Ménage Read online

  — Well, fuck me, the old stinker spat, — they’s Yanks, he called out to the blood-teethed bar bimbo and the assembled pissers. — Wot the fuck you doing here then?

  Saul muttered something about a Mardi Gras, which left the old pisser perplexed, and took Dot to one side then, for a whisper. I got the gist – she was doing fine, just to nod and grunt, that he would handle this. I was stuck next to the old pisser, hoping the interrogation would stop soon.

  The two bricklayers, just feet away, were doing slo-mo punch moves. The story of violence never-ending.

  — . . . wiv a fackin’ bottuw, so I’s duckin’ daan, an’ turned on the caant an’ smacked him a Tyson rite in is fackin’ kissa! BAAAYYYM!

  I needed to pee although I’d only drunk a mouthful. Pissing myself with fear, perhaps. I prepared our escape plan but the old stench was shouting: — A round, for the ’merican boys.

  But then he turned to Dot, nudged her elbow.

  — Oi, wassat – wassat all abaat then? Fackin’ ’merican football? Daan’t geddit, paddin’, an’ helmets anat, bunch of fackin’ sissies, pardon me French.

  She looked at me, terrified. Saul whispered in her ear. — That’s it, no need to reply, just swear under your breath, a few fucks and cunt or two or some muttering.

  The old fuck was passing the drinks. He raised a glass to clink with Dot.

  — Wassat den, that ’merican football, eh, eh?

  I could see her twitching, preparing to speak.

  — CUNTZ! Dot shrieked, suddenly, extremely high in pitch.

  My eyes shot to the doorway, as the place fell silent and the old fucker’s face was deep in the depths questioning, joining the dots. Saul’s face turned white.

  The old stench’s hand was on Dot’s shoulder then, the size of a builder’s breeze block, his eyes on me and Saul. I was ready to run.

  — You fackers callin’ me a cant?

  Dot shook her head nervously, covered her moustache.

  The old cunt burst out laughing, patted her on the back. — CANTZ! he shouted. — FACKIN’ CANTZ, his glass in the air. — WE’RE ALL FACKIN’ CANTZ HERE!

  Cheers from the back. — CANTZ, CANTZ! A veritable canto of cunts.

  Weird, what the old urinal did then, leaning over to kiss Dot on the cheek. — Had you there, didn’t I? Good one, eh. No offence, mate. Maybe he sensed that there was something alluring about her he couldn’t quite place. Maybe this was something very drunk old men did, kiss other men.

  Maybe London was too drunk to notice or care if you were two men and a woman with a fake moustache.

  Saul, anxious, wanted us to leave immediately but Dot whispered that she wanted to stay. He headed for the door and I was caught in the middle. I spent the next ten minutes running back and forth from him outside to her inside, trying to get us to stick together.

  Saul marched off towards Hoxton Square. I dragged Dot along, as she laughed about the adventure, oblivious to Saul’s mood. We finally caught up with him,

  — Fucking stupid! he muttered.

  — Oh Sozzle, they were lovely, it was perfectly safe.

  — Do I look scared? he snapped. — And take off that fucking ridiculous moustache!

  It had been our first outright fight and they were both silent all the way home, me between them, trying my best to get them to talk. She tried to take his hand but he pushed hers away. She held mine for a minute but must have felt it was wrong, and unequal, so let it go.

  I could understand her confusion – had Saul not filled her head with all this talk of the Duchess and craziness, only to walk away when it all got too real?

  He locked his door to her that night, but she did not come to talk to me. For the first time in two months we were each very alone.

  It had been a wake-up call. The very next day Dot had been a good student and put in a whole day at art school. She returned with a bunch of flowers and a box of sherry for Saul and a video to watch, by way of making it up to us. It was called Withnail and I and was basically a shaggy dog story about two losers who live in squalor, both failed actors. The scene in the pub had been very much like our one of the day before, and she’d wanted to show us it, so we could laugh about it all. Saul sat stone-faced throughout.

