One bright morning she volunteered to do the errands herself. It seemed an amusing role reversal to leave him attending to business in the studio while she set off for a little light fetching and carrying. She needed a break and it would be good to walk briskly and feel the cool air on her face. She’d been working so intensely, she’d almost forgotten a world existed beyond the studio.
She stepped out into a copper blaze of sun and walked through the deserted business park—its local authority designation a double oxymoron; there wasn’t much business going on and the neighbourhood bore no resemblance to a pleasure garden. Once it was part of the second-largest industrial estate in Europe, a thronging citadel of factories and workshops on a confluence of canal and river, a useful debouch for toxic by-products in those heedless days. Now the area was silent, those hulking buildings were mostly deserted and, apart from the occasional discarded supermarket trolley or bicycle, the river was cleaner than it had been for a century. The fish were back, it was said, though Eve would take some persuading before she would eat a pan-fried product of this river, whose banks were haunted by junkies and winos.
Kristof bought the lease on the site with a long-term proposal to turn it into a “technology hub” and there was talk of converting the old flour mill into luxury flats. Plans stalled last year. Their son-in-law, the impenetrable Norbert, was said to be acting as an intermediary with several IT companies which were seeking to relocate their British headquarters. The white heat of technology was not much in evidence at the moment. A couple of Internet fashion retailers inhabited two floors of the flour mill, above a car wash that, judging by the number and demeanour of its clientele, seemed to be a front for a shadier business. Next door to them was a minicab company, an analogue Canute, holding the tide against the digital advance of Uber.
Her studio, it struck her on bleaker days, had something of the medieval Danish king about it too—valiantly standing firm on the shore, producing art for an impervious world, as waves bearing debris from a polluted sea crashed around it. She had to watch for the undertow.
A low, rusty iron bridge crossed the canal. From there, a muddy path led to a flight of concrete steps up to the broad concrete walkway spanning the motorway. She stopped at its midpoint to look down on the lines of speeding traffic sixteen feet below. She liked these impersonal industrial views—the noisy machines streaming in orderly lines like a monstrous piece of op art.
Across the motorway, she descended again and skirted the river, walking through the bank of scrubby bushes—broom, hawthorn and a thicket of lilac hung with small knotted plastic bags heavy with dog shit: a copse of excremental prayer trees. What was that about? The human urge to decorate? One for Wanda.
She turned into the shabby high street. She’d brought Hans here once on some errand—a last-minute present from the deli for his aged aunt—and he’d been appalled: “This is the high street?”
The delicatessen, run by a tenaciously cheerful gay couple, was an optimistic anomaly in a thirties parade of grimy shops dominated by a castellated pub draped with St. George’s flags. There was a betting shop and a massage parlour, where it was also possible to get tanned and tattooed in a single sitting. Next door to a charity shop—a dispiriting holding pen for the cast-offs of the poor—the small branch library had been turned into a food bank and there were boxes of donations outside: low-grade tins, biscuits, spongy white bread and a pack of disposable nappies.
The deli was empty and she rang the bell on the counter to summon Dino or Thierry. As she waited, she gazed absently at the glass cabinet filled with wheels and wedges of cheese—an Orphist abstract in zinc white and pyrrole orange with a slab of blue-veined Carrara marble. On the counter were bowls of exotic salads. Plump vine leaf parcels made her think of the faecal fruit hanging from the riverbank lilacs and there was a jar of artichoke hearts, pale as pickled embryos in a cabinet of curiosities. Who bought this stuff round here? When she sacked her team, Thierry and Dino must have lost 70 per cent of their custom. Would the cave-aged Roquefort and artichoke hearts end up in the food bank too?
Dino emerged from the back office and took her order.
“How’s Glynn?” he asked.
“Fine,” she said. “As far as I know…”
She paid, took her bags and left the shop before he could ask any more. That was enough social interaction for one day. She walked back past the pub, where a hunched figure now sat outside veiled in cigarette smoke.
“Cheer up, darling,” the cracked voice called out.
