The Exploded View Page 9

  ‘For what? Sock puppets?’

  ‘Sim!’ Sandy called from the house. ‘Simeon! Phone for you.’

  Simeon went inside. He put on the pad again, became aware of it, stretching his stride, felt the elastic in tendon and sinew, toned it down a bit, sleeked back his risen hackles, before he gave the game away. More and more, he wanted to attach value to disconnected, insignificant moments like these. This was how he should express himself, he decided. In entirely private performances, meant for his own eyes only. Not even that: for his own mind’s eye. This was art, everything else was advertising.

  He half expected when he got inside to find that Sandy had made up an excuse to call him away. She could always smell a fight brewing, and Leon was so easy to rile, any nonsense would get him going. Ruth had been widening her eyes at him too behind Leon’s back, flaring her eyes: for God’s sake, don’t start. But there really was someone on the line. Tanya, to say she couldn’t make it, she’d been held up.

  At gunpoint?

  No really, Simeon, unavoidably detained.

  Know how it is. Terribly sorry. We’ll talk.

  After he put the phone down, he sat in the darkened room with his hand resting limply on the receiver in its cradle.

  He leaned forward to look out of the window. Nearly everyone was still gathered around the table in the garden, one big happy family, talking and laughing. Ruth would be pleased. She so badly needed the people she knew to be together in this close-knit way. John and Philippa had gone to examine the lantern against the Bullet-in wall. John called out to the others, some crack about how Keith Kirsten, the nurseryman, could make a fortune out of these, and people laughed. Leon had taken over the braai, just as Sandy said he would. Good for him. Good for her.

  Simeon leaned back again, lit a cigarette, and thought about Tanya’s call. It was irritating that she wouldn’t be coming. Possibly insulting. Curiouser had been a success, she owed it to him to show her face.

  Could the masks have been stolen? It hadn’t occurred to him before, but now that the idea had been put into his head it seemed more than likely. What did a Malawian look like? There had been a Malawian kid at school with him, a couple of classes below, the son of a diplomat – ‘from a diplomatic family,’ his mother said. Was Freddie Chavula typical? He could hardly remember now what he looked like. The only other Malawian he could picture was Hastings Banda. The President-for-Life had acquired an African first name in his old age, but the colonial label stuck. Hastings. Christ.

  Roger – the fence, as James had called him – did not do deliveries. Simeon had to organize a van himself, James’s bakkie, and then they had to make two trips. The bakkie was such a clapped-out old thing, and the crates were bigger than he’d remembered. Even with Roger helping, he’d just about put his back out. When they got to Greenside, he had to rope in a couple of street guards to offload the crates into the garage. He got them to carry the one Roger had already opened straight into his studio. It was just as well Ruth was out.

  The idea for Curiouser must have been in his mind from the start. He recalled the elemental excitement that churned through his body, something like water in dry channels, a disquieting anticipation that was almost painful, when he began to unpack his purchase, when mask after mask issued from that first crate, along with handfuls of crumpled paper covered in French, and African languages that were not at all familiar. The apparent endlessness of the supply was amusing and compelling. A shadow of the potential art work was already forming under the influence of this excess. Excess. He splashed the concept around in his mind. Wasn’t it one of the keys to understanding contemporary style? If you had one of anything, it was simply an object; if you had three, it was a design; if you had three hundred, it was a work of art. On a large enough scale, with sufficient repetition, everything became conceptual, whether you were talking about art or murder.

  He’d unpacked the second and third crates in a fever, piling the masks on the floor of his studio, amassing them. He wanted to see them heaped together. He wished his hands were large enough to scoop them up like grain, to let them trickle through his fingers. He needed to feel this excess, this accumulation, to measure it with his own body.

  The fourth crate brought him to an abrupt halt. It was full of animals, an African menagerie carved in wood. He packed them out on his trestle tables, like Noah releasing his charges into a new world: herds of impala, springbuck and giraffe, flocks of wading birds, the Big Five in a reserve of their own behind the computer.

