Entering the largest room at the Pollak, the visitor was stopped short by footage of Rwanda projected on an enormous screen. The slaughter in Nyanza had not been filmed, of course, but television news crews had come to the area a week later, when corpses still lay sprawled in the streets or heaped against walls, where they had been shoved by bulldozers. There was film of the international peacekeepers pulling out of the country, and battle scenes from other parts of the region featuring jeeps and armoured vehicles. The screen stretched from floor to ceiling, apparently as solid as a wall, blocking off two thirds of the room and dwarfing the viewer.
Simeon had spent days at the gallery watching how people responded. Many turned for relief to the monitor on the left-hand wall, which showed the video footage of Nyanza he had shot himself, slow and silent, a small, manageable world, made touching by its scale. Then they crossed to the right-hand wall, where his Polaroids were quilted together. This undulating square the size of a blanket kept suggesting a landscape or a portrait, a relief map or a figure study, before falling apart into random blocks of jungle texture, clay, bark, the surface of the continent seen from a satellite.
Most people were ready to face the projection again, and stepped back against the third wall to try and see the image whole. At this point some of them actually left, retreating through the door they had entered by without having seen the bulk of the exhibition. But those who had read the reviews or glanced at the floor plan on the price list now approached the screen, looking for the gap that would let them through into the space behind, where the shrouds were displayed. The slit was spanned tight and offset deliberately from the centre to make it harder to find. He loved watching this moment – the drama of the compère stranded on the wrong side of the stage curtains, beating at the fabric, sending panicky darts and ripples over the moving surface, until an arm plunged through the gap, and then the whole body slipped gratefully into the image, swallowed up in it.
The opening of the show had been the usual ironic spectacle. One was always aware of the uncomfortable contrasts, the hacked limbs and bleached skulls, the guests with their glasses of wine, the price tags, the little green and red stickers. By the end of the evening several people had spilled their wine stepping through the gap in the screen and left their palmprints on the fabric.
The highlight was undoubtedly the performance of the Minister of Culture. She had come to give the opening address – there was some political mileage to be made, South Africa was involved in the peace talks in Rwanda, it was all Tanya’s idea – and she arrived in a wheelchair. Officially, she had sprained her ankle playing tennis, but everyone knew she’d been hitting the bottle. There she was, slumped in the chair and looking smaller than usual, rolled out to the microphone against a backdrop of military convoys as if she herself were a war veteran. Her foot in its plaster cast stuck out stiffly like the cannon of a tank. Leon, the painter, Simeon’s old university buddy, had leaned over, breathing vinegar and cigarette smoke, and said, ‘Shot herself in the foot again…’ The Star’s critic would remark in his review that the Minister symbolized perfectly the state of art and culture under her administration.
Of course, only ‘S. Majara’ saw the connection between the plastered foot of the Minister and the powdery shrouds in the room next door, which some people insisted were ‘too easy’ and she herself was indisposed to view. You could hide a multitude of private jokes in a term like ‘mixed media’.
Grace was a concept he considered more and more important for negotiating the world. He had picked it up on Oprah during his years at the Art Institute in Chicago, and he clung to it for that reason. What was that segment of her show called again? ‘Remember Your Spirit.’ Like a sign saying ‘Mind the Step’. Perhaps it was to be expected: the more vulgar everyday life became, and the more overwhelmed people were by craven impulses and base desires, greed and envy, gluttony and lust, the more they reached for the old ideals like generosity and grace. He thought of people in hotel rooms, who knew they should go out for air or open a window, at least, but could not rouse themselves to do it, who turned their faces instead towards wheezing air conditioners and tut-tutting fans.
He put the lanterns down on either side of the door in the garden wall, stood a candle in each one, scraped a match into his palm and carried the flame down to the wicks like a drop of precious liquid.
Then he walked back up the path, kicking at the railway sleepers with the toes of his trainers. They were not sleepers at all, they were not even made of wood, they were precast concrete paving blocks, grained and chipped, made to look used and weathered. There were specially designed holes through the ends where the rails had supposedly been secured by spikes.
