Ministry of Moral Panic

by Amanda Lee Koe

  You’ve gotten so—he ran his fingers through his hair—corporate. He smiled and leaned back. They were in the outdoor smoking area of a sidewalk café, a neutral space almost exactly in between his studio and the museum at which she worked.

  She stirred the stick of honey into her coffee, looking at him, resolutely deadpan. She said: We leave it to the artists to be bohemian.

  He leaned forward abruptly—Tell me, do you still paint?

  No, she said, quiet but furious. Never.

  They both picked up their coffee cups and took a drink. As she settled hers back down onto the saucer, she managed to say, Besides—as evidenced by your success—painting is dead. She took out a leather-bound notebook and a pen. Now, shall we?

  He steepled his fingers agreeably.

  When you developed Carousel, the work where the cross-sectionally halved carcasses of two horses are suspended and chained on opposing ends of a metal rod to a fulcrum and dragged across the floor for the full duration of the exhibition, what was your process; what were you thinking of?

  You.

  Excuse me?

  I was thinking of you.

  Why are you making this harder than it has to be?

  Suddenly, she felt very, very tired. The buzzing edge that had made her snappy to her subordinates, curt to her superiors, and unable to get a decent night’s rest for the whole week had expired. She wanted to go home. Perhaps she could get a medical certificate for the rest of the week. Perhaps she would not be able to curate this exhibition; it would really only be one more addition to the long line of things he had ruined for her. Perhaps she should apply to a higher position in the new private museum that would be opening at the end of the year, the one that was rumoured to be financed by an oil sheikh. It was about time to make a career move anyway.

  I’m not trying to make things difficult for you. I’m talking to you as a human being, as an artist, coarse as they come. I tell you the base instinct, you turn it to gold. It’s your job to make my work sound polished. Besides, c’mon, it’s not at all like I was thinking of you throughout my practice. Carousel was a very early work.

  She looked at him. He looked at her. She ordered one more flat white. She dislodged the clasp of her clutch and brought out a pack of menthols, then lit up and exhaled.

  He said: What happened to the Sampoernas?

  They were too cloying.

  He said: Okay, okay. When I made Carousel, what I was thinking of was this: the inevitable, cyclical failure of relationships. How bloody it is. How tiring it is. How persistent we—the universal plural that is—are. The carcasses are spun across the gallery floor till the meat gets worn down to the bone. They are both in pursuit of one another but they will always be the same distance apart. The circular spread of blood across the floor, the carcass as a blunt, honest apparatus of painting. To paint in blood with a stump of flesh, over blood that has dried over itself. It never ends till we’re bled dry. It’s a macabre, visceral celebration of failure and persistence, the failed persistence or the persistent failure of love if you like, in all its guts and glory.

  She did not look up from her notebook as her pen flew across the page.

  She said: People go to see Carousel, and they throw up.

  Yes, and I love that—I love it when there is a physiological reaction to my work. I find it so flattering. It seems something dramatic always tends to happen with my larger works. It is pain, it is discomfiture, it is nausea. But isn’t that true to life, to the way things end?

  Do you enjoy causing hurt? She looked up briefly. Is the pain, discomfiture and nausea on your agenda, as an artist?

  He seemed to laugh and frown at the same time. I don’t aspire to that, no. It isn’t foremost in my mind. They are reactionary by-products that I feel attest to the physical and emotional brutality of my work, but it isn’t something I actively seek out in my process—how should I pain my viewer?—the process is much purer, in that it is, I admit, self-absorbed.

  You admit to being self-absorbed?

  I admit to my process being self-absorbed. But if you must, yes—I admit to being self-absorbed, as should every good artist.

  Let us talk about your recent work Fort, the one that has everyone riled up. You’ve constructed a simple sangar breastwork with pebbles you picked in Iran, where the sacks encasing the pebbles are the burqas of Iranian women you met and offered money to.

