by Sara Baume
You can’t dance to paintings. This is something Ben said, during one of our White Cube conversations, back when I was still wrong about him. He said it even though, at the time, he was desperately trying to be a painter. He said it because it was true and not because it was something either of us wanted to hear.
The bus driver plays the radio. On the talking station, they are discussing how new pieces of the missing aeroplane are being found every day. Thrown by the sea to the shore, beaching like pilot whales. The wife of a man who went down with the flight tells the story of how their little boy begged his father not to leave on the morning it crashed, to stay behind and play with him instead. His Lego on the living room rug. Hundreds and hundreds of tiny, indented blocks. While other little boys carry home the beached pieces of the missing aeroplane and stick them to their bedroom walls between the posters of football players and Luke Skywalker.
I lean my head against the window. I bump-bump-bump and try to, but do not, sleep.
The road ahead is lined with strange structures. Some of them are definitely public sculptures, but with others, I’m not so sure. A billboard displaying torn and stapled paper fragments: art? Concrete steps up a grassy verge leading to nowhere: art?
I think: art is everywhere. I think: art is every inexplicable thing.
It was March. It was March and I was so bored to death of being alone in my bedsit. The winter, at last, was beginning to wane. Sometimes there were sunny spells and I’d take my book to the park. In my coat and scarf I’d sit on a wooden bench and drink the cold sun, the wind turning my pages for me.
The park was perfectly square with wrought-iron railings and ornate Victorian street lamps which didn’t actually work. There were tall, brick-faced houses on every side. Stone steps rose to the front doors, which were painted brilliant yellow and red and green. I never knew for sure whether the park was meant solely for the residents of those houses. There weren’t any signs to indicate it was private and nobody ever asked me to leave, but the time I spent there was always shadowed by doubt, by the wavering suspicion that I was trespassing.
It was the day before I lay down on my carpet and couldn’t get up again until I knew my mother was coming.
I bought a hot chocolate from the Italian deli which I passed on the short walk between my bedsit and the park. It came with a paper case of chocolate buttons balanced on the lid. They’d melted into warm, brown goo before I reached my bench. I sat down, licked chocolate from paper, opened my book. Every other person was only passing through. With shoulder bags, briefcases or apartment-sized, hypoallergenic dogs—dogs who believed that nature was that square of lawn, that freedom was the five metres afforded by their extendable leash.
I remember the book I was reading. Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector. I remember because there were so many things in Hour of the Star with which I found kinship that I’d brought along a stub of pencil in case I urgently needed to underline. With my hot chocolate, my open book, my pencil stub, the bench was a delicate accommodation of elements, small plates spinning on tall sticks, and so I was especially reluctant to move when an old man sat down heavily beside me.
Moving away is my instinctive reaction. I would never impose myself on a stranger’s bench, and if I were to find every single one in the whole square park occupied, I’d sit on the ground rather than share. But on this occasion, I remained as I was. Because of the balance, but also because I felt sorry for the man, who was certainly lonely; why else would he choose the park’s only already-occupied bench? And sure enough, within the space of seconds, he asked me what I was reading.
I answered, then closed Clarice, placed her aside. I decided I would stay and sup to the bottom of my chocolate, to talk to him for just a while. I could tell he didn’t really care about books, so I steered us towards topics we were likely to have in common. The locality and its ‘gentrification’—which he had observed and I had arrived with; the rain. We pointed out signs of spring to one another. The leaves returning to the plane trees, the crocus buds up but yet to open. Was I curious about his life; did I want to touch it? Or was I being, uncharacteristically, kind? I can’t remember. We talked about what sort of summer might be in store, what sort of summers had gone before. And as soon as there was nothing left to coax through the sippy-cup lid of my cardboard cup, I gathered my elements, made my excuses, and left.
It wasn’t until I was again alone, walking the short distance home, that I realised I had told this strange, large man where I lived, or at least the street name and that it was a bedsit, surely enough to find me, if he wanted to find me. I realised I’d told him that I was single, that I lived alone.
