Ménage (33 page)

fn1
. As Carol Jenning noted, ‘[Shears] holds the camera to the face as a suicide would a gun.’ From
DEADARTLIVES
, Riot Press, 2002.

fn2
. Charcot, 1866, experiments with female in-patients in Salpêtrière. See Foucault.

fn3
. Documentary,
WYMEN
. FBC, 2004.

fn4
. NMN-UK, women’s helpline and resource centre.

fn5
. The work is entitled
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living
. Hirst’s most recent work
For the Love of God
(a real diamond-encrusted human skull) was recently sold for a record-breaking £50 million.

fn6
. The image from the award-winning ‘Eco-Diesel’ advertisements for BP. A number of other ‘artists’ have latched onto the image, such as the neo-punk band Xeon, who pastiched the work in the music video for ‘Deliver Me – (From What I Want)’, ref. J. Holzer. It is almost inconceivable how this one image can be seen as containing a radical feminist message, while at the same time is seen as being a symbol for the anti-globalisation movement. The common interpretation seems to come from the idea of ‘walking blind into the future’ and the image is sometimes renamed ‘The Angel of the Future’ – see W. Benjamin – the eyes closed being seen as a double-edged symbol, as manifesting ‘a desire to turn our eyes from the horrors of consumerism’, but also as an image of our moral blindness.

fn7
. Shears has claimed that the idea came from a friend saying, ‘You’re always walking round with your eyes closed.’

fn8
. Controversy over whether latter acts of violence, reportedly committed by Shears, were actually artworks or ‘happenings’ or acts committed while ‘ill’ and thus not breaches of the law.

fn9
. Emin has succeeded in surpassing Damien Hirst in terms of notoriety in the eyes of the general public. See her drunken outburst on a Channel 4 TV discussion, 2003. See also the many auto-biographical works charting her adolescence in Margate and the artwork entitled:
Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995
.

fn10
. Shears has produced twenty-one artworks from 1993 to the present. Eight of these are ‘remakes’. While this in total may seem a small amount, many artists who have produced more have found that collectors have shelved, stored or in some cases destroyed some of their works in order to elevate the prices of the remaining ones and young artists are now being encouraged to ‘produce less’. Author’s note: it is possible that the idea of being an ‘artist for life’ is more to do with the needs of the market and of branding than it is to do with the actual processes of art-making. Many artists find that they have ‘a good five years’, others that they have only one or two in which creativity flows. Having to reproduce mechanically the semblance of that original outpouring, long after it has been spent, has been the condition many biographers claim is to be blamed for the suicides of many painters and musicians. See D. Weaver,
Hate Me Again
– From Pollock to Cobain, Chatto & Windus, 2002.

THE FOOTAGE IS
in slow motion and is of people being slapped. The number of faces is around thirty. The act of slapping echoes that which took place in the earlier, similarly titled
Trust
,
^fn1
but whereas the slapping in
Trust
was within an intimate setting and focused on one person, in
Trust 2
and
3
, there are many subjects who receive a blow and the context is public. Faces of onlookers can be seen in the background and it is clear that the location for each ‘slap event’ is, in fact, an art gallery.

As
Trust 3
is one of Shears’s remade works it is interesting, the transformation and change in the nature of footage between
Trust 1
,
2
and
3
. (1993, 1993, 2001 respectively).

Trust 2
appears to be amateur footage of Shears slapping people at a gallery opening. Her voice can be heard off-mike, asking people to take part in a ‘social experiment’. There is a playful party atmosphere and much laughter as Shears convinces people, individually. After slapping five or six, very hard, a commotion starts up, and judging by the footage (erratic, thrown around) it would seem that Shears was forced to stop filming.

The slapping that had been so gentle and understated in
Trust
has, by the time of making
Trust 2
become violence enacted on strangers, with only the most tenuous consent. The work began as an exploration of the power of the camera: what could someone get away with, what rules of conduct could they break, simply by virtue of the fact that they were recording an event that was being called art? In
Trust 2
, Shears’s ‘game’ becomes dangerous, antisocial.

