by Rob Doyle
‘The objective of this piece is to become the object of a discussion!’
At first they whispered it, repeating it more loudly each time. The chant suggested that what I was seeing here was something like a pure conceptual art piece, self-reflexive to the point where the object vanished into its own discourse – or, less generously, up its own hole. I had long suspected that, since the turn towards conceptual art however many decades ago, talking about the artwork – conceptualising it – had become more important than the encounter with the work itself. When I looked at art in galleries and museums, the first thing I always did was read the accompanying text on the plaque beside it, and in many cases I was happy to leave it at that, the work itself adding nothing besides a sense of the disparity between what the text on the plaque told me I was supposed to think and feel, and what the artwork actually provoked me to think and feel, which was often nothing. Some of them were really quite stimulating, the texts, the concepts. Under the reign of conceptualism, it wasn’t enough to produce art, you needed to be able to articulate precisely why you had done it, and this ‘why’, this articulation, was the art. Artists today were philosophers, academics, theorists in drag, auto-critics. At some point, the way we were going, art would merge into the everyday, an invisible conceptual film that would hang over reality to render it itself yet not quite – which, come to think of it, was sort of what Tino Sehgal’s work was like. After the performers had recited the line for the fourth time, a voice from the crowd along the opposite wall called out:
‘I love Marine Le Pen.’
There were scattered laughs, a ripple of unease. Some of the audience were black or Arab and all of us bore the sartorial markings of urban sophisticates – not part of a demographic who looked kindly on Le Pen. Looking around to see who had spoken, I was astonished (and yet, punch-drunk with derealisation, not really surprised) to discover it was an acquaintance of mine from Ireland named Declan – Art Deco, as he was widely known. He stood a head taller than everyone else, wire-thin with dark curly hair, wearing a red scarf.
A new chant began:
‘There has been a comment!’
Then the performers discussed Declan’s edgy intervention while he gazed on, poker-faced behind black-rimmed glasses.
I can’t remember what was said because I was still trying to process the fact that Art Deco was here, now, at the same Paris art show as me. Was he part of the performance? Or was he just a spectator, throwing a curveball into proceedings by declaring his love for the Front National leader? Provocation was by no means uncharacteristic of Art Deco. I’d had no idea he was in Paris – but then, it had been a while since we’d been in touch. Before I’d ever met him, Art Deco had been a near-mythical figure in certain Dublin circles: performing with bands, involved in art projects and literary journals, generally considered an eccentric, enigmatic dude who might one day do something either great or catastrophic. He had studied at the National College of Art and Design but, although he was the most promising student in his year, dropped out on the eve of his final exams – four years of study down the drain. The legend grew that this dropping out was intended as Art Deco’s first major artwork: a punkish meta-commentary on the careerist art establishment and the university system; perhaps a celebration of nihilism, a potlatch gesture of waste and extravagance.
After I’d got to know him a few years later, however, Art Deco told me it was all bullshit: the truth was he’d dropped out of NCAD in the pits of a shattering ‘nervous crisis’: extreme paranoia, panic attacks, suicidal delirium. He bitterly wished he had finished art college: that way his life might have turned out differently. He might have succeeded in ‘professionalising his psychodemons’, as he put it (he had a way of saying such things without sounding pretentious or self-aggrandising), rather than channelling them haphazardly through the vague collaborations and low-key projects that had punctuated his twenties. Art Deco and I had been in sporadic contact over the past five years: the last I’d heard, he’d moved to Berlin and was living in a huge residential block on the outskirts of the city, inhabited by artists, punks, anarchists, dropouts and refugees. He’d gone out there to write a novel, provisionally titled The Lord of the Universe, which I gathered was a frenziedly paranoiac, metaphysical enigma. Art Deco had sketched out the plot in an email: living alone in a bedsit on Kienitzer Straße, the young narrator smokes a great deal of weed and starts to believe that the graffiti on the streets and the U-Bahn tunnels contain coded messages meant for him and him alone. He is ultimately led to an abandoned fairground outside the city, where he confronts a ‘messianic’ hunchback (presumably the titular ‘Lord’, though only our narrator believes him to be special). The encounter triggers some sort of dire cosmic unravelling.
