Before I applied to the school, I went around and saw some studio spaces together with Anders Balle, a guy I barely knew. He’d entered the academy of arts the previous year. The first half year he couldn’t produce anything, he said. That happened to a lot of people, but now the floodgates were obviously open and things were gushing with vigor.
We headed to Charlottenborg a Saturday evening when we were certain to be alone. All the students were gone, but their works had been left behind in the large rooms with wood floors, high panel-walls, and windows facing Nyhavn on one side and the inner courtyard on the other.
“So. Have a look around and we’ll meet up again in an hour,” Anders said as he disappeared around a corner.
I took a kind of running start and sprang out, or maybe in.
The first space was filled with thread. Yarn and fabric were suspended from the lofts, were stretched between the walls, creeping between the various planes like cobwebs. Sacks of clothes lay spread across the floor. There were glue gobs, there were boxes and an old loom. In another room someone was in the process of making an air balloon from some gray stuff that stank.
I tried to find the door from which I’d entered, for some reason I just really wanted to see it, and suddenly there were two doors. I opened one and stepped into a new room where walls, windows, posts, chair, and table were covered in spray paint. In a corner were three paint buckets and some jam jars. Beneath a sink there was a box of jam jars. In the sink were some jars without lids.
I was reminded of the girl who won admission to the school after sitting for a couple of days in a large wooden box among all the submitted work. Her box sojourn was itself the work. It lasted until she was up before the admissions committee. Then she stepped out of the box and read aloud from a diary she’d kept. The girl had pissed and shit in some jam jars. She left them standing behind.
I stuck as many of the jars into my bag as would fit. I hated the fucking place. And all the fucking, jar-shitting artists.
I didn’t hate them. I loved them. No. That’s not how it was. I hated the ones I loved. I also wanted to be just like that right there. In that exact spot.
It was cold when I began to create my work. The cold stood right outside the windows. On the floor the paper stretched and readied itself. I wrote in sprawling letters. In Greenlandic. Burned the letters into the paper with a spirit marker and drowned them in lacquer. The alkyd flayed the letters to dun. Everything snarled and sweat stood out on my skin. I removed my clothes and opened the windows. The panes broke. The lacquer was yellow and smelled like piss. First the surface received a coat, then the deeper layers. The wallpaper disintegrated and curled and dropped off. The wind started in. In February it snowed on the floor. I drank whiskey from jam jars and tossed them out the open windows. I turned on the video camera and made a song. I moved my body in dance. I delivered the pictures, the song, and the dance to the listed address.
Grandpa took it in stride when I told him I was going to attend the academy. Actually, he didn’t react. But then he heard about Ane.
“What did she do?” he asked.
“She filmed herself kicking a goat.”
“Ane?”
“Yeah.”
“A video? But what did she kick a goat for? Never mind. And she taped it?”
Grandpa looked disgusted.
“It was no big deal, Grandpa. She borrowed a goat from one of the other families. Then she tied it to a tree, so it couldn’t escape. Then she took the video camera and filmed while she kicked it, I mean, kicked, that’s not really what she did, she just poked it a little, you know: tap, tap. It didn’t take ten seconds. No one could come and say it was animal abuse, Grandpa. The goat’s fine.”
“But can’t you see it for yourself, Justine?” Grandpa asked. “That’s a damned insane thing to do. Kicking a goat? That’s never been art.”
“Grandpa, trust me. That’s art. I could try and explain it to you, but I don’t think it would help much. You’d still think it was ridiculous.”
“You can damn well try. In fact, that’s the least you can do. You can’t just say it’s art, and that’s that. Tell me, Justine. What is it that makes kicking a goat a work of art?”
“Mainly because Ane says that it’s art. And because she’s going to the academy, of course.”
“But how did she get in?”
“With the goat, Grandpa . . .”
“That’s completely absurd. Can’t you see that? It reminds me of those idiotic videos where people film each other in all sorts of stupid situations, like when they fall on their ass or get their pants soaked or something. That’s just as idiotic,” said Grandpa. “But you don’t make things like that, right?”
