Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (53 page)

The unevenness of time, its dependence on place and people, puzzled Håkan. In some places time had begun to speed at a different pace form others. And some people aged much faster than others. Sometimes Håkan wondered how people could encounter one another at all, so asynchronously, at such different times, did they live.

His grandmother woke up again and said: ‘Håkan, what are you doing here, in the middle of the school day? Be a good boy and go home now.’

To his grandmother, Håkan was a child again. He walked the street and he was a child and he was a man. He saw the city through his memories. There was not a single street, not a single block, to which something of his life had not been transferred.

On that corner he had been bought a blue balloon on the May Day of the year he turned seven. But it was already a bit wrinkled, and when he got home it no longer stayed up in the air. Then, it had been a great sadness.

Where that accountants’ office now stood there had previously been a grocer’s shop where he had bought sultanas. In its window there had been willow baskets containing exotic fruits, bags of spices and packets of coffee. Now there were no longer any such grocer’s shops anywhere, and food stores’ windows were taped over with yellow price labels.

Two street corners on, on the first floor, there had lived the woman he had first slept with. The woman was now dead, but sometimes, on that street, Håkan felt again the wafting of her scent.

The secret of old age was the same as the secret of childhood. What raised them also made them old. What nourished them also killed them.

He was on his way home.

Fiat Ars, Pereat Mundus

What a stench! I was waiting for my cousin in the art museum, and it smelt. I had never imagined that an art museum could stink. To anyone present, the reason was not unclear. In the room was a glass case, the size of a studio apartment, which was buzzing with furious life; it was boiling with blowflies and their hungry grubs. There was no shortage of food for them; like their peers, they lived on death. In the case, on top of a severed Carthaginian column, a hunk of meat had been placed, already highly putrefied.

It would not ever have occurred to me to visit an art museum; I was not really interested in art, particularly contemporary art. But when I arrived in the city I telephoned Håkan, my cousin, and he suggested that we should meet at precisely this exhibition.

Håkan was himself a kind of artist, although he had not achieved any fame to speak of. He developed performances and video installations, had already been doing it for a couple of decades. I had never seen any of his work, if work is what it could be called. I knew that Håkan aimed to produce sensations, but what I had heard about his work sounded pretty yawn-inducing. The name of one of his videos was La Primavera: it showed a man sneezing. I do not know whether the attack was caused by snuff, allergy or the flu, but apparently it lasted about three hours.

My old uncle had asked me to get in touch with Håkan, and it was only for his sake that I did so. My uncle was chronically anxious about his son, although he was already well over forty and made a decent living. He imagined – completely erroneously, of course – that I could have a positive influence on my cousin. The reality was that Håkan treated me as patronizingly as he had in our childhood. I certainly understood that he found me a colourless bore, whose very job title – chief accountant – was, to him, pitiable. Håkan believed that no one with a head for figures and a job in a tax office could understand anything about the higher cultivation of the spirit. Perhaps he was right, but I have never made any claim to pass as an art expert.

There were no other artists in the family. My mother said coldly of Håkan: ‘He may be an artist, but he’s certainly a hopeless bum.’

Håkan said he did not belong to any grouping, he was neither a modernist or a post-modernist, neither a minimalist nor a maximalist. He was always part of the mainstream’s counter-current. In the ranks of the country’s artist he was a lone wolf, the eternal opponent of institutionalised concepts of culture.

I had, in fact, never encountered an artist who had claimed anything else about himself. None of them had ever come to tell me that they were understood correctly and completely and that their work and their
oeuvre
had gained sufficient attention. It was quite remarkable that, although there was always much talk of the national culture’s clannishness, cliques and sects, no one had never seen an artist who had belonged to them. And if everyone belonged to the counter-current, then where on earth was the great mainstream?

Håkan talked a lot about the end of art. He said that because everything is art, nothing is any longer art. The time was already dawning. The noblest aim of art was to destroy itself voluntarily. I did not dare argue, what did it have to do with me and surely he must himself know, since he was a professional in the area.

