Ménage Page 12

  Saul looked us up and down and I trembled waiting for his judgement on the kiss he must have seen. He blew smoke in my face.

  — A night in with cocoa and slippers would have been more radical, he said. There’s nothing more dull than people trying to be shocking.

  So he had seen nothing. I breathed again. As we rode the taxi back home that night I learned something about Saul. He often put down what he envied most in others. Enthusiasm he called naivety, but he was utterly lacking in that spontaneity that emanated from Dot, that infected me, that could energise an entire crowd. The truth was, for all his advocating of ‘the leap of faith’ he would have been afraid to jump into a puddle.

  Back home Dot and I watched the night’s recording together in her room. I accidentally hit the slo-mo button and the sound went off. She said, — Wait, don’t fix it! The images moved so gently, all the lights pulsing, not flashing. The hands in the air, waiting, reaching up. She turned down the colour, made it black and white. A hundred hands in the air waiting for the body to land, it seemed to take forever, there was some fuzz. I messed around with the cables at the back to try to get a better picture and she was shouting, — YES, YES. By accident the picture had gone into negative. It took ages to get it to stay like that. With some Band-Aids we got the cables in place. Slow and negative. And as we watched it again and again, our kiss resumed, our tongues circling round and round as, on-screen, her body fell endlessly through space.

  It would not happen again, I told myself. It had just been drunkenness or adrenalin. But still, her lips haunted me those next long nights. It was as if I could still taste her. I refused to brush my teeth. Hope is for the hopeless, Saul once said.

  I’d been shaken by Dot’s news. She’d taken the tape to Goldsmiths and played it to peers and tutors. Laughing, she recounted what they’d said, as she presented Saul and me with a celebratory bottle of Croft Original.

  — ‘Beautiful – reminiscent of religious renaissance art.’ ‘Of Warhol.’

  The tutors had asked to see more works of this nature and stature for Dot’s graduation show. All these accolades and enthusiasm were barely believable. It took a while to grasp exactly what had happened; when she got wound up like that she always stopped mid-sentence.

  — And Pierce, well, I think that’s his second name, they call him Pierce, he was there too and he loved the tape, anyway he wants it, he’s not a gallery owner, more like, I think he’s a sculptor, cos it’s like a proper group show, kind of anarchist, and it’s called Bug, I don’t know why, in this biscuit factory, warehouse thingy, off Old Street I think, and Hirst and Tracey and . . . you know like City Racing . . .

  I could see Saul gritting his teeth through his forced smile.

  – . . . And there’s no electricity or fire escapes. Isn’t that cool? . . . And Saatchi was at the last one . . . the one in the meat factory . . . bought nearly everything, and the Chapmans and Sarah Lucas and . . . and I told them all about the Duchess, all your stories, Sozzle, and Pierce wants you too, he does, he wants you to make a big wall of words . . . and maybe a big essay too . . . and words for the flyers and he’s dying to meet you – isn’t it awesome? You’re such a genius, Sozzle. If it wasn’t for you, you grumpy old bugger, making me stop painting and Edna and all the cocks then . . . I mean, all I did was turn on the camera . . . no, it wasn’t even me . . . this is all your art really . . . and you too, O. Aren’t you both chuffed?

  For sure, the show could have been the start of some success for Saul; finally, the gems he’d been polishing for years in the dark could see the light of day. I hoped he would see that. Dot tried to hug him, but he shrugged away, groaning: — Hmmph. It’s all just inverted Thatcherism, the artists are in the pay of estate agents. Mark my words, it’ll be Greenwich Village all over again. I hope the entire building collapses under the weight of everyone’s pretentiousness!

  He retreated to his room, grabbing the bottle on the way. I had a sense of portentous doom about it all. Dot was upset and I stayed by her side calming her for half an hour, giving her words of encouragement and praise.

  Dot went to the bathroom to wash her face and I was left alone on her bed. Suddenly she screamed. I ran through and Saul was passed out on the floor by his bed. The entire bottle empty on the floor beside him. Dot was in a panic as I dragged him to the toilet.