The new students gathered with the old in the academy’s banquet hall with its gold chandeliers and antique plaster friezes. The rector talked about art’s necessity and about the great masters whose steps had graced the courtyard’s cobblestones. It was a great honor and a great responsibility to be a student in the castle. We were already becoming a part of history.
Grandpa thought it was all a lot of snobbery, he couldn’t care less about the overblown place, he said. Nothing good would ever come out of it. But we who were released into the castle’s corridors hurried to find the place that would be ours. I had nothing on me but some India ink, and I wrote my name on a piece of paper and stuck it to a wall. A moment later Ane appeared and staked out a spot next to me. In reality, she said, she’d mostly done drawings and watercolors before applying to the school, but when she was working on the application piece she’d talked to one of the academy’s professors a friend of a friend had put her in touch with. The professor had said she shouldn’t apply with her paintings. They were too emotive, he thought, and way, way too nice. They lacked bite, distance, that something that gave them artistic legitimacy. Ane thought she’d fooled him, and she enjoyed the fact that she was now free to drop goats and videos and continue with the paintings she’d always done.
We flowed together. The whole studio flowed together. Things whirled around. They entered through doors and windows. Boxes, tables, chairs, more boxes, buckets, pots, jam jars, lamps, paints, stands. It wasn’t too long before the janitorial staff could no longer tell the difference between what was trash and what was important.
“The difference between whoever made this piece and you is that you want people to experience something in particular. They just want to make you aware of the fact that you’re experiencing,” I said.
“I never wanted people to experience any particular thing,” Grandpa said. “They can think and feel whatever they want.”
“I don’t know how to respond to that, Grandpa. I actually think it has to do with the fact that at some point the brain simply stops trying to understand.”
“What the hell do you mean by that, kid?”
I slammed the door so that the window rattled in its frame. A moment later he came out into the garden. He took the deck chair from the shed and opened it next to the chopping block.
“There’s enough wood for plenty of winters, Justine.”
“Do you plan on moving any?”
“Remember that I’ve got to be able to stack it.”
“I’m not a child, Grandpa.”
Grandpa sank heavily into the chair.
“No, I’m well aware of that, Justine. I’m well aware. It’s just that I’m getting a little fucking old.”
“That’s what I’ve been saying all along.”
“But no one is going to fucking come along and tell me that my senses aren’t intact.”
“All you’re missing is the metasense, Grandpa.”
“What kind of sense?”
Anders Balle was with me when I created my piniartorsuaq, my great hunter, a woman named Inngili. Inngili was me, and I was her, and it was great, we could simply inhabit the same body.
Inngili and I accompanied Balle to Nordsøcentret in Hirtshals. We wanted to take some shots with animals, preferably seals. I’d
arranged things with the aquarium’s head, and Balle had rented some camera equipment for seventy thousand kroner from Zentropa, where he had a contact. We were well prepared. Balle would take the photographs so that I could exclusively concentrate on Inngili and the animals. Bear skin trousers and a white anorak. I didn’t just look it, I was a real hunter.
The seals reclined on the artificial rocks, there were quite a few of them, at least twenty. It was like the olden days, said Inngili, back when there were seals all over the ice. Lounging. Distending. I wondered if I would be able to instill life in those that were dozing, but then a pair of the seals glided into the water after all and frolicked about, barking. Back on land Balle got the camera equipment in place, and I climbed up to the highest rock and surveyed the landscape. A hefty sea dog yelped, rolled over to one side, and fell asleep again. Anders stood behind the camera’s eye and yelled that I should play a hunter on the way home with my catch.
Ahh. I turned my weather-beaten face to the sun. It had been a bountiful day. In a pool surrounded by ice, the water still seethed with animals. On the ice, a bearded seal flock lay gliding along in the afternoon sun. Time to set for home before it got too dark and cold. The dogs jumped for glee at the sight of the catch and pulled impatiently at the sled’s traces, they knew they would get a share of the spoils, but they had to wait until they’d delivered it safely home. I tied the three seals securely to the sled. In the distance a snowstorm was brewing. Time to be off.