Håkan had chosen this particular room for our meeting. He said that he had a new performance there this afternoon. I did not dare leave the room, although I suffered from the smell. There were so many people in the museum that I feared I would lose Håkan if I wandered into the other rooms.

I waited in the doorway, as far from the glass case as I could. I should have taken a clothes-peg with me, for the work of art continued to smell at the door. Some people in the room held a collar, handkerchief or hat in front of their noses. But in fact only a gas mask would have been sufficiently effective.

The exhibition had been opened just a couple of days before, and would run for another three weeks. A pity for the staff, but perhaps it was possible to grow accustomed to the smell. Without a doubt, in three weeks it would be still more nauseating.

From my position, I could see on the back wall of the other room an enormous picture whose subject I was not quite sure of. The picture was an oil painting, but at the same time some kind of enlargement. Hairs were growing in it, in the picture they were almost two metres long, thick and black as the branches of a tree in November. It was possible that the subject of the artwork was a vagina, for between the hairs there gaped a deep and dark hole. In fact, I could not help thinking that if the intention of the picture really was to show a vagina, the artist had examined his subject very carelessly.

I looked up the work’s name in the catalogue. It was Untitled. I have gradually reached the conclusion that at least one third of all the works in museums of modern art share the same name, unless they are Forms in Space.

I went up to the guard and asked whether he knew what the subject of the picture was. It was, of course, in those surroundings, a most unsuitable question. It was not the intention for viewers to know what the works represented; neither were their makers able or willing to explain them in any greater detail. The question revealed to the guard my lack of sophistication, but I did not care. It was unlikely that I would ever see him again, and what was more, he did not know my name.

But to my surprise the guard was able to answer my question. The picture really did represent something. He said it was a bullet-hole in a head, and even the head of an identifiable person. The murderer was so-and-so, and the victim was so-and-so, everything was very exact, but I have now already forgotten the names. The crime had taken place in the same city some years previously. The killer had fired the bullet into the other man’s head at close range.

‘Why?’ I asked. That the guard did not remember; probably no one else did, either.

I glanced through the doorway to the next room. In the centre of it a dried tree-trunk had been set up. From the branches of the tree, people hanged. Some had dismembered hands, some dismembered feet, some dismembered genitals. One was missing his head. Everything was very realistic and believable.

A little to one side was a small work which, at last, really appealed to me. On a high, narrow stone plinth was a finger, a single, pale finger. As I examined it more closely, I became fairly convinced that this was a forefinger. It was upright, reproachful, guiding or pointing at something, who knows. I remember the finger that pointed at the moon. I remember God’s finger, which hurled the spirit of life into Adam.

I looked at the single, slim finger for a long time. I found it a very beautiful and memorable finger.

As I was admiring the finger, Håkan stepped in, carrying a violin case. I did not, in fact, immediately recognise him, for he had shaved his head since I had last seen him. The violin case was also a surprise; I had not known that Håkan could also play the violin.

Håkan was accompanied by a young man in an elegant silver-grey suit, who was carrying a video camera. Håkan himself was in some kind of a dervish outfit, or so I imagined, a white robe and under it a pair of brightly coloured trousers. Although I could not understand why he was dressed as a dervish. Håkan came up to me and we shook hands with ceremonial formality; it was a couple of years since we had last met.

‘What do you think of the exhibition?’ Håkan asked.

Because I wanted to show a positive attitude, I said that I was particularly taken by the forefinger.

‘Oh, that,’ Håkan said. ‘It’s the artist’s own finger. From his left hand.’

‘What are you talking about?’ I asked. ‘You cannot be serious.’

I felt myself growing depressed. I felt like leaving immediately.

‘I certainly am,’ Håkan said. ‘I know the maker well.’

I almost felt like crying. Now the work no longer appealed to me one bit. Håkan told me that the artist had himself cut off the forefinger of his left hand. Then he had had it embalmed.

‘Does that shock you?’ asked Håkan, laughing.

