The Map and the Territory (16 page)

The recommendation of a
blanquette de veau
plunged the Japanese man into anxiety; he opted for an entrecôte, which arrived a few minutes later and which he prodded sadly, and irresolutely, with the end of his fork. Jed feared he was going to strike up a conversation, which he did, in English, after sucking on a few chips. The poor man was employed by Komatsu, a machine-tool business that had managed to place one of its new-generation textile robots with the last cloth-manufacturing company still operating in the area. The programming of the machine
had broken down, and he had come to try and repair it. For a journey of this order, he lamented, his firm used to send three or four technicians, or two at the very least; but budgetary restrictions were terrible, and he found himself alone in Beauvais, faced with a furious client and a machine with defective programming.

He was indeed in a nasty situation, Jed agreed. But wasn’t there some sort of help line he could call? “Time difference,” the Japanese man said sadly. Maybe, around one in the morning, he would get through to someone in Japan, when the offices opened; but until then he was on his own, and he didn’t even have Japanese cable channels in his room. For a moment he looked at his steak knife, as if he were contemplating seppuku, then decided to start eating his entrecôte.

In his bedroom, while watching
Thalassa
with the sound off, Jed switched on his cell phone. Franz had left three messages. He answered after the first ring.

“So? How did it go?”

“Well. Almost well. Except that I think he’ll be a bit late with the text.”

“Oh no, that’s not possible. I need it by the end of March, otherwise I can’t print the catalogue.”

“I told him …” Jed hesitated, then came to the point. “I told him that it wasn’t a problem; that he could take all the time he needed.”

Franz uttered a sort of incredulous grumble, then went silent before speaking in a voice that was tense and on the verge of exploding.

“Listen, we’ve got to meet up and talk about this. Can you come by the gallery now?”

“No, I’m in Beauvais.”

“
Beauvais
? What the fuck are you doing in
Beauvais
?”

“I’m taking some time out. It’s good, taking time out in Beauvais.”

There was a train at 8:47 a.m., and the journey to Gare du Nord took a little over an hour. At eleven Jed was at the gallery, facing a downcast Franz. “You’re not my only artist,” he said reproachfully. “If the exhibition can’t take place in May, I’m obliged to put it back to December.”

The arrival of Marylin, ten minutes later, improved the mood a little. “Oh, December’s perfectly fine by me,” she announced immediately, then continued with ferocious joviality. “That’ll give me more time to work the English magazines; you have to go right to the top with the English magazines.”

“Good, then December it is,” Franz conceded, morose and beaten.

“I am …” began Jed, lifting his hands slightly; then he stopped. He was going to say “I am the artist,” or words to that effect, but he came to his senses and simply added: “I also need the time to make the portrait of Houellebecq. I want it to be a good painting. I want it to be my best painting.”

In
Michel Houellebecq, Writer
, as most art historians stress, Jed Martin breaks with that practice of realistic backgrounds which had characterized his work all through the period of the Professions. He has trouble breaking with it, and you can sense that this break comes with much effort, that he strives through various artifices to maintain the illusion of a plausible realistic background as much as possible. In the painting, Houellebecq is standing in front of a desk covered with written or half-written pages. Behind him, at a distance of some five meters, the white wall is entirely papered with handwritten pages stuck to one another, without any interstices whatsoever. Ironically, those art historians stress, Jed Martin seems in this work to accord an enormous importance to the text, and focuses on it detached from any real referent. Now, as all the historians of literature confirm, if Houellebecq liked in the course of his work to pin various documents to the wall, most often they were photos, representing the places where he situated the scenes of his novels, and rarely written or half-written scenes. Jed Martin probably chose to portray him in the middle of a universe of paper neither to make a statement about realism in literature nor to bring Houellebecq closer to a formalist position that he had explicitly rejected. Without doubt, more simply, he was taken by a purely plastic fascination with the image of these branching blocks of text, engendering one another like some gigantic octopus.