Was I supposed to be afraid? I did not even know whether or not I was supposed to be afraid.
I didn’t go directly home. I walked instead to the DVD store and stood paralysed in the Documentaries aisle, combing back through the conversation in my mind for traces of menace, of indecency. Eventually I returned to my bedsit, and sat by the window, and twitched the net curtain like an old woman.
It was what made me feel so suddenly and inexplicably bad; the source from which the huge and crushing sorrow rose. Not the penguin in Encounters at the End of the World, the DVD I watched that evening, which struck the bottom of the deposit box with a hollow, rebarbative clonk when I returned it the following day. I have only wanted to believe it was the deranged penguin because this is a better reason for being inconsolable, a so-much-more interesting and complicated and quixotic thing to be disturbed by than the banal reality. Than attack, rape, murder. I have only wanted to believe it was the deranged penguin so I can consequently believe it is possible for me to be driven mad by concern for some creature other than myself.
I pull the bus curtain, and find it is huge, and so, I wrap myself up, cover my shoulders, neck, face. Like a child in a ghost costume at Halloween. Even though there is a NO SMOKING sticker right beside it on the glass, it smells like cigarette smoke, like my dad leaning against the kitchen sink way back when I was still slightly afraid of him. Now I wonder what happened to that man from the bench in the perfectly square park in March. Did he ever seek out the street where I used to live, and hide in the suburban shrubbery, and watch to see which door I would emerge from?
Of course he didn’t. Of course he was only as I first thought. Lonely, harmless, bored. He forgot me as surely as I cleared the park gates, as pacifically as I ought to have forgotten him.
The bus driver pulls into a lay-by and we pile out and queue for the toilets, for coffee, for chips.
The sun setting. Rush-hour traffic thundering along the motorway, as if there might be a hurricane or typhoon or rogue wave closing in behind. I linger at the edge of the car park, waiting for the almighty wind or water to appear. And here is a badger curled on the hard shoulder. Of course. I put down my paper bag and cup. I take out my camera and lie in the road.
Black blood bubbles elegantly from its nostrils; it must be only newly dead. Cars pass so fast, their wind blows my eyelashes back to the sockets. It causes the badger’s dense, monochrome fur to divide and swirl. It is of such great size and heft that it must have felt, to the driver who hit it, like knocking down a small child.
It is so utterly the end of summer. Back down the motorway in the direction from which I have travelled, there is a small tree standing solo on the horizon, and it waves its branches weakly against the whited-out sky.
The badger is magnificent, and so I lie beside it, cheek against tarmac, the smell of oil and dust and beast. I take picture after picture. A final showdown of concern for a creature other than myself. Until the bus driver sticks his head out the window to shout at me.
I am holding everybody up.
On the night boat, I find a quietish spot in the corner of the bar. I buy a pot of tea and scrunch myself into a seat beside my plastic bag. With my sneakers kicked off, I see my socks are from two different pairs. Though they are both black, the left is more vibrant than the right, its cotton-enriched polyeste
r distinctly thicker. The engine starts to shudder, somewhere deep below the night-boat bar, a gurgling of mechanical guts. There is an enormous TV mounted on the wall, visible even from my quietish corner, though there is no sound; the jukebox drowns it out. The presenters on the 24-hour news channel mouth along, defectively, to classic pop tracks from the eighties.
Out the windows on the opposite side of the bar, open sea has appeared. Out mine but behind me, Dublin thins to a stripe of lights laid along the shoreline, a queue with no particular destination.
I think: goodbye city-which-broke-me, bungalow-scarred-midlands, car-abandoned-in-alleyway.
Goodbye turbine hill.
At home to the sea. Even though the sea is not my home, and never has been.
Mum. I write inside my phone with only my thumb. Don’t freak out but I’m on a boat. I just can’t open my eyes tomorrow morning to that same patch of ceiling I open my eyes to every morning. I promise I’ll let you know, every day I’m alive, that I’m alive. I know it’s stupid to say please don’t worry about me, but please don’t worry about me. Please worry about you. Please don’t worry at all. Please stop all the worrying and just enjoy the slow stars, the leaf noises.
