On the Heroism of Mortals

by Allan Cameron

  But this conversation did not take place, because he had this fixation with how paint glues itself to a surface and fools us into seeing things we can’t understand and understanding things we hitherto have failed to see.

  While I slept and floated through the sluggish dreamlessness of a post-meridiem nap, my wife must have left me to do some shopping. I awoke and saw an elegant gentleman in a suit. He was photographing me, and my immediate reaction was one of indignation, but then I heard his words: “Excellent artwork, reclining artist on a couch. A statement, I would say, on domesticity in the early twenty-first century. Here in the middle of nowhere: this guy’s a genius.”

  I was heartened by what he said, but also a little confused. “Who are you?” I asked.

  “Here’s my card,” he laughed superciliously, “I’m an art dealer. Highly successful one, I should tell you.”

  “Mart-Art?”

  “Good God, no,” he scoffed in a manner that immediately revealed an upper-crusty background. Posh school and all that. Probably knew the prime minister. “Living concept art – that’s my thing. I believe that art should be fashioned not just from organic material, but from live organic material – preferably humanoid. In your case, the ‘oid’ is entirely necessary.”

  “Conceptual art? You mean like cows cut in two and formaldehyde?”

  “No, no, bisected beasts are old hat, I’m afraid. I’m at the cutting edge.”

  I confess that, although an educated man, I could not entirely follow his drift – or indeed a word he said. His irritating manner was countervailed by a forceful notion that there might be a few quid in this encounter for me. I sat up and stared the man in the eye, to show him that I was not a man to be trifled with and that I was quite assured of my right to set down my sofa anywhere on the pedestrian highway and use it as I wished. “Are you, by any chance, interested in buying this artwork? The idea only came to me this morning.”

  “I am, dear friend. I am very interested.”

  “How much?”

  “A thousand smackeroos per diem!” he smiled grandly, obviously enjoying his affected turn of phrase.

  “Per diem?”

  “Per day, if you like.”

  “I know that. I am an educated man,” I said, “but what do you mean? Are you renting the sofa for a thousand pounds a day?”

  “No, that would be ridiculous,” he laughed again, quite taken aback. “The sofa, if you don’t mind me saying so, is almost worthless. You are, as I’m sure you know better than I do, an integral part of the artwork. Without your good self, the concept cannot work. I therefore need you to be at my gallery in High Wycombe from nine in the morning until six o’clock in the evening. And I need you dressed pretty much as you are now. Very clever, how you did that.”

  “Did what?”

  “Choose that clothing. Very ironic in a fashionably post-modern kind of way. They’ll come up from London to see you.”

  “But …”

  “You’ll be famous.”

  “Can I sleep on the sofa occasionally?”

  The gentleman gave my question a great deal of thought before suddenly making his decision: “Yes, that could work. I like it.”

  “And will I be able to watch television?”

  “I’m afraid not,” he replied without hesitation.

  You see how we’re the playthings of fate? This poor man was being offered the chance to do the kind of thing he refused to do two decades earlier at great cost to himself and his partner, and the new terms offered by this man were decidedly worse and very humiliating. But the money was good and sooner or later everyone must make a compromise with society as it actually is. Those who don’t bend to their times deserve everything that happens to them.

  That was the moment when my wife returned. I have to say that she was brighter than I have ever given her credit for. She immediately sensed that something was not quite kosher, if you know what I mean. Here was this smartly dressed man who had now extracted a wad of money from his pocket, and he was telling me what to do, as though he were born to command and I to be commanded.

  “Who is this creep?” she asked.

  “An art dealer.”

  “What does he want?”

  “To buy my artwork.”

  Here she brightened. “You mean he has seen your paintings. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “No, he’s going to buy this work.” I pointed to the sofa. “This item of organically living art.”

  “Live concept art,” the gentleman corrected me with a sneer.

  “And I’m an integral part of the exhibit. So I’ve got to go down to England – to a place called High Wycombe near London where they’ll come and see me. And I’ll be rich. And you too, of course.”

  “So you’ve sold him our sofa, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “No. I’ve hired out my exhibit, which consists of myself and the sofa, but I have the more important role.”

  “It gets worse and worse. Can’t you see he’s jerking you around?”

  “Do you know this woman?” asked the gentleman, who was now becoming impatient.

  “Well,” I replied, “I can’t say that I do. She looks a lot like the woman I’ve been married to for the last twenty-five years, but she doesn’t behave like her at all.”

  “Listen, you dickhead,” my wife pronounced with uncommon rudeness, “I married you because I believe in you and your work. We made sacrifices, and I respected you for sticking to your principles. I put up with you, when you became depressed and could never get your arse up off this bloody sofa of yours. And now when we’ve grown old together, you’re going to throw it all up to go off with this ponce to High Fuckem.”

  “Don’t take it so personally, dear,” I protested calmly, even though my blood was boiling and I couldn’t believe the change from her usual demeanour.

  “You haven’t touched a paintbrush in fifteen years. You gave up on life and I stood by you. And now this! I’m going home for a cup of tea, and you can do what the fuck you want.” And that was the last time I saw her.

