Ash before Oak

by Jeremy Cooper

  Received today the third of Beth’s parcels of mail from Terhill, including current copies of the New Statesman and the TLS. I’m pleased to register connections retained with the art market back home, marked by invitation cards in the post from artists and galleries. White Cube announces Gavin’s new show: ‘a single, large-scale installation that explores the notions of perception and suspension, image and reality’. Beth writes of her days thinking and making things at the place which, for this time, is hers alone. Will we find ways of sharing?

  At Joshua Compston’s second street festival in Shoreditch, his Fête Worse Than Death of 1994, Gavin dressed up in silver drag, and while excreting artificial sausages from his false bum, with a string of real sausages cling-filmed across his stomach, mimed on stage to the David Bowie song Scary Monsters.

  20 February

  On four of the drier recent afternoons I’ve continued to cut and shape bushes and trees high on the bank at the back of Shenagh’s garden. It’s an activity I like doing, almost anywhere. A kind-of sculpting. Nobody has been around during the day to see me at work and I can’t think who will notice much difference; all the same, I take unusual satisfaction in the labour, sensing achievement.

  Above the bed in the room in which I sleep hangs an oil painting that I used to own, a gift to me by the artist, a Tuscan, who lived in a restored farmhouse on a spit of land in the valley below Impruneta, twenty minutes by bus into the hills south of Florence. A large oak tree grew beside the loggia – La Quercia (The Oak) is both the name of the house, and the title of the picture. I spent the whole of one summer there, making my way most days by Vespa down into Florence to study art patronage in the fifteenth century, the main subject of my third year at Cambridge. I had first arrived at La Quercia on an ox cart, hitching from the next-door farmer a lift down the dirt track in the heat. Francesco Clemente the painter was called, owner of several shoe shops in town. Not the Milanese artist of the same name. ‘My’ Francesco hated the muddle with his famous namesake. He worked in a studio in the converted granary, separate from the house, playing records of classical music all day long and smoking cigarettes, driving off to friends most late afternoons to play tennis. I used to sit quietly in the cool on the settee and watch him add the finishing touches to his painting of the oak, which years ago I ceased to appreciate and let my sister ship together with her other stuff from Manchester to New Zealand.

  This afternoon, half-watching the one-day cricket match in Westpac Stadium, South Africa versus New Zealand, I find myself back in the gardens of Palazzo Cappone, on a break for coffee from cataloguing furniture for a Sotheby’s sale. John Winter was head of our Florence office then, and he arranged for me to fly out three times a year to take, in Italian, the auctions we held beneath frescoed ceilings in the main rooms of the Palazzo. Auctioneers, if they’re good, have complete control!

  Francesco used to view the sales and we often had lunch together, although the magic of my contact with him that earlier summer at La Quercia had gone, and after leaving Sotheby’s I saw him only once more before he died. The walls of his house were plastered and oiled to the texture and colour of vellum, the floors of old terracotta tiles worn by time, a small pigeon loft at the centre of the square sloping roof. I was happy there. Felt myself to have been lowered softly into the middle of a landscape by Piero della Francesca, the vineyards and olive groves farmed unchangingly for centuries.

  At Westpac they dry the grass beneath the rotary blades of a helicopter and the cricketers are athletes, hurling themselves across the turf in a high-scoring game, names and numbers of individual players printed across their backs, black strip for New Zealand, the South Africans wearing green and yellow.

  I don’t understand the cricket fuss.

  21 February

  The third of Shenagh’s cats, Leah, a street tabby, has been missing for five weeks. I saw her this morning cross Oban Street and pad up the drive of the house next door, where Sam reckons she has moved in to live, in order to be regularly fed.

  Christa Wolf, I discover from the TLS, has pursued to its conclusion an idea similar to one I failed years ago to follow. In 1960 the communist newspaper Izvestia asked its readers to record in detail the events of a single arbitrarily chosen day, 27 September. Intrigued by the concept, Wolf extended the challenge and now publishes the results in Ein Tag im Jahr 1960-2000, in which she writes annually of the events and thoughts of this single day for the next forty years. Her youngest daughter’s birthday happens to fall on the day after, 28 September, and much of what concerns her regularly involves family matters.

  Wolf tells of feeling her life’s work to be a long narrative of defeated hopes.

  My idea, back in December 1979, was to buy Christmas presents for ten friends, careful in the choice from amongst London’s fashionable shops of items to match the taste of each individual, not necessarily expensive but stylish, and to request that the presents be packaged and gift-wrapped and then to put them away untouched in the dark for the next twenty years. To mark the millennium, I planned to mount a gallery show of the gifts, half-opened, every aspect of design of the earlier period exhibited to pristine effect. I intended to write a detailed descriptive catalogue, including analysis of both the stylistic and the personal choices made, in packing material as well as object.

  It didn’t happen.

  I sold to developers my lease on the premises and turned to other things.