Few people, when the painting was first put on display, would pay
much attention to the background, which was eclipsed by the incredible expressiveness of the main figure. Captured at the moment of noticing a mistake on one of the pages on the desk in front of him, the author appears to be in a trance, possessed by a fury that some have not hesitated to describe as demonic; his hand holding the pen, treated with a certain blurring movement, throws itself on the page “with the speed of a cobra stretching to strike its prey,” as Wong Fu Xin writes in a visual way, probably giving an ironic twist to the clichés of metaphorical exuberance traditionally associated with the authors of the Far East (Wong Fu Xin wanted, above all, to be a poet; but his poems are almost never read now, and aren’t even easily available, while his essays on the work of Jed Martin remain a central reference point in art-history circles). The lighting, which is far more contrasting than in Martin’s previous paintings, leaves in shadow a large part of the writer’s body, concentrating uniquely on the upper half of the face and on the hands with their hooked, long, scrawny fingers, like the talons of a raptor. The expression in the eyes appeared at the time so strange that it could not, in the critics’ view, be compared to any existing pictorial tradition, but had rather to be compared to certain archival ethnological images taken during voodoo ceremonies.

Jed phoned Franz on 25 October to announce that his painting was finished. For a few months they hadn’t seen much of each other; contrary to his usual practice he hadn’t called to show him preparatory work or sketches. Franz for his part had concentrated on other exhibitions, which had gone rather well. His gallery had been quite prominent for a few years now, its reputation gradually increasing—though that hadn’t yet translated into substantial sales.

Franz arrived at about 6 p.m. The canvas was in the center of the studio, hung on a standard chassis of 116 centimeters by 89, well lit by halogen lamps. Franz sat on a folding canvas chair, just opposite, and looked at it wordlessly for about ten minutes.

“Okay …” he finally said. “You can be fucking annoying at times, but you’re a good artist. I must admit it was worth the wait. It’s a good painting; a very good painting. You sure you want to give it to him?”

“I promised.”

“And the text, is it arriving soon?”

“By the end of the month.”

“But are you in contact or not?”

“Not really. He just sent me an e-mail in August to tell me he was coming back to settle in France, that he’d managed to buy his childhood home in the Loiret. But he added that this didn’t change anything, and that I’d have the text by the end of October. I trust him.”

In fact, on the morning of 31 October, Jed received an e-mail accompanied by an untitled text of about fifty pages, which he immediately forwarded to Marylin and Franz, although he was a bit concerned: wasn’t it too long? Marylin reassured him immediately: on the contrary, she said, it was always preferable “to go big.”

Even if today it is considered a historical curiosity, Houellebecq’s text—the first of this size devoted to Martin’s work—nonetheless contains some interesting intuitions. Beyond the variation of themes and techniques, he asserts for the first time the unity of the artist’s work, and discovers a deep logic in the fact that having devoted his formative years to hunting for the essence of the world’s manufactured products, he is interested, during the second half of his life, in their producers.

Jed Martin’s view of the society of his time, Houellebecq stresses, is that of an ethnologist much more than that of a political commentator. Martin, he insists, is in no way a committed artist, and even if
The Stock Exchange Flotation of Shares in Beate Uhse
, one of the rare crowd scenes, is reminiscent of the expressionist period, we are very far from the scathing, caustic treatment of a George Grosz or an Otto Dix. His traders in running shoes and hooded sweatshirts, who acclaim with blasé world-weariness the great German porn businesswoman, are the direct descendants of the suited bourgeois who meet endlessly in the receptions
directed by Fritz Lang in the
Mabuse
films; they are treated with the same detachment, the same objective coldness. In his titles as in his painting itself, Martin is always simple and direct: he describes the world, rarely allowing himself a poetic notation or a subtitle serving as commentary. He does this, however, in one of his most successful works,
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology
, which he chose to subtitle
The Conversation at Palo Alto
.

