The dehumanisation of artists
The indescribable weather continued. Suffocated by my readings, having nightmares about realistic tiny penises made out of raw beef, I began to look at the cardboard boxes around me with comical disgust. Was I surrounded by boxes full of penis substitutes? Wasn’t it the case that high heels were androgynous objects, a beautiful example of the optical unconscious translated into matter, moreover animal skin transfigured into the elegant and sensuous straitjacket of culture? Undoubtedly, some of these shoes, my mother’s shoes, were quite vulgar. I liked this vulgarity in terms of its convulsive beauty. But the fact was that I had never looked at these shoes as shoes. The fact was that I saw high heels, not as shoes, but as sculptures. I had rarely worn high heels myself, put off by the limitations they entailed in terms of movement, by the pain. I had now and again worn platforms. Platforms also displaced anatomically the centre of gravity forward, creating a lengthening effect of the body, but the lengthening effect wasn’t quite the same, minimal contact with the earth was lost and as objects they were not androgynous.
Italy, the land of shoes, it had been written on its geography, an obvious high heel boot. As part of my curiosity I wrote a letter to my mother’s sister in Italy, zia Carla. I had never thought of her as an aunt, I barely knew her, all I knew was that she was a bit stern, a bit of a snob. My mother, the black sheep of the family, who had married a night porter, my father, that’s how my aunt perceived my mother. An Italian dictionary helped me with the letter, my written Italian was a bit rusty, I wanted her to take my words seriously. I didn’t tell her that my father was in a rest home, I told her about the shoe bounty I had found in the loft, told her I was doing an exhibition, then asked her if she knew anything about all these shoes, her sister’s shoes, la incredibile collezione di scarpe della mia mama, sua sorella. I wanted to know before the exhibition. I had agreed to share the exhibition with Mary Jane. Saw it more as Mary Jane’s exhibition. Was glad to see her positively energised. Her psychotic stare had lost intensity. It now emanated euphoria. Sheer exhilaration. I was charged by her exhilaration. Intrigued by her collection of thumb sucking substitutes, teething objects, objects that inhabited the border between the inside and the outside, the first possessions treasured by babies. She was intoxicated while preparing her show. She would display all her baby soothers, all her baby toys. Me, the adult toys, my mother’s shoes. In a way, they were all adult toys, the kind of toys some adults become fixated upon.
Some of the shoes had gathered a bit of dust. I bought an ostrich feather duster. Carefully dusted them. Then thought shoes were usually brushed, not dusted and brushed them carefully. I didn’t know whether to show them scattered all over the floor as if waiting for the emergence of order, in a circular whirlpool that hypnotised you towards the void, in a rigorous formal taxonomy arranged by tonal relations, arranged by shape, whether to organise them in groups of sense branching out from pristine to worn, from perversity to modesty, from beauty to horror, in a linear way with a beginning, a middle and an end, in such a way that they would delicately contradict each other, just display one pair in the middle of the room and push to a corner all the rest or display them against the skirting-board one after the other according to a chance logic that made the gaze jump in unexpected and personal ways. I didn’t know whether to call them ‘Specular couples’, ‘Elegant animals’ or ‘Leather-bound Stories’. Mary Jane wanted me to call them ‘25% Protrusion’ after the fact that high heels make your buttocks protrude 25% mimicking the vertical posture typical during female arousal. We thought of crazy titles. She decided she would call her toys ‘Things of Initiation’. She decided she would do the show under a pseudonym, she didn’t believe in authorship, she chose Lala French. It would be amusing the gallerists calling her Lala, strangers calling her Lala at the opening, and her slight delay in turning round, in responding. But then, the gallery rang saying Mary Jane should remove the brutalised baby toys, she should only show the pristine ones. It was ridiculous. Mary Jane refused to remove the dirty toys. New, polished, slick, clean, that was the law at the time, anything that didn’t comply with the law was censored. It didn’t make any sense. The whole thing came to some kind of impasse. Mary Jane said she wouldn’t do the show. I didn’t want to do it if she didn’t. But then, she insisted I should do it, they didn’t have anything against my mother’s shoes, they were acceptable, even the slightly worn ones, they were relatively easy objects.