On the edge of the lawn he stopped and called to Sandy, ‘What do you think?’
She looked at the lanterns with him. ‘Spooky.’ A twist in her tone, a hint of mimicry, to signal that she was using the word of the moment.
He had expected the effect to be merely amusing in a self-consciously kitsch way, a jokey African Halloween no scarier than a gutted pumpkin. But the mask-heads, streaming light from their eyes, mouths and noses, were chilling. It confirmed one of Ruth’s half-serious propositions about Curiouser: that he had chanced upon a talent for frightening people, for giving them goosebumps by doing violence to their ordinary clutter.
‘I think I’ll put a couple in the shrubbery.’
He went towards the house, waggling his fingers creepily.
‘These things are disgusting.’ Rubbing at the table-top again. ‘The birds have shat all over them.’
‘Weavers.’
‘Do you have to clean them every time you use them? What a drag.’
‘Nothing we can do about it.’
‘Scare them off. Take a few potshots with your famous Luger. A bit of gunplay.’
He made a dismissive gesture with his hand and went inside. As soon as he was out of sight, she knelt at the edge of the pool and rinsed her rag in the water.
Gunplay. He had indulged in some of that, for effect.
Once – this was before Ruth’s time – he had locked himself out of his house. He was living in Bellevue then and drinking too much. He could have called a locksmith, but instead he had fetched a pistol from his car and tried to shoot out the lock like a desperado. Rather than springing apart as it was meant to, the stupid thing jammed, and he needed the Lock Wizard after all.
Then there was his William Tell act with the garden gnome, when one of the bullets ricocheted and passed straight through the lounge (people said) where Ruth was watching television. In truth, she was not even home that afternoon. This particular bullet was never found. There was the hole in the blind and, using some rudimentary ballistics picked up in Homicide: Life on the Street, it was easy enough to figure out where the hole in the opposite wall should be. But it wasn’t there.
Such stories got around. The cynics said that was the point: he would do anything to attract attention.
And then there was Bullet-in, a photographic sequence inspired by Huambo, the most battle-ravaged place he had ever seen. The buildings were so full of bullet holes it was laughable, like the set of a Clint Eastwood movie. On a pockmarked wall he found a fragment of untouched plaster in the shape of a man, as if someone had been shot there and left behind a stencil of his body. This first image was the only one made by chance: those that followed were produced deliberately, with live rounds and a template, in the trouble spots of the world. According to the official account, anyway, the one you read in the catalogue. Unofficially, they had all been made here in Greenside without a shot being fired – he was too afraid of hurting someone, and Ruth would never have allowed it. He drilled the holes in his own garden wall with a Black & Decker, and repainted the surface between photographs, patching the cracks with Polyfilla, putting together Latin American colour schemes, tatters of Middle Eastern advertising, scraps of graffiti. Waiting for the weather to turn.
His personal favourite supposedly came from the hi
lls of KwaZulu-Natal. It showed three angular figures, a segment of a human chain, outlined in bullet holes against a mud wall. Modelled on the Guronsan C tube.
When he was finished with the series, he replastered the wall for the last time and painted it white again. In daylight you could make out the brighter patch. On an impulse, he put the last of his lanterns at the foot of this wall as a private marker. Then he went to take a shower before the guests arrived.
Bullet-in. He had arrived at this after a little improvisation. Bulletin, Bullet(in), Bullet•in. It was compulsive. Take the last show: CurioUSER, CURIOuser, [Curio]user, Curio_user, Curio>>>user. He had been through countless variations, riddled with characters from the little-used ranges of the keyboard. In the end: Curiouser. Plain and simple. Part of the new restraint which he intended to make his hallmark.
The new restraint. Where should one draw the line? The world was so loud, and no one took seriously a thing that didn’t attract attention to itself. There was no room for subtlety. Things were either visible or not, their qualities were either shouting from the surface or silent. This silence, the lull behind the noisy surface of objects, was difficult and dangerous. You never knew what it held, if anything. How were you to judge whether the voice you heard was a deeper meaning, whispering its secrets, or merely the distorted echo of your own babble?
