Mad Meg

by Sally Morrison

  I was told this a while ago by an astronomer from Edinburgh on the overnight train from Paris to Milan. He was going to the Isle of Elba via Turin for a conference on interstellar gases. ‘There’s an equation for it,’ he said.

  And I’d imagined black holes were evidence of a celestial mother, vacuuming.

  It was the only trip I’ve ever made to Milan. I took myself off in 1991, going first to Paris. We left Paris an hour or so before midnight. The astronomer and I made ourselves as comfortable as we could among the bags and knapsacks and other bodies in our carriage and tried to sleep, roasted by a heater on one side and frozen by the draught from a jammed window on the other. I woke once to see a full moon skating on an alpine lake. When I woke again, the train was ramming, loud and vulgar, through the veils of morning.

  After Turin, where the astronomer left me, I journeyed on through an industrial landscape to Milano Centrale, Mussolini’s monstrous marble railway station with its liver-coloured veins. It compared favourably, I thought, with the tombstone towers, those monuments to the still-born businesses of the 1980s, along St Kilda Road at home.

  I had come to look at the city where Dadda was born. I stayed in a pensione on the fifth floor of a run-down building in Corso Buenos Aires, where the air was far from bueno. To reach my room, I had to hail the caretaker to open the street door and then cross an echoing courtyard, negotiate another locked grille with a key too small for the lock, take a two-person lift that had three directions in which it could open and dismount in the right orientation on what I had calculated was the fifth floor, there being no lighted panel to say so. And even then, there was the room key to collect.

  The room was like a prison cell with a view of similar cells stretching into the far-flung smog. The window was barred, no doubt to deter intending suicides. Blue bedspread, white sink, reading light, writing table. In the event of fire, no instructions, no fire escape, no stairs.

  In Piazza Castello, where Dadda was born, the houses are tall and bourgeois and bound to each other wall to wall. Though it is a tree-lined crescent, there are no external gardens. Aerial photographs of the castle show the houses open onto common courtyards that are grassed but have no shrubs. The Milanese don’t seem to care for plants, or perhaps they don’t thrive in the polluted air.

  If Cupid had been leaning out of the firing slits in the castle when Dadda was a baby, he could have shot him through the heart. The arrow would have crossed the grassy remains of the moat, in which cats of every variety (all thin) commune, mate, produce more cats and get fed by a madwoman, a bent little beetle, who passes by on a bike in the afternoons. The moat is about fifteen or twenty feet deep, and the sound of mudguards rattling is a signal for the hardier cats to scale the walls and congregate on the drawbridge. The drawbridge is forbidden the public by a ridiculously thick chain between metal bollards set in concrete in the ground. All you have to do is step over the chain.

  The madwoman has had her bicycle adapted to her calling, and in a large wooden crate affair affixed to the back wheel are meals-on-wheels for cats. She scuttles with her saucers of offal, back and forth, back and forth. She has to be quick, because the moment the smell of liver hits the air, rottweilers and alsatians come loping towards her through the park. For the cats who don’t make it to the drawbridge, she shunts meat off a platter over the side into the moat.

  In the moat, as well as the cats, I saw boots, long modern boots, boots that had belonged on feet but were now cast aside: a long black one, a long studded brown one with a cuban heel, another black with a high heel, and a green. Left over, perhaps, from the War of the Boots?

  But the Square of the Duomo is where it happens in Milan, where the strikers gather, the effigies are burnt, the victims of terrorists are laid out and the corteges of the famous, the infamous, the assassinated and the merely dead leave for the final resting place. From Piazza Castello you go there down via Dante, street of the mellifluous poet, clanging, banging and racketing with trams. And there it is, the gala-ball Duomo, an apparition in pink and white marble, once gazed on by that human Apparition from her apartment above the square in the glass-domed arcade. Dadda spent much of his first year there.

