Ménage (30 page)

I heard the door open and his boots down the hall. I made my preparations.

— Can you come through? he called out.

I took a breath and headed to his room, brandishing the book of quotations.

His appearance, when I opened the door, seemed completely haggard. He was still wearing the clothes from the night before. He had the Duchamps on very quietly. ‘Disparu’. His face smeared with wept mascara. I fought against the impulse to pity, raised the book in my hand.

— Shh, listen, he said as the singer reached that horrible crescendo with that screaming so out of tune and the audio
samples
of people wailing as if dying against the plinky-plonky eighties synths and the vocals with north of England accents singing
Nous avons disparu
.

— Look, I’ve had more than enough of . . .

The sight of him kept me from finishing. He burst open a sherry box and pushed the plastic lever and started guzzling it. His eyes were bloodshot and I noticed a fleck of vomit on his chin. As if remembering I was there he offered the box to me. I refused. All over the floor his records and tapes were scattered as if he’d been trying to finally find the sleeves for each.

— ’bout time you saw this.

He was holding up some newspaper clipping. Of a band from the early eighties, posing. I glanced to his wardrobe; in the back there was a pile of maybe twenty or thirty empty sherry boxes. His brow was sweating vinegar piss.

— Read it, he said.

I sat and gave him another minute, looked at the stupid clipping.

LOCAL BAND IN TOP
100. It was from the
Hull Courier
. 1984. ‘In at number 89 in the charts, Ashton Bar favourites the Dooshamps . . .’ Even the spelling was wrong. In the photo five guys in their early twenties were dressed with scarves round their waists à la Spandau Ballet. Each was androgynous with tons of face paint, like Cleopatra. One was obese, another anorexic-looking; by way of unity they had ‘pirate’ boots sprayed silver and ribbons in their hair, all pulling very serious expressions. One had a fist in the air, another had a keyboard strapped round his neck and a growling expression with black lipstick. What this was about I had no idea.

Saul tried to relight a fag end and broke into a hideous cough. I was about to hand the clipping back when he raised a finger and pointed to a body half cut off, no face visible, just an elbow at the edge of the frame.

— I did tambourine, he said, — on track four.

I was in shock. I was close to laughing even.

— No way, you?

He nodded, fell silent, smoking and pointed to one of the other faces. The one on the edge.

— Edna, he said.

The fat boy with feathers in his hair.

— No way!

Saul had blown smoke into his own eyes and they were watering. I felt about to burst into hysterical laughter. The song ended.

— I want you to be honest, he said.

I nodded. Waited.

— It’s really not very good, is it?

For the first time ever he had reached to hold me and it was me that withdrew. Even at risk of offending, I could not stay a second longer and had to hide my laughter. I got up and along the hall came the sound of the cough, then the retching. Alone in my room I allowed myself a little giggle then chastised myself for being so weak again – I had gone there to assassinate him, but had emerged with only pity. How could I not? The source of everything he thought was true and unique and good, the basis of his aesthetic tyranny, and all he had ever achieved in his life had been this. An elbow in a photo of the band that wrote ‘Disparu’. From my room, I suffered the sounds of his vomiting, his guts tearing themselves inside out trying to find something solid to puke up, but finding nothing.

All the rest of that day and through the night I waited for her to return. A 10 a.m. the next morning I heard the door open. Her face was sleepless, maybe stoned. She said she’d spent the night at Edna’s. She let me hug her. Her clothes were dirty and she stank of booze. I took her into my room and helped her off with her jacket. She was talking deliriously.

— We could just get on a plane . . . go to Tuscany . . . my dad’s got a villa there, or Rome . . . we could get high . . . or take Edna . . . or run away or . . .

I tried to calm her, get her to lie down. No point running away.

— Just tell me what to do, she said.

— Well.

— Tell me and I’ll do it. Please.

Her eyes waiting on me, her hand gripping mine.

— Well, I’ll help you with your degree show, we can do it together, then once you graduate we can maybe go away, I said. — Let’s stay a few more days, wait and see, we’ll work it all out, together.

I reached to kiss her but she raised her hand to say no.

— Just wait and see, she repeated, just do nothing?

No, no, I said, and tried to explain. But she stood and walked away. I tried to grab her back but her fingers slipped from mine and she was gone. I knew it even then. She’d needed me to take the lead but I’d been practical, passionless, pathetic. I sat on my bed as next door, back in her solitary room, I heard her picking up her many broken things.

In the days that followed violent fluctuations left her ever more drained.

— I have to apologise to Pierce, she whimpered over and over. — Poor Pierce, I have to find him and say sorry.

— Forget him, let’s just think about your degree show, OK?

And she’d flash with rage.

— Fuck art school! Did fucking Duchamp kiss ass to get a degree, did the Duchess? That cunt Pierce. I’ll slash his fucking face.