The lanterns cast an unexpected shadow over the company. Usually their friends needed little help to be rowdy. A couple of bottles of Blaauwklippen’s Sociable White – the affordable plonk for sociable whites, as he said to Ruth – and they could be relied upon to misbehave. But tonight the mood was sombre and guarded. People were talking quietly in little groups, hunched against the night, as if they were afraid of being eavesdropped upon by these glowing heads with candlelight spilling around in them like drunken thoughts. It made Ruth anxious. She kept trying to communicate this anxiety to him, turning her head aside and widening her eyes in exaggerated alarm.
‘Can I top you up?’ Simeon leaned over the table between Leon and his new girlfriend. They were hearing about Uganda from John and Philippa.
‘I’m hungry,’ said Leon.
‘My assistant has lit the fire.’ Simeon filled their glasses.
My assistant. Despite the mocking emphasis, he liked the phrase. It gave him the same soft-shoed kick he’d got earlier when Sandy mentioned the office. He was turning into a little business. It irritated the hell out of Leon. He wanted to be a little business too, he wanted a manager and a personal assistant – stuff that, he wanted to be an industry – but he was just another muddler.
‘We’ve been talking about Curiouser,’ Philippa said.
‘Don’t let me stop you. Go on, tell me the good bits.’
‘You know what’s amazing? It’s like you’re deconstructing the whole curio thing, which seems pretty obvious. But then you’re saying, yelling actually: Look, I’m deconstructing this curio! So then it’s like you’re deconstructing the deconstruction thing, know what I mean? That’s really amazing.’
‘I think it’s more about reconstruction,’ said John. ‘It’s about putting things together in new ways.’
‘And how are you going to put something together again if you haven’t taken it apart? That’s what’s amazing. I’m like, what is this thing? I’m looking at it and thinking: What am I looking at? What is it? Bits and pieces of elephant. Kudu salad. The do-it-yourself zebra. Know what I mean?’
‘I liked the rhino,’ said James, drifting closer, ‘the skinny rhino. Norman Fischhoff bought it.’
‘Oh really?’ said Leon.
‘The rickety rhino.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ said Philippa. ‘It’s beautiful.’
‘In a sly way, I suppose,’ said John. ‘You don’t have to be an art historian to see it’s poking fun at Hirst’s pickles. Those lab specimens are designed for the squeamish, aren’t they? Your rhino’s kind of clean-cut and cute, the way it fits together, snug as a puzzle. That pink on the cross sections is wonderful.’
‘Wood primer.’
‘I thought it was natural.’
‘Pink wood primer.’
‘Love that colour.’
‘My best is the crazy paving,’ said Philippa. ‘Amazing.’
‘ “Baloney.” ’
‘Why “Baloney”?’
‘Jesus, you’re slow on the uptake.’
‘That’s the colour!’ said John. ‘Polony, Escort French Polony.’
‘I hear you’ve got some more of these doodads,’ Leon said.
‘Couple of hundred. Mainly masks.’
‘Hundreds?’ Everyone laughed. ‘Well, we know what you’ll be doing for the next five years. Curiouser II, Curiouser III…’
‘Consider yourself lucky. You won’t have to look at my work again until, let’s see, 2010.’
Leon’s girlfriend – Simeon had forgotten her name – said, ‘Where did you get them?’
‘I’ve heard this saga already,’ said James, receding swiftly, as if his moorings had been cut. ‘Think I’ll move to the better wine.’
‘Tell us,’ said Leon, ‘I want to hear.’
‘Well, I got more than I bargained for, I can tell you that. I was just looking for a few knick-knacks to use on a set-dressing job. Bra Zama’s African Eatery.’
‘I hear the food’s amazing.’
