Ménage Read online

  — These are really lovely, I said, but then my eyes came to rest on the torn paintings by the door and I remembered Saul’s venom. How could he have dismissed all her effort and struggle as if it were all a joke? My chest grew tight as the anger rose.

  Her hand was on my shoulder.

  — Hello? You OK?

  She told me I was hyperventilating and took my hand and squeezed it, explaining that it was acupressure and might help.

  — You want a pill?

  She held these things in front of me. Plastic and silver wrapping. Beta blockers. Or if I wanted she could give me half a Valium. And she was sorry, people often responded like this when she showed them her past. I said yes, to all, to both tablets. She asked if I was sure. I said please. She placed two pills in my hand, got me a glass of water.

  A knock on the door.

  In all the time we had been in there Saul had paid us no heed and had played Ministry and Foetus and Millions of Dead Cops and even William Shatner Sings the Blues, but now, his ugliest records exhausted, he was at her door. Mister-and-something-else-is-happening-and-I’m-excluded – so I want to be part of it.

  — Hi, he said, all cutesy in a whole new get-up: torn flares and his Prince T-shirt and purple eyeliner, doing that oh-so-awkward-I’m-so-sensitive-lost-for-words-staring-atthe-floor thing that he did when he wanted something.

  She gestured for him to sit and he seemed so excited or was faking it.

  — So what’s going on?

  I tried to explain, but she was before us with the contents of her medication cabinet. I played it smart.

  — We’re doing drugs.

  — Drugs, huh. I did three acid before breakfast once and it had no effect whatsoever.

  The liar.

  — Mind-contracting drugs, now that’s what we need. My mind’s over-expanded enough as it is!

  I wanted the Valium, just because he’d have to take it too, and I knew for a fact he’d not taken half the drugs he claimed. He’d never hugged strangers on E, or been lucid on speed like Lou Reed. He found all these things signs of weakness in me. And I knew he would only heap scorn on the confessional Dot and I had just shared. It being something about depth and truth.

  She gave us three pills each and we sat with them in our hands like kids in school taking their vitamins, as she explained what each did and how the lithium wouldn’t really have any effect because it had to be taken every day and build up in your metabolism. She was laughing but I was worried, the forever practical me, that in taking them we were depriving her of what she needed.

  It was strange to see the new rapport between them. Her forgiveness of his former obnoxiousness, and the transformation in him, like a goofy kid.

  Valium. It’s nothing. Things happen and you feel nothing. Things that were boundaries or taboos collapse. All of my anxieties vanished, but there was no sense of the liberation, of the break or the joy of overcoming. Just nothing.

  — Bit of a disappointment, Saul declared. — If we’re going to explore the void, we may as well listen to some Abba while we’re at it.

  In Saul’s room, Dot was looking through his records on the floor and he was putting on track after track, no memory of what, none of my usual analysis of what mood he was in by reading his music, no sense of excitement or dread over his next choice. Iggy Pop or Parliament or Mahler. And in that Valium nothing I did not care; he could have overdosed or slashed his wrists and I would have just stared at the turntable going round and round. Horrific, that her father had fed her these pills for years. In the name of love, these pills that make love or hate impossible.

  We ran out of tobacco and were all quite spacious so I suggested we play the Rizla game. Dot had never done it before, so we taught her.

  Saul wrote HITLER and stuck it on her head. I wrote THATCHER and stuck it on his. She wrote MADONNA and stuck it on mine. Dot didn’t quite get the rules, but found the whole thing hilarious.

  — Wait, am I John Wayne? Or no, no . . . what’s his name?

  — You’re the one who’s supposed to guess!

  — Superman?

  Saul, as always, was the first to work out who he was and I was sure he always cheated and had a little mirror stashed somewhere among his mess. When it was over, Saul turned suddenly pale, excused himself like the perfect gent and ran, hand to mouth, to puke in the kitchen sink. I thought perhaps the mixture of sherry and Valium. When he came back through Dot told us both, — No more drugs, not for you, not for any of us.

