by Helen Dewitt
And he was saying: You are the one with this special training, you must pick what you would work with, what they taught you to work with.
She said: I can’t.
He said: If I say something maybe it corrupts what you were taught.
She said: I can’t.
He said: OK, OK. Look, we take everything back with us, I don’t have time for this, when we get back you decide what you want to use.
He went to the saleswoman and he pointed to the back: Ich will alles verkaufen.
You could tell she was not used to customers who did not know German. You could tell Adalberto was not used to people who would not roll over and play dead if you would give them a lot of money.
She said: Kaufen, Adalberto. You are saying you want to sell everything.
In the fullness of time, said Adalberto. I will. But OK. Ich will alles kaufen, Madame.
But she couldn’t stand it, all this money sloshing around when she kept agonising about £600 for the studio, and where she would put the paintings if she could not pay the rent.
So she said: No. It’s stupid. There’s nowhere in the studio to put it all.
She said: Look, Adalberto, go away. Go for a walk. Go to a café. I can’t think with you standing there saying che brutto.
This was one of the luckiest things she ever did.
OK, said Adalberto. You’re the boss. I come back in an hour.
In Germany it is not like Britain, where you go into a shop and you ask for advice and they haven’t a clue. If you go to a building supply store the people working there will know all about the different grades of wood. If you go to a shop that sells beds the people working there will know all about the construction of the beds, and which beds are good for the back, and the beds are all really well built because people know what they’re doing. And if you go to a haberdashers the staff will know all about the different types of cloth, and the proper thread to use, and the proper zip to use with a particular weight of cloth, and if you try to buy the wrong thing they will be really strict. So it is holding back the economy because to get a certain sort of job you have to have had this training, but if you go into a shop they are knowledgeable. So Adalberto was the one who was so keen on this project but he was doing it in this impulsive Italian way which would never come out right, because to do it right, look, here was the shopkeeper who had been working in the trade since her teens, and Adalberto wanted to rely on the memory of someone who did an apprenticeship back in 1962.
So you have to love this about the Italians, that they are completely impulsive and unpredictable and inconsistent, and in the War they were not at all keen to exterminate the Jews, after the Germans occupied France Jews would go to Italy to escape the Vichy regime, and that is what you have to love about them. And if you look at Goethe, if you look at Germans who love the South, you see that is what they do love about it, that love of the moment.
But if you are going to do something properly you have to plan ahead or you will end up cutting the moment wrong. Then events will be all wrinkled and puckered.
She had brought the suit with her because if you are buying notions you can’t rely on memory. So now she brought it out of the bag and she explained that her friend wanted more like it, and maybe it would be quite hard because it was made in 1962. And then she told this little lie, because if she told the truth it would sound completely bonkers. She said she thought maybe he was making a movie and he wanted the costumes to be authentic. This would be something that a German would understand, that you would want the details to be correct.
The saleswoman looked at the suit. She said: Did you make this?
She said: Yes: a long time ago.
She had not been back to Germany since she left. After the years of hitchhiking she had gone to Britain, because if she would go to Germany she would kill herself. It was as if she had discontinued German, and then had to dig up a tube of it at the back of a cupboard.
The woman was looking at the suit, inspecting the workmanship and nodding and making little noises of appreciation. She said she thought she had something that would work.
She brought out this bolt of cloth that nobody would ever have picked up for something to wear. If you would make a suit in it the suit would last for a million years. It was this muddy olive green.
The woman said: Does he want different colours?
If you set out to make something ugly it is like setting out to make something beautiful, you will just end up with kitsch.
So she had to pretend she was just making some suits the way they used to make suits.
They had two kinds of grey, a navy blue, a dull mustardy tan, a black, two kinds of brown, and then the linings. There was a chest with 25 drawers, and on 5 of the drawers was a button. That was the selection of buttons. There were those metal zips that nobody uses any more.
You could see the shop had been there since before the War, so its fittings were unchanged. The chest of drawers for the buttons had remained unchanged, but production of buttons would have been suspended during the War, luxury buttons, and under the Communists this would not have been a high priority, the resumption of button production. After the Wall fell dressmaking would maybe not look sexy so the shop would not be rushing to expand. So there was something touching about the 5 buttons, it made you want to buy them, but to do the suit properly you would cover buttons in the same cloth, to show your skill.
And this was another thing that was quite old-fashioned, the shop had the linen that used to be used for the interface. It used to be you would use linen for the interface, and you would sew it in under the collar using these big stitches, basting, now they have an artificial material, and you can even iron it on, but in the east maybe they would be more conservative so this was this shop in 1992.
Adalberto came back. He looked at what was on the counter and he said OK, but we take the whole cloth because maybe they stop making it.