‘You remember I did the décor? With Gemma at the Frame Up? It turned out to be tricky finding masks, of all things. These guys are very protective of their turf. It’s a whole big secret international network, passing mainly through back doors and legal loopholes. Then I met this guy at Bruma, one of the curio-sellers, name of Roger. A Malawian. He said he thought we could come to an arrangement. He asked some connection at the next stall to watch his goods and hustled me into the shopping centre, to that Toasted Bagel place, for coffee.
‘ “I’ve got what you’re looking for, but it’s difficult.” How so? “The goods belong to my friend Victor.” Does he want to sell? “Oh yes.” Perhaps we can go and see him together? “Impossible.” You could ask him to call me. Does he have a cell? “I don’t think so…he’s been dead for six weeks.” ’
Laughter, loud enough to turn heads. Simeon had told this story before and was getting better at it. It helped that everyone was a little tipsy. You could always count on the Sociable White.
What had become of poor Victor? Apparently he’d been shot dead on the pavement outside a block of flats in Berea. ‘The Metropolitan? You know the one?’ Roger had asked. But Simeon did not want the details, thank you very much. The day before he died, Victor had received a large shipment of masks, as it happened, and they were gathering dust in a factory in Doornfontein. Roger was planning to take over the order himself, but he would be just as happy, happier in fact, to get rid of them all at once. There was a widow back home in Lilongwe with children to feed, and a lump sum would come in useful.
The next Saturday, Simeon picked the Malawian up on a corner in Berea and drove him to Doornfontein, looking over his shoulder all the time. One read these stories about Nigerian con men practising routines so standard they had names and numbers, the ‘Black Money’ swindle, the 419 scam. They parked the car in End Street and went into a shabby four-storey building, walked up the widest staircase Simeon had ever seen, the risers faced with metal. What had they been manufacturing up here? The space beneath the corrugated-iron roof was cold and empty. There were windows down one wall, and, huddled together in a corner as if for warmth, five or six machines whose purpose he could not fathom, although a defunct terminology rolled through his mind – presses, lathes, gins, jennies. An abandoned sweatshop, smelling of damp cement and engine oil.
The goods were at the back behind a locked, metal-plated door: half a dozen slatted wooden crates with the shipping details pasted to their sides. Roger jemmied one open, tossed out a few handfuls of shredded paper, and held up a mask, a moonface carved in dark wood, with slitty eyes and a toothless mouth, good-natured and foolish.
Something stirred in Simeon’s head, in that corner of it where his work began. He made a show of examining the mask, inside and out, with a connoisseur’s eye, and ran a critical fingertip over a hairline crack, while Roger scooped out more of the paper and stacked another four or five on the floor. He did not know exactly how many items there were in each crate and had no wish to unpack them to make a count. Take it or leave it.
While Simeon was speaking some others had drifted closer, Marge, Lorraine and Bheki, all of them sceptical and intent. His story faltered.
‘To cut a long story short,’ he said, ‘I had to have them, I couldn’t resist. I made him an offer.’
Silence for a moment, while the obvious rejoinder echoed in several minds. Then Leon: ‘How much?’
‘A couple of grand.’
‘For the lot?’
‘Per crate.’
‘How many in a crate?’
‘It varies.’
‘Do you know what these things are fetching on the street?’
‘Eighty bucks, a hundred bucks.’
‘And that doesn’t tell you something?’
‘Should it?’
‘Please. This whole sob story about Victor and his widow. The stuff’s obviously fallen off the back of a truck.’
‘I suppose it might have.’
‘You’re dealing in stolen property, you shit.’
‘I’m hardly dealing. Mind you, it’s quite a nice twist. If you consider how much African art has been swiped by the real dealers, the wheeler-dealers.’
‘I’m sorry, you’ll have to explain. How is this different?’
‘I’m an African, for one thing.’
‘You mean you’re black.’
‘That’s not what I said.’
‘This Roger,’ James butted in, ‘the seller, the fence – he was an African too.’
‘I’ll bet he wasn’t a bloody Malawian though,’ said Leon.
‘The whole business is probably a front.’
The Exploded View Page 8