by Philip Teir
‘I’ve always known that you’d be an artist,’ her father had said when she phoned to tell him the news. It was as though he’d just been waiting all along for her to make this decision.
‘Why didn’t you ever say anything?’
‘I didn’t want to influence you. You need to do what interests you most, and not what I think you should do.’
The classes started in September. During the first week there were two orientation days for foreign postgraduate students, and on Wednesday the lectures began. Eva showed up for the first lecture ten minutes early and found the room practically deserted. Only two other students were present – a guy and a young woman. Eva guessed they were probably a couple. She nodded to them as she came in, then took out her mobile to surf, trying to look busy.
There were very few chairs. The students were apparently supposed to sit on cushions and small Oriental rugs in the room with bare whitewashed walls. The classrooms seemed new, although they were in an old building that Eva surmised was from the mid-nineteenth century. This part of town was called Hendon, and the campus consisted of both modern architecture and old stone buildings. At nine fifteen the doors were closed. Eva had found a place for herself in a corner of the room.
Malik Martin was a tall, broad-shouldered man in his forties. He had dark curly hair which was thinning at the back. He looked as if he worked out on a regular basis. He wore a tight cotton shirt with short sleeves stretched over his hairy arms.
‘Before we begin, there are a few things that you need to know about my classes,’ he said as he walked around the room, making everyone turn their head to look at him.
‘Some of you may be here because you want to be the next Damien Hirst, because you’ve heard that London has the most dynamic art scene in the world. And you think you can make money here. In that case, let me spare you both time and effort: you can’t. Or let’s put it this way: ninety-nine per cent of you can’t.’
Malik glared at them in a way that was presumably meant to signal a combination of authority and mystery, but Eva thought he looked a little shifty, like an estate agent.
‘Another thing: there are certain words that I never want to hear in my classroom. “Beauty” is one of them. “Sublime” is another. “Masterpiece” is a third. These are words used by people who think of art in an emotional way. They’re words that belong to the romantic tradition, which admires the solitary genius and believes in essential values. But the last time I checked, this was the twenty-first century. The purpose of art is to explore the key cultural and social ideas of its time. If you want to create emotions and pleasure, you can go to Hollywood for that. What I want you to do here is to find your own voice.’
Eva felt her cheeks flush. Her essay on the application had been filled with words such as ‘sublime’ and ‘beauty’.
There was a wide range in age among her classmates. Before they started, Malik wanted all the students to introduce themselves. Many seemed to have an impressive array of accomplishments. One person had already had his work exhibited in a gallery, another had a degree from Oxford. A young woman mentioned that she viewed this course as a means for her to get into Goldsmiths’ famed art course. Eva knew that many of England’s most successful contemporary artists had attended that college, and some of them had won the Turner Prize.
When it was Eva’s turn, she briefly explained that she came from Finland and had moved to London a month earlier.
‘And what is it that appeals to you?’ asked Malik Martin, running his hand through his black hair. Everyone’s eyes were fixed on her.
‘What appeals to me?’ she repeated.
Malik nodded.
‘I don’t know … I guess I like the High Romantic period.’
Several guys in another corner of the room started to laugh. Another guy, a bit delicate-looking and sporting a moustache, looked at her with interest. Some of the female students were texting on their mobiles.
‘Anything else?’
The truth was that Eva had very little interest in contemporary art. In her opinion it was often based on simple ideas that acquired importance merely through association with a specific gallery or museum. She had no idea what sort of work she intended to create.
‘Well, it really doesn’t matter what any of you think or know. You’re here to forget about all of that,’ said Malik, as he moved to the front of the room and took up position there.
‘You’ve probably heard that my teaching method is a little unusual. I don’t give any tests, and we won’t be studying periods of cultural history according to some fixed chronology. Instead, each week for the next ten weeks we’re going to discuss a specific work created by one of you. For each class, one student will be asked to prepare a work. And that’s why we really need to get going. I expect you to start working immediately. Today we’ll begin by discussing a particular work of art that I’m hoping you’ll find exciting.’
In the afternoon, when Eva joined some of the students at a nearby pub, she got to hear all about Malik Martin. Everybody sat there eagerly talking about how exciting the class was going to be, and several times they mentioned someone named ‘Sarah’. When Eva asked who Sarah was, a skinny young woman sitting next to her explained.
‘That’s his wife. She’s almost as legendary as Malik. She owns an art gallery in Bethnal Green. Apparently they have an open marriage, or at least that’s what people say. Malik’s got something of a reputation.’
‘That’s right. He likes to sleep with young female artists,’ said another student.
‘Male artists too,’ added the skinny young woman.
‘I see,’ said Eva.
She felt a slight tingling in her stomach, yet she was surprised at how comfortable the whole situation felt – sitting here with the other students and being able to say that she was studying art in London. Was it really that easy? She realised that she was the one who would have to give substance to that simple statement. She thought the others seemed very self-confident, and she had a hard time determining what they might think of her. Even though she didn’t feel that she had her ‘own voice’, did that really matter? Wasn’t that why she was here? To find it?