  I’m sure you’ve heard about this already, but it’s too important to not make certain—it’s not an urban legend—I offered them money for the very burqa on their body.

  Could you elaborate on the motivation behind that?

  I wanted to know at what price one can be coerced into disavowing one’s beliefs, one’s modesty, one’s dignity.

  And they would walk home naked?

  Well, they would usually try to run. In their undergarments. Not all of them wore undergarments, though. I must say however that the project is fatally weaker than it should have been—for the moment they turned around to leave, I would stop them and hand them a fresh burqa, so they wouldn’t be shamed.

  How does it weaken the project? It makes you less despicable. Gallant, almost.

  Precisely. Gallantry isn’t strength, it’s a deference to restraint. Their shame, my brutality, would have raised the conceptual price on the head of a project like this. It’s like the photojournalist who waited for the vulture to close in on the starving Sudanese child before he pressed the shutter and left it there.

  Only this time you were both the vulture and the photojournalist.

  Yes. But—don’t look at me like that, you’re a curator, we’re in this contemporary hot soup together—it is a leap of faith to engender the opposite of a leap of faith. I only wanted to push something as far as it could logically go. The moment she strips off her burqa for me for a certain sum of money—US dollars, I might add—I’ve proven my point, and I can’t bear to shame her further.

  Why did you want to make this project? You’ve never been interested in religion in your practice. And I hear you’ve received the requisite death threats from the Islamic fundamentalists who’ve gotten wind.

  Do you really want to know?

  What do you mean?

  Yes, or no.

  All right.

  Is that a yes?

  She rolled her eyes. Yes.

  I’d like to keep this off the record, but I was in love with an Iranian reporter at that time. She, too, loved me, but she said we could never be together because I wasn’t Muslim. Strict atheist though I was and am, I did actually love her enough to consider converting to Islam, but I thought about it long and hard and I couldn’t do it because it meant that she didn’t love me enough to see past something categorical. If I’d converted to Islam, Allah would have won, and she would always love him more than me.

  You’re crazy.

  I wanted to make a work that would make her rethink her assumptions and beliefs. I wanted it to be a slap in the face to her. At the same time, I wanted the slap to be charming and clever and outlandish, I wanted her to love me for the sting it left on her cheek. And so I went around Iran, playing the devil propositioning these local women, one pocket stuffed full of dollar bills, the other laden with the pebbles I was collecting by hand. My gait was lopsided. Sometimes I felt like Virginia Woolf packing her pockets with stones to weigh her body down. I felt so burdened, so drained. I felt like I was walking into the River Ouse, I felt like I was drowning in the dunes of the Dasht-e Kavir.

  How very touching, she said with a slight sneer that she’d calibrated so it wouldn’t seem vicious. She stubbed out her cigarette. Well—did it work?

  She was the one who told the Basji fundamentalists about me.

  Oh my god—I’m sorry to hear that.

  I’m not.

  Why?

  In a way, it was then I knew how much she loved me.

  The curator slapped her notebook down onto the table and laughed. She threw her head back. Her laughter was sincere
. You’re really—you’re really something, aren’t you? Why didn’t you tell this story to the press, though? They would’ve lapped it up. It’s feature film-worthy.

  Because it’s between me and her. It’s far more romantic this way. Everyone else’s got their knickers in a twist because of the politics and the religion, but really, for us, it’s just a love story. It’s so romantic it would kill my name as an artist.

  For a moment she desperately wanted him back. Then as quickly as it came over her, it passed. She was glad that a substantial heft of time had elapsed and that the sensation had passed without undue thought. She felt surer of herself now.

  You’re such a ladies’ man.

  They both laughed.

  I do love my women, he said.

  I note the plural tense, she said lightly. But seriously: is every work of yours about a woman? Doesn’t that emasculate you in a way?

  Not every work of mine is about a woman. But even if it were so, I wouldn’t be afraid of that emasculation. That’s how much I love women. I don’t pretend that my existence would be complete without them. I don’t mind if my work springs from their rib.

