shoes at the boarding gate and the one
in which I pass quietly through the apartments
of four strangers to reach the one
I’m subletting
are played out
“before my eyes” while being
narrated to an
accomplice.
Where is she
when I wake up?
2.
All the souls
that swarmed
through me,
intense and complex,
as I first encouraged
then graded them,
have vanished.
SILOS
What if you tell me an interesting story, full of humor and disappointment, and, a few months later, I mention it, and you answer, “I never said that” or “It didn’t happen that way”? What then?
Now we would expect the umpire to swoop in with the video playback, but, of course, there is no umpire here.
Perhaps we are our own worst witnesses.
Is this what’s meant by “information silos”?
La tortue, or, The Tortoise
Gabriel Blackwell
Decades ago—in fact only a few months after I was born, though of course thousands of miles away and as thoroughly unrelated to my birth as a butterfly’s stretched wings to a distant hurricane—the French publisher Gallimard brought out a collection of texts attributed to Jorge Luis Borges called La tortue or The Tortoise. At least according to the book’s description, none of La tortue’s essays, fictions, or “unclassifiable prose” (the translation is mine, I should say, as are any mistakes in it or in any of the translations that follow) appear in Borges’s Obras Completas, and thus their discovery—in French translation, no less!—ought naturally to have been an event. The book’s fate was, however, otherwise. La tortue was printed but never distributed, its publisher or its editor perhaps having a change of heart regarding its authenticity. There are no court documents, no documentation of any kind, to rely on now; there are rumors, naturally, but the rumors are of recent origin, and so less reliable. Copies are said to exist, for example, unread and unsold, in a warehouse in a suburb of Paterson, New Jersey, and why a French edition of obscure works said to be by an Argentinian writer would go unread and unsold in an unnamed New Jersey township is, it seems to me, completely understandable, but why such books would have come to be there in the first place is considerably more of a mystery. My efforts to locate the exact site of this rumored warehouse have so far come to nothing.
In an essay whose title I haven’t been able to find, appearing on page 175 of La tortue and (once) accessible via Google Books, Borges writes, “It is a species of melancholy to have to do with books that have met with such a fate.” The page this quote appears on is the only page of this particular essay to make it into Google Books’ preview, and most of it is devoted to an enumeration of the various editions of the Bible and the degree to which the Apocryphal Gospels are integrated into them, yet the Bible isn’t the subject of the sentence. What fate is Borges speaking of? What books? I don’t suppose I have to say why I found this particular passage so intriguing.
There are fifteen pages total in Google’s “preview” of La tortue, but no ordering or library holding information, no e-book offered, and seemingly no way to know how Google’s scanner got his or her hands on the thing. Nor is there any information about why the book was assembled in the first place—the more important question, it seems to me. According to the pages I was able to access, La tortue includes, among other things, a review of the book Unwitnessed Spectacles, 1890–1900, a book that doesn’t seem to exist but that apparently details the washing up on North Avenue Beach, Chicago, of two mermaids in advanced stages of decay, the opening and subsequent closing of a sinkhole one hundred yards across in Jordan, and Marconi’s transmission, from the SS St. Paul, of the entire text of De Quincey’s Suspiria de Profundis. La tortue also includes a list of untranslatable texts (e.g., the schizophrenic A. A. Barnes’s English-rendered-phonetically-into-French À qu’il lise), the essay referenced above, and a short commentary on the proper construction of temporary structures meant to collapse, like those seen in Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr. and Jean Epstein’s La Chute de la maison Usher. There are at least 256 pages in the volume, as the last page that appears in the preview is numbered 255 and the last sentence there reads “Of all the books I have sent to press, none is more personal than this motley, disorganized”—obviously concluding on the following page, ending midthought as it does.
I probably don’t need to remind you that Google Books’ preview function doesn’t allow the reader to control which selection is chosen, and that that selection may change over time—for example: I cannot, at the time of this writing, check whether what I have transcribed above is accurate, as page 255 is no longer part of my preview. I have checked often over the past month, hoping to be able to read more of the text, but the same fifteen pages show up each time (which, again, are not the same as they were when I first discovered the book and began writing this essay). Given the empirical evidence, then, I must conclude that if I were to check the preview every day for the rest of my life I would see the same fifteen pages, but if I were to leave the thing alone and only check it, say, once more, on the day I died, perhaps I would see a further fifteen pages, having thus read, over my lifetime, only a fifth of La tortue. Given my knowledge of the inner workings and algorithms of Google Books is nonexistent.
