forms that have attempted to exploit it across the years.
^fn7

The following discussion of the nine works sets out not to analyse or explain, but to pay respect to the enigma of the works and the woman herself. As she has, throughout the years, invited viewers to lay aside judgement and trust her, so I too beg you to close your eyes, and enter the darkness with her.

Owen Morgan, 2009

THE LANDLINE IS
ringing. It should not be, not outside working hours, not ever without warning. He has taken great care over the years to keep his number from everyone, apart from the editor and the picture desk, going ex-directory so that the artists whose work it is his work to destroy cannot trace him.

It is still ringing.

Friends are few and all know that acts of spontaneity will be ignored. It could only be his mother or ex-wife. But his mother seemed well enough when he called for his quarterly check-in and the ex no longer calls. It could be a fuck-buddy, but they always ring his mobile as is his rule.

Still it rings. It must be to do with the image. It is everywhere: on the tube, fly-posted twenty feet across, in the pages of the
Guardian
, the
Telegraph
. No escaping it. This advert for this exhibition with this photo of a man’s face in obscene sensual agony. They have been ringing and emailing – the gallery and the agent – asking him to return their calls and emails, to consider writing the text for the catalogue for the international touring show by Dorothy Shears. What they don’t know is how that image has almost forced him into hiding this past month. Of how that obscene sensual face in that artwork from 1993 is his own.

It keeps on ringing so something must be wrong.

He has his rules; if he picks it up he knows the night will be ruined. Tonight was going to be the one, which so rarely occurs, when, having found time away from the work he’s paid to write at a certain number of pence per word, he would commune with self and attempt to write his diary
or
a poem or a critique of this or that advert or image or any other damn thing that’s invaded his privacy and reminded him that there’s no escape from images.

The usual ritual had been gone through. The second gin and tonic and the bottle in the freezer ready for the top-ups if inspiration hit. Radiohead on repeat. The secondary plan, if words failed, was to check in on CANDYGIRL. She might be in her bath, or bed, or at her PC and he would instant message her. She is the only person he allows to chat to him at night. She knows him as Nocture9 and he pays eighty-nine US dollars per month for the privilege of watching her 24/7 on her four webcams. He would put on the used pink frilly girlie panties he bought from her which she mailed FedEx and touch himself as he watched her touch her tight firm eighteen-year-old body in her student flat in Los Angeles. These were the limits of his deviances now. There are mental techniques for their control.

But it will not stop ringing. He does not have an answer-phone because it only encourages them. He could turn the ringer off but still the little red light would keep flashing on and off, and in the reaching, he might, after the G&Ts, upset the handset from its cradle and then the caller would hear him pick up and know he’d deliberately hung up and so it would start again. Pull it from the wall then. But he is unsteady on his feet as he reaches for the plug socket and already enraged over so many things. And the fucking world will not go away no matter how strict you make the rules, so he picks it up and shouts: ‘Who the hell is this?’

A male voice saying ‘Owen. Owen Morgan. Hey, it’s me.’

‘I’m going to hang up. I have no idea how you got my –’

‘Chill, man, it’s me . . .’ (cough) ‘ . . . Saul.’

(Silence.)

‘Freaking you out, eh? Sorry, been a while. So how you doing?’

‘Sorry . . . Saul . . . how did you . . .?’

‘Hey, buddy, yeah, they’re doing Dot’s show on telly later, just wanted to let you know. You going to review her show?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘You ever see her around . . . galleries and that?’

‘No . . . Saul, so what are you . . .?’

‘
Late Review
tonight. Just thought I’d let you know.’

‘Well . . . thanks.’

‘Piece in the
Independent
, couldn’t believe it, one of the old videos, how did that happen eh? Picture of you. Saw it on the tube.’

‘Look . . . could you give me your number? I’m kind of in the middle of something right now.’

‘Sure, yeah.’ (Laughter.) ‘The fucking Lieder, eh! Who’d have thought, huh? Hey, you going to review her show?

‘No, I try to avoid –’

‘I was there, snuck in, her opening . . . man, you should see her now, beautiful. Didn’t say hello. Still mad as a brush, her, not . . . she’s got a kid too, you know.’

‘Yes, I read that.’

‘Looks like her mum. Dot – a mum – Jesus! You know with the medication and all that. Wassit called – birth defects – those pills she used to –’

‘Saul, it’s great . . . you sound well, but it’s late and I’m sorry but I’ve got work tomorrow.’