  The Apparition of Light had thrown her weight behind the war effort. She and her comrades, including Comrade Coretti (first without, and then with her baby son), spent the war furiously knitting socks for the soldiers. These were probably more of a hindrance than a help, as they had no heels. Ostensibly the heellessness was to save on time and wool, and if the sock got holed, it could just be turned around a bit. On the other hand, maybe no one knew how to turn a heel.

  I don’t suppose it was socks that accounted for the rout of the Italian army on the 31st of October in 1917 when Dadda was newly in his basinette and the Austrians invaded Italian soil. Ten thousand Italians were killed, thirty thousand wounded and almost three hundred thousand captured. The rest fled, most of them leaving behind their weapons. Certain members of the military blamed the defeat on socialist insubordination and sabotage, but letters from the front describing pitiful conditions, hunger, cold and lack of supplies told the real story.

  Grandfather Emilio Coretti, dapper, moustachio’d and in the pink of his youth, avoided the front because he was a bootmaker. It didn’t seem to matter that his specialty was Cinderella footware, leather was in short supply. Three hundred and ten thousand pairs of boots had been lost at the front along with the killed and the captured. The Apparition, who only just forgave him for his nonparticipation in the fray, wrote to him, when he was in a distant part of Italy on a leather-finding mission, that certain people were getting private exemptions from service. Worse, she wrote admonishingly, prisoners were being sent to the front. Since she couldn’t persuade him to go sit in a trench and sacrifice himself for Italy, she bade him instead to look at the conditions in factories and see for himself the savage and arbitrary regulations that were being enforced on men, women and children, day workers and night workers, in the name of the war, but in reality for the benefit of the factory owners. ‘Il Coretti’ must do his best to save and protect the bootmaking industry for its workers: he could, for example, refuse to supply owners he found in breach of the laws.

  This was just what Emilio was doing. He was compiling a dossier on work practices in the bootmaking industry for Uncle Nicola, who had been researching the conditions of the workers and peasants for years for the Humanitarian Society of Milan.

  Uncle Nicola, older than our grandfather by a decade or more, served with pride in the Alpini up until the defeat at Caporetto, during which he’d been peppered with shrapnel and, afterwards, honourably discharged. He was a graduate in law from the University of Bologna, where the assassinated Matteotti had been a fellow student. His aim in life was to revolutionise the revolution. He was probably quite correct when he asserted that there would have to be traders and merchants before a socialist economy could work; these people were a true class, without whom one of the vital factors of production, selling produce, would be overlooked. He saw no inconsistency in playing the stock exchange while awaiting the downfall of capitalism; the stock exchange told you where things were, and leather, it seemed, could be had from Argentina or Australia. So it was that an order for leather was placed with a Melbourne merchant.

  To Uncle Nicola’s surprise, Australian leather was well and truly spoken for. Not only was it lying all over the slopes of Gallipoli on the feet of Australians living and dead, a fact which flabbergasted the Coretti brothers to whom the Dardanelles seemed totally irrelevant, but it was also keeping Russian soles from the mud, a Melbourne bootmaker having received an order for four hundred thousand pairs of boots from the powers that were, might and could have been in Russia. It was 1917.

  The Italians had made a hesitant entry into the First World War. The Italian left was noninterventionist, and the International hailed them as heroes. But there was nothing heroic about it, Italy couldn’t provision an army. When one was eventually mounted, underprovisioned,
the left invented a policy of ‘Relative Neutrality’, according to which it was all right for the proletariat to fight a defensive war on Italian soil, but not an offensive war against the proletariat of another country on foreign soil. So to fight a war at all, the socialists required an invasion: no wonder the Austrians obliged.

  I found Dadda’s city a place of contradictions. At the other end of the Square of the Duomo in 1991, face-to-face with the gold madonna on the Duomo’s highest spire and reflected in every window in the square, was the black, white and yellow holy family of Benetton. Behind it hid the Palace of Reason.

