Ménage (10 page)

Poundstretcher on Old Street. Saul had his reservations but Dot was enthused and I had the petty pleasure of forcing him to do as I pleased.

All three of us entered separately, minutes apart. Dot was to be at the magazines, Saul at the vegetables, me at
the
canned beans and fruit. The plan was to swap positions and for Dot to steal a can of Heinz Baked Beans and some Ambrosia Creamed Rice, with Saul distracting at the cash register.

But Dot was scared, shooting anxious glances at me and Saul, staring up at the CCTV. As I passed the canned aisle I saw that there were no Heinz beans left, and so the plan was shot. I felt guilty, as it was only a matter of seconds till she would be caught. I had to warn her, but communication was a dead giveaway, the fuckers watching you on the monitor as you started whispering. I checked out the ancient Asian shop woman and wanted to call it all off. Dot was in the poultry aisle, the wrong place entirely. Saul was obviously onto the problem because he was up at the counter, talking, I think about a lottery ticket, getting the woman to bring out one then the next.

I caught a flash of Dot stuffing something immense under her jumper. Her belly, the size of a basketball, what the fuck was it even? She walked past me, looking pregnant, then broke into a run as she exited. I headed for the door. The woman started shouting.

Outside, round the corner, me first, then Saul, perplexed. Dot was nowhere to be seen, was maybe running round while the cops scoured the streets for a pregnant woman with a moustache. We waited in silence, Saul sneaking glances round the corner.

— Boo! She appeared behind us, doubled over in laughter as she pulled the thing out – a self-basting extra-large chicken.

— Happy Christmas!

—
Mon Dieu!
Saul exclaimed. —
Mais c’est Novembre, quelle obscenité
!

It was hard to hate them, even though, once we were back, I heard her slip back into his room. Self-basting. How the fuck could a dead thing prepare itself for the oven? Over
the
weeks that followed I found it a metaphor for my cowardice and my slow-burning rage. Even after it had rotted no one would touch it and it sat there weeping its stinking blood onto the Formica and floor while I had to endure the sounds of their laughter and her many cries and moans.

fn1
. See Duchamp on accidents in
3 Standard Stoppages
, quoted by T. Schwartz in ‘No Accidents in Art’,
New European Critique
, June 1973.

fn2
. See
Taxi Driver
. Also used as ‘found footage’ by Turner Prizewinner Douglas Gordon.

fn3
. This ‘schizophrenic critique’ is reminiscent of
How to Explain America to a Dead Hare
by Joseph Beuys (1965) and
USA
by Vito Acconci (1964) in which Acconci filmed himself arguing (with himself ) over the evils of American imperialism versus his love of and immediate need for a can of Coca-Cola.

fn4
. Ironically, the political artists who fought for the self-expression of sexual minorities – gays, lesbians, sadomasochists, etc. – did not foresee how their ‘liberation’ goals would lead to the sexualisation of the culture as a whole and to the increasing commodification of the body. Shopping malls worldwide selling sadomasochist-inspired lingerie and sexual aids, the reduction of radical oppositional identity to passing fashion and individual consumer choice, was surely not on the original liberation agenda. See Z. Bauman on
Individualisation and Consumer Society
, RKP, 1996.

THE INSTALLATION COMPRISES
two large screens of projected video footage played in extreme slow motion in black and white. On the first screen a woman falls backwards through darkness. On the second many hands reach into the air. This latter footage is in ‘negative’. Both pieces of footage come from a ‘hardcore’ concert in 1992 and represent what is known as ‘stage diving’ or ‘crowd surfing’. This is one of the most powerful examples of the
détournement
of found footage in recent art history.
^fn1

Negative Leap
is generally seen as Shears’s first major work. It quite literally became the ‘leap’ into her career as an artist. In it, the ‘amateur’ nature of the video footage is transcended by her intelligent recontextualistion. The beauty of the work is that the images on the two screens, separated by a distance of over thirty feet, never come together in ‘sync’. While in the real-life filmed action, a woman would have leapt from the stage to be caught by the audience, here the hands are in a perpetual state of waiting. The body too seems trapped mid-leap, in just a few seconds, repeated on loop, as if locked in a space and time of endless falling. The hands wait and reach for a point of contact that never arrives. The fact that the footage is played in total silence adds to this sense of a void between the two screens, between action and repercussion. The act of union, in which the body is caught by the hands, exists only, on the third (non-existent) screen – the one that exists in the viewer’s imagination.
^fn2

The crowd and the falling woman in ‘cruciform’ pose have often been compared to images of religious ritual and ecstasy. Crowd hysteria and individuals taking ‘the leap of
faith
’
^fn3
being common to the vast majority of religions and cults.
^fn4
However, interpretations that pose Shears as in any way commenting on ‘pop culture as the religion of the masses’
^fn5
seem wide of the mark, as Shears has never expressed any concern with politics.