Trust 3
was made in 2001. This time again within a gallery setting, but the footage shows a slightly older group of people, of mixed ethnic backgrounds, fashionably dressed. Whereas the original footage was hand-held and raw, the footage in
3
is filmed on Steadicam, the room is ‘lit’ and the ‘slapping’ seems pre-organised. There is none of the process of coercion/talking people into taking part that was on the first footage. Each person simply stands facing the camera, waiting for their turn to receive the blow. It cannot be ignored that several of these ‘people’ are film and music celebrities, others respected names in the art business.
^fn2
As such the change from the first work to the last is a material indicator of the rise of Shears’s career.

Some have seen it as an impassioned critique of the art market, quite literally Shears striking out against it all, or even against ‘the image of her own celebrity’. Exponents of this view cite the ‘subversive role of play in the social context’.

Others claim, to the contrary, that the work is an example of the impotence of such rebellious gestures – the act of rebellion itself being recuperated back into the canon of art. As with Dada and surrealism, the anti-art statement ultimately becomes just another commodified gesture/ object. A more balanced interpretation is that the work comments, on a meta-level, on the processes of recuperation and is in fact an ironic critique of the idea of ‘rebellion’ through art. The attempt is futile from the start and that is the point. Critics of Shears’s work have pointed to this work as the end of the period of ‘playing games’. As J. Thompson wrote, ‘We all knew this would end in tears.’
^fn3

There is a sadness about this work. As the many faces of the rich and famous line up to be slapped in turn, there is a sense of the artist’s desperation. She strikes out with raw violence, unimpeded by concern over the degree to
which
she might hurt each person. But no matter how hard the slap is, no matter how much a cry for help, or expression of anger, there is always a next face waiting for her to ‘do her worst’. Thus the role of the artist is parodied and inverted. The artist is asked again and again to express rebellion to an indifferent world, only to be applauded for how ‘expressive’ and ‘angry’ she is. These attacks occur in a vacuum. They are without repercussion or, worse still, only fuel the mechanisms of publicity. The faces seem pleased to have been slapped by the artist, as if they have just received an autographed print, ‘a real Shears’. Shears’s voice from behind camera, her grunts and gasps as she strikes, are deeply disturbing, and after witnessing so many faces being slapped, focus tends towards the sounds of Shears’s own voice behind the camera.

As a critic and friend of Shears has said: ‘This is really an act of desperation.’

It is ultimately not the faces who are slapped that we feel for, but the person off-screen and unseen. The work is really about Shears striking out against herself and what she has become. She must perform the role of rebel, day in, day out, and the act is increasingly as empty as the waiting faces. We sense that behind this violence all she wants perhaps is to reach out and touch with the gentleness she once knew, before success placed a screen between her and the world. As in her first work called
Trust
, which was truly about trust, and not its attempted, and failed, betrayal.

THEY WERE BOOKED
on the 09.30 KLM 472 for Zurich. She said she’d pay for his ticket, at the last minute even. He calmed her, telling her his flight had been booked for two days’ time and he would join them both, just in time for the opening night, with the text. He’d have to rewatch all the DVDs, check his references and endnotes, work round the clock to get it done on time and apologised again that it had thrown their plans to travel together. Such a pity, he’d been looking forward to the two adjoining rooms in the Hilton. I know, I know, he said, but this is for you. He’d join them as soon as he could. But secretly, he wanted Dot and Saul to share that bed, to give him the excuse he needed to end it all.

They were all packed and excited on that morning and hugs and kisses at the door with their bags and Dot lingering to ask him if he would be OK, and Molly gave him a little hand-drawn card with big love hearts and kisses.

‘Good luck with the show. Don’t worry, I’ll email the text over as soon as it’s done, you’ll be fine. We’ll find a way round the problem of the ninth work,’ he said. ‘Be good, and don’t worry.’

Then they were away to the waiting taxi and he was alone.

Drink was what it needed.