  The décor at Bra Zama’s could not wait: he had to put aside the animals and go back to the masks. He picked out a few dozen of the finest and stored the rest in his study, which was hardly ever used. The chosen ones were arranged in little families and teams. Then he set about them with saws and drills, roughing them up, scarifying them, shearing off the tips of noses and ears, lopping and gouging. It was, Gemma said of the results, like something you would see on Special Assignment when Jacques Pauw, a television newsman with the manners of an undertaker, made one of his ghoulish safaris north of the border looking for witnesses to an atrocity or survivors of a massacre.

  In the month or two he devoted to the Eatery, the animals stood around in his studio. From time to time he herded them into new configurations. And he spent an afternoon photographing them in the garden, setting the buck out to browse on a savannah of unmown kikuyu and the leopards to lurk in jungles of lily and fern.

  Yet when he turned his attention to them properly, he found himself cutting them into pieces. Perhaps it was the smell of sawdust in the air from the savaged masks that set him off, and the proximity of saws. One day, as if the impulse had come from nowhere, he took up a tenon saw and with a sort of professional curiosity, as if the whole thing were simply a practical exercise, sliced an impala in half. It was telling, given how many creatures there were to choose from, that he took one from the bottom of the food chain. He wanted to see what it looked like inside, what it consisted of under the varnish. He watched the white sawdust sifting down onto his fingers. He turned the lopped hindquarters over and examined the pale, grainy wood that was its raw material.

  Sawing, sawn. Already his arm was itching to do it again, to cut down through solid substance, and keep cutting down through it until his muscles ached.

  So a single gesture had grown into the primary dynamic of his work, replicated a thousand times. It was always easy afterwards to find the motives and themes, to sniff out the references to this art work and that style, but at the time it felt to him like nothing but a mechanical compulsion, a tirelessly repeated dismemberment.

  The first small pieces were simply animal figures sawn into chunks and displayed like butcher’s carcases on marble chopping boards. Then came a series of rhinos and elephants sliced into cross sections a centimetre thick, vertically or horizontally, and reassembled with variable spaces between the sections, so that certain parts of their bodies were unnaturally elongated or thickened. They were like distorted reflections in a hall of mirrors. Later, after he’d acquired the bandsaw which allowed for thinner cross sections and more precise cuts, he could graft the parts of different animals into new species, the head of a lion, the horns of a buffalo, the legs of a hippopotamus, exquisite corpses, many-headed monsters for a contemporary bestiary. The pieces were presented in glass display cases with mock scientific seriousness, as if they were taxidermic specimens. The effects were uncanny – ‘spooky’ was the description he came to – the studio turned into a museum of unnatural history.

  When he tired of tinkering at new creatures, he set himself another challenge: how far could a single curio be made to go? How thin could you slice it? In his three ‘Baloney’ sculptures (springbuck, impala, kudu) the cross sections were spread out flat like pieces from a puzzle, in sequence from horn to hoof. They were beautiful, everyone said so. Abstract images that were constantly jittering off the surface, straining towards a figurative existence in three dimensions.

  ‘Crazy Paving’, the c
entrepiece of the Curiouser show, was laid out on the gallery floor. It contained cross sections of twenty different species and covered a surface of nearly fifty square metres. It looked like an aerial photograph of a newly discovered planet.

  An unopened crate still stood in the garage. Ruth and Sandy had pestered Simeon to open it, but he treasured it instead, somewhat superstitiously, as an investment in the future. A risky one. What if it was full of wooden spoons or soapstone ashtrays?

  Through the window he saw Amy – her name came back to him now – walking towards the house, and in a few moments he heard the bathroom door shut.