When I was small, I became paranoid that my mother would die. That was the defining fixation, the source of every fixation to come. It made me perform all kinds of odd little actions, surreptitiously, over and over. I believed they were in exchange for keeping the person I loved most in the world alive. But I didn’t believe, not really. I was just, as with the cat, too frightened to put it to the test.
Why don’t I tell her about what happened in the bedroom in the dark? About the webs? Why do I blame the ceiling? The ceilings of my grandmother’s bungalow have never really offended me. Even though, now I come to think of it, they are all white. Every carpet is green; every wall is pastel; every ceiling is a blank.
I didn’t tell my mother about what happened because I already know it’s nonsense, that nothing happened at all. The spiders only forgot to repair the strands I broke the morning before, and there was no Jink. The Jink I thought I saw was my unfathomable light, my unfathomable light was my grandmother, and she showed herself, at last, in order that I could leave.
I press send. How can there possibly be a phone signal out at sea? But it seems to go, so I write another.
Mum, I write. What was the tree again? The morning Grannie died?
It’s late now, she is asleep. But the second message sends too. Her phone network is sympathetic, and I know my mother will be the same.
In the bar, people are beginning to lower their voices, to roll jumpers into makeshift pillows, to hoist their feet up. The excitement of sailing has worn off. The overpriced meals eaten, the cardboard coffee cups drained to gritty slosh, the pint glasses left standing empty but for a petticoat of froth. The lights go low, the passengers nod off.
The 24-hour news keeps playing, as does the jukebox. The screen shows a toy train on a toy railway track. Puffing toy steam. Rushing, rushing. But the landscape it rushes through is life-sized; the tracks it rushes along stretch for human miles and human miles. I can’t figure it out and the TV is too far away for me to read the scrolling text which might explain it.
I give up on sleep, gather my plastic bag, get up from my seat to search for a deck.
Out in the air, pressing my cheek to the railings, there is a perfect path of brightness from the precise point where I am standing directly to the moon across the empty water. A moon blue as the sea, the night sky blue as a wet rook. I tilt my head down to the spume, hold my breath and wait for something terrific to surface. A tail fin, a mermaid, a Portuguese man-of-war. I watch so hard for so long, until my vision begins to disseminate, until, from foam and blue and will alone, I might see anything at all—anything I want to see.
I remember the timber-screw-box in my pocket. I lift it out and gift it to the spume. Plop. A blob of paint from the mouth of the tube. Splash. A tiny concentration of colour blown apart, of grey. My grandmother.
Works about the Marvellous, I test myself: Bas Jan Ader, his final artwork.
In 1975, Jan Ader cast off from the harbour at Cape Cod, Massachusetts. His intention was to sail single-handedly across the Atlantic in a yacht smaller than any other ever to have crossed it before, as a work of performance art. After three weeks, radio contact broke off. After ten months, his wrecked boat was spotted drifting approximately one hundred and fifty miles off the south-west coast of Ireland, and hauled to land by a Spanish trawler. The artist’s body was never found.
Some of the people close to Jan Ader insisted that it was a tragic accident, that he had always intended to reach Europe, to return home. Others said it was unquestionably suicide.
Bas Jan Ader didn’t do happy endings.
The artist’s title for this work: In Search of the Miraculous.
My phone springs. Even though my mother is surely asleep.
Oh Frankie, she says. I think it was an oak.
Back in the bar, I find my seat still empty, and am finally beginning to fall asleep when I see, on the 24-hour news channel, through my half-closed lids, tribesmen. Naked but for painted faces, armed but with their spears lowered. They are walking out of the rainforest. I jump up and my bag thumps to the ground. I hurry closer to the screen, in order to make out the scrolling text. These men are from the last ‘uncontacted’ tribe, it says. The same tribe photographed trying to attack a low-flying aircraft which crossed the Amazon earlier this year.