The class had ended with a video of an art installation. It showed a glass of water sitting on a shelf on a wall. Nothing happened, and yet they watched it for close to ten minutes.
Afterwards Malik handed out a sort of Q & A form that apparently went with the video, with the artist answering questions about the work. He claimed that the glass of water actually represented an oak tree.
Q: Do you mean that the glass of water is a symbol of an oak tree?
A: No. It’s not a symbol. I’ve changed the physical substance of the glass of water into that of an oak tree.
Eva thought the whole thing seemed like an exercise that might be presented in a secondary-school philosophy class. But she didn’t say a word, hoping that someone else would do the talking.
‘So how would you interpret this? What do you think about it?’ asked Malik. He was standing in the middle of the room, giving them an earnest, child-like look – the same look that Eva had seen on the faces of boyfriends when they played some new tune that they thought would impress her.
‘No opinions? Come on, people, you’re not here to sit in silence, are you?’
A wiry guy with reddish-brown hair and freckles cautiously raised his hand. He was wearing a T-shirt that said ‘Lipstick Lesbian’, and he was as thin as his shirt.
‘Yes, Mr Parr?’
‘I think it’s brilliant. At first you just see the glass of water and you think, like, okay, it has to do with life, meaning it’s deep symbolism, with the water as a basic element. But then the artist, like, comes in and just fucks you over, because it’s not a glass of water, it’s not a symbol, it’s a tree. So this is just as much about our preconceived ideas about how to interpret a work of art as it is about the work itself.’
Malik Martin raised his eyebrows. ‘Uh-huh. Uh-huh. And what does th
at mean?’
‘I don’t know, or rather, I assume it’s what it says here on the paper. “That to understand the classification of oak as a specific oak is not the same as understanding and experiencing a glass of water as an oak.”’
‘What else? Anyone?’
Malik looked around at the other students.
When Eva had studied art history, they’d sometimes used this kind of exercise in class. They could spend several class hours discussing what art was, and who determined what it was.
She raised her hand.
‘Yes?’ said Malik.
She looked around the room. ‘Well, as I see it, the idea behind this work of art is to show how art is about trust. The spectator’s trust in the artist’s perspective. If the artist says that the glass of water is an oak tree, we have to believe him or her.’
Malik’s expression revealed nothing about what his reaction might be to what she’d said. Instead, he moved to the middle of the room and said, ‘Interesting. And what’s your own opinion? Do you trust the artist?’
She hesitated. She’d learned that there was no right or wrong in this sort of discussion – and that resorting to personal preferences when it came to conceptual art was like using Hitler to win an argument. The point wasn’t whether a specific work of art was good or bad. The point was whether it was interesting.
‘It makes me think about Descartes. I mean, it’s dealing with similar questions, isn’t it? “Does the table exist – in reality?” et cetera. Although I don’t think this particular text is very well written.’
‘I’m sorry you don’t think so,’ said Malik Martin. ‘The critics had a completely different view when Michael Craig-Martin first showed this artwork in 1973. Later a theatre piece was even made from it.’
‘From this one work?’ asked Eva.
‘Absolutely. Picture it: what’s happening here is just like in the theatre. The transformation from one thing to another. It’s exactly what you’re saying. Theatre is totally based on trust. The actor transforms himself into a character in the play, and we believe it, because that’s part of the contract. Descartes is an excellent comparison. He asked himself: how we can believe that the table actually exists? And what was his answer? That we can’t. We can only trust in the subject. This work of art shows how strong the subject’s power is over the perceived reality. If we choose to believe the artist, then anything is possible. It’s about surrendering yourself, as some wise person once expressed it.’
Eva blushed. Her reply was brief. ‘But the actors don’t just stand on the stage without doing anything. They move about and speak their lines. It’s not the same with the glass of water, which is completely motionless.’
‘Don’t be so sure about that,’ said Malik.
Now one of the young women students turned to face the others in the room. She had an eighties-style Cyndi Lauper hairdo, and her arms were covered with tattoos.
‘Isn’t it a little like the Duchamps pissoir? I mean, taking a totally ordinary object and calling it art?’
The guy in the Lipstick Lesbian T-shirt protested. ‘We’re not seriously going to talk about the Duchamps pissoir, are we? That was fucking ninety years ago.’
The young woman looked surprised, but Malik didn’t reply. He abruptly clapped his hands and announced that the class was over. Eva stood up, noticing how stiff her joints were. Her brain also felt like it had gone numb, the same feeling she got if she hadn’t eaten all day and just drank coffee – a huge echoing whiteness.
five
GRADUALLY, EVA’S STUDIES gathered momentum. She enjoyed showing up at the university every day and spending half her time just talking about various topics. Malik was a strong supporter of the idea that discussions were the most important part of these study years, and he thought they ought to proceed organically, without being steered by any preconceived notions about how art criticism should be formulated. Each student was assigned a place in a studio and was allowed full use of the school’s art supplies, which were included in the tuition fees.