  — See, you’re so Withnail, she joked, trying to tickle him, but he did not respond. Her plan had backfired horribly as the film’s message was only too clear: Withnail was a drunk and waster and ‘I’ would go on to greater things – it was, after all, his story. The story of I. I was not such a bad role. I was in fact rather flattered to be I. By the end Saul asked us to leave the room as he wanted to be alone. As soon as we were in the hall he locked the door behind us.

  Dot was outside his room for nearly an hour after, apologising. He would not let her in, or speak. It had been foolish of her, but understandable. She wanted to show Saul how much she understood him but made the mistake of reducing him to an existing image. He had to be the total innovation of himself, he was not Richard E. Grant, no matter how closely the film mapped our lives. It was perhaps some subconscious revenge on her part. Saul had made her slash her canvases and now she had exposed his vulnerabilities.

  I couldn’t help but laugh though as I stared at the kitchen sink. There’s something moving in there. It may be a mouse. Then the bastard will rue the day!

  Did not Saul have this same fixation on vermin months back? Did he not swear that a rat came out to watch the telly every time he put an art-house tape on? Did he not say at the time, — The vermin is obsessed with Bergman!

  — Please open up and stop being so grumpy, I heard her say to his closed door. — It’s just a silly film. But the damage had been done. The power of human weakness is greater than strength. She would be banished from his affections.

  That night I finally gave in to the impulse to competitiveness. The event had revealed his weaknesses at last and she would be repulsed. I have to confess that I masturbated with her panties thinking of how she now favoured me more than him.

  But, my God, how wrong I was.

  — Nothing happened, OK, she said as I found her in only a T-shirt, staggering out of his room. But the fact that she ventured the excuse before I had even asked the question was proof enough. And the guilt on her face, eyes not meeting mine. They had slept together that night. As if overcome with guilt, she ran to the bathroom and threw up.

  As if all the world was conspiring against me, I had to sign on that day and declare my earnings from the Hoxton Advertiser, which was then deducted, so it all came to nothing. A whole hour and a half in which I had to leave Saul and Dot alone, as I sat there in the dole office.

  On my return she was still wearing his T-shirt and little else and they were in the bathroom together, giggling. Dot rushed out. They’d just made her a new moustache from Saul’s hair. It was so much more wiry and convincing, didn’t I think?

  In a fit of jealousy I tried to put her down.

  — So how’s the art coming along? Any plans for your graduation show?

  I became the secret double agent, trying to find the split between them. In a moment alone with Saul I told him we shouldn’t be wasting so much time with Dot, he had his book or play or film or art concept or whatever to create, and surely it was time now to really get down to some serious work.

  But he was oblivious and so I concocted a plan. I suggested we really should teach Dot how to shoplift food. I had visions of her being caught red-handed, and wanted to see if he would stand up for her when the police came. Saul was all smiles and post-coital stupidity and unaware of my subterfuge. I had time with Dot alone as I ran through the rules. An avocado, some parsley, or a can of beans. Her moustache could be a problem, but I didn’t say it. I wanted her to be arrested. I ran through the moves with her, there in his room, before his eyes, and revelled in making him watch.

  In those minutes while I instructed her, I had her full attention and Saul was silent, and I knew then that they had fucked and this whole thing of humouring Owen had been pl
anned to make it seem like nothing had happened. Saul was a hypocrite and a whore. Never let a woman come between us, indeed. She would be caught and he too and then they would do their penance. Or if I was caught and they ran it was a sure sign that they had conspired together.

  Poundstretcher on Old Street. Saul had his reservations but Dot was enthused and I had the petty pleasure of forcing him to do as I pleased.

  All three of us entered separately, minutes apart. Dot was to be at the magazines, Saul at the vegetables, me at the canned beans and fruit. The plan was to swap positions and for Dot to steal a can of Heinz Baked Beans and some Ambrosia Creamed Rice, with Saul distracting at the cash register.