Sunk in a wicker chair, Bill Gates was spreading his arms out wide while smiling at his interlocutor. He was dressed in canvas trousers and a khaki short-sleeved shirt; his bare feet were in flip-flops. It was no longer the Bill Gates in a sea-blue suit at the time when Microsoft was consolidating its global domination, and when he himself, dethroning the Sultan of Brunei, became the world’s richest man. Nor was it yet the concerned, sorrowful Bill Gates, visiting Sri Lankan orphanages or calling on the international community to be vigilant about the outbreak of smallpox in West Africa. It was an intermediary Bill Gates, relaxed, manifestly happy about retiring from his post as chairman of the planet’s biggest software business; in short, a Bill Gates on holiday. Only his metal-framed glasses, with their strongly magnifying lenses, recalled his past as a nerd.

In front of him, Steve Jobs, although sitting cross-legged on the white leather sofa, seemed paradoxically an embodiment of austerity, of the
Sorge
traditionally associated with Protestant capitalism. There was nothing Californian in the way his hand clutched his jaw as if to help him in some difficult reflection, nothing in the look full of uncertainty which he sent his interlocutor; and even the Hawaiian shirt that Martin had decked him out in did nothing to dispel the impression of a general sadness produced by his slightly slumped position, and by the expression of disarray that could be read in his features.

The encounter, quite obviously, took place in Steve Jobs’s home. A mixture of coolly designed white furniture and brightly colored ethnic draperies, everything in the room recalled the aesthetic universe of the founder of Apple, the polar opposite of the profusion of high-tech gadgets, at the limit of science fiction, which, legend would have it, characterized the home the founder of Microsoft had built in the Seattle
suburbs. Between the two men, a chessboard with handcrafted wooden pieces sat on a coffee table; they had just interrupted the game in a stage unfavorable to the blacks—namely to Jobs.

In certain pages of his autobiography,
The Road Ahead
, Bill Gates occasionally lets slip what could be considered total cynicism—particularly in the passage where he confesses quite plainly that it is not necessarily advantageous for a business to offer the most innovative products. More often it is preferable to observe what the competitors are doing (and there he clearly refers, without using the name, to Apple), to let them bring out their products, confront the difficulties inherent in any innovation, and, in a way, surmount the initial problems; then, in a second phase, to flood the market by offering low-price copies of the competing products. This apparent cynicism is not, however, as Houellebecq stresses, the true nature of Gates; this is expressed instead in the surprising, almost touching passages in which he reasserts his faith in capitalism, in the mysterious “invisible hand”; his absolute, unshakable conviction that whatever the vicissitudes and apparent counter-examples, the market, at the end of the day, is always right, and that the good of the market is always identical to the general good. It is then that the fundamental truth about Bill Gates appears, as a creature of faith, and it is this faith, this candor of the sincere capitalist, that Jed Martin was able to render by portraying him, arms open wide, warm and friendly, his glasses gleaming in the last rays of the sun setting on the Pacific Ocean. Jobs, however, made thin by illness, his face careworn and dotted with stubble, sorrowfully leaning on his right hand, is reminiscent of one of those traveling evangelists who, on finding himself preaching for perhaps the tenth time to a small and indifferent audience, is suddenly filled with doubt.

And yet it was Jobs, motionless, weakened, in a losing position, who gave the impression of being the master of the game; such was, according to Houellebecq’s text, the profound paradox of this canvas. In his eyes still burned that flame common not only to preachers and prophets but also to the inventors so often described by Jules Verne. By looking more closely at the position of Jobs’s chess pieces as portrayed by Martin, you realized that it was not necessarily a losing one; and that Jobs could, by sacrificing his queen, conclude in three moves with an audacious bishop–knight checkmate. Similarly, you had the sense that
he could, through the brilliant intuition of a new product, suddenly impose new norms on the market. Through the bay window behind them could be made out a landscape of meadows, of an almost surreal emerald green, gently descending to a line of cliffs, where they joined a forest of conifers. Farther away, the Pacific Ocean unfurled its endless golden-brown waves. On the lawn, some young girls had started a game of Frisbee. Evening was falling, magnificently, in the explosion of a sun that Martin had wanted to be almost improbable in its orangey magnificence, setting on northern California, and the evening was falling on the most advanced part of the world; it was that too, that indefinite sadness of farewells, which could be read in Jobs’s eyes.