This is the first work by Shears in which her triumvirate of thematic concerns come together into a coherent combination greater than the sum of the parts. They are: play, swapping roles and trust. It was, at that time, uncommon for women to ‘stage-dive’, and so in her leap, she has taken a masculine position; nonetheless, she is conceding control and placing herself at risk – the crowd may not catch her, may let her fall. This throwing oneself into the dark many find deeply unsettling.

The work is not ‘about’ a subject in both senses (the content and the ‘human subject’) and Shears defies our need to think of her as ‘an artist’ with a ‘singular message’. Some see in this a failure to take responsibility for her own authorship and criticise the communal processes involved in the making of her work (she did not hold the camera, the footage is merely a document, her role in it is just ‘showing off’, etc.). But the message of Shears’s work is a non-negative or anti-message.
^fn6
It invokes a desire for escape from the isolated identity, from the responsibility for and self-management of the ego.
^fn7
Through playing games with identity, swapping roles and taking a leap into non-identity, she is asking us, as she asks herself, to become ‘nobody’ and to join with and trust others. If we believe that the role of the artist is to be an exemplary individual with a singular message then we would indeed find Shears’s actions empty, meaningless and ‘negative’. If, however, we find the culture of the constructed self oppressive, then Shears’s selfless leap is one towards freedom.

SAUL STAGGERED BAREFOOT
by the side of the motorway. The sun pounded down on his red leathered head as he searched for roadkill, a fox, a rat, to cook later in his billycan. The cars screamed past and teenagers jeered at him, but he had long ceased noticing the scorn of passing faces and it had been many years since he’d even glimpsed his own. He shaved now with a piece of broken bottle and tied what was left of his grey hair in an old piece of twine from a packing crate. Beneath his concrete flyover, as he drank from the stagnant stolen milk cartons, he cursed the passing cars and swore again his vow to never again succumb to the need of that road with its service station and its promise of ice-cold water and the charity of passing drivers. How could he live in the modern world, every day being confronted with the images, the adverts, newspaper and magazine covers, with their many smiling photo faces all of which reminded him? How could he not scream at the sight of those images of a success that was rightfully his, stolen by a woman, a mere child, a thief and plagiarist. Had he not taught her everything she knew: the meaning of irony, of punk, Dada, of rebellion itself? In the darkness of his dripping underpass home, when all the world slept, he would take out the box of newspaper clippings, and carefully lift them by candlelight, taking care not to spill the wax, then place them in such a way, shrine-like, to stare until the tears came, fighting with himself, against the urge to tear her face to pieces. In his piss-stinking sleeping bag, from his most secret hideway space behind the stolen supermarket trolley, beneath the scavenged food cartons and empty boxes of sherry, he would,
nightly
, retrieve the wet and warped, much annotated mass-market paperback of
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
and whisper the memorised words:

Each virtue is jealous of the others, and jealousy is a terrible thing. Virtues too can perish of jealousy. Surrounded by the flame of jealousy, one will in the end, like the scorpion, turn one’s poisonous sting against oneself
.

After the usual time he would place the clippings back inside the box and pronounce again, silently, that he had grown wiser than the sage and would never again descend with his message for the masses to face the humiliation of their ignorant laughter, he would leave all images and roads forever and go deeper into more forgotten spaces of the desert they called the real.

This image of Saul was the one that came to Owen whenever he felt a twinge of jealousy over Dot’s career, in those days, which caught him unawares when Dot’s face, without warning, appeared at the turn of a magazine page. There but for the grace of God go I. Saul in the desert was the only thing that saved him from those moments when he couldn’t face the fact that, yes, he might just envy her success. A dubious sidestep, no doubt, to transfer his sense of failure onto a now fictional persona, but how could Saul have survived Dot’s success without having dropped out, moved to another country, gone in search of God? For years now Saul had aimlessly wandered the desert so that Owen could stride with purpose through the world.

But today, Owen was doing his penance. The PR woman from the Lieder had called back to let him know that Dorothy Shears had agreed to meet for an interview. They were excited to ‘potentially’ have him on board and he was on their list of potential candidates for the ‘big job’ – an essay on the nine works in the show for the catalogue for the international tour, starting in Zurich, in two months’ time. None
of
this could be leaked to any newspapers and he could not reuse any of the material in other formats or countries; if he did it would be a case for litigation, as per item 5 in the contract which they would email, that should be signed by his lawyer and returned as per soonest possible date.

