Or Radical realism by Anna Leov of the University of New Hampshire. The New Deal democratisation of culture, art ‘for the people’ and abstraction in the murals of Maxine Albro.
She likes Anna. Two years ago they had spent a sunny afternoon wandering about San Francisco rather than attending the 2 p.m. session, both feeling a little giddy, the bad kids at the back of the class bunking off to head downtown. They had escaped into the brilliant Pacific light that saturated this strangely familiar mirror-image of Wellington. The houses had exactly the same air of flimsy bravado, poised above another weak joint in the earth’s frail crust like a reckless rabble of Edwardian great-aunts: former actresses with a defiant maquillage of primary colours on soffit and window frame, barge board and door. Just hanging on and hoping for the best.
Anna had been seated next to Clare in the back row of another conference room, listening to another fast-talking, demonstrably brilliant young theoretician deliver a post-Foucaultian analysis of a utopia of Facebook, YouTube and six billion co-creators. He was tattooed and bare skulled and clad in fashionable black, tongue and mind rattling at machine-gun speed as he cleared the trenches of the old battalions and prepared to occupy them himself. Clare watched him dispassionately from the back row: a middle-aged woman, so far out of the loop, so terminally irrelevant now with her quaint old-fashioned feminism, so unfuckable finally, that he could afford to ignore her and her cohort completely. The ones he wanted to impress were the silverbacks who held the keys to promotion and a place at a more prestigious university. Clare Lacey from Canterbury fell far beneath his radar.
He’d do all right, she thought, watching him chatter, his entire body explosive with seduction. He had achieved just the right degree of androgynous appeal: youthfully masculine enough to bed the young women, but with a hint of sexual ambiguity, a tantalising air of dangerous unpredictability. Demonstrably well grounded in a classical training, which he could reference effortlessly, while dazzlingly familiar with the zeitgeist, that nebulous Second Life that existed beyond the walls of the conference room with its transitory customs and language that older academics might refer to, perhaps, but without that hint of easy intimate acquaintance. Posh enough not to make a nuisance of himself in the common room, common enough to lend a feral whiff of the street.
He was judging it perfectly. He attacked, but managed to convey that his rebuttal of the work of older academics was a sign of serious regard: they were worth his fire. It was in a way a kind of compliment to be singled out for his criticism. He got the deference right too, choosing his heroes well, so that to be elected to his pantheon of older-men-worth-quoting might also seem something to aspire to. They leaned back, preparing to slap him about a little during question time just to keep him in his place a year or two longer, but there was an indulgent look in their eye. How like them he was! How like him they once had been!
When they were young, they had been filled with that same passion. They too had bedded the women or seduced the men, fired their salvos, taken out the dull eminences before them. They too had lived as bare-chested warriors in the academic badlands. Back in the glory days, before the territory was contested by women and the rules wavered. Public ridicule and attack had made life a little awkward for a while. They had had to be careful. Even the ones who seemed acquiescent could suddenly turn on you and make an embarrassing fuss.
But all that was gone now. The women had got what they presumably wanted: careers and heart attacks, and an office next door to the photocopier with a view of the carpark. A few had squeezed through to real power. But the storm had passed. The young women, thank god, seemed a more peaceable lot. They were really quite attractive in their certainty of success.
The older men watched the young man with a pleasant sense of recognition and guarded approval. And tucked away, deep in the self-protective primary cortex, was a tiny flicker of anxiety, because this young man was not merely their past but their future. In no time at all, he would be running the show and he could, once in a position to do so, make life most uncomfortable. Young men like this one did not simply look like young gods. Sometimes they behaved like them too. Redundancy and early retirement could be the twin thunderbolts flourished in his raised hands. The older men watched him closely, assessing their chances under his inevitable regime. How much time would he give them, once he had their time at his disposal? How far could they let him run now, without restraint? And if they did slap him here, pointing out a couple of flaws and oversights in his dynamic argument, when might he return and deliver his riposte? When and how might he reduce them to dust?
The young man was onto Magnetic Resonance Imaging and its migration to the atelier amid a welter of scientific detail, musical sampling and cross-modal reference, when the alarm sounded.
For a split second the art historians assumed the shrilling to be part of the performance, but the young man was ahead of them. Like some pixillated action man he abandoned the future for the present and leapt from the podium for the exit door, and, as one, the audience rose to follow. For now they were no longer diverted, they were aware suddenly of some alien taint to the air in the windowless room, some unfamiliar acrid odour that was flowing along with the oxygen through the ducts above their heads. It caught in the throat and made the eyes water. And as soon as the door opened, a grey billow rolled in as if it had been waiting politely and silently on the other side for just this moment to gain admission.
And then the power went out and the room was plunged into darkness. In the darkness the art historians fumbled for their bags, they removed their spectacles, they struggled awkwardly from tiers of fold-down seating and, breathing lightly, they filed out into the corridor.