The essay would never be finished. Their whole plan of making sense of the past was a pathetic fallacy. She had already left him and taken Saul too. This must have been the revenge she’d been planning all these years.

He’d got five texts from her that day. The second last
read
: ‘Horrible city but show looks good. Sozzle and Mozzer send love. XXX’.

The last said: ‘Wish you were here my O. X’.

He could just see them walking round Zurich together. Their hands in Molly’s hands, swinging her along the streets. He saw the city. The old buildings and the concrete motorway that cut through its centre, ripping the heart from the place. The boulevards that lacked the grace of Paris. The centre that had been a sex district last time he’d been there. He saw himself in a video cabin ten years back watching some hardcore fantasy tape, the naked woman held down by two men, screaming
nein, nein, nein
. A couple of marks it had cost.

He had willed them gone but now that they were it was too much.

Saul would be there at her gallery opening, all wit and clever one-liners, at his best and walking hand in hand to the hotel with her. They would sleep together tonight. Making love in the hotel room, taking great care not to wake Molly.

He paced the flat. The many things scattered; the paper people on the walls; her clothes; the toys; the three adult toothbrushes in the sink, the small child’s one; Saul’s child psychology manual, the page folded over on Bowlby’s maternal deprivation theory; the wine glass with her lipstick kiss; their plates from their last meal together, stacked above the dishwasher; Dot’s Post-it notes. One that read: WE ARE FILMS – THREE FILMS.

In her mind he was going to get the KLM flight the day after tomorrow. Fuck her and Saul. Fuck them forever. Owen couldn’t sleep. It was back to the mobile again and the list of fuck-buddies, texting them all the same message.

‘Hiya, how you been, you free for sum fun 2nite?’

Only one reply from Liz, she was in Ibiza.

He placed the mobile by his pillow. If one texted or
called
back he would fuck her. Get her in a taxi, pay for it. Right here in this bed that was his and Dot’s. No sleep for fear of what he would do if a reply came and he was given the choice.

He knew what he had to do.

First, put on her panties. The empty rooms told him so. No choice but to see it to the end, no more questions. It was their fault for leaving him alone. Ideally it would have required a hotel room; a vodka hip flask, an ounce of hashish maybe, or a gram of coke, a bottle of poppers; sex with strangers, perverts, transsexuals. In homage to Edna, may she rest in peace.

But look at yourself now, Owen, thirty-nine, and still you don’t know anything much. As if sex had an answer and you are scared of going outdoors to Soho where sex is sold.

Owen got the bottle and went through to her room and opened her drawers. Shirts and bras and panties. Holding them to his face. Washing powder – no trace of her. A pile of used clothes. Another drink and her panties on his face, mask-like and then it had to be the music.

The CDs. Versions of the old albums. All were there – Dinosaur Junior, Parliament, Foetus off the Wheel, Wagner, the Revolting Cocks, Rapeman – Nirvana – these songs Dot played to her child as if there was something to be learned from them.

Fuck it, play them all, have another fucking drink, coward yellow-belly.

Rapeman. The band name that had Albini banned from Europe, and more voddie and it was pathetic really how much he had invested in that year. Hear the music now, really listen to it. So many attempts to shock, to overthrow the dominant order – through doing what? Buying some videos and some CDs? Pathetic. A refill from the voddie. Pills, it needed pills. Dot always had her stash,
the
hundreds of things she took and then didn’t take, the bag in the bathroom.

Ibuprofen, diazepam, Valium, Sertraline, Propranolol, lithium. Lithium then in homage to the song by Cobain and Saul had been right, the fucker didn’t last the year and maybe that had been the better way to go, better that than this. And Saul must have been deeply disappointed when the millennium bug hadn’t destroyed civilisation at 00.00 hours on 1 January 2000.

All her tablets, one from each packet, ten packets.

Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 1999.

A line like a song lyric running through him: you’ve made me like this, you made me do this and now you’ll pay.

Throwing back the pills like they did on that first night. When Saul came in, when she said she was going to give them all up because she had something better now, before she flushed the rest away. Pink and blue and white and semi-transparent in gel capsules. Diazepam, Valium, lithium, Sertraline.

