Ménage (5 page)

THE WORK COMPRISES
two video projections on free-standing screens, twenty feet by fourteen feet, placed facing each other at a distance of twenty feet. The audio is in sync with the pictures. The footage is hand-held and ‘home movie’ in style. The subject is a woman in her early twenties (the artist).

The location of the footage is a domestic toilet. Both pieces of footage are almost identical. In each, the artist faces the (bathroom) mirror with a video camera, filming her reflection, striking poses and talking to herself. In the first, the artist is in a loose-fitting top, her areolae visible; in the second, she is wearing a ‘fake’ moustache. In the first, the content of her dialogue (with herself) is entirely negative and derisory: ‘Ugly bitch’, ‘droopy tits’, ‘useless cunt’. In the second, she compliments herself on her ‘male’ image. ‘Hunky bastard’, ‘cute spunky man’, etc.

The placement of the two screens facing each other gives the impression that the artist is recording the other self on the facing screen. This uncanny illusion is reinforced by the fact that at one point in the screening, which may or may not be a happy accident,
^fn1
the ‘male’ artist on screen two seems to speak to the ‘female’ artist on screen one – ‘What you fucking looking at?’ – at which point the female artist lowers her eyes as if in shame and says, ‘Nothing. Sorry.’
^fn2

Many viewers have commented that this artwork is ‘spookily alive’ and feel they’re intruding on a very private experience. Others feel that they can relate to this daily self-criticism before a mirror and have felt trapped between the two screens, becoming ‘the third person’ to whom both of the screens address their comments – the stated ‘What
you
fucking looking at?’ refers to the art viewer him/herself and is as such a critique of the ways in which gender identity is constructed within consumerism.
^fn3

Less favourable responses have come from the tabloid press. The 1994 headline in the
Sun
was: ‘£50,000
FOR A GIRL IN THE BOG
’. The story claimed that the footage was ‘just a typical stoned posh student mucking about with a new video camera’.

It’s worth bearing in mind that in the year this work was made, gender and sexual identity were issues of greater importance than they are now: Madonna’s
Sex
book had just been banned by the Vatican; Sinead O’Connor had torn up an image of the Pope on US television over the issues of homosexuality and contraception; in the UK the Operation Spanner trial raised a political outcry within lesbian and gay communities; the artist Cindy Sherman had, at this time, created the seminal works in which she enacted gender stereotypes for her camera, while artists such as Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger were deconstructing ‘male language’; the Aids activists ACT-UP toured their artwork and theatre worldwide; in fashion culture, sadomasochistic-style PVC clothing made it into high street stores such as Dorothy Perkins and H&M; sex shops made it onto the main streets and the first ‘drag kings’ were reaching the public eye through the popularisation of the queer scene.

Whatever conclusions we may draw from
PlayBoy
, no matter how ‘trivial’ or ‘dated’ it may now seem, Shears has, undoubtedly, held a mirror up to her time. In that mirror we see a generation who came to sexual maturity beneath the shadow of the Aids epidemic, under the ‘back to basics’ reactionary ‘family’ politics of John Major’s Conservative Party. A generation who had grown up witnessing the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of Socialism, the defeat of union power, of resistance politics, and the co-option of dissent into mainstream culture.

If nothing else, this is a simple, non-judgemental document of what it meant to be a young woman growing to maturity within the many contradictory messages of modern consumerist culture. For all its simplicity, this, ultimately, is of greater historic significance than the work of so-called politically engaged artists.
^fn4

‘I’LL HOLD
,’ Owen said. The call-waiting jingle started up, just like a call centre but it sounded religious. Probably Arvo Pärt, he thought, typical for a high-end gallery.

A car alarm was wailing outside. Owen took a peep out the window: some hooligan had thrown the next-door neighbours’ FOR SALE sign onto the bonnet of a trendy retro Beetle. He checked to see how many of the other FOR SALE signs were still there. Nope, no change.

