I was often there, in the dean’s office. I was preparing for the next session of the symposium that was to follow the one held at Saint-Paul-de-Vence, to which I wanted rn bring a more North American tone. Newborn and still lacking confidence, the university was prepared to lay out plenty of money in an attempt to make a name for itself in leading-edge studies. The guaranteed presence of Bruno Farinacci-Lepore would help us recruit other prestigious participants, in particular from New York. Montreal’s tight little contemporary art world was simmering with excitement. The meeting would take place in June again, at Cité du Havre, where the curators of the Musée d’art contemporain, renowned for preferring international chitchat over works of art, would consent to emerge from their lethargy and offer, for once, a look at Quebec’s avant-garde. The sculpture garden would be extended down to the St. Lawrence and the site transformed into an open-air artists’ studio. The Port of Montreal would offer an ideal background, with its raw ugliness, its vacant lots and blind buildings. We would not be in New France, I didn’t want prettiness.
During that academic year I lived like a monk; I had to finish my thesis, young teaching assistants trained in the U.S. were already showing up with their PhDs. I was a star in the department, because of the sole publication devoted to art and the rumour that was spreading about my European summer, but my lead was frail.
Marianne lost her husband in December, she’d had time to love him a little and above all to admire his stoicism in the midst of suffering, which had been hideous. Cancer makes the strongest men scream and he had barely moaned. I dropped by to take my leave of him on the eve of his death. I regretted not having known him. All that was left of him was the voice, which he moistened with water sipped through a straw, no longer able to hold a glass. He was naked save for the loincloth — a diaper, the skin on his long bones was the skin of birth, of the first helplessness. I was looking death in the face for the first time, and without fear. He talked about the children he’d have liked to have, about how time is unravelling over Quebec, about the impasse. He was utterly engrossed in a tomorrow he would never see. I was astonished. But not now. The only life that interests me today is the one that is preparing to break away from me. I shall resemble that dead man who is still slightly present, I’ll be blind, I am told, but do not fear. A slow death brings a state of grace to the living.
The winter was grey then and Marianne had nothing to do. From her husband she had learned about class, she was starting to have some, she had time to cultivate it, especially because it requires very little in this country to appear less of a parvenu than the Laurier Street regulars. She had an inheritance, she was tall and still beautiful, her son’s career in the art world was off to a good start, she learned how to entertain and often invited me. One evening I turned up with a Mexican historian passing through town, he was on his own in Montreal and I thought he was hilarious. Very handsome too, with black hair already turning grey, Inca eyes, a mixed-race complexion. I thought Marianne would like him, she thought I did. From some remarks she made the next day, I realized I could have told her about my nights with Bruno and she wouldn’t have blinked. Indeed, she even found it appealing to tolerate my unusual loves in her elegant way. She would prefer by far handsome, talkative boys to a girl from Mentana Street who would resemble her. I wasn’t there yet.
Bruno arrived two days before the symposium, Marianne put him up in a big room she had transformed into a black-and-white suite following my instructions. They went around together beginning on the first evening, she drove him to the mountain, he gave her his arm, in Montreal he was a copy of himself, he walked and lulled himself inside a huge dark brown pullover that was too hot and that had probably been knitted for Armani.
Once again I fell under the spell of his words when we visited artists’ studios. I believed I was doing the right thing by taking him first to see Jérémie Wells, who had been one of the first to grasp the importance of photography in the return to representative art, which was just now taking off in the United States. Not very gifted as a painter, Jérémie had transformed his atelier into a darkroom and photography studio. To it he brought female beggars whom he’d warm up for a few hours and he’d pay them a few dollars: they posed for him nude in surrealistic settings that he built himself. The folds of their bellies were extended into the gathers of the velvet, their cracked sexes gave birth to orchids, the breasts hung more flaccid still beneath rivers of pearls. They had eyes closed in dreams, and the smiles of schizophrenics. Sometimes he would photograph only his setting, overprinting in the margins bits of their flesh, slabs of a back, of buttocks that resembled beaches.
