Affairs of Art (4 page)

About the art being created here, there was nothing one could learn in a library. Even the extravagant praise for our sculptors who copied the Europeans had to be extirpated from a literature that was first of all religious. There weren't ten books on secular art, a smattering, I did not yet know how to search the newspapers. No, I didn't resolve then and there to become the great interpreter of contemporary art, there was nothing of the conqueror about me. I made my guesses at random, moving from question to question. While Solange sighed. I remember her long straight hair, the bangs that gave her a sombre look, in the fall she was going to teach in a high school for girls on the Plateau Mont-Royal, she had bought a sundress and thrown out all her notes, she read novels now. Came September and henceforth we would meet at six p.m., a teacher of English as a second language and a university student, our notebooks separated, but the Iago still helped me to forget.

At the time, I found genius in Picasso. It was at the museum, before the recently acquired
Blind Minotaur,
that Solange announced the purchase of a red car, a huge used Plymouth. We could explore the Laurentians on weekends. I was getting ready to explain to her the part man, part horse standing against the shadow of the night and the darkness of his life. In the angle formed by his arm that called down curses and his cripple's cane was framed a bird-woman I wanted to present as the ultimate subversion, the feather bed where all those who rebel will end up. I sacrificed my first knowledge and, in the flat light, Solange radiated too. I told her, but feebly, that I'd have preferred a Renault.

But Solange was paying and it was in a red Plymouth that I learned how to drive, even though I'd have preferred that she drive. She was an Amazon, I was rather proud to step out of a car that braked hard and red when she dropped me off at the faculty. You'll find it difficult to believe, Vitalie, if I tell you I don't know how Solange ended up. There's a veil over everything at the end of that autumn when I became absorbed in writing my first article to submit to the cultural section of
Quartier Latin
and when my mezzanine apartment became distinctly damp. She left me in December, just in time for me to parade my despair through other people's festivities, to drink Iago as if it were hemlock — Proustian memory of a body I thought I could never replace. Solange was just cruel enough, she phoned me now and then to lavish on me what she saw as the consolation of friendship. In March or April, when I was still shivering, I received a handsomely embossed invitation. To her wedding. She was marrying the former brother, our normal school classmate, the only one who had visited the museum. I don't know if they were happy. As was the case with the red car, I hoped not. Absurd suffering breeds malice.

In the faculty, the bourgeois students chattered and the others tried to write, all dreams fastened on the sole publication devoted to art published in Quebec, which served as a belated and subsidized pedestal for the plastic revolts of the fifties. I was humble. It was right that I be excluded from the very fringes of such a first circle
,
since I was not yet sure of anything except that I loathed landscapes and adored pure abstraction, which is too vague for judging the moderns. I echoed my pro­fessors and articles from the French magazines that I greedily consumed.

After Solange, I had time. I found it every evening, in my pain that I wanted to be enduring and disciplined. Alone, I drank, neat but in moderation, cheap cognac, I was just dazed enough to think I was grasping the meaning of the texts I would annotate quite coolly. I imagined I had found a secret garden, an angle: rather than speak out on colour, on balance, on the transcendence of form, I would work inside the contemporary artist's head, I would observe there the death of inspiration. I had studied a little psychology at normal school, and during this post-Solange period, I was in fact doing battle with my own feelings. I would write a thesis on the sterilization of the emotions — the painful but obligatory passage towards pure creation. On a brandnew Olivetti, a gift from Marianne who had chosen asparagus green with beige keys, I tested my future thesis against Borduas's suicide — the ultimate weakness
of a being who had refused the calvary of the disap­pearance of the self.

I dared not submit it anywhere but to the
Quartier Latin,
where the political science students left the literary types a few pages every week for culture. A pale, bearded redhead led the fight there for the
nouveau roman,
he waged war on adjectives, and he used ellipses even in subtitles. He received me as a brother and published me in full, while reproducing the Borduas upside down. I became the art critic for
Quartier Latin,
a position that was free, and free of the requirement that I make myself understood, as my texts appeared only in case of a shortage.