The call-waiting choir was singing in Latin in a cathedral.

He escaped the alarm noise, took the cordless phone through to the empty back room and sat on the window ledge, picking at the lining paper, fingering the dust. Funny, he thought, that he’d hardly ever been in here, that he’d not actually got round to redecorating the place, never got beyond that first burst of energy that was stripping out and whitewashing every trace of the ex, filling it up with odds and sods of second-hand furniture – when was it? Year of the war? Was it Iraq? That far back?

The choir sang in his call-waiting ear. Jaysooo Chreestay.

The morning post thudded on the floor and he tiptoed along the half-varnished floor, phone still to ear. Bills, bills, bank statement – not to be opened – then another one of those bloody estate agent brochures. In the recent hysteria some moron had got the addresses mixed up. One of the adverts was of the place just across the road, identical to his own.

FIXED PRICE £295,000. It had been FIXED PRICE £320K last month.

As the choir sang Dominum, dominum, he scanned the
printed
hype: . . .
pleased to offer this spacious 2-bedroom 2-floor Edwardian maisonette in Balls Pond Road, blah blah blah . . . two double bedrooms, en suite water closet, a third room ideal for a small child, the property benefits from blah de blah
– Jesooo Chreestay –
Location is ideal – to the east is Dalston, tipped to thrive from the Olympic boom and a new tube station, to the west you have central Islington and trendy Upper Street . . .

Wonderful, he told himself, how they missed out any mention of the concrete towers of the housing estate, the shadows from which even now were growing menacingly along the street. Still, he’d been bloody lucky that the bank had let him remortgage to buy out the ex’s share. Bloody lucky not to be out on his ear. To be going absolutely nowhere. The choir were cut off mid crescendo.

‘Sorry,’ the girl on the phone said, ‘Miss Shears is in Hamburg till the 22nd at the Freiberg Institute.

Thank fuck, thought Owen. They belonged in different worlds and there was absolutely no way he was going to sneak into Dot’s exhibition if there was any chance of her actually being there.

As he caught sight of the video surveillance footage of himself getting onto the tube escalator at Angel, he thought of the many ridiculous lengths he’d gone to over the years to avoid her. Of the many openings, group shows, biennales, in Paris, Frankfurt and Berlin, he’d attended while secretly mapping her schedule of appointments. Thankfully, now, she was just like many other artists, spending almost half the year touring with her art, so the chances of bumping into her locally had much diminished. He was notorious for turning up at private views just before they started, whisking round in ten minutes, and then leaving before the drinks were opened and the hundreds arrived. He gave the excuse that meeting artists socially would cloud his judgement – he refused point-blank
to
do face to face interviews. Of course, while this had brought him even more respect, skirting around her and not being at the epicentre of the scene had damaged his career. He was sure this was why at the age of thirty-nine he was still without pension plan, or salary, precariously scraping a living from bits and pieces for so many different magazines and papers.

‘There is no drearier and more repulsive creature than the man who has evaded his own genius,’ Saul had once said. Nonetheless, this failure to face up to his greater potential was a lesser humiliation compared with what hell could be unleashed if he ever did come face to face with Dot.

The real challenge came when he had to review a group show that had her work in it. If he had refused the job it would have aroused suspicion. So he developed a technique: he never praised or was overcritical; he gave her the column inches that befitted an artist of her standing with words carefully cribbed from other critics’ reviews, but with absolutely no value judgements of his own. They had never agreed on this course of action, there had been no secret negotiations through third parties. Although all the world knew of, and almost celebrated, her suicide attempt, she, or her PR people, had taken great care to hide the truth about the love triangle that had led to it. He wanted it kept that way.

Owen turned the corner onto the King’s Road and saw the sign on the austere modernist facade. The Lieder Gallery.