I remember.
The tribespeople are sick and hungry, the scrolling text says, slowly dying. In the undergrowth behind them, a path has been channelled by their emergence, a line made by walking.
Out of the rainforest. Ambling in faulty time to, mouthing imperfectly along with ‘Blue Monday’ by New Order. Waddling, stumbling, waddling.
Casting off the uncontainable vastness, stepping into the known world.
Works about Trees, I test myself, the final test, I promise. Joseph Beuys, 7000 Oaks. The first planted in Kassel in 1982. The mission to plant seven thousand, each coupled with a basalt standing stone, four foot high. A symbolic beginning, predetermined to continue through time, across continents. And so it did, does. Italy, America, England, Ireland, Norway, Australia. After Beuys had stopped planting them for himself, after he died.
The oaks which grow. The stones which don’t.
Art, and sadness, which last forever.
Author’s Note
In these pages, many works of visual art from many different artists and eras have been named and outlined. I want to make clear that these are described as the narrator remembers and perceives them; they are interpreted according to Frankie. I urge readers to seek out, perceive and interpret these artworks for themselves.
List of Artworks
1 ROBIN
Bas Jan Ader, Fall I, Los Angeles, 1970.
Bernard Moitessier, 1925–1994.
Yves Klein, Leap into the Void, 1960.
Erik Wesselo, Düffels Möll, 1997.
On Kawara, the Today series, ongoing from the 1960s through to 2013.
the I Am Still Alive series, ongoing throughout the 1960s and 70s.
Mona Hatoum, Entrails Carpet, 1995.
Helen Phillips, Moon, 1960.
Guido van der Werve, Running to Rachmaninoff, annual performance which began in 2010.
2 RABBIT
Tracey Emin, My Bed, 1998.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled, 1991.
Cai Guo-Qiang, Project for Extraterrestrials, series throughout 1990s.
3 RAT
Anya Gallaccio, preserve ‘beauty’, 1991–2003.
Mona Hatoum, Recollection, 1995.
L. S. Lowry, The Irwell at Salford, 1947.
Cornelia Parker, Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, 1991.
Cory Arcangel, Drei Klavierstücke, op. 11. 2009.
Bas Jan Ader, Fall II, Amsterdam, 1970.
Marco Evaristti, Helena, 2000.
; Jan Dibbets, Robin Redbreast’s Territory Sculpture, 1969.
Vincent van Gogh, Wheatfield with Crows, 1890.
4 MOUSE
Vito Acconci, Step Piece, 1970.
The Leeds 13, Going Places, 1998.
René Magritte, The Treachery of Images, 1929.
William Anastasi, Constellation Drawings, a series from the 1960s.
Allora & Calzadilla, Half Mast/Full Mast, 2010.
Gillian Wearing, 10–16, 1997.
Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance, 1978–79.
Hermann Nitsch, Orgien Mysterien Theater, a series of performances and ‘actions’ beginning 1962.
Sir John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851–52.
5 ROOK
Stanley Brouwn, This way brouwn, 1960–64.
Vito Acconci, Following Piece, 1969.
6 FOX
On Kawara, I Got Up, 1968–79.
Xu Zhen, In Just a Blink of an Eye, 2005–07.
Tim Hawkinson, Bird, 1997.
Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document, 1973–79.
Lin Yilin, Safely Maneuvering across Lin He Road, 1995.
Peter Friedl, The Zoo Story, 2007.
Rudolf Schwarzkogler, 1940–1969.
Atsuko Tanaka, Electric Dress, 1956.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Toronto), 1992.
7 FROG
Ger van Elk, The Flattening of the Brook’s Surface, 1972. William Anastasi, Free Will, 1968.
Christian Marclay, The Clock, 2010.
Jennifer Dalton, What Does an Artist Look Like? (Every Photograph of an Artist to Appear in The New Yorker, 1999–2001), 2002.