‘Course, course, career man, yup, OK, sorry for calling . . . just wanted to . . . well, to say sorry if I put you down, I was always putting you down. You proved me wrong though, eh? What did I know? Good on you, partner. The
Guardian
, eh?’

‘Well, freelance actually.’

‘Who’d have thought . . . and Dot, she’s quite the artist, eh?’

‘Look, if you could give me your number I can call back when I have –’

‘You still in Hoxton?’

‘Well . . . no, a bit . . . further out.’

‘Big place, is it? Amazing the changes, eh? Hope you didn’t over-mortgage on a big yuppie place. Amazing what’s happening out there, eh? It’s all going to hell, man. The end of capitalism again, eh? We’re all going down.’ (Laughter.)

‘Where are you exactly, Saul?’

‘Me, getting by . . . living in Dalston, been here a few years now.’

‘Really?’

(Silence.)

‘Hey, Owen, fuck, eh? Member that time we watched Bergman what was it? No, no, the one with the . . . no, maybe Tarkovsky, anyway . . . I kissed her, her hand, I mean and . . . it was . . .’ (Laughter.)

‘OK, Saul.’

‘ . . . thought it was hers! It was your fucking hand!’ (Laughter.)

(Silence.)

‘OK, fine, look . . . what can I do for you, Saul?’

‘No need to –’

‘How did you get this number anyway?’

‘You know, I know my place, man, happier than ever, no need to get all –’

‘Saul.’

‘Never been happier – Jesus Christ, I’m talking to Owen fucking Morgan – you grow that beard yet?’

‘Saul!’

‘Hey, ’member when she pinched that chicken?!’

‘What do you
want
, Saul?’

(Silence.)

‘I love you, man.’

‘OK.’

‘No, I mean it. Just had to say it.’

(Silence.)

‘Always have done.’

‘OK, thanks for calling. We’ll speak soon. Got to go.’

‘Love you, partner.’

‘OK. Bye.’

He hung up. Seconds then, just staring at the phone. The past coming back to haunt you was an old bullshit lie from movies and therapy. The voice from the past with its apocalyptic overtones. ‘We’re all going down.’

He resisted the sudden desire to call the ex-wife in Paris. Fuck it all. He needed to fuck. He scrolled through the fuck-buddies on his mobile: Alexis, Angie, Annabel, Beth, Carolyn, Camilla – but then an old Saulism came to him: ‘Endless consumer choice masks the fact that there’s no choice at all.’

He felt guilt now over his tone with Saul, for having got rid of him so abruptly, for not even having had the politeness to ask how he was, if he made a living, or was in a relationship, had kids even, or ever finished that artwork or written that book. Guilt, for having withheld his address, for having harboured the fear that Saul was lurking, waiting. Looking for a place to crash. Stalker.

He turned on the TV and there was
Late Review
. Dot wasn’t there, just the usual three critics in round-table discussion about whether this show was the epitaph for YBA. The post-feminist was saying the early works marked the end of Marxist feminism and the birth of gender fucking. The tabloid nu-lad was saying: ‘It’s a rip-off, you can find better video stuff on YouTube.’ The black Oxbridge academic said he found her work typical of work from the Aids-panic era. The usual round of tediously well-balanced argument but all he could focus on was that image on the back wall behind the critics from that night when Dot and Saul had tied him up and took turns kissing and slapping him. This image now called art. Now called
Trust
.

Images flooded him. He was searching for loose change
and
shoplifting to eat – waking to find Dot running her cunt-wet fingers over his lips as he slept beside Saul – dancing to Saul’s suicidal music – the needle and the blood – the green tube of her intravenous drip – kissing her torn knuckles as she drifted in and out of consciousness – praying for her to wake and, in time, come to forgive, if she lived.

Stop it. End it again. The images wouldn’t go till it was done. OK, he told himself. He would go and see Dot’s retrospective, get it done in ten minutes, have it over with, put the past back where it belonged – on the cold dead white of a commercial gallery wall.

*

Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here – that should have been the sign above our door. It was the Thursday, the week after Black Wednesday 1992, the year of Dot. The stock market had crashed; Communism was dead; Whitney Houston was just about to start a three-month run at number one; and Saul and I were under threat of eviction for our failure to find a co-tenant and our five months’ worth of rent arrears. For two years I had endured Saul’s self-imposed poverty while he sat and quoted his aphorisms at me (‘To confront death every day is the only way to really live!’). I could no longer endure the squalor, but made one last attempt to save myself from the street by putting adverts up in all the local shops. The wording had been his.