Certain factions soon crystallised. Some students were skilled at drawing and often could produce remarkable results very quickly. Eva belonged to this group. She’d always been good at drawing, and she had developed her own style, which she stuck to faithfully, especially early in the autumn, when she wanted to impress the others without taking any big risks.
The problem with these skilful drawings was that they swiftly became quite repetitive. For instance, Eva soon learned that Laurie, a young woman with a freckled face and open expression that always reflected the mood of the group, liked to paint big, bright pictures that used a lot of paint and canvas. But almost all her paintings looked the same, flirting vaguely with the early modernist style, with everything blotchy and deliberately slapdash. Yet in places it was possible to glimpse a proper painting. This was the exact opposite of Ben’s work. He spent his time making vector systems on Adobe Illustrator, which he then printed out and transformed into small, extremely detailed laser-printed pieces with titles like ‘Reasons My Girlfriend Won’t Fuck Me’ and ‘Experiences From My Four Years as an Involuntary Teenage Virgin’.
There were also sculptors, photographers and students who focussed on performance art. A quiet but interesting guy named Russ stood out from the others because he didn’t shower his work with a bunch of conceptual bullshit but simply dedicated himself to his painting. Plus he painted in oils, which meant that he was always cloaked in a strong, but not entirely unpleasant, odour of oil and turpentine. His paintings were almost never done when they were supposed to be shown, so the discussions often ended with him promising to show more the next time it was his turn to present work to the class.
Malik Martin made an effort to offer everyone critiques, moving from one work of art to another, and sometimes handing out stern words. ‘Good God, Russ, is that your own pile of shit that you’re trying to convey?’ But the real core of his instruction was focussed on the weekly sessions when they all got together to discuss one another’s work.
The first weeks were marked by a certain cautiousness in the group. No one dared criticise anyone else. Instead, they used adjectives like ‘interesting’ or ‘exciting’. Another standard phrase was quickly adopted: ‘I understand it much better now that you’ve explained the actual process involved.’ Eva thought this was just another way of saying that the artwork was more interesting as an idea than it was in reality.
She felt that they rarely had time to do anything properly. They were always scrambling to create the next work, but when she pointed this out to Malik, he merely said that they weren’t there to ‘paint some fucking Renaissance masterpiece’, but to form an initial, basic concept of themselves as artists.
During a recent class session they’d discussed Ben’s small triptychs. He’d produced the actual pattern on the computer and then changed it into a screen print, which he highlighted using neon-pink and cyan-blue on three square canvases. When he talked about the work, he gave the impression that there was some sort of intricate numerological system behind the geometric figures in the painting, but the interpretation was made even more obscure by the fact that he’d titled the work ‘Afghanistan’.
‘I think it’s exciting,’ said Laurie, who was always generous with her comments and the one who broke the ice if no one else wanted to say anything. But her remarks were meaningless because she always liked everything the other students did.
The rest of the class sat in silence on their cushions and rugs. Most of them brought coffee and something to eat to these critique sessions. The student with the Cyndi Lauper hairdo – her name was Margot – had brought a bottle of wine, and since Malik didn’t object when she opened it, some of the guys had asked her for a glass.
Now Malik was walking around the room, waiting for someone to say something. ‘Doesn’t anybody have an opinion about Ben’s work?’
Margot looked at it and decided to venture a remark. ‘I think it’s nice. The colours are nice
, and the composition is too. But I’m not really sure I understand the title. What does this have to do with Afghanistan?’
‘Ben, care to comment?’ asked Malik.
Ben shook his head. ‘Preferably not. I don’t want to steer the interpretation. Do I have to?’
‘You’re entitled to refuse to comment. But what if I put the question like this: would you describe this as a political work of art?’
Again, Ben shook his head. ‘I don’t think it makes any difference what I say. I’m not the one who determines that.’
Eva had a feeling that a lot of students in the class were making art that looked like art – meaning they had a definite idea about how art should look and function. Certain ideas and topics were considered to be ‘important’, and a proper interpretation was supposed to sound a certain way. So that was what served as the starting point for their work. Ben seemed totally uninterested in participating in the expected discussion.
No one said a word.
‘I could tell you what I think, but what I think doesn’t matter. Come on, folks!’ said Malik.
It occurred to Eva how ridiculous this was – they were all forced to come up with an opinion that functioned in synthesis with the work of art. The whole field of art was like that. Everyone was striving towards an ideal of consensus. But what existed beyond that? Or was this merely a way to role-play, an approach to art that they had learned? The same way that young people who were politically active spoke of politics the way they imagined that politics should sound.