Bruno questioned him with fierce intensity. First about his techniques, then about his relations with his models and about the meaning of his work. Jérémie replied at length, he thought he was taking human contradictions to their logical conclusion, by making of old age and poverty a form of pornography and by trying to sell to the rich his mockery of their wealth. “As a designer excellent, as a thinker worthless,” decreed Bruno as soon as the door was shut. There was enough for a book in what he told me about the relationship between art and poverty. Up to the nineteenth century it had been painted in the smiling colours of genre scenes or sacred art, then it moved on to the pure illustration of the tragic. But we were now at the frontier of the direct exploitation of the misery of others, of its production for the purposes of provocation, basically mercantile. “From the poor one steals even their grime,” he said. I was discovering his moral side and it made me admire him all the more.
In the industrial building that had become a congregation of artists, he had a few minutes for each of them, but to my delight he lingered over Charlene Lemire, a tiny woman with huge eyes who was striving to create on her smooth canvas those ghostly effects that raise you up inexplicably from a fear more physical than anguish. Today she would give no further explanations, not even for the famous Farinacci-Lepore. She told him all kinds of nonsense, said she’d found the texture of the ghost in cheesecloth and her fringes in the fur of an afghan hound that had, she thought, the eyes of Lucifer. She enjoyed herself, she thought she was outside the master’s game. She asked about Italy, prided herself on being a better cook than any Italian woman, thanks to the teaching of her Sicilian neighbour and her own research.
And that was how the greatest international art critic came to Cartier Street, climbed a curving outdoor staircase, bringing several bottles of a great wine that bore the label of Quebec’s Liquor Board, and entered the Quebecitude of art. All evening Charlene made him laugh, telling him how she paid her rent by teaching gouache to charitable ladies, and about her recent fierce battles with her closest friends to obtain a thousand-dollar grant and a two-week stay in France, in a shared studio outside Paris where she slept on a sofa and only barely had running water, which made her unkempt and hence desirable to her neighbour, a superior Frenchman who believed he was granting the grace of his body to a poor little thing from the colonies. Her paintings had ended up for a month in the cultural centre of Rueil-Malmaison, which attracted neither Le Monde nor Artpress. But she finally had a European line in her CV. It fills the horizon, it is the vanishing point for Quebec art, which was born at the wrong latitude. Charlene made fun of my own European line, remembered she’d known me as a stammering junior lecturer before I became a master and professor who now spoke about my own European line. She added up my sacrifices: I wore pure cotton shirts instead of T-shirts, I slept under uncomfortably hot down, I drank bitter coffee without sugar, I forced myself to read Lacan and to stay thin like a French intellectual. Only too happy to add it to the list, I talked about the sole publication devoted to art, which was going downhill, and about the despicable acts its editor would agree to in order to have Bruno write something for it, which he promised to do by making Charlene a star.
At coffee time, he became gloomy. Even with his blessing, he said, Charlene would go nowhere. She should have gone to live elsewhere
, though in any case elsewheres welcome only the Jérémie Wellses, because there is a destiny in art that irrevocably crosses borders and is the only thing that counts. “This is the era of the cold, the calculated, the universal, there is no reason to shy away from it.” And that was why, if he were to add a zest of Montreal to his papers once he was back in Bracciano, he would say something fairly elliptical so as to sound positive about Jérémie Wells. “You’ll frame the article and use it as a dart board or a conceptual piece.” His job was to predict the direction art would take in future, he was a meteorologist, it earned him a superb living and enabled him to travel. He would sometimes encounter a jewel among the frauds and celebrate that, but he never went against the current.
We drank more wine, in silence, on the candlelit balcony. Across the street, a fat woman sat rocking in her chair. Bruno did not touch me, I could hear his slow breathing, a cat stretching, domesticated. “Quebec is a balcony on Cartier Street, Charlene, and we won’t leave it.” I did not think I’d said it out loud. But she heard.