If the collar of a suit is to fall properly the inside, the underside has to be smaller than the outside. So you have to mould the cloth to shape it properly. There is a special stand of wood, with a wooden crossbar covered in padding, and you hang the jacket on it, and then you can work on it with an iron. It is not all sewing, there is a lot you can do with heat. But you need proper equipment. So they did not find this in Leipzig but they went to Berlin and bought one and it was a nightmare to get on the plane, but if you are flying first class they are more friendly and helpful, even the Germans. You would have thought Adalberto was their long-lost uncle, everyone was so anxious to help with the stand and the bolts of cloth.
So Adalberto was going to New York and he said he would like to do a show in 2 months.
When you make a garment for the Geselle you have one week to do it under exam conditions. You can’t ask anyone how to do something. The room is all set up with the equipment, and you go in from 7 to 6, and you work there. But that was one week for one suit at the end of three years of hell, when you can do it all in your sleep. And the cutting has already been done for you, because you learn to make the pattern and cut in the next stage, that is when you start being creative. So even if there are some things that are more mechanical to talk of doing 19 suits in 2 months, single-handed, was mad. But if you would pour cold water on the idea of someone like Adalberto he would not find a way around the problem, or give you another month, he would just lose interest and do something else.
People think it would be easy to walk away.
Artists are lucky to get a gallerist, and you think if you get a gallerist the world is your oyster, and then maybe you are still teaching or working in a call centre. But if Charles Saatchi would walk into the gallery and buy out the show, or walk into the studio and buy out the studio, you would not have to worry any more. There are these collectors who can make a career. And there are these gallerists that people watch, they can make a career. So you know
if you tell one to go away because he is interested in something that doesn’t interest you, probably you will never meet someone like that again.
On the weekend of the open studio the administrator was already writing to her for the third time about the rent. But naturally word got round about Adalberto. If you think that the people who run it are dreaming that someone like Adalberto will just come, and that if he would take up an artist they would be over the moon, they are not going to throw out that artist because of the rent. But if they would hear that it is all off they would be hounding you for a cheque.
The paintings on the walls were defenceless. They could not dry faster if it would not be possible to pay the rent on the studio. The paint is completely trusting. You think if nobody else is going to look after it it is up to you.
She had a superstition. If you have made your Gesellenstück, you should not let it go. So she made 20 new suits, instead of 19, and this was a very clever thing to do.
If you watch art auctions maybe you will think there are some very rich artists, because Hockney’s Portrait of Nick Wilder sold for £3 million. But Hockney sold the painting a long time ago. It is the paintings from the 60s and 70s that make that money, and it is the people who own those paintings, and the people who handle the sale, who make the money. So it is too bad for Hockney that he did not keep aside a painting from that time.
Nobody would ask Hockney, at least you think nobody would ask Hockney to go back to that early style. You think he must have enough money so he would not be pressurised, anyway. But what if somebody discovers what you were doing in 1962, and they commission you to do 19 more of what you were doing in 1962? If you can do even one you can do 19, and if you can do 19 you can do 20.
So she did 20, and Adalberto never saw her Gesellenstück again, because it stayed on its padded hanger.
Adalberto gave her a cheque for £45,000, because he had subtracted the cost of the materials. So he had made this really grand gesture of wanting to buy out the shop, but if he would have done it she would have had to pay for all that useless stuff, and she still had bolts and bolts of material.
If you have followed the British art scene at all you will know that there are some things that are secondary. Tracey Emin made a tent called Everyone I Have Ever Slept With and the point was not the quality of the stitching. Later Emin did some other sewn work, but she got other people to do the sewing, and Hirst’s dot paintings were not executed by Hirst, and this is all in the tradition of Warhol’s Factory.
This would not do for Adalberto. It was the hatefulness of the pockets, the pleats, the buttonholes, the hatefulness of the stitching, that gave the garment its brutality. How is a garment to be brutal if made by someone lucky to get the work?
So Adalberto came back from New York, and he walked up and down in front of the 20 suits. They had been pressed with a proper steam iron. These were the wallflowers.
He said: What is that German word? Schrecklich.
He hung the 20 hideous suits in his showroom in Milan. The show could never be so transgressive outside Milan — if you have no sense of style, if you know nothing of design, you cannot see the stupidity of the ugly pocket which only a trained apprentice could execute correctly. But in Milan they practically fainted. Miuccia Prada bought out the show.
Adalberto still wanted to have a show in New York. Prada said OK.
Adalberto did not like the kind of catalogue that gives a cv of the artist.
Adalberto did not like it when an image of the artist was used as a sign of the artist.
Adalberto came to talk to her. He said: We are doing a show in New York. It’s not Italy, they are not so sophisticated, people need things spelled out.
He said: I need a, what is the word, urine sample.
He had one of those little plastic cups, and you know, maybe you think it is for a visa or something, so she went to the loo.