  — I’m calling an ambulance, Dot whimpered. — Ohmigod, the Croft Original!

  I shouted at her to be calm and held his hair from his face as he puked in the toilet. He vomited everywhere in mewing spasms in my arms as I tried to remove his soiled clothes. He tried to slap me, yelling out, — Unhand me, you faggot!

  As I got him scrubbed down and re-dressed into underpants, I saw the genius of his passivity. In making himself ill he had found a way to make himself the centre of attention again. And what was he puking other than his jealousy? The promise of her imminent success had made him sick and he wanted to bring her down to his level. He would make himself sick and sicker, force her to abandon her career to become his femme de ménage. Such clever devices he had.

  She sat by his bed that night, the kitchen bowl by his pillow, stroking his head, gently cooing at him, singing him a lullaby. I told myself that this time he would not win with the power of his weakness. I would be strong and conquer. Her kiss had given me strength.

  fn1. Found footage: see Nam June Paik, Douglas Gordon, Baldassarri, Warhol, Duchamp, Debord. Ironically, the use of found footage has become so popular that certain artists have been exposed as lying about the origins of their material – having actually shot it themselves while trying to hide this fact. See controversy around J. Albert’s Trovato, S. Burgin, New Left Review, June 2001.

  fn2. Discussion of the return of dialectical thinking, post-demise of deconstruction. E. Voltimer, The Invisible Third, CUP, 2003.

  fn3. S. Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Penguin, 1992.

  fn4. G. Bataille on the origins of pre-historic religious ceremonies/ human sacrifice, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, City Lights, 2001.

  fn5. A. Kaplan, from ‘The New Opium’, in Screen, vol. 45, 2003.

  fn6. Shears has often claimed that her work ‘means nothing’ – ‘I didn’t even make it myself’, Harper’s, September 2004. See strategic use of feigned naiveté in Warhol.

  fn7. Theory that the project of individualist self-emancipation in the sixties has led to an even more oppressive culture in which the mechanisms of state and power have become micro-internalised, in which each person polices themselves, in health, psychology, sexuality, behaviour and consumption. The only way to escape ‘the prison of the self’ being through the ordeal of the negative, to explore nihilism’s end and confront death. ‘One must put into play, show up, transform and reverse the systems which quietly order us about.’ Foucault, 1968, quoted in J. Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, Flamingo, 1994. See also F. Nietzsche, Human, All-Too-Human, Dover, 2006.

  three

  Name Game 3. 2004. Three-screen video loop installation. 20 mins. Variable dimensions. Tobias Lomax Collection

  Name Game. 1993. Video still from video loop installation. 18 mins. Variable dimensions. Private collection.

  THE WORK COMPRISES three large video-projection screens placed equidistant in a triangular formation. On each is a different person’s face (a man and a woman, both early twenties and another man, older). On each head is stuck a piece of paper and on each paper a name has been written. Each name is taken from popular culture and each ‘player’ does not know the name on their own head, as it has been stuck there by one of the other players without them disclosing the name. The object of the ‘game’ is for each person to guess what their head-name is through asking questions about who they ‘are’, which can only be answered with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’, such as ‘Am I a man?’, ‘Am I a politician?’, ‘Am I alive?’ The first person to guess who they ‘are’ is the ‘winner’. The game is taken from a popular ‘stoner’ game.fn1 And so again we see the use of the three key eleme
nts in Shears’s work: play, trust, swapping.

  The footage has been shot with three separate tripod-mounted cameras ‘in sync’ with each other, and in playback gives the impression that the people on-screen are talking to each other.fn2 The audio is played back in the gallery in ‘synchronised surround sound’, which serves to heighten the sense of a real-time event. As such it evokes other technically ambitious works by artists such as Barbara Kruger.fn3

  A popular interpretation of this filmed ‘game’ is that it critiques the influence of media culture on the postmodern subject:

  ‘We are all, almost literally, walking round with names inscribed on our skins. Who I am, maybe a little bit of Bob Dylan, plus some Marlon Brando and a little of Germaine Greer. We consume these cultural identities but in turn they consume us and constitute the parameters of the roles we are permitted to play. It is no trivial question to ask – am I an actor?’fn4

  Appraisal within the post-feminist tradition has addressed the radicality of the gender reversal within the ‘game’ – that the female player has a man’s name and one of the male players the name of an iconic female star. Since devised by a woman, they claim, the ‘game’ could not be more serious.