  SIXTEEN

  Mad Meg’s Basket

  A MAN IS ‘nesting’ on the roof of Mad Meg. He’s going to be there for a week. In the mornings, we’re to send him up a bucket of food and he’s to send us down a bucket of waste. If it rains, he will put up an umbrella, a red umbrella as specified on his instruction sheet, pinned up by the back door. To see him, you have to go out into the backyard. Initially he was furious that we wouldn’t let him make his nest on the front part of the roof because it was too near the electricity lines. He accused us of censorship and discrimination against people in wheelchairs who wouldn’t be able to see him because you have to go down steps to get into the backyard.

  He’s an installation, part of a joint effort by Figments, Siècle and us, though Siècle doesn’t realise it’s participating. Siècle is guilty of all modern crimes. Because their paintings are consciously made with the buying public in mind, they are guilty of producing ‘art objects’, of turning artworks into dollars.

  At Mad Meg, on the other hand, we have given up painting. What’s the point? In our day and age, culture ceases to be property. Property only reinforces the bourgeois myth and the hard sell through a hedge of pompous words, behind which lurk the slight, the superficial, the fatuous and the vacuous.

  Institutional art is not art. You might as well exhibit money – in fact, Mad Meg has. One of our exhibits was the tapestry of a ten-dollar note and somebody knitted us a heap of chequebooks.

  The art object has become the enemy of art. We live in our heads. If you can’t make art that isn’t permanent, you can’t make art. Part of the beauty of art is its ephemeral nature.

  Inside Mad Meg on this occasion we have a total environment called Little Red Riding Whom? On your right as you come in the door, there’s an installation called Manhood, in which a frieze of the same suburban street scene, taken over and over from early morning till late night, surrounds a Harley-Davidson mounted on a revolving disc in the centre of the room. Visitors are invited to sit on the bike and enjoy the resultant effect, which is that of making the street scene move. People record their experiences afterwards in a book by the door: some say it looks as though the houses are flying through twenty-four hours, others that the scene is repeated ad nauseam in the same way the suburbs are, morning, noon and night, so when you’re riding, in a sense you’re going nowhere and the bike loses all its prestige. A few feel powerful when they sit on the bike and there are those, of course, who say the whole thing’s shit, by which I suppose they mean it’s the deconstruction of motion.

  On your left there’s an installation called Womanhood which consists of a carefully set kitchen table using the sausage as an art object. Viewers are invited to sit on the chairs around the table and watch a video on melon balling in which several experts show how to do it their way.

  In the right-side back room is an installation called Manhole which didn’t require anything of the artist apart from artistically removing the manhole cover from the ceiling. Needless to say, across the corridor is an installation called Womanhole, which, in years gone by, before schoolgirls mastered the Art of Tampon Insertion, would have been fair game for the vice squad, but in these enlightened times anything goes.

  At Figments, Miles is doing Objecthood. Room One: white paintings on white walls. Room Two: continual release of bubbles from a bubble-blowing machine over a sand drawing by Miles’s wife, Anita, on the floor. Room Three: Absence – the huge painting of a black pedestal, abraded so the struts behind the canvas show through. The process of making art is part of the art object.

  In the back room off Miles’s foyer is a show of pictures painted in the dark by me and Miles’s nephew, David Silver. They are called ‘The Birth and Extinction of Red’. Mine map the departure of red from a bowl of roses into darkness; his are much more minimal, done like a Dulux colour chart, from black to red to white. I painted mine in the evenings; he, an insomniac, painted his in the mornings. I was told that mine were far too figurative until I came up with the idea of them representing the eclipse of the bourgeois image.

  Both galleries have Siècle invitations on trays by the doors. When Checkie Laurington came to the opening she asked Miles, ‘What are they doing there?’ When she came over to see the Mad Meg part of the show, she said, ‘Don’t you realise, Allegra, you won’t sell any of this?’

  Later, she joined us for drinks upstairs in Miles’s flat.

  Miles’s wife, Anita, is shy and never appears at openings. She hasn’t set foot in Mad Meg, though we always send her invitations. We (the politically correct plural) like her work, and Miles has suggested that Mad Meg might be a good place to show since we’re mainly women and, these days, we mainly show conceptual or performance art. But Anita will only show with Miles and then only in a group.