I slept with Bruno for the rest of the night, under my mother’s roof. She had set three places for breakfast.
From that day I became François Dubeau, master of the balcony. I left the sole publication devoted to art and started Parallèle. The correspondence with Farinacci-Lepore brought both grants and the friendship of the young art historians who were beginning to take over the museums, and also the international influence that sells two or three copies to Quebeckers passing through the bookstore in the Musée d’art moderne in Paris. We never had as many as five hundred readers but we claimed two thousand, counting unsold copies and those sent free to government bureaucrats, journalists, and our counterparts around the world. I edited it for five years, then turned it over to a submissive assistant who was better at public relations.
It gave me pleasure, Vitalie. What I told you about that world was too often only the ridiculous, the petty, the pathetic. But that can be enjoyable when one has come up from insignificance. In art there is a clearing, a picnic ground between the birches, where young people lunch sur l’herbe, stripping themselves bare, while their parents go back to work again on Mondays, and all around them the city rumbles, consuming the last of their childhood friends who populate the suburbs. Gaining entry to that clearing, drinking there the sour wine of vernissages and sharing the tables at which freedom is being drawn, means entering into fear. Fear of losing oneself again, of losing everything, of finding oneself at noon ‘wearing a necktie, crossing the esplanade of Place Ville-Marie, of being wary of pigeons, of going to a place where nothing happens.
Then the young people close the pen behind them, they plant pickets, defend themselves against newcomers, and attach themselves to the master who is able to alleviate their great fear.
I played the part, taking as my model Bruno, who had guided me to the clearing. I took my first male lover openly in the village of Les Éboulements, below an inn, the Auberge des Aïeux, where the first Symposium de la jeune sculpture was being held during raspberry season, above the St. Lawrence. I had agreed to chair it during the summer vacation, to re-create a little of Sarzanello. There was the same slope down to the sea and the same cows in the meadow, as well as a steeply inclined street where a blacksmith for tourists stood in for the goose-boy. The inn had not yet been enlarged into motels, the rooms were cells and each two shared a tiny bathroom. Jean-Pierre Daigle entered one naked just as I was getting into the shower, he apologized for not having heard me, he was slim and brown and smiling, with eyes that drill into the groin as they focus there unabashedly. I didn’t move. But late that afternoon I stopped close to him, he was working at the southern edge of the property, just above the thin forest that went down to Saint-Joseph-de-la-Rive. He was starting work on a steel-and-wood latticework whose foundations were enough to imprison you. I dropped my hand onto his shoulder as I questioned him. He was wearing a thin tank-top and my finger ran under the strap, two or perhaps three of his friends noticed, they slowed down their work I think, the sound of files and sanders seemed to me to diminish. We climbed up the entire site standing very close to one another, then we went and played in a bedroom where the sun, still high, did not enter. I opened the window, he leaned out, standing with his back to me, I hoped his panting could be heard down on the terrace where the artists were beginning to gather for the daily discussion. His sculptor’s hands were not yet callused, he tasted of summer and wood and steel, he was the furthest thing from a virgin and he used those hands particularly well. I allowed myself to be venerated, nothing is easier once you’re naked and consenting.
Jean-Pierre taught me the advantage of loving that is rapid, silent, unembarrassed. He hung out at the baths. Half an hour later we were ensconced in wicker chairs, some twenty of us debating the use of biodegradable materials in permanent installations. Did the work of art unmake or remake itself? I remember a tall Jacinthe who saw a prohibition there because of a question of ethics. “It would be deceiving those who look at the work,” she kept saying. Jean-Pierre shrugged, pointing to the old ladies who were already preparing for the six o’clock dinner sitting in the big room lit up like a boarding-house. “They’ll see your work and they’ll think it’s shit. In our societies it’s the professional objectifier who sees art as biodegradable.” I thought he was predictable and rather pompous, but the others were already listening to him with a hint of reverence. By now they all knew what had gone on in room 13.