  ‘Shears deconstructs the notion of fixed gender and reveals it as a game with power.’fn5

  Further to this, Kate Colliers has claimed that since in Shears’s ‘games’ we are never shown a ‘winner’, the focus is on celebrating the act of shared play and is, as such, a defiant feminist stance against the male discourse of conquest.

  Reactions from the tabloid newspapers have been (predictably) extreme due to the high profile of the piece and go beyond the usual ‘this isn’t art’ controversies.fn6

  What many commentators fail to notice, however, is the subtle humour of the work. Unlike comparable works (Kruger et al.), which explore the politics of identity, the effect of Shears’s Name Game 3 is tragicomic – with each player on-screen growing increasingly exasperated as they try to find out who they are. Am I a porno star? Did I ever take drugs? Did I die young? While these may be philosophical or cultural questions, we must guard against taking the ‘game’ too seriously. In choosing to show this material in a gallery, Shears may be poking fun at the pretentious tone of art discourse, playing a clever double bluff. She has described the work as ‘a joke’.

  The reason why the humour is missed may be a result of the fact that Name Game 3 is a re-creation, the second in fact, of an original work from 1993. In comparing the original Name Game to Name Game 3, the former has the feel of an almost accidental moment between real people, while the latter is staged with actors and scripted dialogue. In 3 the tension between the faces on the screens is less than that in the ‘original’. Also, the erratic hand-held movement in the first Name Game (with the camera being shared between the three participants) is missing in 3. Furthermore, Shears herself is missing from 3 (replaced by the actress Glenda Matheson), whereas she was one of the players in the original. All these factors conspire to make 3 a colder, more detached work. It has been said that as Shears’s status has increased and her works have become more epic in scale and construction, the ‘humour’ and the ‘heart’ have diminished proportionally.

  ‘It has the air of a staged homage to a lost moment. The three screens are like a mausoleum. It lacks the simple spontaneity of that work from her incredible outpouring in the first few years in which her iconic artworks were born.’fn7

  Certainly works like Name Game 3 require expensive multi-screens, hi-tech high-luminance video projectors, synchronised video, feature-film budgets and professional film crews, and as such the intimacy of the earlier ‘amateur’ work is lost. Other criticisms levelled at Shears’s ‘recreations’ have been extreme, almost as if fans of her earlier works have felt betrayed:

  ‘It strikes me that the artist has attempted to merely repeat the success of those early works by formula. Trust, Walking Blind, Name Game and PlayBoy have all been remade, exposing the fact that no new ideas have been generated in the last ten years . . . It is a great shame to have to witness an artist selling out and rehashing her work just to make sales.’fn8

  In Shears’s defence, it must be said that, through her remakes, she has forced us to see how the meaning around an artwork can change over time. The cult of celebrity and global culture has since ’93 expanded to such a degree that, by simply repeating the ‘same’ work, Shears has shown us how our attitudes to celebrity culture have changed.fn9 Whereas the original Name Game may have seemed a more ‘radical’ critique of consumerist values, Name Game 3 exists in a time in which the sociopolitical forms of opposition to consumerism are in crisis. As such, criticisms of Name Game 3 as ‘empty spectacle’, ‘a sell-out’, etc., are really just criticisms of the culture as a whole. The work itself may be a staging of a question that the artist wants to ask herself: in this media-saturated culture, against these images of success which surround me and of which my face has become a part – who am I really?

  A SUDDEN MOVEMENT woke him in fright. From the bottom of the bed frame two eyes stared at him, huge, the very image of Dot’s. As he tried to focus, the eyes joined a tiny body that ran laughing from the room. He nudged Dot.

  ‘Shit! I think . . . Molly just . . .’