Just a moment ago, my wife called to me from downstairs. Honey, she said, the children are waiting. They will all be arranged around the dinner table, a plain pine table chosen for its simplicity and now scarred at its ankles by the dog’s incessant chewing, two sets of hungry eyes centered above matching Donald Duck plates, and my wife’s eyes, urgent, tired from her long day of caring for the children—all of them, that is, except for the youngest, who will be set back a bit from the table in his high chair, a bib around his neck and a Diego sippy cup affixed to his hand (unless he has thrown it, the cup, I mean, to get my wife’s attention). They will wait for me to be seated before eating, a rule my wife invented, that we all be together before the meal starts; they will even wait long after the dishes have been set down steaming in the middle of the table. In my imagination, they will wait forever, though I know this isn’t so, and I wonder at my fantasized cruelty. Who am I, even to myself? If things get cold, they will complain, of course, and my wife will be upset with me, but still, I think, they will wait (again, except for the youngest, who has already eaten). I will get up from my desk, piled high with books I will never read, and I will cross my office to the recently-oiled-but-still-creaking door, just barely cracked so that I can be called to dinner but mostly closed so the children will know not to bother me, and I will open the door and I will walk down the hall to the top of the stairs and I will take hold of the banister, loose and runneled from the children sliding down it, and I will descend the thirteen steps to the first floor, and I will cross the hall to the kitchen, passing the dining room to get the saltshaker or the pepper grinder or the water jug, or any other forgotten thing, and I will ask my wife and children, from my place in the kitchen, if there is anything anyone needs, and then, finally, I will enter the dining room and my children will smile or look at their plates, depending on how long it has taken me to do all these things, and then I will sit and I will tell them about Borges’s lost book, or anyway, the book attributed to Borges but that may not exist and may not have been by Borges, but first, first I will have to command certain muscles to extend and other muscles to contr
act so that I may rise from my desk, which anyhow is covered in old, yellowed bills and empty envelopes, not books, and before I can do that, I must have the impulse to rise, which, just now, is too much to ask, I think, for I have been hungry for days and have had very little to eat, and, perhaps more importantly for this essay, I must have a desk to rise from, a desk and a chair, and I must have work that demands time at that desk, and so I must have some sort of education, perhaps some sort of experience, in order to get such work, and before I forget, I must also have a wife, and children, and so I cannot begin because at present only some of these things have been accomplished and not even necessarily the most important, such as the children, who exist only in my imagination, since, before one can have children, one must have a kind of hope, and my wife and I have instead, in its place, debts, for I am a mostly-unemployable scholar and she is employed by a temporary agency as a file clerk, and we are neither one of us in good health, and so we have not started the family we ought to have long ago started, “long ago” because I am nearing middle age and she is not far behind, and we live, childless, in an apartment that is much too cold and too small even for the two of us, and, besides, completely unsuited for children, and this is a source of much friction between us, and we spend the nights we ought to spend dreaming together each on our own side of the bed, lying awake with our separate worries, hers more serious than mine owing to certain health problems making pregnancy a complicated and even dangerous proposition but mine still strong enough to wake me at 4:00 a.m. when there is absolutely nothing else to do but think about what has yet to be done, how much further there is to go, how little time there is left—for any of us, really, but for the two of us most of all.
Piracy, Chemistry, and Mappa Mundi
Susan Daitch
THE SHOPPING LIST
At the Shocking Art Supply Store in Portlandia, you can buy pre-smashed eighties-era televisions, doll parts, upside-down American flags posted on diminutive poles, mannequins spray-stenciled across the chest with the image of riot cops. The shopping list matters. These objects have become such an integral part of art production, the talking heads of Portlandia say, that they’re stocked in the store along with quotidian supplies like paint and mat board.
When Damien Hirst had For the Love of God fabricated, his shopping list included a human skull possibly last animated in the eighteenth century, 8,601 white diamonds, plus a single bigger pink diamond for the forehead and an unknown amount of platinum. Artist John LeKay, a former friend of Hirst’s, claimed he had made the sculpture that For the Love of God was based on. His work, Spiritus Callidus #2, a skull covered in crystals, predates For the Love of God by about fourteen years, and his trip to collect materials wouldn’t have involved renting an armored car, bricks of cash, or security guards. Even less glamorous in material acquisition, El Anatsui’s shopping list for his wall hangings and sculpture includes hundreds of thousands of the metallic wrappers that cloak the necks of beer and wine bottles found in the rubbish heaps of Ghana and Nigeria. Ai Weiwei’s shopping list might include the possessions of an arrested family, hundreds of pounds of black tea, or thousands of children’s backpacks.
TO BE CONTINUED NO MATTER WHAT
There are precedents for artists like John LeKay, who have confronted their forgers. Albrecht Dürer traveled to Venice in 1506 for the sole purpose of suing engraver Marcantonio Raimondi, who was circulating copies of Dürer’s woodcuts made from his own blocks, not the original. Lawsuits, as a response, were benign compared to the reaction of some artists. Andrea Mantegna, for example, attacked one of his forgers, accusing him of sodomy, and the fellow had to flee Mantua for Verona. Going through legal channels, Dürer was only partially successful, in that Raimondi simply agreed to put his own name on the prints, and no longer claim they were made by Dürer himself, but he must have been laughing at the German as soon as the door closed behind him. According to the Council of Nuremberg of 1512, the fraudulently produced images continued to be found in circulation. Dürer was so popular, had so many students and followers who reproduced his work, that the cataract of Dürer’s work could not be stopped or always authenticated without a doubt. The market was flooded.