She looked over and saw that it was a lone woman gripping a glass of urinous-coloured spirits in one hand, a cigarette in the other. Next to her was a supermarket trolley piled high with what must have been her worldly goods, carefully sorted into scores of tightly packed plastic bags.
“All right, love?” the woman said, baring a gargoyle’s broken-toothed smile. A jaunty mascot—a grubby naked Barbie doll—was pinned to the front of the trolley like a ship’s figurehead.
Eve turned and walked away.
“I said, ‘all right?,’ you stuck-up cow!” the woman shouted after her.
Eve hurried on; every step she’d taken away from the studio had been an unnecessary diversion. She needed perspective on her work and now she’d got it. She wanted to run back, to the calm order of easel and canvas, to the clear narrative of film, to the beauty of the floating herbarium, and Luka.
16
The rain seems to have stopped at last. She pauses to fold away her umbrella and sees that she’s outside the small Cartoon Museum. Art of a kind, she supposes. Draughtsmanship and wit were involved, at least, and an attempt to address current concerns—qualities absent from any of Wanda Wilson’s infantile “concepts” and sickening confidence tricks.
* * *
—
When Eve returned to the studio after her dispiriting trip to the high street, she sensed that something had changed. Luka’s back was turned to her and he was working at the canvas. Painting. But he’d completed the background for the green sequence days ago.
“Luka?” she called out, walking towards him as calmly as she could. He had moved on from wide gestural strokes of chromium oxide and flat green ground. Leaning in, his face inches from the canvas, he was absorbed in detail, using a rigger brush loaded with the milkier copper azomethine green, painting the leaves of artemisia with pointillist precision.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
It was as if she hadn’t spoken. He glanced at her watercolour, which he’d propped up on the paint table to use as a guide, then turned back to the canvas and stippled at the detail to create a hazy effect.
She grabbed his wrist. “Enough. You’ve crossed a line here.”
He laughed, shook her off and reloaded his brush with colour. This was all a joke to him.
“I thought I’d help out. I know we need to push on.”
He was defacing her work and making light of it. How could she have misread him so badly? He was smiling, expecting to be congratulated or thanked. Then she looked at the canvas. He’d made rapid progress. And here was the thing, the second shock of the day—it was really rather good. The delicate fronds, like terrestrial seaweed, were exact reproductions of her watercolour. No one would know the difference.
“Not bad,” she conceded finally.
“Yeah.” He put down his brush and kissed her. “This is how I used to earn a living, remember? Copying. Belle always said I’d make a good counterfeiter.”
Belle was right. Eve felt such guilt for mistrusting him. She watched in silence as he went back to work, conjuring the plant in quick, economical strokes. His pride was touching. It hadn’t occurred to him that she would object. Why should she? He was paying her homage. She picked up another small brush, a sable round, and began to work alongside him. This canvas would be their joint work—her gift to him and an act of trust. G
reen on green: from the distance an undifferentiated field, close up a subtle tapestry of sixty-seven interlacing plants, beautiful and deadly.
He set the camera on the tripod to film them both at work.
“Tell me about this one again,” he said.
“Artemisia. They use it to make absinthe—that aromatic anise smell. It’s also known as lad’s love…”
They kept at it, side by side, engaged in true collaboration. A first, for her. Once, the prospect of relinquishing her autonomy would have been terrifying. Now, working closely with someone who valued her vision and shared her sense of purpose, she found his competence and commitment set her free. Like a soloist tentatively exploring the pleasures of the duet, she discovered the repertoire was larger, the interplay of resonances deeper.
This was work as compulsion, a race against a deadline, though as far as she was concerned, the real deadline for her was death—far closer to her than youth, and more pressing than any artificial cut-off point set by Hans, who wanted to capitalise on the success of the Sigmoid show and the coming Gerstein retrospective. But Luka, for whom death was pure abstraction, sensed the urgency too. He matched her pace, a tireless helpmate, intuiting her needs. For him, Eve knew, it was also about bringing this one perfect work, the product of consummate skill and a unique vision, to an imperfect world mired in the mediocre.