He had only wanted to see her again, but already it was getting convoluted and legal and too late to back out of and anxiety crept over him – that Dot had agreed so easily; that these fifteen years fearing her had been his own invention; that their reunion could have taken place long before and saved him the angst that had become a way of life.

And what the hell would he even write about her art? He’d noticed recently that the adjectives around her work had changed from ‘radical’ and ‘challenging’ to ‘compelling’. ‘Compelling’ was a variation on ‘interesting’ and betrayed a lack of confidence in the artist’s brand name and a downturn in investment. The video-art bubble was bursting because of YouTube – some teenager in Pakistan had recently committed suicide online after getting viewers to vote on whether she should see it through. A guy in Germany had cut off his dick in front of half a million global viewers. Hundreds of thousands of barely legal-age girls the world over had twenty-four-hour webcams recording their every living moment for cash. It was rumoured that Saatchi was looking to buy online Islamic web porn as art. The truth was Dot’s work was an interesting footnote in the onward destructive march of the moving image.

If he had the integrity of Saul he would have called it all off, but the PR woman made it very clear that, even after the interview and their analysis of his essay, they reserved the right to give the job to another writer. And that galled him, to still be the whore, fighting for a cheque counted at pence per word.

The time, date and location of the interview had been picked – her studio between London Bridge and Southwark.
He
was actually going to meet Dot again. Today. In two hours, forty-six minutes. He would first of all apologise for not keeping in touch, then, ice broken, apologise for all that had happened. Those would be the words – ‘Sorry for all that happened.’ Two beta blockers were all he’d managed by way of breakfast.

But then his clothes had caused him grief. The linen suit or jeans and one of his remaining ironic-sloganed T-shirts? ‘Today I’m wearing mostly black’ or ‘Your band sucks’. He caught himself, after a third change, standing in front of the mirror in grey socks and paisley-patterned boxers, staring at his paunchy, hairy belly button, wondering who the hell he was trying to be. Had Dot mapped a story of his fifteen years in her head? Thought him a coward yellow-belly for hiding from her? Or worse, had she barely thought of him at all? Only on opening a newspaper, and seeing his face, maybe once a year. His twenty Xmas-present tips for
Time Out
five years back that he should never have agreed to put his name to. They must not talk about the past when they met. If they did, she would learn very quickly that he knew too much, that he did in fact have a press-clipping box, two in fact, filled with her many faces.

The clothes he finally picked were designer grunge.

Images wouldn’t leave him alone on the walk to Angel. A whole street of FOR SALE signs, newspapers with Wall Street traders, heads in hands; 27% fall on the FTSE index. Meltdown Monday they’d called it, just a month back, but still the economy was smouldering into nothing. It struck him that he’d first met Dot just after Black Wednesday, that his career had been a tenuous thread stretched between two troughs of depression. There was something reassuring about being in a recession again, the comfort of being just another failure among millions, of not having to try to be someone any more.

He fought his way through the morning crowds, swiped
his
Oyster card and headed to the Northern Line. There were video adverts on the down escalator, all showing images of sexy young things, eyeing each other on a virtual escalator, all the video monitors in sync.
Match.com
. ‘Has your future partner just passed you by?’ Would he actually recognise her when he saw her? The latest promo photo showed her thin-boned with short white hair. Warholesque. A little Paula Yates circa late eighties, but without make-up. White not to shock but maybe to hide grey.

He waited on the platform and caught himself looking at the waiting women: a tall Swedish-looker in designer leathers, a shaved-headed dyke with denims. Strange, to be checking the faces as if looking for her.

No, he had not followed her slavishly; there were at least three years of almost total denial. Freelance work, travelling, building a reputation, jobbing it for anyone that would take him, lifestyle columns on fashion, pop, hairstyles, cover bands, photographers, community workshops, children with disabilities making murals in Bradford, music rehab projects for junkies in Birmingham. The time of attempted domesticity. Telling himself that Dot’s world was fake. That a quiet life, with a wife, planning a child would be the antidote to the hype.

What the hell would he say to her after the words of hello?

The anxiety grew as the train arrived and he climbed on board and found a seat. Across from him a young emo couple shared an iPod between them, just as the Hoxton couple had done, one earpiece apiece. He looked up and there above them was an advert for iPod showing a silhouette of a young couple doing exactly the same thing. ‘Consumers are manufactured now, not products,’ Saul had said.