  The art dealer was called Charles Devon, and sadly our artist had never heard my grandmother’s favourite expression: “Never trust a man named after a county”. He was true to his word and did pay a thousand pounds a day for the installation, but the artist had to pay most of it back for the rental of the dealer’s penthouse in High Wycombe and the costs that came with the new persona that was imposed on the poor man. After the long day lying on the sofa, the artist generally had to go home, shower and dress in black tie. He was then expected to quaff red wine at various cultural events, where he recycled all the drivel he’d learnt from Mr. Devon and was rewarded with glances of approval and wonderment.

  Life’s defeats and life’s successes, how they both weigh you down! I ask myself whether I would have done better to compromise or – let’s use the word I’ve been avoiding – sell out, back when I was young, to those who can afford to buy you. Or whether I should have followed my wife’s advice and kept aloof from this world and its shabby trade-offs. We could have continued in our state of glorious suspended animation.

  I now enjoy greater recognition than I have ever enjoyed in my life – in fact it is the only recognition of any kind that I have ever received. And what for? What exactly do I do to earn these looks of high regard not from the hoi polloi, but the cognoscenti of the art world? I recline, lie, sleep and occasionally snore on a battered blue sofa in clothes that I have now come to detest, but which once belonged to me as much as my own skin. They think that I wear them as an affectation, as a statement on the human condition, but the affectation is, I think, the black tie I wear in the evening. I have almost become part of those who judge and comment upon the lives of others, who smile weakly with worldly wisdom and carry lightly the grandness of their designs.

  The lack of authenticity in everything I do started to feel bearable, as I soon realised after the initial shock that this job, if I can call it that, is leading somewhere. Eventually I
will be accepted as an artist of a kind, and this will emancipate me from my servitude to young Devon. Why do they smile at my reclining self? Where is the supposed subtle irony? It is in my wide girth and the vacant stare of a defeated man. But by making an artefact of my former self, I am freeing myself from it. I now eat low-fat yoghurt and go jogging at weekends; my stomach recedes and my confidence grows. I tell anecdotes and smoothly syllabise the words I speak, giving the impression of great thoughtfulness. People laugh at my jokes, although I suspect they seldom understand them. And they fill my glass with intoxicating conviviality. I will succeed.

  But succeed in what? The question still returns – and every time it burdens me with increasing cynicism and worldliness and, more recently, inflicts a tiny fear which also grows so slowly, but grows nonetheless. That fear is the fear of losing all this, although I’m not sure what “this” is, or whether it has any intrinsic worth.

  A young artist came to see me the other day and he brought a work of exquisite clarity: a portrait of a young woman playing chess outside a café. It was set in a Mediterranean country and she had a warm liveliness even as her concentration on the game isolated her from a colourful, motley company of onlookers. The painting sent a shiver down my back, and I could have cried: that was what I wanted to do, if only I had the skill to do it. I had once come close enough to the skill required, for me to appreciate it fully. But I gave nothing away, and the young man was so in awe of me that I could feel his craving for recognition like a magnetic force I needed to resist. But why did he crave? Because I am suddenly prominent in artistic circles? Doesn’t he see through the sham and shambles of this art trade? The idiot got everything he deserved. “Is that a woman’s face or an item of footwear?” I asked. “Her eyes are dead and her thin mouth like the lace of a shoe. If you must paint, I suggest you restrict yourself to still lifes.” And I felt no guilt at all, but I did feel a sickly pleasure in crushing another human being’s desire to succeed where I had failed. In the evening as I went to bed slightly drunk, I thought to myself that when I was depressed and isolated and living with my wife, I would never have been capable of such an act of wilful cruelty whose only purpose was the exercise of cruelty itself.

  There is, I suppose, always success in failure and failure in success. But my success is based on something inauthentic to me, which brings an extra burden of failure. How many times I dreamt of a dealer discovering my paintings, and then this fool appears and turns my depressed self into a living artwork.

  I detest Devon for having commandeered my life and having made it better – in a way. Despair removes all concern about the future and throws its victim into the arms of the present, which has some comforts, but hope creates the oppressiveness of infinite possibilities – of too many plausible futures. I think the main reason I stay with Devon is to find out how far this absurdity can go, and that creates the intoxication of even greater absurdities. I’m not an artist; I am an objet d’art. If what I do is art, then Devon is the artist and he made me, but for his own reasons he maintains the fiction that I am the creative one.

  He could never understand why I would not like to live a lie, because he lives a lie and lives it happily and with great gusto. He calls me “dear friend”, as though he were the older man. He buys my clothes and deducts the bills from my pay. He invites leading journalists to interview me, filling them with extraordinary stories of my prowess, and then calls me a “chump” when he comes round to complain about something late in the evening. Everything he does repels me, and everything he does binds me to him. His is a very sophisticated form of economic exploitation, and mine is a very peculiar form of alienation.