  But Dot was scared, shooting anxious glances at me and Saul, staring up at the CCTV. As I passed the canned aisle I saw that there were no Heinz beans left, and so the plan was shot. I felt guilty, as it was only a matter of seconds till she would be caught. I had to warn her, but communication was a dead giveaway, the fuckers watching you on the monitor as you started whispering. I checked out the ancient Asian shop woman and wanted to call it all off. Dot was in the poultry aisle, the wrong place entirely. Saul was obviously onto the problem because he was up at the counter, talking, I think about a lottery ticket, getting the woman to bring out one then the next.

  I caught a flash of Dot stuffing something immense under her jumper. Her belly, the size of a basketball, what the fuck was it even? She walked past me, looking pregnant, then broke into a run as she exited. I headed for the door. The woman started shouting.

  Outside, round the corner, me first, then Saul, perplexed. Dot was nowhere to be seen, was maybe running round while the cops scoured the streets for a pregnant woman with a moustache. We waited in silence, Saul sneaking glances round the corner.

  — Boo! She appeared behind us, doubled over in laughter as she pulled the thing out – a self-basting extra-large chicken.

  — Happy Christmas!

  — Mon Dieu! Saul exclaimed. — Mais c’est Novembre, quelle obscenité!

  It was hard to hate them, even though, once we were back, I heard her slip back into his room. Self-basting. How the fuck could a dead thing prepare itself for the oven? Over the weeks that followed I found it a metaphor for my cowardice and my slow-burning rage. Even after it had rotted no one would touch it and it sat there weeping its stinking blood onto the Formica and floor while I had to endure the sounds of their laughter and her many cries and moans.

  fn1. See Duchamp on accidents in 3 Standard Stoppages, quoted by T. Schwartz in ‘No Accidents in Art’, New European Critique, June 1973.

  fn2. See Taxi Driver. Also used as ‘found footage’ by Turner Prizewinner Douglas Gordon.

  fn3. This ‘schizophrenic critique’ is reminiscent of How to Explain America to a Dead Hare by Joseph Beuys (1965) and USA by Vito Acconci (1964) in which Acconci filmed himself arguing (with himself ) over the evils of American imperialism versus his love of and immediate need for a can of Coca-Cola.

  fn4. Ironically, the political artists who fought for the self-expression of sexual minorities – gays, lesbians, sadomasochists, etc. – did not foresee how their ‘liberation’ goals would lead to the sexualisation of the culture as a whole and to the increasing commodification of the body. Shopping malls worldwide selling sadomasochist-inspired lingerie and sexual aids, the reduction of radical oppositional identity to passing fashion and individual consumer choice, was surely not on the original liberation agenda. See Z. Bauman on Individualisation and Consumer Society, RKP, 1996.

  two

  Negative Leap. 1993. Video installation. 12 minutes, video loop. Variable dimensions. P. Buchler Collection.

  THE INSTALLATION COMPRISES two large screens of projected video footage played in extreme slow motion in black and white. On the first screen a woman falls backwards through darkness. On the second many hands reach into the air. This latter footage is in ‘negative’. Both pieces of footage come from a ‘hardcore’ concert in 1992 and represent what is known as ‘stage diving’ or ‘crowd surfing’. This is one of the most powerful examples of the détournement of found footage in recent art history.fn1

  Negative Leap is generally seen as Shears’s first major work. It quite literally became the ‘leap’ into her career as an artist. In it, the ‘amateur’ nature of the video footage is transcended by her intelligent recontextualistion. The beauty of the work is that the images on the two screens, separated by a distance of over thirty feet, never come together in ‘sync’. While in the real-life filmed action, a woman would have leapt from the stage to be caught by the audience, here the hands are in a perpetual state of waiting. The body too seems trapped mid-leap, in just a few seconds, repeated on loop, as if locked in a space and time of endless falling. The hands wait and reach for a point of contact that never arrives. The fact that the footage is played in total silence adds to this sense of a void between the two screens, between action and repercussion. The act of union, in which the body is caught by the hands, exists only, on the third (non-existent) screen – the one that exists in the viewer’s imagination.fn2

  The crowd and the falling woman in ‘cruciform’ pose have often been compared to images of religious ritual and ecstasy. Crowd hysteria and individuals taking ‘the leap of faith’fn3 being common to the vast majority of religions and cults.fn4 However, interpretations that pose Shears as in any way commenting on ‘pop culture as the religion of the masses’fn5 seem wide of the mark, as Shears has never expressed any concern with politics.