“That was a good catch we made there,” Balle said on the way home in the car. “It’ll make for a good photo series. How will you show them?”
“I can provide for an entire settlement if it comes to it. There aren’t many women who could catch three seals in one afternoon.”
“Nah, you’re a cool artist.”
“I’m hungry.”
“I damn well bet you are.”
Six
Bo chews in his sleep. He’s back from a concert in Femøren. He bashed his forehead on the closed door. He collapsed onto the mattress. He was very drunk and very silly, he laughed and laughed and got stomach cramps and gasped: Oh, oh, make me stop, and then he laughed himself to sleep.
That gold, taut stomach. The skin glitters beneath the pubic hair in a soft band up to the navel up to his chest. The slack body, the hard body, it rises, it sinks, the nipples float, come to rest beside his chest. Flesh. The carotid’s nervous pulse, thud, thud, thud.
I’m Inngili. I can perch atop him and ride. In my hands he’s an animal I’m bringing down. I’ll ride him like he’s never been ridden, until he spurts, until he dies. I unzip his pants. There’s softness in the warmth between the hairs. I ride him with my hand. I transform him to a fountain that shoots high into the air.
Oh yes. Rock that cunt, driver, bundle me tight, wolf.
Now it’s morning. He scratches himself. Gives me a lewd look.
“Keep your pants on,” I say. “Nothing happened.”
Yelp.
He groans, scratches himself a hundred places at once. Then he steps out and whistles while he washes.
Aren’t you sticking around, man? Else, I’ll have to work.
I don’t say it too loud. He doesn’t hear anything and leaves. I stick around.
There’s a floating fuzz. It hovers, ascends, and moves straight to the right, ten centimeters, I think, maybe twelve, and then it hovers again. All of it. No matter how I approach things, it’s the wrong way. I blow the fuzz that takes a decent flight of more than a meter, and then I need to drink more. Thinking makes me so thirsty. I think so much I’ve perpetually got to pee. Yet again. Every time I sit a moment and am about to have an idea, that’s it . . . off to pee.
I find my telephone in my bag and call Marianne Fillerup at the National Gallery.
“Keep your pants on,” Inngili says in an authoritative voice, putting a lot of space between her words. The works are safe. They’re currently up in my friend’s attic. Fortunately. Marianne Fillerup groans.
I hate the telephone, that shitty apparatus, and switch it off before I end up dialing someone else. I need to pee.
Ane sits on a bench in Enghave Park. She was pushing the baby in the stroller, but every time she’d let go, he’d wake up. She didn’t get to do her shopping. Now she’s tired of walking and parks the stroller in the shade where she can keep an eye on it. Soon he’ll wake up, but that’s okay.
“There’s really nothing to say,” she says, “about Marianne Fillerup wanting to see how much progress you’ve made. She’s responsible, after all.”
And she adds:
“I mean, you’re not all that bright. What are you actually going to do?”
The last two sentences are the most accurate that’ve been spoken in a while. They’re true. And relevant. I’m not all that bright. And: What am I going to do. I isolate the sentences in order to remember them.
“I’ll pocket them,” I say, “these sentences.”
Ane’s at it again, in the process of lifting the stroller cover to peek. She says:
“Now then, little man, you’re awake?” She removes the cover. “You’ve had a good nap, love. Are you hungry?” She takes out her telephone and checks the time. “You slept for two hours. That’s right, two hours,” she says, lifting the red-cheeked baby from the stroller. All in one movement. Now she fidgets the baby to her breast.
“I’m moving to a hotel here in Frederiksberg,” I say.
“What’s that? In Frederiksberg? Can you afford it?”
“I can’t stay at The Factory another day.”