The chanters suddenly started yelping. Then they hopped and skipped out of the room, signalling a break in the performance. I approached Art Deco, gesturing till he saw me.
‘Rob, what’s the craic,’ he said, his voice betraying zero surprise.
I was glad to see him: we weren’t particularly close but we’d had some lively conversations at Dublin house parties and in London cafes. We chatted about the overlapping lives of our friends, then I asked him if he was part of the show. He shook his head.
‘Just passing through. I’m still out in Berlin.’
I asked him how the novel was going.
‘Grand. I get very involved in it, maybe too involved. Like, I’m writing about my life, which is fair enough. But then I start to suspect I’m also living about my writing. Do you know what I mean?’
‘Kind of.’
‘Like, I wander around Berlin looking at street art, putting myself in the head of a guy who’s doing the very same thing – Bertolt Schultz is his name – except he sees hidden meaning everywhere. And then I realise it’s my head I’m putting myself in. I’m Bertolt Schultz inside the book, imagining my life into being – this life out here. Without me, Bertolt Schultz wouldn’t exist, but without him I’d exist differently – in other words, I wouldn’t exist. When you walk around and imagine seeing meaning everywhere, it generates meaning. I write it down, but the more I think about it, Bertolt Schultz is the one writing me, on a Möbius strip.’
I was really losing him …
‘Like that Spacemen 3 album’, he continued, ‘Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs To. Anyway, that’s why I had to come to this show. Twelve hours on the train from Berlin. I thought it would do me good to decompress in a space where everyone is pretending to be themselves. Usually they’re pretending to be someone else, and that makes me nervous. I can already feel the benefit of coming here today. I’ll walk out renewed. Do you have any ganj?’
I told him I hadn’t really smoked in years – it made me paranoid.
‘Fair enough, man. We’re all hanging on by a thread.’
We swapped phone numbers and agreed to meet up before he left Paris. After we parted, I roamed the space for hours, discovering new rooms, returning to the main sites to find them transformed into fresh variations. The show was a continuous flux, so that you could never determine the final parameters of the artwork: it mutated even as you observed it. There were no texts to read, no plaques on the walls to fix Sehgal’s evanescent human art: the work would leave no trace other than memories, emotions, words between friends, critical response. For someone like me, whose very career was an avoidance strategy of touching from afar, as safe and distant as a drone operator from his victims, Sehgal’s art administered shocks of presence: face-to-face encounters stripped of the numb rituals of politesse, the opiate of functional chatter. I was, in fact, finding it seriously destabilising.
Periodically I would turn on my phone, fancying that my girlfriend’s insistent, emoji-adorned PKD quotes were part of the game, a subliminal commentary hurled out to alter my perceptions and scramble reality.
Borne along by a current of abandon
she dreamed of disembodied voices in the stellar dust
her essence a sympto
m of some deeper cosmic pathology
Through open wounds the cold drifted, a wind across the plane which reality had become
And now it came to her, as if in a whisper …
There could never be a test for what she was pregnant with.
This last one, about a pregnancy, was not what I needed to see. Why had she sent that? It was one of those frazzled and defenceless days, the nervous system coiled against some imminent shock of revelation. In the main hall I sat against a pillar and rested. Outside the skylights, darkness had long since fallen. I scribbled notes around the fanciful idea that Tino Sehgal was a gnostic demiurge who had choreographed all of creation: his show was the universe, enacted by everyone I had ever met and everyone I hadn’t, every generation who had tended the earth and all who ever would. The tower, I wrote, was everywhere. While I was bent over my notebook, a man in a beret broke from the shoal of backwards-walkers and approached. He hunkered down beside me and said
‘I like to burn books.’
I asked him if he’d repeat that, please.
‘I like burning books.’
I laughed; he smiled.
‘Are you a Nazi?’ I said.