For art forgers too, the shopping list matters. Wolfgang Beltracchi, a contemporary forger who, in fact, looks like Dürer, and his wife, Helene, were unmasked when zinc white containing traces of titanium was found in a painting they had sold as a work by a German expressionist, Heinrich Campendonk, circa 1914. Titanium didn’t come into use in oil paint until 1957. The actual painter would have used white lead, which is more luminous, creamier in texture, poisonous.
The Beltracchis were the movie stars of art cons and their forgeries made them fantastically wealthy. They had spectacular parties at their estates in Southern France and in Freiburg, flying in musicians and flamenco dancers from Spain. The couple rented huge villas on Caribbean islands, took friends sailing on their yacht, Voodoo Child. To their neighbors, the party throwers appeared to come out of nowhere and arrive presto: wealthy art collectors with no past except the one they advertised themselves.
Beltracchi’s actual history was not one of Olympic-size swimming pools in Guadeloupe, hotels suites with a view of the Grand Canal, or African safaris for a weekend. His father was a house painter who also restored churches and made copies of famous and recognizable paintings from Rembrandt to Picasso, which he sold to make extra money. In the seventies and eighties Wolfgang bummed around Europe and Morocco, living on a houseboat, staging psychedelic light shows from time to time, but debt tugged at his shirtsleeves constantly, and only grew worse. Flea markets were the Shocking Art Supply Stores of the era and would remain so for the Beltracchis, providing old paintings whose frames and stretchers could be repurposed to pass the test of scientific dating techniques. They didn’t just look old, they were old. He noticed that old paintings of winter scenes sold more if there were skaters in them. He bought paintings, added skaters, and in this way his career in duplicity began. He needed money, couldn’t find his own foothold, and so imitated others who were dead and couldn’t personally come back to accuse him of sodomy or anything else. Doing your own work takes time. There are a lot of false floors and dead ends, but if you take on the role of someone else, you skip all that. Success is instant if you can pass, and he did.
From sentimental skaters he moved up to German expressionists, and money began to pour in. He only needed to paint two or three forgeries a year to be a millionaire, selling through auction houses eager for sales, a venue that seemed to ask fewer questions than galleries. The exact number of paintings he sold and amount of money he netted are still murky. Two numbers intersect in the territory of unaccountability: mystery cash and pictures whose whereabouts remain unknown.
But then the first Gulf War and a faltering economy led to an end to his production. People were buying less art, at least for a while. When the art market deflated, Wolfgang turned his attention to pirates. He had been drawn to the romance of a certain kind of outlaw-ism, not necessarily the physically violent kind, more buccaneer Errol Flynn or Burt Lancaster. The kind of piracy committed by residents of the Horn of Africa, victims of depleted fishing resources and coerced by organized crime, wasn’t what he had in mind. Beltracchi began production on a documentary about pirates, financed by the sale of his forgeries. Buying an eighty-foot sailboat, he hired a crew and planned to sail from Spain to Madagascar to South America, tracing the routes of swashbuckling explorers like Sir Francis Drake and brigands who hid out in less well-known trade routes. The film project only got as far as Majorca before sinking altogether, and so the forgery business came due for a revival.
The forgeries
took two forms. Beltracchi didn’t always produce copies of original works, but rather paintings he thought a given artist (Ernst, Léger, Picasso, and others) would have created. So, in a sense, they were original Beltracchis passed off as original someone else, and because that someone was a historically recognized painter, those molecules of paint assembled to comprise Ernst’s, Léger’s, or Picasso’s signature meant a crime had been committed. Had they not been signed and supposedly attributed, they would have been just paint and canvas, and their value would have been negligible. The paintings needed not just signatures but a story to justify their existence as marketable commodities. The idea was not for them to be the valueless marvels of an idiot-savant copyist. Helene Beltracchi invented a history about grandparents who had hidden the art collection of their neighbors and good friends, the Flechtheims, when the family had had to flee the Nazis. Only part of this story was true. The two families had been neighbors but not friends, and none of Alfred Flechtheim’s collection ever came into their possession. Her grandfather was a member of the Nazi party, abandoned her grandmother, and the degenerate art in both the real and the alleged collection would probably have been, to him, opaque and worthless smatterings.
The tale of the heroic grandparents sounded fairly plausible, fulfilled a need in postwar Germany to believe in good deeds, but the Beltracchis felt the story needed additional material support to acquire the valence of being really unimpeachable. Using a camera from the 1920s, printing pictures on prewar paper, the couple produced black-and-white pictures of Helene posing as her grandmother with the paintings visible in the background. The photographs were props that backed up a whole fictional universe, and they were convincing—as if August Sander had dropped by for coffee before he was deported and took a few pictures. Many dealers and collectors bought into the story of the phantom art saviors. Wolfgang’s pictures were snapped up. Until they were betrayed by a few ounces of white paint, it was the perfect con.
Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand Page 12