  Would you say, then, that when you enter into a relationship, you’re looking to make art out of it?

  God, no.

  She lit up again. She offered him the pack, and he took a stick. She extended her lighter towards him; he cupped his hand around hers as the flame trembled in the breeze.

  • • •

  How long does it take for an artist to make a career? How long does it take for an artist to give up?

  They’d met at the scholarship ceremony, more than two decades ago. He’d noticed her slim legs onstage as she shook hands with the minister, the shy bow and smile she gave. His girlfriend was with him at the ceremony, but when she went to the bathroom, he went up to the girl with the legs and said, Glasgow? Goldsmiths? SVA? RCA?

  She looked a little taken aback, even as she stepped aside from her parents and said, Glasgow.

  I’ll be there too, he said, I’ll look out for you.

  In Glasgow, they’d moved in together within the first month. Six months into the relationship, he told her about his extant girlfriend back home. She threw a glass ashtray at him and walked out the door, but came back crying that very night. He held her tight and promised to end it, but when the girlfriend came to Glasgow for Christmas, he squired the girl with the legs off to live in a dorm for the two weeks, packing off all her clothes and trinkets and the photo booth strips of them into a cardboard box that he stashed in his campus locker. For the whole of that year and the next, he continued seeing both girls simultaneously.

  She was wearing his oversized, threadbare Flaming Lips t-shirt and he could see her thong under it as he came through the door. When they first got together, she would wear sweaters and capris at home, but as the year went by, he noticed her changing for him. He knew she found thongs uncomfortable but he’d told her how good it made him feel to see her in one. He’d in fact just returned from a quick liaison with the foundation year life-drawing model in the sculpting studio in the west wing on campus. The model was a redhead and when he’d charcoaled in her pubic hair the lack of colour had seemed such a shame.

  Where were you? she’d asked, smiling at him as he walked towards her. There was white paint on her nose and he flicked it off tenderly.

  I was playing with clay—I’m considering changing my major.

  Did you know that Dalí was afraid of women with body hair?

  That’s really funny.

  They moved to her easel, by the window.

  Y’know, you’re really good, he said, nuzzling her behind the ear.

  Only technically, she said. I don’t have the flair. I know it. But you, she turned to face him, You’re really—you’re really something, aren’t you?

  • • •

  On the night of the artist’s opening at the museum, the curator was in a midnight blue dress that showed off her figure. The artist was in a black blazer over a rumpled grey t-shirt. The curator noticed that he’d dyed his grey hairs black when they air-kissed in greeting. The curator was speaking with a pair of collectors. The artist was listening to the director’s institutional spiel. He was flipping through the exhibition catalogue, noticing—and smiling at—the curator’s choice of words: faith-seeking brutality, an iconoclast-saviour complex, satyriasis, despair, extravagant syntax, “Art is a lie that makes us realise truth”. She’d asked him to vet the curatorial essay, but he’d laughed and said, Leave me dazzled.

  A fat man in pinstripes was shaking his hand; the director was making introductions. The viewing public was mostly standing around Carousel in the main gallery, silent, whilst his smaller-scale works lay littered and lonely in the annexes like afterthoughts. A fair smattering of people surrounded Fort too, in the antechamber, these ones talking animatedly. A waiter came by with canapés. There was a prawn and mango mousse concoction on a porcelain spoon. The artist picked that, and having consumed it, wondered what he was to do with the spoon. He held on to it, feeling a little silly.

  At around 9pm, a car bomb went off on the front lawn of the museum. Women in high heels were screaming. A limb, blown off, hung below a painting. Guests lay crushed dead by pillars of the museum, whose structure was a reclaimed art-deco missionary boys’ school. The artist, hit by shrapnel in the back of the head, died almost instantly.