That great artwork, that one with him and Saul in her mother’s clothes. So be it.
Leg Show
, and no one to see it but the mirror.

He is in the bedroom, stripping naked, going through her boxes and bags, trying to make himself hard. He finds her tights. Five pairs packed. He must have the old ones, used ones, that smell of her. Bathroom for another diazepam, the ones she said made her happy, sleepy, sleepy happy.

Feel the denier on your hairs. Laugh at it, laugh at yourself.

So naughty, telling himself shh. He pulls them on so slowly because he doesn’t want to rip them with his toenails, but then remembers that when she comes back he is going to have to. Yes, finish that sentence for once, for both of them. Yes, tell her she has to leave, her and Saul. She will be gone in a week anyway, he can start tonight, packing her
boxes
, and Saul will only be a matter of days. He will carry Saul’s boxes to his car, and wish him well as he drops him at his new council flat.

Shh – as he throws back the rest, as he, the stockings now on and tight-fitting fabric round his cock, looks at her rack of dresses. And it was a mistake all along to let her move half of her stuff here. Because women need security and a man they can trust and he is dangerous still, more than ever he was before, and it makes him laugh how they both came to him for security and maybe this is his revenge, finally. He could kill them both now in sweet Valium indifference, make them pay. He is in hysterics as he pulls her sparkly minidress over his head, as he bursts the seam, as he takes a minute there, to pose in the mirror like she did in that artwork called
PlayBoy
. As he pulls the dress up in the mirror and looks at the legs and tells himself higher higher as she did in that artwork called
Leg Show
.

Am I a film star? Am I a man? The mirror tells him he is a man, nearly forty, overweight and laughable, wearing his girlfriend’s clothes. Oh, but she is not his girlfriend, she is neither girl nor friend and his attempts to bring her back have failed. All he wants is to just for a minute to take stock, as in a photo, to say I am happy or sad. Just one thing finally resolved.

Saul’s old songs. And wine uncorked because vodka done.

Rapeman was screaming thoughout the flat. He tried to sing along. Another CD. To hell with it. Go the worst. The Revolting Cocks. ‘I’m a killing MACHINE!’

He found the heels, the ones she’d worn on the TV broadcast of the Turner Prize. His toes bursting the seams, he took one off and sniffed it, dizzy. Considered wanking into it, his cock between the straps. Soft, old softie walkover Owen, wimp and sucker. No more booze. Fuck, how many tabs had he taken?

And she had swallowed every pill she had, they said, then slashed her wrists.

‘Killing machine’, ‘Killing machine’.

The album was all wrong. He staggered through in the heels, catching himself in the hallway mirror. Maybe the lighting was wrong. The hairy legs, the big shoulders. Not like Dot at all. He bent over to change the CD and felt the rip at his arse. His fingers reaching back to find the tear. Dot would kill him. I’m a killing machine.

Tomorrow he’d pack all of her things. She had to go, he’d write her a cheque for the torn Dolce and Gabbana. Another for childcare. So, stoned fingers through the CDs – Slint, Psychic TV, Nirvana, Einstürzende Neubauten.

He stumbled back as the Nirvana started, tried to turn it into a dance. He was moshing, James Brown-ing, Prince-ing and funkadelic-ing in the living room, struggling to stand, reaching for the wine bottle, thinking of them in Zurich, walking round like fucking Lord and Lady Muck of fucken’ Muckenddoo. They had left him again and they would pay.

The Duchamps. It had to be there somewhere. He’d found it on eBay just a tape with a photocopied cover. To walk the street blind tonight in Dot’s clothes and be Duchamp’s Duchess. To write a name on his head and ask everyone who he was. Am I Elvis, am I Cobain? The faces passing scared in the street. Fucking tell me – am I dead or alive?