  This is the first work by Shears in which her triumvirate of thematic concerns come together into a coherent combination greater than the sum of the parts. They are: play, swapping roles and trust. It was, at that time, uncommon for women to ‘stage-dive’, and so in her leap, she has taken a masculine position; nonetheless, she is conceding control and placing herself at risk – the crowd may not catch her, may let her fall. This throwing oneself into the dark many find deeply unsettling.

  The work is not ‘about’ a subject in both senses (the content and the ‘human subject’) and Shears defies our need to think of her as ‘an artist’ with a ‘singular message’. Some see in this a failure to take responsibility for her own authorship and criticise the communal processes involved in the making of her work (she did not hold the camera, the footage is merely a document, her role in it is just ‘showing off’, etc.). But the message of Shears’s work is a non-negative or anti-message.fn6 It invokes a desire for escape from the isolated identity, from the responsibility for and self-management of the ego.fn7 Through playing games with identity, swapping roles and taking a leap into non-identity, she is asking us, as she asks herself, to become ‘nobody’ and to join with and trust others. If we believe that the role of the artist is to be an exemplary individual with a singular message then we would indeed find Shears’s actions empty, meaningless and ‘negative’. If, however, we find the culture of the constructed self oppressive, then Shears’s selfless leap is one towards freedom.

  SAUL STAGGERED BAREFOOT by the side of the motorway. The sun pounded down on his red leathered head as he searched for roadkill, a fox, a rat, to cook later in his billycan. The cars screamed past and teenagers jeered at him, but he had long ceased noticing the scorn of passing faces and it had been many years since he’d even glimpsed his own. He shaved now with a piece of broken bottle and tied what was left of his grey hair in an old piece of twine from a packing crate. Beneath his concrete flyover, as he drank from the stagnant stolen milk cartons, he cursed the passing cars and swore again his vow to never again succumb to the need of that road with its service station and its promise of ice-cold water and the charity of passing drivers. How could he live in the modern world, every day being confronted with the images, the adverts, newspaper and magazine covers, with their many smiling photo faces all of which reminded him? How could he not scream at the sight of those images of a success that was rightfully his, stolen by a woman, a mere child, a thief and plagiarist. Had he not taught her everyt
hing she knew: the meaning of irony, of punk, Dada, of rebellion itself? In the darkness of his dripping underpass home, when all the world slept, he would take out the box of newspaper clippings, and carefully lift them by candlelight, taking care not to spill the wax, then place them in such a way, shrine-like, to stare until the tears came, fighting with himself, against the urge to tear her face to pieces. In his piss-stinking sleeping bag, from his most secret hideway space behind the stolen supermarket trolley, beneath the scavenged food cartons and empty boxes of sherry, he would, nightly, retrieve the wet and warped, much annotated mass-market paperback of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and whisper the memorised words:

  Each virtue is jealous of the others, and jealousy is a terrible thing. Virtues too can perish of jealousy. Surrounded by the flame of jealousy, one will in the end, like the scorpion, turn one’s poisonous sting against oneself.

  After the usual time he would place the clippings back inside the box and pronounce again, silently, that he had grown wiser than the sage and would never again descend with his message for the masses to face the humiliation of their ignorant laughter, he would leave all images and roads forever and go deeper into more forgotten spaces of the desert they called the real.

  This image of Saul was the one that came to Owen whenever he felt a twinge of jealousy over Dot’s career, in those days, which caught him unawares when Dot’s face, without warning, appeared at the turn of a magazine page. There but for the grace of God go I. Saul in the desert was the only thing that saved him from those moments when he couldn’t face the fact that, yes, he might just envy her success. A dubious sidestep, no doubt, to transfer his sense of failure onto a now fictional persona, but how could Saul have survived Dot’s success without having dropped out, moved to another country, gone in search of God? For years now Saul had aimlessly wandered the desert so that Owen could stride with purpose through the world.