He would not tell her of the years of exhaustion and of his wife’s creeping disappointment in him. Her desire for
a
child and his constant attempts to reassure her that they should wait till things were more ‘secure’. But being freelance, every job was a struggle to tie down, and he came to dread the confining limits of the marriage he’d bought into. After another year of it she screamed that he was always postponing, running up and down the country and for what? Just another couple of hundred quid. ‘There’s never a right time to have a kid,’ she’d said. ‘We have to believe in ourselves, take a risk.’

Moorgate. A peroxide blonde was suddenly beside him and he jumped. He watched the way she held the metal pole as if she was a lap dancer. Her breasts in a low-cut top were on display. A short man in a business suit kept staring, trying to edge closer. As the train jumped Owen was sure he saw the man rub his crotch against her and she did not flinch. Her face – steel.

He recalled the time Dot had been nominated for the Turner Prize, 2001. The embarrassment he’d felt as he sat beside Becky and watched the award ceremony. She’d pointed at the TV saying: ‘Didn’t you know her?’ And he’d lied. The time of lies. For the next few months, Becky had bullied him into trying to make babies, and each time he’d faked ejaculation. After that it was the secret drinking, the secret porn habit, and, most bizarre of all, his secret search for that old album of Saul’s –
The Duchamps
– for weeks on end, in all the retro shops and online, everywhere, an obsession. When she found out, it was the last straw. She left him to chase her image of a partner more fit to be father, a man with a future, with money.

The first stop was Old Street. A group of trendy twenty-somethings got on, with retro hippy hair, talking excitedly. He was feeling light-headed and took a Rennie to calm his churning gut. At the end of the carriage there was a mother and child, poor-looking, olive-skinned, possibly immigrant. He wondered how old this child Dot had was, this Molly.
A
hot flush rose up his neck and he tasted salt. He took a second beta blocker and contemplated another antacid.

One more stop till London Bridge. If he’d just had a drink to calm his nerves. But it was only 11 a.m. and he had rules about hours and times and quantities. As the human surge left at Bank – it was as if the world was giving him secret coded messages – he glimpsed that image of his face smeared in lipstick and the words writ large:
Nine Works
– before it vanished into the multitudes of other advert faces accelerating into tunnel darkness. Then it was a woman, with huge fake gold earrings reading
Dazed & Confused
and on her page was the image of the sculpture of Kate Moss cast in gold. ‘Gold and art are the only two safe investments in a global recession,’ Saul had once said, ‘because neither can be mass-produced.’ As the tube sped by and the stench of sweating tourists filled his nostrils and anonymous bodies dug their elbows into his ribs, he closed his eyes and surrendered to the images.

Dazed
, nine years back. She was long-haired, dyed blonde and wearing sunglasses on the arm of a hunky punk guy on the centre pages; then she was in a Ghost dress at a gallery opening in the society pages of
Tatler
in 2002; in
Vogue
in a bikini on a beach with her lover and the father of her child, gallery owner Hans Gershoon. Every time it had been the fury that these men were beneath her, that she could let herself stoop so low. No, he’d not been jealous – all of it was contemptible and if she had fallen for it then she was a hypocrite and whore. The relationship with the gallery owner Gershoon had been despicably calculating, made even more so by the fact that other artists had done similar things. If he had just acted differently, on that one day in May 1993 – stayed with her till she woke, then he could have saved her from this. They could have been together, maybe with a child of their own. It would have been almost sixteen now, old enough to leave home. He
opened
his eyes and the iPod couple were whispering together, as if about him.

Out and up the tube steps. London Bridge and factories and warehouses converted into apartments and artists’ studios. Three streets of towering sand-blasted brick and fifty TO LET signs and more adverts and the number was hard to find: 752. There was graffiti on the walls but it didn’t look real, more like some artist’s project, some pseudo Banksy. He was at 684, his gut tightening. As he walked the numbers, up the cobblestoned streets that once ran with industrial and human waste, he passed a sign for an estate agent that, beside it, had an advert for Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull. The words of Saul: ‘I fear irony is dead. We shall be laughing ourselves into mass graves.’

Finally, it was 752. He took a deep breath as he entered and found the old cast-iron lift as the gallery email told him he would and pushed the button for the fifth floor.

The vast metal doors opened and, of course, the place was immense and she was nowhere to be seen. But even given the great deal he knew of the workings of contemporary artists, he was surprised to find that her studio was basically no more than a storeroom for artworks. Several hundred packing crates covered in Post-it notes. Polystyrene packing, plastic wrapping, FedEx boxes. Not an artwork in sight and no sight of her.