Sometimes they listened to music as they worked—Bill Evans, Couperin, Dollar Brand—at other times they would turn on the news: another terrorist attack outside the Houses of Parliament; heatwaves and wildfires had given way to heavy rainfall, catastrophically in Italy, where a motorway bridge collapsed—forty dead so far—and in Kerala, where more than four hundred died and a million were displaced. Then, when the news oppressed them and the music ceased to transport, they would shut out the world and he would return to the camera and film her.
He liked to hear her reminisce about her art school years, about her early days on the circuit, about her time in New York, about Wanda, the parties at Warhol’s Factory, the earnest Fluxus crew and the crazy days with the Viennese Actionists, as he steered the film from an exposition of Eve’s singular process to an exploration of her life and work in the context of late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century contemporary art.
His college dissertation on her work had been a useful apprenticeship for their relationship. It was a shortcut too—none of that lying in the dark, tentatively outlining the CV to a new lover. Luka knew it all. And he wanted to get the details, go deeper.
“So what was she like, Wanda? I mean really…?”
The rhythm of reminiscence complemented the process of work. The broad sweep first, then the detail.
“Really? Well, to be honest…”
“You were friends, though?”
“You could say that. Once. It was complicated.”
“How complicated?”
He smiled—that alluring grin.
“The usual,” she said. “Lovers, status anxiety…Wanda was always…hypersensitive.”
He scanned her with the camera—close up, in intimate engagement with the canvas; medium shot, mixing pigment or refining a floating herbarium; long shot, a tiny figure in the vastness of the studio, a miniature peasant in a Claude landscape—and indiscretion was tempting. He urged her to say more, tell all, but she resisted. A lifetime’s habit of wariness was acquired for a reason.
“But,” he persisted, “you did say that thing about her sole talent being for monstrous self-pity?”
“I was misreported,” Eve said. She had, by now, learned to deflect that one. “A creepy journalist from the Village Voice misheard me at a party.”
The camera was on and—even though the final edit would be hers—she didn’t want to risk derailing her reputation at this stage by challenging art world shibboleths. Wanda wasn’t worth that.
“And you were at her first exhibition—Love/Object—in the seventies. That must have been amazing.”
“Amazing. Yes. You could say that.”
As Eve knew from Nancy, this generation had no sense of history, so it was especially flattering that Luka should value Eve’s experience, be so curious and know so much about the art scene of the seventies. But you could have too much history.
There was no need to encourage his unhealthy interest in Wanda Wilson, or to tell him the story behind that first pitiful exhibition. How Wanda, naked but for a russet velvet robe draped over one shoulder and a garland of laurel leaves crowning her wild hair, in the guise of J. W. Waterhouse’s Narcissus, stood in front of a mirrored wall for two weeks, staring impassively at her reflection for eight hours a day, her attention never wavering despite the distraction of spectators, some admiring, some sceptical, crowding around her. The admission fee kept out mischievous schoolkids but it didn’t stop more uninhibited male spectators tugging at her toga, whispering lewd suggestions or, in one case, slapping her dimpled buttocks. Wanda barely flinched, gazed on and was rewarded with more press attention for the stunt.
As a feat of endurance it could hardly be faulted, like those human statues which later sprang up, tourism memes—gold-painted Charlie Chaplins winking in Covent Garden, cloth-draped Mariannes by the Pont des Arts, silver-sprayed Fernsehturms in Alexanderplatz. They all deserved a euro and a commendation for stamina. But Wanda was making bigger claims than that, according to the exhibition’s two-page catalogue. She was “challenging the relationship between viewer and artist, subverting the process of objectification in an alchemical engagement which transforms spectator and practitioner alike.” It was Eve’s duty, as a serious artist, to test the hypothesis.
If unfinished business with Wanda over Florian Kiš played any part in Eve’s plan, she wasn’t aware of it at the time.