  Allegra has gone out of her way to befriend Anita, but Anita doesn’t like to be wooed. Whenever anyone from the Mad Meg collective is around, Anita lets Miles do the talking.

  She and Miles live above Figments on two barn-like floors. It’s a steep climb up three sets of steps that are more like ladders. The first set takes you to the space where Miles hangs his picture stock on vertical floor-to-ceiling racks. Also on this floor are his collections of antiquarian books and Aboriginal artefacts, so there are a great many dusty bookstacks and spooky shapes to negotiate in the half light on the way up to the flat.

  Anita generally hangs around the kitchen, brewing coffee in the shadows. Whenever Allegra makes to go and ask if she can help, Miles says, ‘No, no, it’s all right. It’s Anita’s custom.’

  ‘Brewing the coffee and doing the washing up,’ says Allegra, ‘are not customs in anyone’s language, and I’m sure Anita’s ancestors did neither.’ Anita is descended from the Bunurong and Wurundjeri Aboriginal people.

  Bridget Kelly says the Bunurong haunt the dump: it was one of their corroboree sites. Whether they haunt it or not, they have just made it part of a land claim. Before white settlement, they were granted 27 acres of (their own) inner Melbourne suburban land, which these days takes the form of two recreation reserves, the billabong and what has become the dump. A couple of weeks ago, Kooris from several tribes marched on state parliament and presented a petition for their return. The petitioners were duly thanked, but the dump and the billabong were declared non-negotiable. They, according to state parliament, had been on a road construction reserve since 1957.

  No one can take rubbish to the dump anymore because it is no longer officially a dump. There is a lot of pressure for the freeway to go through. Even the Workers’ Union has agreed to it and we’re thoroughly shat off with them. Bridget wouldn’t give in without a fight, though. When the bulldozers came to wreck her house, she barricaded herself in and loaded Little Ernie’s shotgun. After a standoff that took up most of the daylight hours, hours during which thwarted bulldozer drivers had sought advice, had taken their tea and lunch breaks in the regulation hut, to and from which they had had to be driven in a regulation vehicle. When night fell and the dozer drivers had knocked off, the police went in. They had her gas and electricity cut off.

  Bridget, short of neither candles nor firewood, soon had the house better lit than it had been by the dust-smirched globes. The house seemed a little wooden ark set to sail through the night o’er the rubbishy sea.

  When the police turned on a loud hailer, Bridget hurled up a window and yelled, ‘Piss off, you fuckers!
You’re disturbing the peace!’

  Kellys and Corettis called encouragement from the fence.

  When the television crews arrived, the whole place was floodlit like a stage on which a sinister glint had been imparted to the barrel of Little Ernie’s rifle at a front window. Lights on police cars flashed; the players in the drama threw long-legged shadows with little bodies riding around on top of them. ‘She’s got a gun,’ they said. The spectators were required to withdraw to a safe distance. We stood shoulder to shoulder and the shadow we threw behind us was a long monster with many heads and twice as many legs.

  About eight o’clock the police, with the quiet aid of the fire brigade, managed to get themselves over the ribbon wire (a draconian precaution ostensibly taken against seagull feeders, but in reality to deter freeway bombers) at the back of the house and burst into it from the rear, but in their bursting, they upset several of the great many candles Bridget had burning all over the extremely messy and tinder-dry interior. The flames immediately found things to feed on and got raging: the police burst out the back again and Bridget burst out the front. So fierce was the fire, it took less than fifteen minutes for the house to go up like a bomb, windows exploding outwards and a great whoompf of smoke rising in a column in the floodlit sky.

  The fire engines, having been engaged at the rear of the house down a dead-end lane, didn’t reach the access for a good five minutes (perhaps they were under instructions not to), and the house continued to give itself up in white smoke as wide as the house was long and as thick as the house was deep.