On entering, it was the usual: the vast reception of white that was supposed to instil reverence and symbolise purity and timelessness but which he knew was no more than the antechamber to a spectacle as empty and fleeting as fashion, desire and fashionable investment.

At the front desk, two girls in black suits with headsets
on
were busy with visitors. There were brochures in full colour with a portrait of Dot. A new one, possibly Leibovitz. He slipped by and went to look on his own. The layout was very much like that that she’d had at the Venice Biennale. That night when his avoidance techniques had been almost slapstick.

It had been 2003; he’d known she was in town with
Walking Blind 2
in the International Salon, so he’d snuck away early from the opening and headed to the Italian Pavilion to see the seventies Viennese performance art retrospective, only to look up and see her ten feet away sipping champagne with the Wilson Twins. He’d ducked swiftly into the darkness of a walled installation – early video works on monitors on the floor of naked artists smearing themselves in the blood of suspended dogs’ carcasses – only to realise that the space had two doorways and that Dot had entered from the other with the twins. He’d turned away swiftly, knocking a glass of champagne from some woman’s hands, it smashing on the floor, him trying to say sorry but not wanting Dot to hear his voice. Him hunching his shoulders, trying to change his appearance as he hobbled away from her, then almost running through the throngs to the door, not looking back. He harboured a suspicion that she’d secretly sensed the identity of the man always running away from galleries.

He was just about to enter one of the enclosures when the PR woman ran to catch him.

‘Excuse me, are you Owen Morgan?’

She’d got him. He nodded and had to smile. He couldn’t help but wonder if they had CCTV at the door and a member of staff employed to search for critics.

‘Are you here in connection with a review in the
Guardian
, or concerning the essay for the catalogue? Mr Schwarz isn’t here right now, but we could book a time for you –’

‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘before I write anything, I’m going to just see if it’s any good, that OK?’ Fucking PR people, he thought. The last thing they want is for anyone to see the fucking product they’re selling. ‘I just need ten minutes by myself, that OK?’

She backed away whispering into her headpiece, eyeing him up and down.

He paused at the white-walled maze-like entrance to the artwork known as
Name Game 3
. He calmed himself and told himself to withhold judgement: this is Dot’s work but Dot is a fashionable media fabrication too – like Hirst in the pages of
Vogue
and Sam Taylor-Wood posing naked in
Harpers & Queen
. He must resist the temptation to write a review in his head. That is not the purpose of this exercise. No copy will be filed. He is here to erase.

He entered and the projections were epic in scale: three faces on free-standing screens, two men and one woman; each face had a name on a piece of paper on their heads, each taking turns to guess what their head-names were. The bits of paper read: STALIN, JESUS, COBAIN. The faces asked questions of themselves – Am I still alive? Am I a woman? Am I a film star?

It cannot but disappoint – this expensive remake of that stoner game they’d played many times, only Dot had filmed it and so it entered the canon of art history. The people in this remake are professional actors, their lines scripted. The lighting and production values, superb, almost Hollywood. Their faces, all different in ethnic mix, reflecting the pressure to be politically correct that Dot’s work in the last few years has succumbed to.

It does not touch him as the original did. He walks out. There are many other walled enclosures to choose from. He wants to go to that room, the one that has his face. He returns to the front desk and asks the PR woman where it is, laughing to himself that she has probably
seen
that face a hundred times but does not know that it is his.

She shows him the floor plan and offers the information pack. As she talks and smiles Saul’s voice returns again, scorning him, Jiminy Cricket-like.

‘Art critics are people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.’

When Saul said it, it had been funny, but living it was no joke. Yet Dot must have been haunted by Saul too. Every artwork she’d ever made came from something Saul had said, even the titles. Some of them had been jokes he’d made that she’d taken seriously. Most of her speech on accepting the Lieder Prize in 2002 had been Saul’s words.