‘Well, that’s the question,’ he replied.
He told a story: his parents had died and left him a house in the Brittany countryside, which was full of books. In the months following their death, he would drive out to the house at weekends and sort through the books, some of which were valuable as literature, whereas many others were trash – potboilers, romances and such. He would burn the worthless books in the fireplace. Before chucking a book into the blaze he would read a few lines or paragraphs, honouring an impulse to bear final witness to these stories: after all, someone had once laboured over them, even if it wasn’t quite Proust or Balzac.
One Saturday afternoon, standing before the crackling fire, he randomly opened a book on a scene in which one man was viciously humiliating another, employing the vilest epithets. The victim of the humiliation was a Jew. There followed a scene of appalling violence. He flicked through the book: it was foul with the rhetoric of anti-Semitism. What the hell was this book? And why had his parents owned it? The cover had been ripped off so he had no idea who its author was. He flipped to another page and found a passage from the Talmud, which seemed to him profound. He read it many times, memorising it. Then he flung the book into the fireplace, watching it curl and crumble in tongues of flame.
So what was the quote from the Talmud, I wanted to know.
He smiled. ‘I’ve forgotten. It was something to do with the Word, and the true name of God. Perhaps I was meant to forget – the message so bright it erases itself, a blank space in the psyche that beheld it.’
He asked me what I reckoned: was he right to have burned the book?
I shrugged. Why not?
Then he suggested, citing some metaphysical school or other, that he, I, everyone who lived, had consented to all this in advance; that the soul, in some pre-terrestrial limbo, had viewed its coming adventure: every hurt and embarrassment, every idle afternoon and schoolyard humiliation, all the laughter and each instance of tenderness – the whole and specific human confusion. The soul had foreseen all this, in the knowledge that it would be forgotten upon arrival in our world. And the soul had said yes, let it happen, let it be, and so here we were, out of our depth in life. ‘What do you think?’ he said. ‘Does that seem astonishing? Would you indeed have said yes to this life, knowing what you do?’
‘I dunno,’ I replied.
‘This piece has now concluded,’ he said coldly.
I left the Palais de Tokyo and cycled through the lit-up streets near the Champs-Élysées, heading vaguely in the direction of home. Above the boulevards hung the fattest moon I’d ever seen, a shining yellow disc like a Seroquel pill. Stopped at a red light, I read another message on my phone:
She passed imperceptibly from one scene, one age, one life to another. There was nobody who could shield her from malignancy – think back to the rapist
On Rue Washington, I locked my bike up and stepped inside a little Vietnamese restaurant with bright fluorescent lights. A plump middle-aged woman took my order. I ate a bowl of pho, the hot soup warming my insides as I read over my notes, jotting down reflections before they dissolved in the frazzled wiring of my mind. Like Art Deco writing his novel, I tried to imagine how I’d have experienced Sehgal’s show if I were psychotically paranoid, beset by an ego that perceived connections everywhere, the symbols of an absolute conspiracy. How would it feel to drift in a space where the borders had broken down, a metaphysically altered limbo, if one were caught in the centrifugal pull of an ecstatic delirium? I sketched out a story in which I was trapped inside a story that took place within the Tino Sehgal show, right up to the scene where I saw myself enter a Vietnamese restaurant and begin writing in my black notebook, and for a shocking instant I had a sense of being authored, of perceiving the vision behind it all, he who guided my pen and wrote me into being at once – a vertigo of tunnelling fictions falling away to infinity.
I turned on my data again, like a smoker reaching for his pack. Art Deco had emailed to tell me I was going in his novel. What is progress? he asked. Progress is the absence of reason, he suggested. Progress is falling down a staircase in the dead of night. Progress is retribution, upheaval and murder. Did I want to come to a party in Bastille on Saturday? A message arrived from my girlfriend.
Get out of my skull
I strained to remember where this line appeared in Flow My Tears, but it didn’t seem familiar. I sent a reply: hmm? and a puzzled-face emoji. Another message appeared.