‘Deeply. I think it’s awful,’ I said, seriously. ‘Really awful.’

‘I thought so,’ he said. ‘You do not understand that a true artist can give up his right hand, for example. Quite so.’

Quite so! The smugness of the expression irritated me a great deal. Our conversation lapsed, and Håkan began to talk with his companion about camera angles and to look for electrical sockets. I began to wonder whether the corpses hanging from the tree were also real dead people. Perhaps the artist had fetched the bodies from the hospital or the morgue. Perhaps they were people who had perished in car crashes or terrorist strikes or suicides, so natural did they look. I did not dare ask Håkan anything about them; neither did I wish to inspect them more closely, fearing that my thoughts might be proved correct.

The guard with whom I had spoken went up to the men and told them that it was forbidden to bring cameras into the room. I moved tactfully, if a little astonished, farther off. Had they not asked permission from the museum in advance for their performance? I began to fear that Håkan would get himself in trouble, and I did not wish to witness any incidents.

To my relief, however, I thought I heard Håkan say that everything had been agreed with the director. They were just presenting a small performance in the room. It would not last longer than a couple of moments. The guard appeared to be puzzled too, but shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Well, in that case . . . ’

Håkan took up some kind of lotus pose in front of the fly case, a microphone in his hand.

‘Friends of art!’ Håkan said. ‘Honoured audience! The time is past when artists painted rectangular canvases in their studios. The museum is also no longer a place of privilege, as it was before. We can no longer distinguish between life and art. The artist has broken the barriers between them. Every artist is an exception, as is art itself. Every artist is suspended between earth and heaven in a divine levitation. And everything the artist does is art. He makes it of the banal, the profane, the most ordinary, of anything, of nothing. It is the work of creation!’

Oh dear, I could not help thinking. Why is he talking such a lot? This is not good. And such . . . nonsense, for that is what it sounded like, at least to me.

He talked and talked. The people, who had at first gathered in the fly room, began to grow tired. Some were already leaving, others spoke, half aloud. I was not surprised; my own thoughts, too, began to wander. I sat down on the guard’s chair in the doorway, although I do not know whether it was allowed. But I could not see the guard anywhere. I began to feel sleepy. I could no longer sense the smell, I had been in the room for so long. Sometimes I could no longer hear Håkan’s voice at all, all I could hear was the buzzing of the flies. I slipped for a moment into some other day, a July day at home in the country, a meadow where the neighbour’s cattle were grazing.

Much more time had passed than Håkan had promised, at least three-quarters of an hour or even more. And Håkan was still talking.

‘It is the job of the artist to extend the concept of art,’ he said, ‘to make art of parts of life which have not previously been understood as art. Everything the artist does is, in the final analysis, art.’

Had he not already said that once? I could see that the guard had returned to the room accompanied by an elegantly grey-haired lady in a suit. I imagine she was the museum director. I got up to stretch my legs.

Then Håkan abandoned his lotus pose with a kind of half vault whose suddenness and virtuosity made the audience alert. He began to open his violin case, and I prepared myself for a musical interlude. But the object Håkan took out of the case did not look like a violin.

‘This,’ said Håkan, ‘is no musical instrument.’

I went closer and saw that he was speaking the truth. For there was an axe whose blade shone with newness. The guard and the lady peered over my shoulder. I heard one of them draw a deep breath.

‘Art always demands a sacrificial spirit,’ Håkan said. ‘The true artist is ready to sacrifice even his life on the altar of art. And not only his own but, where necessary, also those of others.’

At this point those standing in the front row moved furtively backward. I gulped. I hoped Håkan was not intended to do something he would later regret. And perhaps I, too; the man was, after all, a blood relative.

‘Every artist is an alchemist, a magician and a scientist,’ Håkan said. ‘His sacrificial spirit and his ecstasy are a counterweight to petrified materialism and dogmatic social logic. It is necessary for the artist to open up the vacuums, for him to tear open the road between art and real life, even if it means apparent injury.