Adalberto said: That’s great and we will need one of the other, here is a box for it,
and she knew she would have heard of it if the US government made people give a shit sample,
she said: Adalberto, what are you doing?
Adalberto said: We are doing a show in New York. We have to be more explicit. That’s all.
He said: It’s about the body. Hatred of the body. Denial of the body. The hanging requires the body.
He said: I hate the kind of hanging where you have seen it a million times, the lighting is a cliché, the frames are a cliché, and then the buyer wants to know if it comes with the fucking frame and you want to say sure, and just for you we are throwing in a free pack of underwear autographed by the artist, I hate that crap.
Adalberto said Prada said she would maybe show it in the store in Tokyo.
That was because of the purity of the idea of the urine sample. People have this idea of the frame, a piece of wood, a piece of metal contiguous with the piece, we really have to get away from that.
Adalberto said: Now don’t freak out on me.
He said: Are you still menstruating?
If you go to some new country you think you can leave behind the universe of words you grew up with, and even in the new country people are always building that cage of words, that is why it is good that art can be a thing. But people are always thinking they can break through the cage another way. When she was in art school in the 70s it was this very radical experimental time and sometimes people would do art that the teachers did not get, there was this bloke who did an installation in Manchester or it might have been Bradford and he had the examiners come out for it, and they just left. So he didn’t get a degree. And even in those days it was funny that art was supposed to be transgressive but you were supposed to get a degree, but to be an artist and not go to art school would have been the absolute pits. But it was exciting because these famous artists would come to talk to the students, or you could go to London and see the shows and it was all happening right now.
There was this guy, Kerry Trengrove, he died, he smoked and he drank, if you do both it’s bad, he got cancer of the throat and tongue. Most of his stuff ended up in the skip. But he did groundbreaking work. He did a show at Covent Garden, they put on very new things, he dug this deep hole in the ground of the gallery, just big enough to sleep and move around in. And he put a bed in, and a wall of Complan, and he covered it over with thick glass, with just enough of a gap to let air in, and he stayed there a week, he did everything there, he slept and ate and peed, and people could come and look down and see him underground. And that was groundbreaking work. That was back in the 70s. And he did another piece, he got these dogs, that were disturbed, or strays, and he stayed with them in a room for a week, and just by being there with him, for the week, they became tame.
And now, who has heard of Kerry Trengrove? Maybe five other people.
Or this other artist, Stuart Brisley. He was the performance artist in the 70s. He got this bath and he filled it full of offal and he lay in it. Another time he went on the roof of the Hayward Gallery, and he had himself strung up, naked, upside down. First he covered himself in this thick clay mud — his work always had this painterly quality — and then he had himself strung up, and it was already autumn so it was quite cold, and someone stood on the ground with a hose and hosed him down — cleansed him.
But he is in books. You can read about him in books. So there is a record. That is why records are so important. You need someone to be there, to be a witness.
But all that expressiveness, that confessionality, that exhibitionism, that plastering of more meaning on the world, maybe you want to leave that, maybe you just do.
But then maybe you think of the paintings going in a skip. Maybe you think if someone wants to be a witness for this kind of covert exhibitionism then the paintings will not go in the skip.
This was this very bad time when the National Gallery was quite keen on plastering meaning on i
ts collections, so once a year they would have an exhibition and a big banner outside the National Gallery that said Making and Meaning, and if she would take a bus through Trafalgar Square she would want to vomit, the buses through Trafalgar Square should have art sickness bags during the Making and Meaning Season but they didn’t.
And now here was Adalberto with this idea that he was a curative genius and if other people got that idea all the gallerists would be doing it.
But maybe you don’t see this, if you have done something you were never going to do again and somebody asks you to do something else you would not really do it is easy to go down that road.
Adalberto said if she was not menstruating they would just take a blood sample with a syringe but it would not be so good. He said they were going to have to use someone else for the breast milk which was not so good.
Sometimes the fact that something is easy seduces you. It is not like making a buttonhole or a pleat, the body is producing these fluids and solids and it is so simple to collect them.
Adalberto took her to this gym as a guest member, what a production. Men today have these bodies that you never used to see, they are pouring these hours into the body, if you look at Jim Morrison that is the type of body that men used to have and a man with a body like Anthony Quinn in La Strada would be really embarrassing because it would be really over the top, but today nobody would want a body like Anthony Quinn because it would not be buff. Compared to what men have nowadays that would be nothing, and here was Adalberto with one of these bodies, and he was saying she must wear 3 sweatshirts and 2 pairs of sweatpants and run on a treadmill but it was not practical to run because she had been poor for so long. So he said OK, and he punched this button until the track was quite steep. He had brought this motorcycle helmet that he put on her head. It had a little rubber cup where the chin strap was and he said he would be back in 15 minutes.
It took about an hour to collect the sweat.
He said she could use an onion for the tears.