And so, in the eighth hour of the final day of the show, she turned up with Wanda’s boyfriend, Mike, who, after a year on the wagon, had been talked into anticipating the evening’s triumphant closing party by getting stupefyingly drunk. Holding his hand, Eve forced their way to the front of the crowd, right next to Wanda, whose gaze, as she neared the finishing line, now had a desperate fixity. Eve looked into the mirror at her room-mate’s reflection. In her wonky laurel crown and toga, staring ahead at her own uncomely image, there was something affectingly risible in Wanda’s self-belief.
Then Eve moved so fast that Mike later claimed to have no recollection of the moment she grabbed his crotch with her right hand and pulled him towards her with her left. They began to make out, tongue on tongue, hungrily tearing at each other’s clothes as if they were entirely alone. Wanda saw the whole thing, as she was meant to, but stared on, unmoving, even when the spectators cheered and whistled, applauding Eve and Mike as if they were a fitting finale devised by the artist to her Love/Object marathon.
Wanda didn’t make it to the closing party that night. Nor to any party for the next few months, while Mike and Eve pursued their frivolous affair. Mara attempted to mediate but got only abuse from heavily medicated Wanda, whose six-month crack-up—reprised and amplified when Kristof and Eve got together two years later—became her subject. And look where it got her.
The Three Msketeers fell on their swords and Wanda was now a “world-renowned multi-disciplinary artist,” presiding over a multimillion-dollar industry. She’d exhibited at the Getty, the Whitney and the Pompidou Centre and was credited with, according to one fatuous review, “transforming the definition of art” with her “explorations of the body, sexuality and gender”—in other words, she compulsively took off her clothes in public, displaying those parts of the anatomy which, in the absence of lovers, were usually seen by gynaecologists and colorectal surgeons. For this generous spirit, she received countless grants from American arts foundations, held teaching posts at NYU, Bard and San Francisco, and was given an honorary professorship by a university in Estonia.
She moved on to “immersive art,” which saw her ta
king up residence in institutions and galleries and the homes of the super rich, role-playing—Maries Antoinette and Curie, late-period Colette, Ayn Rand, Frida Kahlo, eccentric housekeeper, vengeful mother-in-law, medieval saint—for weeks on end in pantomimes that had the critics swooning.
“In the age of the Internet and cyber alienation, Wilson offers a thrilling carbon-based durational experience in which the boundaries between art and life are entirely dissolved. Her characters inhabit our space over time, we feel their breath on our cheeks, their touch on our skin, and in a thaumaturgical process, we are transformed by the encounter.” Eve had to consult the copies kept on her phone to remember the exact phrasing of her own positive reviews, but she was word-perfect on Wanda Wilson’s.
In May, when Kristof was preparing his brief for the Art Ranch, he showed Eve a New York Times piece from last year outlining Wanda’s most recent work—Domestic Intervention I/Mansion—in which for two weeks she took over the Long Island home of a financial analyst and his wife, trustee of a dozen U.S. galleries, relegating them to the role of uniformed domestic servants who waited on the artist at table, did her laundry and cleaned up after her. The whole piece was committed to film, in which Wanda portentously described her consensual home invasion as “relational art.” “In Domestic Intervention I/Mansion,” she said, “the artist is mere catalyst, the spectator takes centre stage and becomes both medium and subject.” The couple, who paid more than a million dollars for the experience, described it as a “profound, life-changing exploration of empathy.”
Wanda had moved on, in every sense: from angry young feminist épating the male bourgeois by flinging a pot of menses in his face, to grande dame of the conceptual art scene, bestriding a billion-dollar hokum industry. She now had studios in New York, Berlin and Rome, as well as her Double U Art Ranch in Connecticut—a boot camp (tastefully spartan dorms at luxury-spa prices) where acolytes from all over the world were inculcated in the “Wilson Technique,” a gruelling series of fasts, eye-gazing workshops, group screaming, “creative role play,” and “backwards hiking” through prepared trails holding rear-view mirrors, to prepare them, in a pyramid scheme of abominable pretension, to go forth and spread the Wilson word to a gullible public.
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