Owen thanks the PR woman for her help and walks the long white corridors. He passes four other rooms with the newer works, all of it is, as he knows, as they said on
Late Review
, recreations/reinventions/re-explorations of the works from that one incredible year when Dot made the works that her career has since rested upon. As he turned the corner before entering
Trust
, Owen closed his eyes and laughed at himself over that little beat, that pause of reverence that was required, before stepping in and looking up at the screen.

The face – the hair was long, grunge-like; he’d been told often that he looked like Cobain, like Jesus. Anorexic, anaemic. A blur round his chin, that first growth of a goatee. His face covered in lipstick kisses. The light was bright in his eyes while all in the background was black. Every fifteen, twenty or thirty seconds Saul or Dot entered to kiss or slap him. The face twitching in anticipation.

What the other critics failed to notice was the smile. A smile you may have had to live through to understand. To be kissed and slapped by your secret lover and the man she said she loved, your best and only friend whom you had betrayed with her. To be at the heart of that love triangle,
sitting
in the dark, not knowing if it was she or he that would strike you, fearing violence. An hour the whole video had taken to make, the clip was thirty minutes long. The critics said the light-blinded man was a critique of consumerism, the stimulus-response model of taught televisual consumption. Pavlov’s Dog.

But the face, twenty feet wide, contorting in expectation. This almost static portrait of the act of waiting. Some audiences wept, it was said. Others jumped when the kiss or slap hit.

And your own face, Owen, if you could only see it now.

The camera had been turned on, she said, they were recording. He had to keep a straight face, no giggling. He couldn’t, was laughing at how the whole thing was absurd and sorry for spoiling it all. A shot broke the silence. A sharp noise to his left. He turned to see but his eyes were branded by the glow of the bulb. Dot’s command to face the light. Then a hand, so gentle, stroking his cheek, and the brush of a kiss. Then nothing, only the waiting for another kiss, but it was a vicious slap.

The noises echoed round the empty gallery. Owen guessed the tape had another five minutes to go. He’d stay for its repeat. He was trying to anticipate the next blow, but it did not come when expected and when the face was struck it was by a kiss. So out of sync. He edged closer towards the screen to see more clearly but got too close and the image broke into thousands of multicoloured pixels. He turned back and was blinded by the projector light, and then startled by a shadow on the projection screen. He apologised to the unseen person only to discover that the place was empty and the shadow was his own.

As he hit the street it was not the video but what happened just after the camera had been turned off that lingered: flashes of flesh, the sharing of her body in the dark.

Back on the Piccadilly Line at South Ken, he found
himself
staring at the reflection of his face upside down in the bevelled glass, between the shoulders of a man and a woman, above the empty seat between them. The skin was neon green, the features stretched, aged, ghostlike. He closed his eyes and waited, it would be another ten minutes till his stop. The Northern Line, the way it was really two lines that joined then split then joined then split. If you missed the change at Euston, you had to go to Camden then double back south to Angel before the long walk home.

He shouldn’t be here, he knows this. The choice of exits: Old Street, City Road North, City Road South – he picks the old one, passes a beggar dressed in red like a Hare Krishna with a chalk drawing of spirals beneath his bare feet. ‘True beauty only survives in the gutter, where the guardians of high culture have overlooked it,’ Saul once said. The old familiar street signs: Ring Road A11, A13 and A2. Finn’s Court, Hackney Housing, sixties mosaics and graffiti, just as before. The old high-rises to his left. To his right – a trendy skater shop. City Best Kebab where it was, then all the new FOR LET signs. Old Street Moroccan and Mediterranean Cuisine. He laughs to himself thinking of Edna and Dot and the plaster-cast penises and smoking Moroccan black. Edna was dead now, four years back, maybe more. He passes the new blue recycling bins. There was an authentic Banksy somewhere near here. The locals had protested that his anarchic graffiti had pushed up property prices, forcing them out. The irony of it would have made Saul laugh, or puke over the original Banksy on the wall. Now they’d be welcoming as many Banksys as they could get.