  She moaned and pulled the duvet around herself, exposing his every-morning erection. He fought the duvet back and tried to cover himself, searching for his pants and trousers on the floor only to find the used condoms. The voice of the South American nanny from down the hall. ‘Bambino, silencio. Mama dormi.’

  This had been the third time he had slept over with her and although he had said he wanted to meet her child, he’d been postponing.

  He pulled the duvet from Dot and she was flailing for it, grumpy, trying to hide the light from her face and cover her naked body all at once. He felt a fool, standing wrapped in her duvet, as he hopped about trying to pull his trousers on underneath the thing, then falling on his arse and cracking his head against the wardrobe. As if on cue, the child ran back in with arms full of paper and pens shouting, ‘Mummy, Mummy, wake up!’

  ‘Molly,’ he should say. ‘Hello, Molly.’

  He shot Dot a glance. She sleepily extended her arms to the child and brought her to her naked breast. This was wrong, all wrong.

  ‘Mummy, I wanna do a picture, wake up, wake up!’

  Owen got his trousers on and turned his back as he pulled on his T-shirt. The child was giggling at him.

  ‘Mmmmm, baby,’ Dot muttered, ‘you OK . . .? This is Owen, he’s . . . say hello to Molly, Owen.’

  Owen raised an embarrassed hand – ‘Hi, Molly’ – then reached and stuffed the condoms into his pocket. ‘Eh, look,’ he said to Dot. ‘I really should go.’

  Dot protested, and even asked him to come onto the bed with her and do some art with Molly. Her nipples brushing the child’s cheek, Dot enfolding the child in her naked legs, and covering her four-year-old head in kisses. It was not right. Not right at all. He said they’d speak soon and left them in the midst of the child’s screaming for her mother’s attention over the sound of his many awkward goodbyes.

  He was caught at the door by the nanny who shot him a recriminatory glance.

  ‘See you . . . soon,’ he called back through to Dot.

  Outside he chastised himself for not having given her a day and time for their next meeting.

  In the following week Dot was away in New York taking part in the anthology show on the history of video art. He’d got three emails from her. They all talked of art, of Nam June Paik and Douglas Gordon, and of the stress, and how she was sick of it, dragging Molly round the world and Molly couldn’t handle jet lag and it must be the reason why she was such a brat and was unable to focus on anything. And how she needed to change everything or give up art or get married or hire a slave or . . .

  None of the messages mentioned their nights together.

  So he had called some fuck-buddies.

  But with Sue he’d been barely able to
maintain the pretence of post-coital conversation. And with Sharon he’d fallen into a funk after the act and asked if it was OK if she left so he could sleep alone. On the second failed attempt with Toni she’d laughed and said: ‘So, what’s her name?’ Michele had got up halfway through and shouted at him because she just knew he was thinking of someone else. So that was it. Funny as it seemed. What was most offensive to the world of infinite interchangeable bodies was the secret whisperings of love.

  Over two weeks since she left and she must have been back in London, but she had not called and he was losing sleep and had to cancel a few pieces of journalism. To be lovesick this late in life.

  Maybe this was her revenge. To appear enigmatically then leave again. Like that call from Saul in the night. To make him break the resolution he thought he’d reached, to make him spin out the anxieties for another fifteen years.

  Four days of the sickness and then the phone rang. The number was withheld. He knew in his bones that it was Saul. If the number had been there he’d have had it barred. He picked up to tell the man to leave him alone, but it was Dot.

  ‘Owen, thank God, look, I just got in, I’m in a cab, Consuela didn’t meet us at the airport, it’s a real mess, look, sorry about this but, I’ve got to be up early tomorrow at the studio to take a call about Zurich, so it would be much easier to crash at yours, me and Moll, would that be too weird? I’m going to have to get another nanny. I’ve got some duty-frees, would that be OK?

  So then Dot was on his doorstep with her grumpy bleary-eyed child in hand. He struggled with the springs and metal of the sofa bed in the living room. He suddenly felt he was being watched. The child was in the doorway in Hello Kitty pyjamas, holding an in-flight toothbrush bag.