I was doing battle with feelings, Vitalie, but I overflowed with them. I was grateful. I was proud. I was moved. I thought sentences, I lined them up late at night and corrected them early in the morning, they were my mirror and my speech. Then the presses swallowed them and I would rediscover them, printed in ten thousand copies. Someone could read them. They were immortal, stored in the university archives. I deserved to remain humble but I knew the trembling light of the white space between the lines, beneath my name. I was a signifier.

I couldn't keep repeating the death of inspiration, take refuge inside artists' heads. Now I needed to be decisive, to decree that a red was too heavy or a line exhausted. Take a stand. I couldn't. So then I followed the framework of French criticism, I imitated, I tacked on to our local artists judgments that had been conceived over there, but that got lost in the objective elegance of theories of form, which I reformed.

The bearded literary type had become a friend, he taught me the lessons to be found in books, after teaching me those in the newspapers. Thanks to his advice I bought my first limited edition, copy number 2092 of an original edition of two thousand two hundred and fifty copies, which made mine a precious “hors commerce.” Gallimard had published
Le Peintre à l'étude,
by Francis Ponge, in 1946. And in it I found another brother, though nowhere did Ponge note the death of inspiration; on the contrary, he tracked it down by celebrating turmoil and beauty. But on page 112 he had reproduced for me alone this excerpt from a catalogue preface, written reluctantly as a favour for a friend:
Consequently, how could I describe a scene, offer criticism of a show or of a work of art? On that I have no opinion, unable as I am even to gain control over the slightest impression that is somewhat just, or complete.
And on page 113 he had laid claim for himself, and for me, to the right to our critical output,
expression before words or thought.

And thus, Vitalie, was I born to imposture. Francis Ponge is my master. I am giving you the little unread book, whose pages Ponge was waiting for me to cut, for which Georges Braque engraved the butterfly on the cover, the same colour as my Olivetti.
Copy on chestnut wood,
it states on the verso, under the rocking-chair logo of the Nouvelle Revue Française. I leave the taste of it to you, you who know to inspire every wood.

On Barclay Street, my European friend held a salon. I met there a poet whom I'm about to join in death and who would not recognize me even in the harsh light of the Apocalypse, should it bring us face to face as in a Dürer. Michel was a synthesis of what is right and what is unattainable. His family had culture, and knew how to put money into it. Thanks to them, he published his poems in numbered copies, the linen-bound books hand-set in Bodoni and printed on Artemis laid paper, and established printmakers agreed to punctuate the freshness of his struggle against rhyme and resignation. I spent years, even going to vulgar auction sales, looking for these works, which he sold to the rich so he could invent new ones in which to stir up our youth.

About Quebec, he had just written this line.

Unique it is, this country strangled by light.

The uncommon, fatality, violence, agony. I was nothing in his presence, I was the twelfth of twelve obscure individuals clustered around the single armchair in an inadequately heated apartment. I made the coffee along with the girl, a rarity yet the one celebrity among us, for she had long been a star of the television of our childhood. Sarah had become infinitely beautiful, infinitely sad, she dressed in El Greco black with mother-of-pearl buttons that made her garment look something like a mantle of chastity, of which her lover, an elderly writer, would never take unfair advantage. She was studying literature but recited only other people's poems, with unwavering docility. Our host gave her the signal when the moment had arrived. From it he drew the vengeance of the incapable lover, he wanted to despise her, she transcended all his woes, which were so real next to our semblance of intimate afflictions. I never even brushed against the girl.

We were starting to take shape, between these two beings who already had a presence: Sarah, so soon deflowered, and Michel, who was unwittingly turning what life remained to him into poems.

night of broken garrotes

cold in my veins

there are other pools I cannot describe

so much darkness bleeds me to every wind

I got my chance, like a dancer, the one who wears her hair in a flat chignon and is a wallflower in the company of masters obsessed with their favourite, whom an accident finally removes.