  We watched as she flushed all of her pills down the toilet. I asked her if it was a good idea, wouldn’t there be withdrawal symptoms or . . .

  — You’ve convinced me . . . I don’t need them any more, she said, but would not explain what I had said or done to convince her. She smiled with a gentle wisdom that told me she’d survived depths I had only glimpsed and Saul had only read about. In that moment she seemed the most beautiful creature I had ever witnessed.

  It was the last week of September 1992.

  fn1. While still in their artistic infancy, recent art graduates were plucked from obscurity by Charles Saatchi, making this the first artistic movement in history created by an advertising magnate. His rapid buying of an entire show and all the artists within it, then his swift reselling of certain works, rewrote the rules of art galleries which had formerly been concerned with building an artist’s career over a lifetime. Many former YBA ‘successes’ now make a modest living as teachers.

  fn2. Saatchi & Saatchi was responsible for the successful election campaigns of the Conservative Party through the Thatcher years (‘Labour Isn’t Working’) then through the ‘lame duck’ administration of John Major, in which the YBAs emerged. Saatchi, reinvesting the money he made through advertising into art, made a mockery of the hype that promoted these artists as ‘rebels’.

  fn3. Group exhibitions were temporary in nature and held in non-art spaces with names like City Racing (an old betting shop) and Die Yuppie Scum. The warehouse shows in Camden, Hoxton and Docklands would not have passed health and safety standards, but were exhilarating.

  fn4. Britpop bands like the Stone Roses, Blur and Pulp were selling millions internationally. New Brit became a brand for both music and art. Jarvis Cocker (musician and former art student)’s showing his arse while Michael Jackson sang at the Brit Awards became a symbol for this typically irreverent British attitude.

  fn5. Van Gogh syndrome – the belief that certain artists are only appreciated and elevated to a high status because of their tragic personal histories. See R. Clements, The Life and Death of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Random House, 1999.

  fn6. WRT – Tracey Emin, the claim that Emin’s documentation of her working-class victimhood became unsustainable as she climbed the commercial ladder. See J. Cambridge, Variance, IFP, 2003, ‘The Oppressed Minority of One’.

  fn7. Note the many pop promos, advertisements and political campaigns that have exploited Shears’s ‘vérité’ grunge images.

  one

  PlayBoy. 1992. Video loop. 25 mins. Installation view. Private collection.

  THE WORK COMPRISES two video projections on free-standing screens, twenty feet by fourteen feet, placed facing each other at a distance of twenty feet. The audio is in sync with the pictures. The footage is hand-held and ‘home movie’ in style. The subject is a woman in her early twenties (the artist).

  The location of the footage is a domestic toilet. Both pieces of footage are almost identical. In each, the artist faces the (bathroom) mirror with a video camera, filming her reflection, striking poses and talking to herself. In the first, the artist is in a loose-fitting top, her areolae visible; in the second, she is wearing a ‘fake’ moustache. In the first, the content of her dialogue (with herself) is entirely negative and derisory: ‘Ugly bitch’, ‘droopy tits’, ‘useless cunt’. In the second, she compliments herself on her ‘male’ image. ‘Hunky bastard’, ‘cute spunky man’, etc.

  The placement of the two screens facing each other gives the imp
ression that the artist is recording the other self on the facing screen. This uncanny illusion is reinforced by the fact that at one point in the screening, which may or may not be a happy accident,fn1 the ‘male’ artist on screen two seems to speak to the ‘female’ artist on screen one – ‘What you fucking looking at?’ – at which point the female artist lowers her eyes as if in shame and says, ‘Nothing. Sorry.’fn2

  Many viewers have commented that this artwork is ‘spookily alive’ and feel they’re intruding on a very private experience. Others feel that they can relate to this daily self-criticism before a mirror and have felt trapped between the two screens, becoming ‘the third person’ to whom both of the screens address their comments – the stated ‘What you fucking looking at?’ refers to the art viewer him/herself and is as such a critique of the ways in which gender identity is constructed within consumerism.fn3

  Less favourable responses have come from the tabloid press. The 1994 headline in the Sun was: ‘£50,000 FOR A GIRL IN THE BOG’. The story claimed that the footage was ‘just a typical stoned posh student mucking about with a new video camera’.