FLATMATE SOUGHT

To share basement flat, Whitmore Road, Hoxton, w/two aesthetes (male). Rent – cheap, conditions – rudimentary. No limits on sex, race or age. Strictly no hoodlums. Only lovers of Wagner need apply. Call 071 338 9865. Ask for Owen.

My brain was so starved of nutrients that I no longer even knew how I’d got trapped there. It was supposed to be a stopover, the lowest rent in London and probably illegal for occupancy. One of the council houses Thatcher couldn’t sell off. The two floors above were totally derelict and our ‘basement’ seemed dug from the foundations. My window had iron bars on it and a view of the four lanes of Shoreditch overpass. The whole place was dank, dark, fungus-ridden and could have come down at any time, the security door was busted and some moron, or maybe many, used the communal hallway as a toilet.

I returned from sticking up the adverts late in the afternoon and still he had not risen. I stared despairingly into the spare room, knowing we would never rent it in such a state. It was stacked high with three months’ worth of bluebottle infested bin bags and had the sickly sweet malodour of a mortuary. I was damned if it was going to be my turn to clean them out, as I had done the task over fifteen times previously, without him lifting a finger.

Damn him, that very day he would have to take responsibility for our situation or I would leave, I told myself, knowing full well there was no way to beat him in the standoffs. He could have eaten from a maggot-infested plate before admitting it was his turn to do the dishes. Hygiene! He often ejaculated with disgust – what has a more filthy history than cleansing? Think of the Nazis and the Serbs!

As I waited for him to wake I prepared my ultimatum speech. Saul rarely woke before 2 p.m. as he generally kept me up till dawn with his drunken plans for ‘the most transgressive artwork of our time’. Every day it was the same: he cursed me for waking him, with his smoker’s sotto voce, then for letting him sleep so late again, shouting, ‘Another day wasted. It’s pointless! I’m going back to bed, we’ll start again tomorrow.’ But tomorrow, I knew, it would be the same. It struck me then that this was what old people did,
curling
up in bed waiting for death, and saw clearly how it could happen to us both. When Kerouac was our age he’d been driving Route 66. Why were we wasting our halcyon days like this? For what? For art? What the hell was halcyon anyway? There were galleries starting up around us, but Saul was convinced they were all beneath him. That he’d never even made a start on his great artwork he blamed on the fact that there were no functioning light bulbs in the flat and so we were in almost perpetual darkness.

The kitchen had no windows and the light bulb in there had been the first to blow months back and had never been replaced. As I stood in the doorway, I could sense a squirming in the sink beyond. I had to eat something before confronting him, to get my strength up, but all I could make out among the stacks of encrusted plates was a halved orange skin, scooped out and refilled entirely with cigarette butts, like some sick surrealist artwork.

Vomit rose and I swallowed it, took another Rennie and considered how malnutrition was affecting our judgement. Starvation produces ecstatic visions, he often said, and I knew for a fact that the majority of what passed his lips most days was regurgitated phlegm. For three months we had eaten nothing but pasta with no sauce, not even butter, as he had grown weary of stealing it from Spud-u-Like. The occasional can of beans (stolen) or banana (same). Everything else was spent on his necessary Don Quixote (sherry). He considered my concern over nutrition ‘reactionary’ and advised I reread the Marquis de Sade, although what sexual mutilation had to do with nutrition I had yet to work out. My gut was aching from, perhaps, liver failure. I sneezed constantly from the spores and had to take Rennie and paracetamol to kill the side effects of the antihistamines. After paying for all the drugs, buying food was out of the question.

When finally I plucked up the indignation to knock on
his
door, he opened it and struck a dandyish pose, as if he had been waiting all along.

— Yes? What can I do for you?

His appearance never failed to throw me: eyeliner, stubble poking through layers of foundation stretched into cracks around his mouth, high-street girl’s T-shirt, far too tight, which read ‘BABE’, army boots, bare legs and his kimono. That damned kimono. The way his dick would peek out from it occasionally, as if checking whether the coast was clear. The whole issue about sex was very confusing and I had lived those two years without it because every time I tried to pick up a girl he showed great disdain, muttering things like ‘Don’t forget – all they want is to steal your talent, and you have precious little of it to spare’. Naked bodies disgusted him, and as for sex, he said, ‘All that grunting and sweating, it’s like doing push-ups till you’re sick.’ No, I was convinced he was as asexual as he was amoral and our relationship was platonic (although I did once dream I let him sodomise me in exchange for him taking out the bin bags).