by Linda Jaivin
‘What formula?’ ZakDot had returned. He drank half the glass and poured the rest over his head. It dribbled down over the fox trot.
Thurston glanced at me, as if for permission to speak. I shrugged. I still didn’t have a clue what he was on about.
‘For success without compromise.’
‘Shit! That should be on one of my bats!’ ZakDot exclaimed. He picked up a texta from the table and wrote it on his hand as a reminder.
I laughed and sat down on the edge of the table.
But Thurston was serious. ‘Remember those analyses I told you about? Well, I’ve fed in all sorts of data about art and the art world. I’ve slotted in information on artists who burst onto the scene at a young age and compared them with those who emerged later in life. I’ve factored in issues like the tall poppy syndrome, photogenicity, and subcultural status, as well as external factors such as the lag between local and overseas trends.’
ZakDot sat down next to me. He looked thoroughly amused.
Thurston took a breath. ‘Taking note of the fact that you’re a painter, I looked at short, medium and long-term trends in the market for paintings as well as the recent tendency for awards to be given to artists working with very small Styrofoam balls or video games and, well, to make a long story short, I mapped out your optimal career trajectory.’
‘My “optimal career trajectory”?’ I was so flabbergasted that I actually air-quoted the words, to ZakDot’s obvious delight.
Thurston excused himself and came back with a whiteboard, which he propped up in front of the TV. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘This is the basic plan.’ He picked up a blue marker. I was fascinated to see that he wrote in a calligraphic hand reminiscent of illuminated medieval manuscripts. ‘One. Put together a solid body of work. Brilliant and original.’
‘No worries.’ It was, after all, my intention from the start.
‘Two. Attract high-level patronage. Three. Engender a controversy. Four. Cultivate an air of mystery. Five. Live dangerously.’ He turned and faced us with an eager look on his face. A row of large white teeth found a clearing in the curly brown thatch. His smile was like the rest of him—awkward, out of place, but endearing.
‘There’s only one small catch. For the formula to work perfectly, you have to die young.’
‘Cool!’ ZakDot, forgetting that ‘cool’ was ‘over’, sat up straight. ‘What’ll it be then, Miles?’ He grinned. ‘Murder? Suicide? Or accidental? And can I help?’
He helped all right. They all did. And here I am.
Romanticism is ultimately fatal
The Monday after Thurston proposed that I die young in order to live forever, Lynda Tangent came through the painting studio at school to check on the progress of our latest assignment, self-portraits. Lynda is a severe-looking woman who is all angles—knife-blade cheekbones, geometric hair, circumflex eyebrows, pointy breasts. A cubist’s dream model. It’s rumoured, incidentally, that she has a third nipple on her sternum, equidistant from the other two, her own natural equilateral triangle.
Pausing by my easel, she cupped her sharp chin in her hand. After a pause, she uttered the pronouncement, ‘Too beautiful.’
Self-consciously, I ran my hand through my hair, which is thick, wavy and red. I have a longish face, full lips, large and hooded green eyes. A girl in my first-year class once told me I look like the engraver Albrecht Dürer in his self-portrait.
Lynda’s next comment was completely unexpected. ‘You need to live more, Miles.’
What did she mean by that? Sure, I was only twenty-one at the time but, to the best of my knowledge, I had lived every one of those years. ‘And how do you propose I do that?’ I fumed.
‘Take risks. Expose yourself. Give birth to yourself in each painting and kill yourself, too.’
Kill myself? Could it be a coincidence? Though it was a hot day, a chill ran through me from the very top of my head to the tip of my toes. That day marked the beginning of my paranoia. I dipped my brush in crimson, and painted a jagged red slash across the neck of my self-portrait.
After school, I took the painting home and propped it up on the easel to study it. ZakDot, whose own self-portrait, ‘You Are What You Eat’, had consisted of a block of chocolate, a dildo and a sex toy in the shape of a vagina, did a double-take when he walked into the room.
‘There’s something to it, you know,’ he remarked, after I told him about Lynda’s comments. ‘Think about it. Géricault. Keats. Egon Schiele. Jimi Hendrix. Kurt Cobain. They all died young. Legends, every one.’
‘There’s just one problem, Zed.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I don’t want to die.’