Emergency lights illuminated a bleary path at ankle height leading towards the stairs and safety, fifteen stories down. Not, thank god, eighty. For seared into the collective memory was the man diving like a doomed angel from the burning tower, arms clamped to his sides in a perfect trajectory toward death on a New York sidewalk. The horror of that, the terror that this might be the dread moment when an ordinary day becomes the time of fire or gas attack or the spores of disease filtering through the air ducts. The fear that this place might be the place of earthquake, pestilence and fire that signalled the end of all things familiar, all things loved, where there is nothing left but that free fall through empty air to annihilation. Fifteen floors might not be eighty, but it is enough, should this be the time when they will be forced to make that leap.
The alarm shrills and pulses as the narrow corridors fill with people, all moving steadily with elaborate self-restraint toward the sign marking the exit. They keep their heads lowered, they shuffle forward. They do not speak. They emerge onto a staircase, already crowded with others tramp tramp tramping down the metal treads, their feet ringing on architecture. Through the windows, down below on the street, there is the flicker of emergency lights. Out here in the stairwell there is no smoke, just the rhythmic ringing of shoes on metal, echoing up fifteen floors. Civilisation maintains its stern grip. No one shoves anyone else aside. No one makes a run for it, headlong for safety. Instead they move in a single phalanx steadily down toward solid earth and at last they burst forth from a side door onto a patch of scuffed brown grass between the building and a carpark.
And ah! The beauty of that grass, with its litter of cigarette stubs amid the dust, its dead twigs fallen from a scraggy eucalyptus. Ah! The scent of its leaves. And ah! the fragrance of cooking oil from the kitchen vents and the bouquet of petroleum exhaust from the nearby street! How good it is to feel a cool spring breeze ruffling the hair!
It was after all, a minor call. A faulty microwave in the secretarial coffee room on the fourteenth floor, a containable conflagration, some charred furniture, some smoke and water damage. Nothing to be especially concerned about. The art historians stood about in little groups dwarfed by the company of men in bulky firesuits who strode about ensuring that the problem had indeed been little more than an explosion of two-minute
noodles and it would be safe to re-enter the building.
Relief made the art historians voluble. They chattered like starlings in city trees, stranger to stranger, all previous suspicion, all collegial competitiveness laid aside, subsumed by a sudden sense of shared vulnerable humanity. They stood about describing previous encounters with fear and miraculous escapes: aeroplane tyres that burst on take-off from Reykjavik. Terrifying descents through hurricane weather in Trinidad. The moment when the vault of the Basilica at Assisi fell in only minutes after they had been standing beneath it to admire the frescoes.
They reached for the reassurance of ordinary comforts, exchanging the names of favourite restaurants in small Pyrenean villages, or a shared enthusiasm for the 1979 S-type Jaguar, or the exact route of a cycling trip through Mexico, or the wonder of a visit to Xi’an in 2003: all those rows of warriors standing to attention beneath the vast dome of earth. They talked giddily and a little too loudly, remembering with painful clarity children at home, the wife who had driven them to the airport, the dog lolloping across the lawn. Or a lover shrugging aside a farewell embrace. They took out cell phones and dialled familiar numbers, to hear that voice again, even if it were only voicemail, leave a message, beep. Or they looked about in the sunshine for other possibilities: warm skin, a compliant body, someone with whom they could spend that night, not alone in the hotel room but skin to a stranger’s skin, being alive and not after all diving head first, arms to the sides, in a perfectly poised trajectory toward death.
And gradually they calmed down. They laughed a little less loudly, touched one another a little less readily, regained their composure. They became ironic. ‘Terrorism by pot noodle!’ they said. How absurd! They shrugged on their customary public selves like an old familiar jacket and prepared to return to the interrupted conference.
Clare had been talking to a small dark woman with bouncy hair, an enormous shoulder-bag, oversize sunglasses and ridiculously high heels who had made no attempt to conceal her relief on release from the building. She had punched the air, yelled ‘Wahoo! We’re alive!’ then dragged Clare into a funny little jig on the worn grass. They had stood about with the others, exchanging names (Clare/Anna), place of origin (New Zealand/New York), general area of interest (contemporary New Zealand art/New Deal murals). And when one of the firemen announced that they were now free to reenter the building, Anna said, ‘Not me. What I need right now is a drink.’ And Clare did too. So they went downtown to one of those dark American bars, and sat on high stools and drank Manhattans so strong that Clare lost all contact with her feet. Anna knocked back another, then said that in her opinion the other thing you needed to do when you had been really frightened was to go and look at something beautiful. Clare, perched weightlessly on her stool, said, yes, that’s a great idea, let’s do that.
They emerged from the bar as if from a burrow. The street glowed: the traffic was bright and shiny, each car a brand-new toy. The great-aunt houses leaned together companionably, bearing one another up on the rollercoaster streets.
‘Okay,’ said Clare as the footpath jazzed about beneath her heels. ‘What shall we go and look at?’
‘Hope,’ said Anna. ‘Let’s go and look at beautiful hope.’
So they forgot the conference entirely and walked off up Powell Street among the shoppers and tourists, and the street people seated in sunny doorways or round the rim of the city fountains where they seemed not sad and dispossessed but as comfortably in possession of the city as Greek fisherman chatting on an island quay or Turkish farmers seated beneath the shade of olives in some tiny whitewashed village. The mad, the sick, the old, the addicted, the uninsurable, the ones who had lost their balance and fallen head first through thin air to find themselves on the tarmac of Union Square. Anna led her up through Chinatown with its lanterns and bottles full of wizened cures and dumpling shops, and over a busy road, and then she turned onto a steep hill with steps like a Wellington hill, and there was the tower.