She truly did not seem to care if she graduated at all. I kept her busy and away from Saul, whom we hardly saw in those days as we were up at dawn. I practically dragged
her
out of bed every morning, dressed and fed her, although she pushed every meal away. She also cared little about her appearance. On the tube to Goldsmiths, her T-shirt was torn and many eyes stared at her bra, some laughing, whispering. I wanted to ask her to cover herself up but any mention or touch of her body made her shrug away from me.

I tried to get her enthusiastic as we entered, pointing out the students who were turning the studios into gallery space with their boards of MDF, hammers, nails and gallons of white paint, but I could tell the repetition of the same scene we had seen at
Bug
drained her.

A tutor accosted her. She still hadn’t told anyone what she was going to be exhibiting. It would be unwise to spring a surprise on everyone, he said. I saw him eye her from head to foot, intimidated or perhaps aroused. She should come to his office and discuss it, he said. She walked away from him, with utter uninterest. I followed her, past large cibachromes of breasts and weeping faces, a sculpture made entirely out of Coke cans in the shape of Michelangelo’s
David
.

A young male student stopped her and asked what dimensions she needed her space to be. Did it need to be blacked out?

— No idea, she said. — I don’t even know where the fucking thing is.

She pushed past him. He gave directions and I took note and followed. Her blankness I knew from before, from the night of Valium, but she was more down and distant, so much more than before. She would not meet my eye.

— He said to the right and past the cardboard car, I said.

— What?

— Your space.

A female student was hanging dozens of medical blood bags and catheters from the ceiling. Two men in overalls were painting the walls white. Dot stopped and stared.

— Institutions, they’re all the fucking same!

— Sorry? It sounded like something Saul had said.

She paced away again. I located the cardboard car and found her space beyond. White, empty, a Post-it note with her name on it on the wall. I got her to stop, took out my list of things to do. The video projectors we needed and some screens delivered from the company I’d found for her. I asked – where would they go? Should we hire a technician? Could she afford it?

— This place is sick, she kept saying. Her mouth was slow, wet, as from pills.

The empty white space seemed to scare her.

— If you could just tell me what to do. Please. I took her hand in mine.

— Take your fucking hands off me.

— I just want to help.

— Oh, so very you, always helpful, always trying to fix everything, mother’s little helper. Don’t you have any desires of your own?

I couldn’t leave her like that no matter how much she seemed nauseated by me. She was belching, almost gagging on her words.

— We have to try to calm down.

— We? You’re like a fucking mirror. Empty when no one’s there.

— Dot, this is –

— No, no, I see your game. That’s what you do, you just tell me what I want to hear, give me what I want. I thought it was his fault, him. But it’s you. The weak always bring the strong down to their level. You’ve dragged him down. He wouldn’t be such a failure if it wasn’t for you. If you didn’t clean up his shit all the time, he’d face his fate. You’re nothing compared to him. You do things deliberately to upset him . . . I know your game. Soap and toilet roll and God knows what suicidal crap . . . Why don’t you just admit
it
– you’re begging for his big cock to fill you up cos you’re empty! Weak . . . so fucking . . .!

I waited for her to run out of steam.

— Dot? Are you OK?

— Stop it, just stop it!

— What?

— If I’m sick let me be sick! Stop taking care of me, it makes me sick, really fucking sick!

— Sorry.

— Stop saying sorry . . . Leave me alone. Go! Go home to your lover boy, before I stab him in his fucking sleep! GO!

I froze. She pushed me and I stumbled back. I reached to hold her, but she pulled her hand away, put it to her mouth.

— You break my heart, she muttered as she turned and ran out, leaving me in her big empty space. You break my heart.

Other footsteps sounded beyond from her partition. A young trendy-haired student came in, all big smiles, and asked if I knew where to find Dorothy Shears. He’d been appointed to help with technical things. Within seconds of having my attention he started talking about his own work. He made sculptures out of microwaves and was inspired by the ecology movement and Joseph Beuys, he said. Was I here to buy art? I excused myself and left to look for her.

Corridors and then the refectory and no sign. I ran to the station, and she was not there.

I waited for the train, then headed home to make sure Saul was OK.

fn1
. Ed Weaver has commented on how the work deconstructs the conventions of the slasher movie, with the hand-held point of view of those asleep always being that of the killer before the act of murder. See
The Darkest Light
, Interim Press, 2001.

fn2
. G. Wellbeck, ‘Stealing the Camera – Appropriating the Male Gaze’, in
Face-Off
, Angel Press, Mass., 2004. Also ‘Portrayal is Betrayal’, D. Smeaton, ibid.

fn3
. T. Balzarro.
Boundaries
, FPP, 2001.

fn4
. A considerably greater length of time than the conventional duration for art appreciation, which is fifty-six seconds. See A.K. Ridge,
The Psychology of Perception
, UNQP, 1996. See also T. Thomas, ‘The First Nine Yards’,
Guardian
, 12 August 1994, in which he raises troubling statistics on the amount of time consumers spend in a bookshop and the limited mass-market discounted produce they have to access in that time/space.

fn5
. An issue brought up in the 1992 work,
24 hour Psycho
, D. Gordon.