‘Wowser.’
‘Besides,’ I pointed out, ‘they all had solid reputations by the time they died. I haven’t even had an exhibition.’
ZakDot snapped his fingers. ‘How’s this? You die. Don’t make that face, Miles. It’s unbecoming. Besides, you’ve got to work on your aversion to death. It’s holding you back. This is the plan. As I said, you die. We’ll work out the details later. It will have to encompass all those other things, you know, mystery, controversy, the lot. But the crucial thing is, shortly after you die, I release a press statement describing you as the great undiscovered “genius” of our age.’
I didn’t like the way he air-quoted ‘genius’.
‘I let the interest build to a fever pitch,’ he continued, ‘gather a selection of your work and put on an exhibition. It would have to be at some place like’—he paused to think—‘Gallery Trimalkyo, of course.’
‘Of course.’
As ZakDot knew, I’d always dreamed of getting in with Trimalkyo.
I never imagined that it would work out quite as it did. I’m in with Trimalkyo now, all right. In over my neck. And Trimalkyo’s in with me. Over his. Even if he doesn’t know it yet.
Zak kept going. ‘As a result of the enormous success of the sell-out exhibition, there is a tremendous demand for your work. Together with Trimalkyo, I calculate the most advantageous method of dribbling out the paintings to a hungry and eager market. I quit arranging Flying Cow Helicopter Desk Lamps at the Shopping Channel and live off the sales of your work, which continues to appreciate in value, for the rest of my life.’
‘Great,’ I snorted. ‘And what do I get out of this?’
‘Weren’t you listening to Thurston? Immortality. Success without compromise.’
Recalling that conversation now, I feel goose bumps rise along my arms, which are still tethered behind my back. I wonder if perhaps ZakDot does know I’m on board after all. I wonder if Trimalkyo knows. If they’re actually in cahoots.
You know how I said I was the best fucking painter of my generation? Stuff my generation. I’m one of the best painters of any generation who ever lived. I may sound so far up myself that I’m almost inside out, but the truth is I’m major league. The work I’ve done since that throat-slashed self-portrait would knock your socks off. I’m right up there with Rembrandt and Caravaggio and Titian and Goya and the rest. If I could show you my work right now you’d believe me. There’s no question but that it’s worth killing for. The question is, is it worth dying for?
What a mess I’m in. And I have nothing to blame but my own talent.
That and the fact I seem to suffer from terminal naivety.
I suppose I ought to admit that it also has something to do with my love life, or rather, my tendency to fall into bed with the wrong sort of woman. Or maybe just the wrong woman, full stop. Whatever I told Thurston, I don’t really have much experience with women at all. The truth is, they don’t come into my life very often. So when they do, I get a little overexcited. I say ‘yes’ when I should say ‘no’, and when I say ‘no’, it’s clear that I mean ‘yes’. There have been a few occasions, including one this afternoon, when saying ‘no’ really ought to have meant ‘no’.
The boat judders. We’re reversing. Another heavy vibration and the Opera House comes into view, in close up. W
e must be at the Man O’War Jetty. I hear the gangplank slap down, but there’s no rush and flutter of guests streaming on board as happened when we docked at Darling Point or Kurraba Road. I suddenly realise that the music has stopped. The conversation level on the sundeck has dropped to a whisper. A band strikes up the national anthem.
It’s her. The prime minister. Destiny Doppler. Known to artists as the Eliminator, the Terminator, the Scourge. A politician who single-handedly led a movement to wipe the smile of culture off the face of this country.
That’s my baby.
Video art with anchovies
I remember when I first laid eyes on Destiny. It was the first time she appeared on the political landscape of our little country, also notable for being the day that Maddie moved into our warehouse.
We’d decided to rent out ZakDot’s studio. Though his heart belonged to dada, ZakDot was finding it difficult to produce artificial surrealism in a world that already had the Troubles, not to mention the British royal family, professional wrestling, and Dannii Minogue. So, outside of a few projects for art school, he produced nothing. Since inactivity doesn’t require a lot of space and we were always skint, it made sense to find another housemate. We’d just begun the first semester of our final year so we posted an ad on the bulletin board. We couldn’t believe our luck when Maddie answered it.