I settled into my character. It seems despicable to you but it’s not. There are certain circles in Montreal where a person can survive only by making himself the author of his own double. Long-haired, bespectacled, and slim, he eats phony croissants, skims a newspaper that takes itself for Le Monde, has lunch in a bistro that has no bar, reads the great public thinkers of Paris and rewrites them for a subsidized publisher, talks in the accents of cinema vérité thereby creating for himself, in the end, an oasis in this city that will never be much more than a Minneapolis that speaks French.
When I closed the door to my renovated duplex on Rockland Avenue, I was holding a scrap of happiness that was not so idiotic. And not so false. The light was blue, like the cat. He had started out as a pussycat, like all the tabbies that used to get run over on Mentana Street or were tortured in the lanes, he was as dumb as all dumb creatures and as warm to the touch, now he has flabby flanks like all castrated tomcats. But with his long hair the shade of melancholy, he is also Persian and makes you feel that you are stroking the thousand and one nights recounted by someone you know. He became my friend, a reincarnation of Flaubert who hung out in the sleazy bars of the Orient to escape the town-square of suburban Rouen, which he turned into the Croisset. I bought everything by Flaubert, but didn’t read much, I knew him and he reassured me too, a genius born of tardy pox, of a thread of talent, and of his mother’s boeuf miroton. He could have grown up in Pare Laurier and become a schoolteacher.
Unlike Bruno, I acquired paintings and objects to place under the light. I bought what spoke to me. Most people who came to my house looked at nothing. They were afraid of saying the wrong thing in the presence of a masterpiece, or they took the terror in Betty Goodwin’s work for a drawn story. The rare questions had to do with the seven of hearts in the bathroom, which is a joke. A student print, hung there to mask a bulge in the wall that would have cost too much to repair. I invented a kind of cabal — I who believe only in what I can touch — and they wondered if a spell would fall on my seventh lover, though they could not know who the seventh was. To tell the truth, I hadn’t counted them, not all of them entered my oasis.
And truth to tell, Vitalie, I believed that I loved boys. I believed it because of a strong crush I had, an affair that never was. He was a teacher in a Sept-Îles high school, he had written me a long letter describing his attempts to introduce contemporary art into an unwilling environment. To the principal, a Borduas looked like the spots on a cow from poor stock, that was not unusual, b
ut worse, the president of the parent-teacher association had inherited a Marc-Aurèle Fortin from the hideous years when the painter was blind and would paint boats and wooden shacks from memory for his jailers. The lady had been told that her faded watercolour was worth fifteen hundred dollars and she insisted on offering it, from a purely didactic concern, as an example of avant-garde art, since the broad brush strokes of the dying artist made practically no distinction between boat and shack. Before he jumped in the river with a Roussil sculpture around his neck, said my correspondent, would I accept an invitation to meet the gentleman and the lady, capitalizing on my titles and passing myself off as his friend? He had a French buddy, at sea in the kitchen of the local Greek restaurant, who was already offering me a pizza guaranteed edible and some good wine that would make the journey from his cellar under the counter. I found him amusing, I’d never seen Sept-Îles, it was January, the students were getting on my nerves. I took the bus, I saw Quebec turn from grey to white while I read, incognito, Yves Thériault on the great open spaces. I had decided all at once to round out my national culture.
Genest was less attractive than his name, but even funnier than his letter. He decked me out in a tuque so I wouldn’t look like a lunatic in the thirty-below weather, and a tie so the gentleman and the lady, whom he suspected of doing it on the cushions in the gym after PTA meetings, would believe in my doctorate without my having to flaunt it. We worked together on the relationship between Marc-Aurèle Fortin and Borduas, actually bringing in bovine genetics to show that decomposition does indeed lead to abstraction, which is itself merely a manifestation of the landscape as a philosopher might present it. Contemporary painting, I was to explain, is a stand-in for the words of the philosophers. It does without images that are too harsh, it gets to the essence of things and so is accessible only to those who are discerning enough to perceive its music without being shown a picture.
Affairs of Art Page 6