IT IS NIGHT
. A woman walks backwards with her eyes closed. Her face is held in exactly the same position while the background moves behind her. It becomes clear, through time, that she is holding the camera to her face.
^fn1
She walks, eyes closed, through a series of locations, a shopping centre, a city street, a park. At times she bumps into things, or narrowly avoids obstacles, some of which could potentially cause her injury. At other times she comes to a stop entirely, seemingly gripped by fear of hitting something unseen, even though there is no visible threat. She does not open her eyes throughout, even though, at times, the viewer can sense her powerful desire to do so.

Like earlier works by Shears, the face dominates the image and the work is a document of the human emotions expressed on a face during an arduous ‘game of trust’. The activity of ‘walking blind’, although first developed as a group psychology experiment
^fn2
is now widely used, from Stanislavsky’s acting ‘method’ to New Age ‘rebirthing’ and corporate human resources exercises. The difference, which some see as a radical critique of such exercises, is that, in Shears’s version, there is no one at the end of the walk to catch her.

Where this work departs from these games formats, and from Shears’s earlier work, is that the game is no longer played out in a ‘safe’, familiar environment, ‘among friends’. If it is a game of trust then how can it be played alone? Who is Shears trusting, who will save her from hurting herself? Is the work not in fact documenting a lack of trust; its loss? Can we even trust the artist?

This sense of jeopardy and the question of the purpose of the game is deeply traumatic for many viewers. Dramatic reactions have been noted, with viewers shouting at the screen. In interview, they have commented: ‘I couldn’t bear it, she was going to hit this window behind her, I started shouting, “Go to the left”, “Watch out!”, things like that. You want to help her but you can do nothing. It’s horrible.’ ‘It’s like she wants to hurt herself.’ ‘She wants to shut her eyes and make it all go away.’ ‘It’s like she’s screaming inside and no one can hear her.’ ‘It’s a cry for help.’
^fn3

More so than any other work,
Walking Blind
has created heated controversy, with different groups taking polarised positions on single issues within the work. Around the issue of ‘passivity’, some feminists regard the work as ‘irresponsible’: the image of a woman walking blind at night, in public, plays into stereotypes that women are powerless; that they want to be taken care of as much as they want their sexuality to be taken care of for them. Although there are no images of a sexualised nature, the word ‘rape’ comes up again and again in criticism of the work. The NO MEANS NO movement
^fn4
see in the image an ‘every woman’s worst nightmare scenario’ – ‘of walking blind and alone through deserted streets’. The voluntary ‘eyes closed’ is seen as being doubly metaphoric: on the one hand women are seen as being conditioned to this role of passivity, on the other it concerns our culture’s blindness to the issue of rape. From this perspective Shears is criticised as being ethically irresponsible.

On the other hand, many post-feminists passionately argue that the image means exactly the opposite – that
Walking Blind
is a test of strength, the first step towards self-emancipation. They highlight the courage Shears exhibits in walking eyes closed for fifteen minutes without giving up, or asking for help, giving in to fear, etc.

It is no doubt because the work can contain such a
multitude
of differing interpretations that this has become Shears’s iconic work. No other image from the YBA period, save perhaps Hirst’s formaldehyde shark
^fn5
has been so pastiched and recycled as this.
^fn6
That so many interpretations have been spawned may be a result of the dreamlike quality and the lack of any guiding text by the artist, thus leaving the image open to ‘projection’ of meaning by others. Any comments that Shears has made about the work have only served to increase the enigma.
^fn7
One of the main reasons perhaps why Shears never discusses the meaning of her work is that she may not want it to be reduced to the biographical, no doubt because there has been such a great deal of fetishisation in the press around her mental health.
^fn8
Ironically, very few of her peers seem burdened by the same concerns. Quite the opposite, in fact, with several becoming infamous for their ‘wild’ behaviour (Emin) and for, in fact, documenting their own transgressions as artwork.
^fn9

It should be noted that this one work is not one but at least three, in a series over an extended period of years.
^fn10
The three versions (1993, 1999 and 2004) have only recently started being shown together. In each, the central figure is the same – Shears herself. It is as if, over the years, Shears has tested herself by enacting the same ritual.

In the third, most recent work, there is a sense of the event being staged. Shears walks blind with a confidence bordering on indifference, as if whatever she did, whichever way she moved, she would be safe. In fact, records show that there was an entire production team in the wings waiting to catch her, do her hair and make-up, photographers to record her, TV teams to interview her, after the fact. It is perhaps precisely that control that she wanted to escape from but she is caught in a double bind. There is no escaping her career, even if she were to trip and fall that too would become art. This newest work is chilling. It seems, ironically, to represent a desire perhaps to fall away from the lights and the
cameras
into a darker place, where vulnerability and danger might coexist once again. To return to the power of that first work, where she walked blind and alone into the darkness.