  And once the years will have folded away, The Guardian will write the following obituary:

  The Guardian | Friday 28 April 2045

  Robert Scott

  The reclining genius who invented Live Concept Art and became the byword for refinement and sophistication in the 2010s

  Robert Scott, who has died after an extended illness at the age of 85, rose to prominence in 2013 and is generally credited with founding the Live Concept Movement which dramatically broke into the British art scene in that crucial year. Known as “Rabby” by his friends in London, he was a colourful character well liked by most of his peers, in spite of his fondness for the bottle and occasional spats with his fellow artists.

  Born in Bridge of Allan in 1960, Scott appears to have broken off all relations with his family after his move south to High Wycombe in 2013. He never spoke to his wife after he left her and went in search of Charles Devon to pitch his ideas for revolutionising British art once the Mart-Art movement had gone into the doldrums. Devon, then a young, ambitious but relatively unknown art dealer in the provinces, was quick to understand the brilliance of Scott’s new ideas. The story is that he had Scott eat huge quantities of junk food for months before he would allow his protégé to launch his first and most celebrated artwork, “Couch Potato”, in which the artist himself reclined on a ludicrously tattered old sofa. Some considered the sofa and the cheap and gaudy clothing he wore for the installation to be somewhat overstated, but they failed to understand Scott’s subtle humour, which says so much about the human condition without resorting to extravagant complexities. Not without reason he has been referred to as the Raymond Carver of the art world.

  Devon claimed that Scott spent weeks trying to persuade him of his ideas, but Devon found it difficult to picture the lithe and dapper Scott playing the part of an ignorant and slothful unemployed person who does little other than watch daytime TV. But the public who first saw Scott reclining on that now infamous sofa must have thought he was born for the part. That was the power of Scott’s chameleon nature.

  At the age of sixty, Scott married Jean Turvy, the model who was thirty-five years his junior. She too was a trailblazer and the first of the “petite poseurs” who ushered in a new taste in female beauty. Theirs was a short and troubled relationship, although they did have two children who were mainly brought up by Turvy’s mother.

  Scott was often a controversial figure and he fell out badly with Devon ten years after they met. The cause of this rift is still unknown, as they both refused to talk about it. Scott managed to avoid all mention of Devon in his autobiography, or of his first wife Augusta, the daughter of Admiral Pennington who commanded the task force against insurgents in Dhofar in the early seventies. Augusta, very much a child of the sixties, wrote a satirical novel on the Mart-Art milieu which was largely ignored when she published it in 2018 but has since achieved cult status in some artistic circles. She died twelve years ago in Paignton.

  Scott was awarded the OBE in 2033 for services to art and culture. He is survived by his second wife and his children, Dominic and Sarah.

  James Hautiduns

  Robert MacLeod Ferguson Scott, artist, born Saturday 9 January 1960; died Thursday 27 April 2045.

  Lives Both Sundered and Adjoined

  This is not the story of stars, ocean deeps, magma flows and inner cores – just the story of our intangible passions that multiply like galaxies, but with more erratic energy. The constellations of our loves and hates, of our ambitions, gratitudes, kindnesses, obscure sexual needs, quieted desires, lost hopes, aesthetic obsessions, and so much more that sparks from our brains and appears to leave no trace. Appears, I say, for all that humanity has done was done through those sparks – the atoms of emotions that fly through the universe of human habitation but cannot reach beyond it, any more than sound can travel in a vacuum.

  You think me foolish to take on this task? Who can disentangle this maelstrom of random forces and petulant emotion? Who can judge chaos that has no purpose, no guiding principle and no pattern of justice? Why don’t I describe an exotic murder in great detail and lead you through the rational process that uncovers the perpetrator? All would be unravelled and reassuring. Why don’t I tell you of strange people only motivated by power, sex and money? Real people are so much more unreasonable, and we can have little tim
e for them. Surely I could hold you with a simple story of revenge in which horrible acts justify so many others? Forgiveness is out of season.

  Sadly I’m not interested in those silly fantasies whose allure is proof again of our erratic souls. What fascinates me is the real, which defies all understanding and to which I can only add a few more perplexities of my own.

  If it’s all so unknowable, I can only explain a little of its wonders by isolating tiny examples – and in choosing my examples, is it not right that I should rest my attention on one of our finer emotions? In an age in which the scabrous is mistaken for profundity, allow me to talk of love which, restricted as it is to the parts of the earth’s crust not covered by water and snow but not necessarily devoid of them either, is greater in its emotional expanse than several universes. I hear you clicking your tongue in disapproval at my sentimentality – I too am conscious of this hideous faux pas – but listen to my story first and then tell me that I exaggerate. You will not, because we know what it is, even when – slave to cynicism – we spend a lifetime denying its existence.

  There’s the youth who yearns to save his youthfulness – to hoard it like a passion and cash it in for a splendid old age, when he will continue to hoard, because hoarding will have become his inescapable essence. His pots and potions, his diets and work-outs, disguise the fact that he is fading, like us all. While he looks in the mirror and gloats at the ripple of his abdominal muscles and his pecs, he doesn’t notice that he’s drowning in the icy pool of self-love. He is a victim of his time, which thinks it has defeated time. He doesn’t see the parabola of existence, short and curved like the broken back of senescence and decrepitude. He founds his life on land below sea level and spends it furiously building dams to keep out the greater fury of the restless, deathly sea.