  Most of the gallery was falling to rubble. The burqa-sacks of Fort were burning, leaving the pebbles behind, innocuous, cleansed, a trial by fire. Carousel had not been felled; it stood like the ruins of an old fairground. The suspension cable was damaged and the halved carcasses were no longer on either ends of the metal pole—they were almost touching one another, and they were on fire. The circumference of blood they had drawn across the floor was lightened with a layer of dust and strewn with rubble.

  The curator, too, was not hurt; the impact had merely thrown her to the ground. She found herself entirely mesmerised by Carousel. She could not bring herself to move to safety. She had to keep watching. The electrical wiring of the gallery had blown, the lights were out, but the two flaming carcasses were still spinning on principles of physics. One was almost catching up with the other now. The smell of charred meat—whether it was the horses or the guests of the opening—was beginning to perfume the air. With each round, the carcasses were slowing down unevenly on their metal suspension cord. They dragged on the ground sluggishly, roasting from the neck up, bleeding from the flank down, leaving a textured trail of red and rubble in their wake.

  Pawn

  DELIA WAS THE sort of woman you took one look at and instantly knew she’d never once been touched by a man. Perhaps it was in her gait, the slight, awkward twitch of her philtrum before she smiled, or the exact angle at which she tucked her purse under her arm as she headed out for lunch each day. She smelled lightly of mothballs, though there were no mothballs in her wardrobe.

  Still, it puzzled her that she was alone. She knew she wasn’t beautiful, but she looked around her, and there were so many men who were ugly, too. It seemed clear enough to her that they deserved each other. Yet these men only had eyes for the pretty women in the office building, holding open elevator doors, loaning umbrellas, offering up gifts of uninitiated teh ping. These pretty women, with their long hair and painted nails, accepted these little putative alms with coquettish smiles, but behind the backs of these ugly men, in the company of the other women—that is, the ugly women—they ragged these ugly men—as if I would ever go out with somebody like that. The particular mark of ugliness of the man would be enumerated—a face like a bullfrog, body odour, a lardy bottom paired with tight, outmoded trousers.

  Then they would all be expected to laugh in feminine camaraderie, though of course these pretty women knew they were being unnecessarily cruel—to the ugly men yes, but more so, and with crystal clarity, it was a jibe at the ugly women, who could not solicit the attention of even these ugly men: the lowest of low-hanging fruit. You
could see this glint of triumph manifest in the eyes of the pretty women as they filed out of the pantry, toting their mugs, the prettiest women with the brightest mugs.

  Delia had a dull mug, a free gift from one of their client’s events. She’d been tempted once by a ceramic magenta mug with a printed black lace motif. She bought it furtively, only to return home to realise she’d left it on the public bus. After that, she knew that even these small, futile gestures performed in the hopes of self-comfort were grating on the nerves of a higher power.

  She stopped trying. She once collected dresses one size too small, that she could marginally squeeze into, the zip intermittently nipping her skin. She once bought mineral make-up in hues and iridescences she was unsure of. She held her tummy in and stood before the mirror, tossing her hair half-heartedly, but she had plump sloping shoulders and no collarbones. She could never step out of her room, much less her house. To don a pretty dress, to bedaub shimmery eye shadow, was to not know her place. The pretty women would call her bluff, she would be a laughingstock.

  • • •

  There was an economical kiosk tucked away in a corner of their office tower on the ground floor, where variants of tea and coffee and pre-packed boxes of limp bee hoon and nasi lemak could be bought cheaply.

  Whilst the pretty women often trotted off to the salad bars and the gourmet sandwich and wrap cafés, Delia and her rank would make sojourns to kiosks such as these. It wasn’t that the pretty women earned more, it was just that they had better reasons to eat better, to see and be seen. It was like the income disparity gap—the rich became richer, the poor became poorer.

  Since Delia started work in this building four years ago, the kiosk she frequented most often had been manned by a testy middle-aged woman, who handed back her change with oily hands. Today though, as Delia approached the counter, in place of said woman was a beautiful boy in a dirty blue singlet. She cleared her throat, quite suddenly thick and scratchy.