The sole publication devoted to art assigned Michel's books to its official critic, because of the high-quality images, drawings or engravings of which the plates were conscientiously scored after printing. When the third book, the costliest, appeared, the renowned scribe believed the time had come to lay claim to one of the fifty copies in exchange for his favourable comments. Michel turned him down, he was a man who could not be bought, he traded in art at the high price it deserved. He knew how to love artists by knowing how to pay them. The magazine's editors had to find someone else to write the article, some unknown who would not offend the official critic but who knew the subject. I spent days composing a three-page outline that would only reach a thousand readers, but the genuine ones. Some of whom paid two hundred dollars for Michel's books and perhaps glanced at them before putting them away, flat and forever, in their glass-fronted bookcases.

Nothing came. A god's eye lay in the background of the engravings. I knew the artist very slightly, I knew he was commencing his decline because he had just enclosed perfection between onionskin and poem, and henceforth he wanted to be exposed to the open air. On the eve of the deadline I threw out all my outlines, went back to the meaning of Francis Ponge, and wrote my copy as a simple
via dolorosa,
from plate to plate, concerned only with making my words agree with the form and the colours, concentrating on my own literary expression, I was protected from the eye of God who had held the printmaker's hand. What's more, by way of conclusion, I killed him.
Beneath the ochre, the blue, the green, the orange, all of which contain the black of the stone wrenched from its forms, a white dot stands out here and there, like an error. Let us close the eyelid of that blind god, art no longer frames itself as the mirror of the soul. That point is nothing, is final.

The artist I believed I was doing in saw it as the intuitive and discreet expression of his own anguish, the magazine's editors detected the style of the new French criticism, and the readers, as usual, concentrated mainly on the pictures. I was on my way to ousting the official critic without having given it a thought. It seems to me I remember being vaguely concerned. For astonishment was losing its edge. No article is as alive as the first one. I was beginning to hoard words rather than exhume them, fresh and firm, from what had been my
grisaille.

The people's university was being born downtown, it was hiring professors at the same rate as clerks. Merely by undertaking to begin doctoral studies, I found myself in turn facing an amphitheatre where another generation of ignoramuses sat in rows. They were more agitated, convinced they were remaking the world, whereas they were just barely tasting its pleasures, because they were finally having sex. Which is no small matter. The boys talked to us as equals, the girls approached us boldly. I stammered out an introductory course in the history of art and another in contemporary aesthetics, terrified in the face of their indifference. In the somewhat brighter apartment I'd rented near Pare Lafontaine to get myself away from Marianne and closer to the new literary sites, I would ruminate over my notes for hours, discover a hundred veins to be mined for theses, read all the new arrivals from Europe, more numerous now, then I'd waken with migraines like steel on the days I lectured, my knowledge wrecked, in shreds, on cards that were as dry as what I had to say.

An African student saved me. He wore a jacket and tie and kept to himself. At the end of the term he handed in an elegantly constructed paper on the link between the Quebec painter Alfred Pellan and the primitive art of west Africa. To free myself from a portion of the course, I asked him to prepare a brief seminar on his work. They listened. Because he didn't talk to them about Pellan and the primitives, he recounted legends. He told them as if they were children the story of a barren woman or a cuckolded husband delivered from pain by the power of art. It is not the sorcerer who heals, he said; it is the very object that he uses, which touches the eyes before it reaches the soul. From an impeccable leather briefcase he brought out three stat­uettes. One was blackened by age, a sort of big tooth bound with cords, the root like a mask. The other two could have been carved the day before, a poorly squared couple whose genitals arrested one's gaze. It is by touching them that the woman's belly will one day secrete the juices of genuine desire for a child. And that the husband with his callused hands finds his enemy's vulnerable point, whereby he will take his revenge. Whence the primacy of the object and of the person who carves it over sorcerers and their clients, over the rest of mankind. He barely hinted at that conclusion, adding a remark about Pellan's use of vivid colours which ran counter to the very sense of the primitive work of art and was a distortion aimed at humans brought up amid sugar and forgiveness.