  We’re at a bach on the beach at Castlepoint, by a stream running through the grass down which I walk to swim and see, on my way to the water, a tall bird with a long pure-black bill ending in a shape like a spoon. None of the four other adults, nor any of the five teenagers staying with us at the bach, have seen such a bird in the wild. Nobody knows what it’s called. The bird appears to be guarding the place where it lives, the reeds around trampled to the ground and stained with excrement.

  It is beautiful here. The ‘castle’ is a rock at the end of the point, charted and christened by Lieutenant Cook on his original trip of discovery of New Zealand, between October 1769 and March 1770, in His Majesty’s bark Endeavour.

  22 February

  Swam into the rising sun, the sea dead calm. Over my head the strange bird flew in unhappy flaps and glides, disturbed at its morning feed on the shore.

  Dressed and breakfasted, I took a handful of plums on my walk up the beach beyond the last of the houses, on and on, to the mouth of a river. Exposed in the sandstone near the top of a crumbling cliff I found several large fluorescent Paua shells. They may have been buried there for a million years, since last this land was sea. Layers of rock are turned on an angle and project along a section of the foreshore, a minor version of the extraordinary formation at East Quantoxhead, back home in Somerset, where the stones have been placed by nature as though the ruins of a Roman harbour.

  We climbed to the top of the ‘castle’, facing a drop of a thousand feet to the sea.

  Disturbing.

  I don’t forget.

  I won’t forget.

  On the trunk of a pine in the forest down through which we walked a notice was nailed: ‘DANGER. POISON. Pindone carrot bait. Do not touch or remove. Keep all pets away. By order Wellington District Council.’ The government is supported by its people in seeking to kill seventy percent of the country’s possums, a noisome immigrant from Australia.

  23 February

  Gavin’s exhibition The Golden Thread was reviewed in last week’s New Statesman. Across the entire floor of White Cube in Hoxton Square he has built a labyrinth of rectangular glass panels framed in modernist aluminium, described in the review: ‘He raises the issue of looking and thinking: he’s a good artist not because the objects he makes are aesthetically marvellous, but because of the ideas they provoke. They are about values, society, art, the artist and power – who has it and who doesn’t.’

  Reminded that at Podshavers, we decided from the start that there would be no advertising, that no interviews would be granted, that nothi
ng would ever be done to court custom. People must come because they want to be there. If they dislike the wildness of the front yard, if they don’t appreciate direct no-nonsense food, then Podshavers is not for them.

  Gavin works around the idea of artist-as-icon, is himself enchanting and engaged – it is what he charmingly does anyway, whether people like it or not.

  Remember, with disbelief, the fact that eight years have passed since I found Joshua Compston three days dead on the plank bed above his picture store in Charlotte Road. Through him and the events he hatched at Factual Nonsense I met Gavin and some of the other artists who are now my friends. Joshua, with his shock of blonde hair and excess haste, was twenty-five when he died, at his own doing, unintendedly, it is my belief.

  All this time I may slowly have been mourning his loss, removal of what his livingness represented to me: triumph over the anger and isolation of his teenage years.

  Joshua was a hoarder of things – amongst many: his collection of early cigarette packets; and all his exhibition invitation cards and other printed ephemera. The sculptor Joseph Cornell, in papers stored at the Smithsonian Institute, described his archive of found materials as ‘the core of a labyrinth, a clearing house for dreams and visions … childhood regained.’

  In a letter today from Beth at Lower Terhill she tells of returning to the workshop at George Clement’s place, to make at his woodworking machines her kitchen top, from dovetailed cedar, the scent accompanying her throughout the day, in the workshop, in her car on the drive back over from the Levels and in the kennels where she assembled and glued the pieces. It will be in position by now in the original half of the cottage, to the right of the window onto the lane, beside her stack of handmade drawers and a cupboard to contain the water-heater, all made of salvaged timber, rich in seasoned grains and marks of previous use. I’m looking forward to seeing the changes she has made, to seeing her too.

  Acutely aware with my sister’s family these days of separation: my life is elsewhere, is different. At the weekend at Castlepoint I ran alone in the wind along the beach, and twice clambered to the head of a vast sand dune, hurtling down to the shore.

  I can run again, won’t let myself be caught.

  24 February

  Am I aiming at idiocy: connection without commitment?

  I do find it difficult to share. Feelings, to me, are fraught, bordered in black, like invitation cards to a funeral.

  Regan Gentry’s Skip It survives the weather. Eleven days after being installed on the street the television still works and the cell phone still irregularly rings, remaining unanswered – although the wallpaper threatens to peel from the insides of the open skip, the art is otherwise intact, the citizens of Wellington remarkably restrained. I realize that Wellington City Council, the butt of Regan’s skip joke, backs onto the post-modern antics of Civic Square, where the City Gallery flourishes behind the deco façade of the old main library.

  Rosalie Gascoigne didn’t present her first solo exhibition until the age of fifty-seven. ‘Distant memory as well as distant landscape – and the objects that figure in both – shape her allusive and elusive art,’ Greg O’Brien writes in his catalogue essay Plain air / Plain song, in which her piece Birds is given prominence, a collage of cut yellow road signs. Gascoigne remarked, shortly before her death:

  I start doing things with materials I like and then suddenly I remember something usually and I move the work along that path. But it has always been something personal to me or remembered.