  Leon at the braai, turning the coils of wors over expertly with the tongs, careful not to break the skin. He took such fussy pride in his masculine accomplishments – fly-fishing, reverse parking, making a potjie, pitching a tent. He was a walking catalogue of stereotypical male behaviour. Wearing a string vest in the middle of winter like a teenager just to show off his tattooed arms. Drinking out of the bottle. He was like a character in a Tom Waits song, an accountant passing himself off as a sailor on shore leave. When he was younger, his accomplishments had extended to brawling over women and art, and gestures full of ferocious temper, overturning tables, slapping people, dashing drinks in their faces, acts that made the aggressor look more ridiculous than the victim. Once he had smashed a window, cutting his knuckles in the process, to get at some imagined rival, and then received such a thrashing he could not pick up a brush for a month. In the end, all that came of the whole drama was his ‘Self-Portrait with Black Eye’.

  People said they were two of a kind, Simeon and Leon, angry youngish men, but Simeon knew that Leon was the original and he himself the copy. His own riotous behaviour, the fist fights and gunplay, the reckless moves with chainsaws and jackhammers, had been an imitation of Leon’s style. But he had never been able to carry it off. He lacked something, he lacked passion. Another Oprah quality. He had tried to cultivate it for a while, but when he became a man he put it aside and set about the pursuit of grace, to which he thought himself more naturally inclined.

  Of course, Leon was also calmer now. Perhaps they were simply growing older. These days his jealousies stretched no further than a desperate resentment. Where once he might have rushed in, now he would storm out. You could hear him kicking the fender of his own car in the street, careful not to hurt his foot.

  The toilet flushed, the door opened and shut, but Amy did not pass the window where Simeon sat waiting, drumming his nails on the telephone table. Was she putting something up her nose?

  Simeon found her in the study looking off-balance and uncertain, facing the wall layered with masks as if she had stage fright. The sheer profusion was disconcerting, he knew, like a pavement display standing up on end. It made you feel that the room had toppled over on its side.

  ‘Interesting installation.’

  ‘Actually it’s just a storeroom.’ She looked hurt and he quickly went on, ‘I mean they were cluttering up my studio, and I could hardly work with them watching me, so I hung them up here to get them out of the way. But I can see it developing.’

  ‘There’s something frightening about it. It’s like a crowd, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’ Exactly the effect he’d been after at Bra Zama’s. ‘Or a mass grave. Cassinga.’

  She stepped backwards until she bumped against the opposite wall, spread her arms out and pressed her palms flat.

  ‘Is that how it works then, when you make art? Things just develop.’

  ‘Sometimes. I’ll be looking for a place to put things, you know, to get rid of them in a way. And it turns into a work. Things do shape themselves if you give them the space, they find a way of hanging together.’

  ‘If you give them enough rope?’

  They both laughed. She stepped away from the wall and passed slowly in front of his desk, looking down at his papers, spun a page around with her forefinger so that she could read it, browsing, but so frankly he could not be offended.

  ‘I liked Curiouser.’

  ‘Curio-user.’

  ‘Not Curiouser? As in Alice.’

  ‘No, Curio-user. As in a user of curios.’

  This was a game he played. Whatever pronunciation someone chose, he corrected them to its opposite.

  ‘I thought of Curio-user, actually. It’s less obvious and somehow also pretentious. Knowing you, I went with the obvious.’

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’

  ‘The obvious, what’s there, staring you in the face, might finally be more interesting than what’s behind things. If anything.’

  ‘Did I say that?’

  ‘Well, that’s what I understood you to be saying in that interview you did with Jackie Wetzler.’

  ‘God, I didn’t think anyone actually read those things. I thought I could say what I liked.’

  ‘You didn’t mean it then?’

  ‘I was pulling her leg, I’m sure.’

  There was a mask on the desk, being put to use as a paperweight, and she leaned over it, gazing down as if it were her reflection in the varnished surface.

  ‘So you’re going to go on with these things. Carving them up and so on.’

  ‘Yes, I expect so.’

  ‘Why not just leave them here. Put a sign on the door: Curiouser and Curiouser.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘It’s quite beautiful just as it is, before you’ve done anything to it.’