Maddie transferred into our art school from some place in Melbourne. It was rumoured she’d been told that if she left her old school voluntarily they wouldn’t expel her or press charges. We didn’t know what she’d done, but we were all intrigued. She was a rare beauty, tall and statuesque, with a shaved head, cheekbones like golf balls, a Maori-style tattoo on her chin and piercings through the top of her nose, lips and tongue. She dressed in heavy boots and camouflage trousers and that evening was wearing a tank top which showed off her broad shoulders, perky tits and serious biceps. She smelled like baby powder. She looked like she could beat the crap out of you.
‘I hope you like cats,’ I said when she came by to look at the place.
‘Yes,’ she replied, looking at Bacon and slowly licking her lips. ‘Let’s share recipes.’ I must have looked alarmed, because she added, ‘Only kidding.’
Her voice had this flat, almost bored quality that was incredibly sexy.
She told us her surname was @. This gave her and ZakDot an instant connection that I envied.
To celebrate her moving in, we ordered a pizza. While we waited, Maddie reclined on the sofa, her long legs tucked underneath her. She was absorbed in a photocopied tome with the title of The Anarchist Cookbook. Without warning, she dropped the book to the floor. She leaned back against the sofa, gripping the cushions. Pelvis raised, she clenched her jaw and let out a series of guttural exhalations.
Thurston chose this moment to appear in the lounge with a large sack full of clanging metal slung over one shoulder. He was holding a broadaxe. I nearly bolted at the sight, for one moment certain that he was coming to give me that little career boost we’d all been talking about. But Thurston wasn’t even looking at me. He stopped dead in the middle of the lounge, equidistant between the tango and rock ‘n roll, and stared at Maddie. His pale eyes were even rounder than usual. He swallowed. ‘You right?’ he squeaked.
Maddie looked up, raising one eyebrow. ‘Nice blade,’ she commented. Then she began to undulate.
Thurston mumbled something and shabbed out, a bundle of embarrassment and tintinnabulation. Maddie arched her back, moaned, and collapsed across the couch.
It was a source of some satisfaction to note that ZakDot was as gobsmacked as I.
‘Kegels,’ she proclaimed, after a pause long enough for an elephant to gestate. She got up to let in the pizza guy. We hadn’t even heard him knock.
‘She’s so intense,’ ZakDot whispered.
Returning with the pizzas, she plopped the boxes down on the table and levered out the biggest piece for herself. She tore off a slab of cardboard from the top of the box for a plate. I’d got up to get a glass of water when I heard her say, ‘So, like, what sorta art are you into?’ I spun on my heels, eager to grasp even this flimsy straw of her interest only to realise that the question was addressed to ZakDot.
ZakDot was mmm-ing and yum-ing over an anchovy-laden triangle, having been told by a former girlfriend that this was universally understood as a sign that a man was into oral sex. I felt like slapping him. He swallowed and patted his stomach.
‘Well,’ he began, ‘you could call what I do “preconceptual”.’ I was delighted to see that a small shred of spinach was caught between his front teeth. ‘It’s an outgrowth of conceptual art,’ he elaborated. ‘Or ingrowth. Depends how you look at it.’
‘Ah,’ Maddie drawled, ‘a conceptual artist.’ I relished the potential for sarcasm that lurked in her voice.
‘Actually,’ ZakDot continued, warming to his spiel, his fingers making air quotes around every other word, ‘I prefer the phrase “ideas man” to “conceptual artist”, the inverted commas signifying a parodical-slash-paradoxical attitude towards both “gender” and “imagination”. But I suppose the crucial bit is this: by not executing the concepts I come up with, by merely “thinking” of them, I believe I’ve taken art into a “purer” realm. It’s like a state of becoming that never becomes. Rather “Taoist”, really.’
‘The more common name for it,’ I interjected, ‘is procrastination.’
Maddie giggled. She had a surprisingly girlish laugh. It was adorable.
I picked up the last piece with anchovies and savoured it.
‘Rembrandt here is a traditionalist.’ ZakDot said ‘traditionalist’ as if it indicated someone who chewed the ears off live puppies. ‘A painter.’ Painters being the ones who then grabbed the cutest survivors and vivisected them. ‘Miles’ discomfort with and alienation from the world around him,’ ZakDot elaborated, ‘has led him to believe that the only way for him to achieve lasting recognition is to die young, but he hasn’t yet worked out how best to do this.’