“Yeah, I’m really sorry about that.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Of course I can stay at The Factory, I just might have to. What I’m saying is: I won’t. I don’t know. I can’t. I can’t fucking do it any more. When I say that, I get a sense of deep, deep depth. Can’t is the empty space at the end of every branching possibility.
She prattles about Torben everywhere, at home, on Nørrebro, on the Bryggen wharf, and now she’s talking about him again here in Enghave Park while she sits and nurses. He’s apparently fed up with his gallery. They want him to participate in a group exhibition themed around A Man’s Answer to Feminism. However, Torben doesn’t like working with themes that way, Ane says, he’s sure they’re just waiting for an excuse to get rid of him because they think he’s difficult. She’s annoyed on Torben’s behalf, and it’s made worse by the fact that his gallery has also contacted her now. She thought they wanted Torben, but, as it turned out, it was Ane they were looking for. The gallery owner would like to see some of her things, just informally, you know.
“I’m telling you, Torben got weird when I told him that,” she says.
She tucks away the limp breast and removes the firm one.
“I just said I was on maternity leave. Obviously, I don’t want to be in the same gallery as Torben. Nothing good would come of it,” she says.
Vita’s still not home, but I didn’t expect her to be, either. I chose this exact moment. The vegetables in the box on the kitchen table, they’re hers and where she’s still an absence, have grown brown tops. They hang over the edge along the table’s surface and yearn for water, which probably hasn’t run in days to judge from the sink’s dry metal and the calcium deposited there. And there stand the two glasses with their big, round red-wine bellies, their dark edges and the impression of lips and skin.
The couch is waiting in the living room. I lie down on it, down among the cushions.
Someone is rummaging around the fire site. I passed by and looked the other way.
In reality the settlement, which should’ve been, but no longer is, and which makes my stomach flutter, is a continuation of the work I created for the National Museum a year ago. I received permission from the museum’s director to give a special tour four Saturdays in a row on the condition that I made it very clear that the tour was unaffiliated with the National Museum in any way. Before I began my spiel, that is, I had to remember to emph
asize that it was an art project. That’s what the signs should say: An art project.
The guests flocked to participate in whatever was happening with the Eskimos in the ethnographic collection.
“My father’s mother, Inngili, was a great hunter,” I said, “and that was extremely unusual for a woman at that time. Back then it was mostly the men who hunted, but Inngili had made a pact with the animals: If they let her capture them, she would do it with hunting gear that was superb and beautiful. No animal likes being downed by inferior hunting equipment, and my grandmother knew that. Therefore, she made sure to adorn her harpoons and could easily come home with seven, eight seals in one day.”
People peered into the bright showcases that displayed the harpoon with the decorated shaft; the wood and the bone trimmings glowed. It looked so splendid behind the glass, the way the halogen lamp was positioned, it was entirely perfect. Wood and animal grease. And the years layered in.
“My grandmother’s harpoon was stolen from her by a whaler named Wilhelm Löwe. Löwe also stole a small ulo. You can see it over here.”
On another wall hung the women’s knives with their handles of bone and tooth.
“Herr Löwe sailed with a whaling ship from Holland. He was the ship’s captain and had sailed most of the world over. But he also came to Greenland, where the whaling was good at that time.”
I drew the group over to the ulo display case and pointed out an especially beautiful knife with a fine tooth handle.
“My grandmother’s knife,” I said, “shouldn’t be hanging here, but that’s what it’s doing, unfortunately . . . There was always a celebration whenever a foreigner came to the settlement where my grandmother and grandfather lived, and there was dancing and singing at my grandparents’ home. When Löwe landed, my grandfather was on a hunting expedition, so when Löwe fell for my grandmother, he had free reign. She was so clever and different, he thought, different than the other Greenlandic women. Löwe pursued my grandmother the two days his ship lay in the harbor. What exactly happened, she knows only, but when the whaler again pulled anchor, my grandmother’s ulo and one of her harpoons was gone.”
Justine Page 5