Owen fell head first, bashing his face on the wall, as he tried to put the tape in. It was the heels, he told himself. Hello, he said to the face in the mirror, but it did not reply. Hello, baby, who’s a cute girl? Love you, I love you, I . . . To just have a slap in the face, or a kiss, to wake up. His head falling. Wasn’t it beautiful, though, the way – the face in that artwork. The way it waited for the touch. And he was there at the start of the filming. Dot stage-diving and him waiting anxious to see if they would catch her. He needed to sleep, the room spinning.

And ‘Disparu’. That fucking song, maybe it was even Edna singing, and it was crap, so crap, but beautiful because it showed how weak and pathetic and vain people were and how crap the eighties actually were, and the irony of that would be lost on everyone now cos irony meant nothing any more and it wasn’t here anyway, gone and lost and smashed and no one would ever hear that fucking song again. Up in smoke. Poof. DIS – PAR – OOO! French lyrics and Yorkshire accent. Hilarious.
Nous avons
need to puke. Going to. Can’t move. My God.

Up somehow, he chokes the puke through his nose, pulls off a heel and falls to the floor, Molly’s Lego castle breaking under his cheekbone, winded and gagging. He reaches for the phone line, pulls the phone to himself, along the floor. Its voice saying PLEASE REPLACE THE HANDSET AND TRY AGAIN PLEASE REPLACE THE. His fingers can’t find the number. Temazepamwithalcohol, the other one, pink, somegovthealthwarning. ‘Disparoo’. This is her big show and she has to be there to meet her fans and he has maybe done this just to fuck it up for her. He hits all the phone buttons. Her mobile – speed dial 2.

Ringing, ringing. Poor Saul’s voice, in his head, singing along to the stupid song. ‘Noose avons disparooo.’

Ring ring ring.

‘Disparoo.’

A click, a hello. Dot.

‘Hi, Owen. How you doing?’

He couldn’t speak, old Saul was singing loud in his head.

‘Owen? You OK?’

His head spinning, vomit rising again, he tries to speak, but his lips, numb.

He’s asking her about ‘Disparu’ but his mouth is all wrong, he has to focus. ‘Pills’ is all he can manage.

She’s screaming. Sound of her, dropping phone, footsteps running, many things. Off-mike, off-camera. And Action.

Saul is there then.

‘Owen, talk to me. YOU FUCK! YOU DUMB FUCK.’

It’s a movie and artwork. Dot screaming in the background – she knew something like this would happen. Listen, they are both there in Zurich.

‘Wake up! I knew we shouldn’t have,’ shouts Saul. ‘Talk to me. Tell me something. Keep talking. You selfish fuck! . . . Fuck. Look, OK, you have to talk to me. She’s calling an ambulance. Wait, she’s . . . she’s . . .’ He is shouting at her. ‘SHUT THE FUCK UP.’ He is back. ‘We’re going to get the next flight back,’ he says. ‘We’re going straight to the airport. OK, talk to me, you fuck, please fucking talk to me.’ She’s saying keep him talking. Then it’s Dot’s voice on the phone.

‘Owen, talk please. QUIET! I can’t hear. Sorry, I was talking to Saul, tell me something. Talk to me, keep on talking, the ambulance will be there soon. Owen, say my name.

‘Dot.’

‘OK, I want you to tell me something, anything, the first time you met me. OK?’

‘OK.’ And so Owen focused on each word and each word was slow but it took him away from the nausea.

‘Gallery. Old Street.’

‘Yes, yes. Can you remember which one? And the show?’

‘Dazed . . . was called
Arseholes
 . . . pictures of arseholes.’

‘Was it? How can you remember that? Got to keep you talking, the ambulance’ll be there soon. Wait, and you had a rucksack and you were wearing a . . . can you remember? I can’t . . . what were you wearing?’

‘Army trousers, Doc Martens . . .’

‘Can you really remember all that? OK, OK, what was I wearing?’

‘Woolly jumper, grey . . . blue jeans . . . Hush Puppies . . . mousy hair . . . no make-up.’

She was sobbing.

‘Was I really like that? My God, what’d we do without you? We should write this all down so we never . . .’