I wanted to kick him. The joke had gone on all summer—long enough. I wanted it buried before I was. I gave ZakDot my I-am-a-dingo-and-you-are-a-matinee-jacket look. ‘If you have any ideas,’ he continued, ‘I’m sure he’ll be open to them.’
Maddie looked at me and nodded. I hadn’t a clue what she was thinking. I decided not to honour ZakDot’s comments with a rebuttal. I noticed that Maddie had a plug of wood stuck through one earlobe. I wondered if she’d stretched out the hole slowly, like African tribal people did, or had somehow punched it all at once, as painful as that would be. I wasn’t game to ask.
‘How about you, Maddie?’ I said, keen to show her who was the sensitive, listening type around here. ‘What sort of art do you do?’
‘Me? I fuck shit up,’ she replied. I waited for her to elaborate. She licked pizza goo off her thumb.
‘Legendary,’ ZakDot commented. Then, after a pause, ‘What sort of shit?’
‘Oh, you know, just shit.’ As though the matter required no further explanation, she reached for the remote and flicked on the telly. ‘“Baywatch”,’ she observed, as several pairs of breasts went flying down a beach followed by girls. ‘Hubba hubba.’
I felt affronted. She still hadn’t asked me about my art. ‘I could show you my studio sometime if you like,’ I offered.
‘Mm,’ she replied.
She hit the remote once more and Trixie Tinkles, premier exponent of the dramatic facial reaction school of television journalism, filled the screen with her camera-friendly teeth, auto-cue eyes and tabloid blonde hair. She was interviewing another woman. Despite the distortions of TV, you could see that the interviewee, though in her late thirties or early forties, had flawless alabaster skin. Her eyes were heavy-lidded. She had a long thin straight nose and a small, serious mouth. Her thick brown hair was combed back into a severe bun. Her body looked soft and voluptuous underneath her suit. I found her incredibly sexy. Then again, I found most women incredibly sexy. I was hopeless like
that. I also felt like I’d seen her somewhere before. I searched my memory.
‘That’s it. Odalisque!’ I exclaimed. ‘She’s just like the Odalisque! By Ingres.’
If ZakDot and Maddie were cognisant of the history of Western art, they did not let on. They seemed absorbed by the program. This would be a first for ZakDot, who only ever watched current affairs shows with the sound off, so he could do his own voice-overs.
‘You’ve heard of Ingres, I take it.’ This was aimed at ZakDot.
‘Miles, Miles, Miles. Haven’t you heard? Painting’s dead as Elvis,’ ZakDot observed without removing his eyes from the screen.
‘Bollocks.’
‘The contemporary world welcomes you, Miles. No joining fee.’
I was smouldering. Painting had been declared dead and resurrected so many times in the last hundred years that every other day was Easter in the art world. Even the lecturers in the painting department couldn’t decide whether it was a legitimate activity or not. ZakDot passed his last assessment with an empty plinth and flying colours. The only thing that saved my academic career was my tendency to leave one small corner of each work at the stage of underpainting. I think I feared that, once I completed a painting, it would die for me; maybe, like my father, I was just scared of commitment; or perhaps, on some level, I was terrified of the success that I craved. Whatever the reason for it, Cynthia Mopely, our theory teacher, interpreted this tic as a profound statement on the impossibility of closure. This was apparently a good thing. I passed.
This was typical of my experience of art school. My teachers acknowledged my skill, my mastery of pigment and colour, my sense of composition and the power of my vision. But they fretted right from the start that my attitude might not be sufficiently ironic. Perhaps that’s really what Lynda Tangent meant when she declared my work ‘too beautiful’.
It was weird. The more the people of our little country valued and cherished art and culture, the more earnestly they argued over its meanings and origins, the more those who created it grew uncertain about its worth and their own motivations. Sitting in front of the telly with ZakDot and Maddie that night, I wondered what it would have been like to have been born in an era when devotion to ideals of beauty, resonance and truth were not seen by other artists as pitiably retrograde. Maybe I was better off dead. Maybe Thurston was right after all.