Get. Out. Of. My. Skull
Some motion caused me to glance up. The Asian woman behind the counter was staring at me; her lips were moving as if she were silently talking to herself, or praying. My phone emitted a volley of pings.
Get out of my skull
Get the fuck out of my skull
… Robert
Get OUT of my skull
My eyes darted between the screen and the woman as messages flooded in – it was as if she were mouthing the words as I read them.
Get OUT OF MY SKULL
GET OUT OF MY SKULL
GET OUT OF MY SKULL GET OUT OF MY SKULL GET OUT
Now the woman appeared to be weeping silently, tears glistening on her cheeks. I turned off my phone, put it in my pocket, and finished my noodle soup.
Some days ago I met with Niko, a writer from Georgia who lives in Berlin. He was here visiting his girlfriend. We had coffee in Belleville, then he brought me to a flat on Rue Clavel, where he gave me fistfuls of pills I’d never tried before: prescription stuff called tramadol and Lyrica. Also more Valium, in case I need it, which I do. He talked me through which combinations and dosages work best, and issued a vague warning about addiction.
Niko has lived in Berlin for twelve years. He was forced to leave Georgia by the conservative and religious forces he’d pissed off there. The drugs he’s on – medication and recreation seem to blur – constitute a delicate balancing act. It was uncertain as to whether he’d be able to meet me at all – an unnameable fear often prevents him from leaving the house. He says he hates Paris anyway.
Niko and I talked about my friend Linda, whom he knows in Berlin. I can’t recall whether I’ve told you about her. We met more than a decade ago, when I was twenty-three and she was thirty. We travelled together in South America for a while. A year later, I stayed with her in Friedrichshain, for a week of monumental unwisdom. I lost all sense of limits. On one of the last nights, at a club, I decided I would finally confront the tormenting problem of sexual jealousy – there and then, by asking Linda to fuck some other guy. This being the kind of logic that pertains when you’ve been hammering drugs and going without sleep for a week straight. She screwed a guy in the toilets while I sat out at the bar. It was early in the morning. The drugs were dragging on me and I started to doubt what we were doing. So I walked in on them – and that was everyt
hing blackened between us for a long time afterwards.
These days I trust Linda, which is to say I feel I can tell her anything. For instance, I can tell her that I look back on my youth as a campaign of revenge against women – a war of attrition with unforgivables committed on both sides. Nowadays an eerie calm prevails; a belated peace seems to have dawned. The result, I think, of pure exhaustion. I come to women these days as a friend, waving a little white flag. Perhaps there were easier ways to acquire this modicum of what, with a little stretch, might be called wisdom. But they weren’t my ways.
And yet, I wonder how true all that is. The longer you and I stay in contact, I think the greater the likelihood that we’ll somehow maim each other. Did you ever have that dream of no control, the one where you’re not walking, you’re being walked, towards a precipice?
Psychopomp
When Kelly came to Paris to work on her photo essay, she smuggled four tabs of acid past customs at Dublin airport, wrapped in a sliver of tinfoil hidden in her knickers between a sanitary towel and the press of her flesh. She didn’t tell me she was doing it because she knew I’d be obligated to try and dissuade her, but she knew I’d want to take the acid with her too.
Despite several admissions to St Patrick’s psychiatric hospital since her teens, Kelly enjoyed psychedelic drugs with a casualness and frequency that were foreign to me. It was she who had introduced me to the concept of microdosing. ‘All the kids are doing it, daddyo,’ she’d said, joshing me about the difference in our ages – though not, she insisted, in our levels of maturity. Microdosing, she had explained, meant taking a small amount of a psychedelic such as LSD on a daily basis, just enough that its effects would shimmer at the edges of your experience without overrunning it. Subtly under the influence, you could conduct yourself quite normally: for instance, while working part-time in a Nepalese restaurant in Temple Bar, as Kelly did; or studying; or painting. Before I met her, Kelly had been microdosing for several months and had become a committed advocate of the practice, whose benefits included enhanced lateral thinking and being a bit high all the time.