  She allowed her head to sink between her shoulders and tilted her face. Her hands were cupped on either side of the mask and it looked as if she was going to stoop and kiss its rough-hewn lips.

  ‘They’re all the same,’ he said. ‘Mass-produced. Made in a sweatshop like soccer balls or running shoes.’

  ‘The expressions are different.’

  ‘These two are the same.’

  He unhooked a mask from the wall and placed it beside the other on the desktop. He stood next to her, with his hand close to hers, closer than was strictly necessary, looking down at two round mouths and four heavy-lidded eyes.

  ‘They’re not really the same,’ she said, ‘if you look at them properly. They’re like brothers. There’s a family resemblance.’

  ‘Granted, they’re not identical. But let’s say the differences are unimportant.’

  ‘They might have been made by the same person.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘I’ll bet the people who made these things can tell them apart. They would come in here and pick their own work off the walls just like that.’

  She clicked her fingers, three small firecracker explosions. Then she dropped her hand onto the mask and ran the tip of her middle finger along the ridged surface of its lips. In this tender gesture a human being became visible, a man with a chisel and a mallet.

  Simeon turned away and perched on the edge of the desk, gazing at the mass of masks. By invoking the makers, the hands and eyes behind these things, she was changing them subtly, and it irritated him. He had become used to thinking of them as a single element, as raw material, and it suited him.

  He glanced at her profile. He should run his finger along the living flesh of her cheek, the way she was running hers over this dead wood. He leaned closer to her. There was a tattoo on her shoulder, some sort of symbol, a thorny, impatient little hook in her flesh like a Hebrew character. He should touch it. Wasn’t that its purpose, to invite a touch? Not a talking point but a touching point, a point of contact. Perhaps it matched Leon’s. His and hers. He should provoke Leon for old time’s sake, he should invite one of his legendary rages.

  ‘I wonder what they would make of you. The artists.’

  ‘Craftsmen.’

  ‘Craftsmen then. Seeing their things sawn into pieces and reassembled as monsters. Do you think it would upset them?’

  He had an uneasy inkling of where the conversation was going. He said, ‘Perhaps they would see the funny side of it.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘It must be all th
e same to them. Salad bowls, chessmen, masks’ – the unopened crate came into his mind – ‘so long as they get paid for the things, I should think they don’t care much what happens to them.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be so sure. I think they would care very much about the prices you’re getting. It’s unfair, isn’t it? You carve up a cheap curio and put it in a gallery, and suddenly it’s worth a packet.’

  Here we go again, he thought, surprised that he had misjudged her: the contemporary art as quackery discussion. Or will it be the popular art versus high art one? How many times must I have this conversation? Is this the price I pay for being an artist? For living in a cultural backwater? And then it struck him: she was with Leon. Perhaps he’d misread her point entirely. Was it Leon’s cadences he heard, Leon’s colours he saw, the dark ground of the affronted painter shining up through the thin wash of her own thought?

  He said wearily, ‘The curio is in one system and the art work in another. If you move an object from one system into another, by the sweat of your brow, you change its purpose and therefore its value. There’s no point in comparing the systems unless you want to understand this transmutation.’

  ‘We seem to have read the same books,’ she said, swivelling away towards the open end of the room. ‘I’m not trying to make a big political point.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I already told you I liked the show. I’d buy one of those “Baloney” things if I could afford to, I’ve got just the wall for it. But I can’t help being aware of the balance of power, the imbalance, one should say. The way you live here, the way the people who made these masks must live.’

  ‘And you, poor thing, sleeping on a bench at the station.’

  ‘Oh, I’m talking about myself too, you mustn’t take it personally. It’s just a question of awareness, of being conscious and staying conscious of how things are, even if you can’t change them. Especially then.’

  When she had gone, Simeon fetched a beer from the fridge. He could hear laughter from the garden, but he didn’t feel like being there. John and Philippa would have found their way back to Uganda, Lorraine would be hastening the decline of the inner city. He knew their topics by heart.