  It’s worth bearing in mind that in the year this work was made, gender and sexual identity were issues of greater importance than they are now: Madonna’s Sex book had just been banned by the Vatican; Sinead O’Connor had torn up an image of the Pope on US television over the issues of homosexuality and contraception; in the UK the Operation Spanner trial raised a political outcry within lesbian and gay communities; the artist Cindy Sherman had, at this time, created the seminal works in which she enacted gender stereotypes for her camera, while artists such as Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger were deconstructing ‘male language’; the Aids activists ACT-UP toured their artwork and theatre worldwide; in fashion culture, sadomasochistic-style PVC clothing made it into high street stores such as Dorothy Perkins and H&M; sex shops made it onto the main streets and the first ‘drag kings’ were reaching the public eye through the popularisation of the queer scene.

  Whatever conclusions we may draw from PlayBoy, no matter how ‘trivial’ or ‘dated’ it may now seem, Shears has, undoubtedly, held a mirror up to her time. In that mirror we see a generation who came to sexual maturity beneath the shadow of the Aids epidemic, under the ‘back to basics’ reactionary ‘family’ politics of John Major’s Conservative Party. A generation who had grown up witnessing the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of Socialism, the defeat of union power, of resistance politics, and the co-option of dissent into mainstream culture.

  If nothing else, this is a simple, non-judgemental document of what it meant to be a young woman growing to maturity within the many contradictory messages of modern consumerist culture. For all its simplicity, this, ultimately, is of greater historic significance than the work of so-called politically engaged artists.fn4

  ‘I’LL HOLD,’ Owen said. The call-waiting jingle started up, just like a call centre but it sounded religious. Probably Arvo Pärt, he thought, typical for a high-end gallery.

  A car alarm was wailing outside. Owen took a peep out the window: some hooligan had thrown the next-door neighbours’ FOR SALE sign onto the bonnet of a trendy retro Beetle. He checked to see how many of the other FOR SALE signs were still there. Nope, no change.

  The call-waiting choir was singing in Latin in a cathedral.

  He escaped the alarm noise, took the cordless phone through to the empty back room and sat on the window ledge, picking at the lining paper, fingering the dust. Funny, he thought, that he’d hardly ever been in here, that he’d not actually got round to redecorating the place, never got beyond that first burst of energy that was stripping out and whitewashing every trace of the ex, filling it up with odds and sods of second-hand furniture – when was it? Year of the war? Was it Iraq? That far back?

  The choir sang in his call-waiting ear. Jaysooo Chreestay.

  The morning post thudded on the floor and he tiptoed along the half-varnished floor, phone still to ear. Bills, bills, bank statement – not to be opened – then another one of those bloody estate agent brochures. In the recent hysteria some moron had got the addresses mixed up. One of the adverts was of the place just across the road, identical to his own.

  FIXED PRICE £295,000. It had been FIXED PRICE £320K last month.

  As the choir sang Dominum, dominum, he scanned the printed hype: . . . pleased to offer this spacious 2-bedroom 2-floor Edwardian maisonette in Balls Pond Road, blah blah blah . . . two double bedrooms, en suite water closet, a third room ideal for a small child, the property benefits from blah de blah – Jesooo Chreestay – Location is ideal – to the east is Dalston, tipped to thrive from the Olympic boom and a new tube station, to the west you have central Islington and trendy Upper Street . . .

  Wonderful, he told himself, how they missed out any mention of the concrete towers of the housing estate, the shadows from which even now were growing menacingly along the street. Still, he’d been bloody lucky that the bank had let him remortgage to buy out the ex’s share. Bloody lucky not to be out on his ear. To be going absolutely nowhere. The choir were cut off mid crescendo.