  She made work from the bones and feathers she collected on her walks. And from shells. In her Turn of the Tide at the City Gallery, the striped homes of sea-snails (four hundred and eight, I counted them, the vertical lines of the bigger ones on the right in eight rows, and on the left, facing in the opposite direction, nine lines of smaller shells) are glued to wood on a rectangle of beaten galvanized metal, mounted on the unseen panel of a packing case. Light shining through the empty nail holes on the sides of the tin free the piece to float in the air.

  Turn of the Tide hangs next to my other favourite sculpture in the show, Pink Window, the upper section of a glassless wooden frame turned on its side, nailed to it, as if a curtain blowing in the wind, a twisted panel of rippled iron, painted and rusting. The longer I look at her work the clearer I see the patterned shapes, these found objects not arbitrarily placed but composed by experience into meaning. Pink Window was made in 1976 and is still in the possession of the artist’s family. The yellow of her road signs is reflective and glows iridescent beneath the gallery’s artificial light, like the shells of Paua she gathered from the beach in her New Zealand childhood.

  The play of daylight on Gascoigne’s work is significant, squares of alternately directed sticks of driftwood seeming to be of two different colours, seen as I step through and around them all to be of the same bruised grey.

  Wonderful again to be able to look with sustained concentration at works of art. To question and not to doubt.

  25 February

  A line in the sand divides delight and despair. Must retain somehow the capacity to ride out the fears, the blasts of pointlessness. It is for me to find meaning in what I do, nobody can give this to me.

  Anger.

  Twice on this visit my sister has been very angry with me. Angrier than her children had ever previously seen her.

  Both Beths have also been provoked by me into wild spasms of angry violence.

  Leave it. Let it go. Don’t want to push and push to justify myself. Best not define, not explain. These things happened, for reasons I may never understand.

  I hate anger.

  That’s it.

  26 February

  Pankaj Mishra writes in the New Statesman, in his review of Penguin’s revised translation of Gustave Flaubert’s novel A Sentimental Education: ‘Frédéric’s political voltes-face remind one of the radicals of our own time who turn bewilderingly into courtiers to the rich and powerful.’

  The tabby called in briefly to its old home last night, to say hello.

  Notice this lunchtime, on my walk into town, the tall metal letters ‘KS’ and then the words ‘Kate Sheppard Apartments’ across the top of a building being converted into urban lofts, the balconies of the double-storey flats directly facing parliament on one side and on the other the bay.

  KS? Who was she, who is she?

  27 February

  Its name is the monarch, the big butterfly I occasionally see. This afternoon, near the kindergarten, a mother directed her daughter to watch the creature’s bumpy orange flight, calling out its name.

  On a long walk through and beyond Otari Native Botanical Garden I pass, off the back route into the City, two New Zealand icons: on one side of the track the green playing fields of Western Suburbs Rugby Union Football Club; and on the other, tucked pell-mell beneath trees and bushes, the hillside gravestones of Kaori Cemetery. There is almost nobody around, the air wonderfully clean, fresh, clear – on the rugby field and in the graveyard.

  People are also buried in the wooded grounds of Victoria University, the bodies of teachers and statesman of the 1880s.

  28 February

  On an early plane to Auckland to spend two days with Sam, dropped by car at the airport by Shenagh, the rest of the household asleep in the dark before dawn when we left. Recognize that I don’t actually know my sister, not in day-by-day experience. We each hold special knowledge of our childhood, have consistently exchanged in adulthood information about the passage of our lives, but in the fourteen years since my previous visit to her in New Zealand we’ve spent only three consecutive days together, during her busy stay with me when I still lived in Shoreditch. She was good to be with, and I enjoyed sharing with her my connection to young artists, was happy to communicate pleasure at the increasing public recognition of their work. This, though, was heightened time and, in truth, neither of us had any idea what our normal days are like, had little knowledge of the person the other in reality is.

  We
know more about each other now.

  When my father flew out on his own to see Shenagh, not long after the operation on his first broken hip, the family then lived in the suburbs of Auckland, on one of the streets below the park at Mount Eden. He wet himself on the flight, both there and back, the onset of Parkinson’s Disease making it difficult for him to control his bladder.

  My sister felt loved by him, felt love for him.

  The latter is what matters: how we feel, not what is felt for us.

  My parents claim they loved me, but I did not feel it, have never felt love from them.

  Nor do I feel it for them.

  Sadly, I do not love my mother or my father. Even in memory, in his case.

  In the late afternoon I rest and read for an hour. Saw, in a closed-eye moment of day-dream, a wooden tent-peg which I desperately needed to drive into the earth.

  Auckland sprawls, lacking the tight shoreline which is an ever-present feature of Wellington.

  The friends I was staying with pointed out in the night sky the Southern Cross, a perfectly linear constellation of stars. It puzzled me that I had not noticed this before.