Grey concrete rose among twisted macrocarpas that were at home here, sprawled in their natural habitat, and not the dark intruders on the New Zealand landscape that had begun as disciplined hedgerows then swelled to brooding giants. Here they framed a view of the sharp rectangles of the financial district and the gleaming bay with its little island, Alcatraz, looking in this spring sunshine like some medieval abbey on a pilgrim isle, some sweet walled village.
‘There,’ said Anna, spreading her arms expansively. ‘What do you think?’
The tower was tall and narrow, like a factory chimney with a fretwork top.
‘Nice,’ said Clare. ‘I like towers.’
‘The Coit Tower,’ said Anna. ‘A hundred and eighty feet of reinforced concrete, constructed in 1933 to commemorate Lillie Hitchcock Coit, strangely obsessive groupie of Knickerbocker Fire Engine Company Number 5 whom she accompanied for kicks on their callouts. City benefactor who left one hundred thousand dollars for the purpose of beautification. And this is what the city fathers came up with. Come on, I’ll show you round. This is my favourite place in the whole country, if not the world.’
She led the way up the wide shallow steps into the building, bouncing, voluble, her big bag getting in the way and nudging people.
‘Will you look at this!’ she said. The circular walls of the interior were covered in murals. Every inch was crammed with busy figures in angular Art Deco arrangements of pastel blues and greys and washed-out pink. Anna stood among the murals with her face uplifted in rapture. ‘Hope!’
Clare followed as Anna darted from image to image in the ambulatory surrounding a central room that had once served teas and now sold the usual range of souvenir tee shirts, coffee mugs and key rings.
Here’s Arnautoff’s panorama of 1930s American City Life, where the crowd mills about a newspaper kiosk. There’s a carpark full of Model Ts, a chauffeur in khaki, jackboots and cap, women in stumpy heels with upturned fur collars to their coats and their hair gathered back into plump bun or fashionable permanent. About them, the city’s skyscrapers tip at crazy angles.
And this is the work of Frede Vidar. The department store where girls are seated on stools at the soda fountain and workers with sufficient money in their pockets browse to purchase the products of fruitful industry.
And these long panels here, they’re the full-length portraits of the generators of this industry: the Scientist-Inventor dwarfing the curved dome of the observatory, the Surveyor and the heroic Steelworker. And over here, look: here’s the Stockbroker — and look there. His phone has a broken cord! Isn’t that a terrific detail?
And this is one of Anna’s favourites: Maxine Albro’s vision of a California where a woman in ankle-length polka dots gathers a sheaf of scarlet flowers, while another woman in white gathers lilies in a rich and golden land dotted with fruiting orange groves, an Eden of plenty. There is fruit and meat in abundance: links of crimson sausages and baskets of plump strawberries and a rack of marbled beef carcasses. The vision of a New Deal for the country’s citizenry, with food and work for all, painted by the artists of the Federal Art Project as the country raised its collective head from the turbid floodwaters of the Great Depression and spotted the glistening peaks of a promised land.
Anna walked about, eyes shining with delight in it all, pointing out the little alcoves painted on each panel that sometimes frame a real window with a view of the actual city below, and sometimes frame an imagined landscape where the light pours down like the light from heaven illuminating some Renaissance annunciation. She pointed out the socialist newspapers on the news stand and the way the man in the library scene is reaching for a copy of Das Kapital that lies just within his reach on a painted shelf.
‘It’s amazing that’s still here,’ she said. ‘They whitewashed out the portrait of Lenin that Diego Rivera painted on the Rockefeller Center, so these artists put all this stuff in as an act of solidarity. The city administrators came close to whitewashing them too, but in the end the only thing that got oblite
rated was a fresco of the struggle between Capitalism and Communism. This place really pisses some people. Still does. Bill O’Reilly on Fox — he invited al Quaeda to blow it up just a year ago. “You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go right ahead!” Ridiculous asshole. Don’t you just love it?’
‘Yes,’ said Clare, child of seventy years of a mild welfare state, fortunate beneficiary of free education, free health care and untroubled comfort in a small country where the vision might have flickered over the past couple of free-market decades but had yet to disappear completely beneath the whitewash. ‘I’d never heard of it before. It’s fantastic.’
Anna looked about her with satisfaction. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It is. The pure expression of hope. Sometimes this country drives me bananas. You know what I mean? You watch the television and you think, where am I living for god’s sake? Who are these people? What’s that bozo doing, taking us into Iraq? Why are there millions of people who can’t even get decent health care in the richest country on earth? It’s obscene. It’s embarrassing.’ Her voice became louder. It rang round the circular walls. People began to turn and stare. ‘I mean, how can we tolerate it? Then I come here and I think, well, maybe it’s not so bad. Maybe there are other people around who believe we can visualise something better. I mean, once the artist’s created the image, reality can follow, can’t it? Can’t it?’
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