  ‘Sorry,’ the girl on the phone said, ‘Miss Shears is in Hamburg till the 22nd at the Freiberg Institute.

  Thank fuck, thought Owen. They belonged in different worlds and there was absolutely no way he was going to sneak into Dot’s exhibition if there was any chance of her actually being there.

  As he caught sight of the video surveillance footage of himself getting onto the tube escalator at Angel, he thought of the many ridiculous lengths he’d gone to over the years to avoid her. Of the many openings, group shows, biennales, in Paris, Frankfurt and Berlin, he’d attended while secretly mapping her schedule of appointments. Thankfully, now, she was just like many other artists, spending almost half the year touring with her art, so the chances of bumping into her locally had much diminished. He was notorious for turning up at private views just before they started, whisking round in ten minutes, and then leaving before the drinks were opened and the hundreds arrived. He gave the excuse that meeting artists socially would cloud his judgement – he refused point-blank to do face to face interviews. Of course, while this had brought him even more respect, skirting around her and not being at the epicentre of the scene had damaged his career. He was sure this was why at the age of thirty-nine he was still without pension plan, or salary, precariously scraping a living from bits and pieces for so many different magazines and papers.

  ‘There is no drearier and more repulsive creature than the man who has evaded his own genius,’ Saul had once said. Nonetheless, this failure to face up to his greater potential was a lesser humiliation compared with what hell could be unleashed if he ever did come face to face with Dot.

  The real challenge came when he had to review a group show that had her work in it. If he had refused the job it would have aroused suspicion. So he developed a technique: he never praised or was overcritical; he gave her the column inches that befitted an artist of her standing with words carefully cribbed from other critics’ reviews, but with absolutely no value judgements of his own. They had never agreed on this course of action, there had been no secret negotiations through third parties. Although all the world knew of, and almost celebrated, her suicide attempt, she, or her PR people, had taken great care to hide the truth about the love triangle that had led to it. He wanted it kept that way.

  Owen turned the corner onto the King’s Road and saw the sign on the austere modernist facade. The Lieder Gallery.

  On entering, it was the usual: the vast reception of white that was supposed to instil reverence and symbolise purity and timelessness but which he knew was no more than the antechamber to a spectacle as empty and fleeting as fashion, desire and fashionable investment.

  At the front desk, two girls in black suits with headsets on were busy with visitors. There were brochures in full colour with a portrait of Dot. A new one, possibly Leibovitz. He slipped by and went to look on his own. The layout was very much li
ke that that she’d had at the Venice Biennale. That night when his avoidance techniques had been almost slapstick.

  It had been 2003; he’d known she was in town with Walking Blind 2 in the International Salon, so he’d snuck away early from the opening and headed to the Italian Pavilion to see the seventies Viennese performance art retrospective, only to look up and see her ten feet away sipping champagne with the Wilson Twins. He’d ducked swiftly into the darkness of a walled installation – early video works on monitors on the floor of naked artists smearing themselves in the blood of suspended dogs’ carcasses – only to realise that the space had two doorways and that Dot had entered from the other with the twins. He’d turned away swiftly, knocking a glass of champagne from some woman’s hands, it smashing on the floor, him trying to say sorry but not wanting Dot to hear his voice. Him hunching his shoulders, trying to change his appearance as he hobbled away from her, then almost running through the throngs to the door, not looking back. He harboured a suspicion that she’d secretly sensed the identity of the man always running away from galleries.

  He was just about to enter one of the enclosures when the PR woman ran to catch him.

  ‘Excuse me, are you Owen Morgan?’

  She’d got him. He nodded and had to smile. He couldn’t help but wonder if they had CCTV at the door and a member of staff employed to search for critics.

  ‘Are you here in connection with a review in the Guardian, or concerning the essay for the catalogue? Mr Schwarz isn’t here right now, but we could book a time for you –’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘before I write anything, I’m going to just see if it’s any good, that OK?’ Fucking PR people, he thought. The last thing they want is for anyone to see the fucking product they’re selling. ‘I just need ten minutes by myself, that OK?’