A shoe swarm about to attack you.
A shoe explosion.
A shoe-web.
I was still toying with ideas as to how to show my mother’s shoes. An explosion. To recreate an explosion with shoes thrown violently against the ceiling, the walls, the corners. In order to recreate it realistically, I would have to damage my mother’s shoes. That’s what I wanted to do though, an explosion.
To my surprise, the gallery was into the idea. I chose the stilettos that I disliked, the dullest ones and the pink pair that was revoltingly girly. I started disfiguring them. I chose seven pairs. Cut six shoes into pieces and burnt them here and there with a lighter and then I put them under the grill. The other eight shoes I bunged in the oven and carbonised them to different degrees. Some of them had grown charred bubbles. There were also droplets of melted plastic in the oven tray. And the pink pair that was revoltingly girly had disintegrated.
Energised by these small acts of violence, I loaded my mother’s shoes without the shoe boxes into a minicab and once in the gallery, quickly started thinking up the show. I wanted the shoes to capture both motion and stillness. I looked at the white room as if it was a white page. I hung some of my mother’s shoes with nylon thread as if they truly defied gravity. I stuck the carbonised ones to the ceiling, to the walls, was given permission to break a window and scattered the lacerated and torn ones on the other walls. I created the impression of a chaos of shoes, a few trashed and seared, others floating in mid-air, as if the explosion had been frozen two seconds after it happened. In the whiteness of the room … you could experience a psychological state of panic.
Acidic wine, friends, acquaintances, desperados, posers, strangers and polite enemies. How nice to have an enemy, someone specific to hate Mary Jane would say. I had started to see commercial gallery openings through Mary Jane’s eyes. Artists who believed in art, friends, but then also debutantes and posh psychopaths who had the money to run galleries, completely out of touch with the tough side of things, beautifully lobotomised by this ignorance, with pathetic little problems, who had seen the tough side of things as tourists, on TV, how fascinating to live in a council flat next to real squalor, entertaining stories to tell at posh dinner parties, these were the people Mary Jane was supposed to get on with. Some of them were ok, they were innocent of their game. But some of them sported an arrogance that made them all the more indigestible.
Mary Jane called them ‘snootos’. I know what they’re like, I’ve gone to school with them, they swan around as if they were a superior race, she said. To be a snob is to waist one’s life in supreme pettiness, she said. Get real, you only live once, that’s what I’d love to shout at them.
Mary Jane didn’t want to know them, she couldn’t stand snobs. She saw commercial gallery openings as celebrations of the false self, she couldn’t become a false self. Sometimes there was a benign atmosphere, but sometimes the lack of oxygen, oxygen rarefied by the voracious energy of ambition, rivalry, envy. Maybe we were too young. Too receptive to the aggression in the air. To the competitive ruthless spirit. Artists who believe in art? Me, me, me, me, me, ascending in a manic spiral towards the ceiling, then descending, flattening everything out, a viscosity in the air poisoning people, people who would have shot their mother, their father, for their work’s sake, so many people treading on each other, so much violence in the air. I suppose it was the situation that created this cannibal ambience, artists inhabited a perpetually fragile situation, no guarantees, sometimes recognition, sometimes not, most times not, sometimes money, sometimes nothing, most times nothing, the hierarchy of the art world replicated the world as a mass sacrifice pit.
Names, names, name makers and name lickers, to lick a name, look at them, you can’t even look at them, your gaze bounces back, Mary Jane would say.
The harsh wine would soften the barriers. But still, there would be a few creatures with invisible orthopaedic collars, people who had mastered the art of subtly turning away when they sensed the presence of possible undesirables, beings whose thirst for power created a hard aura of self importance which made Mary Jane feel like she would never ever ever ever get anywhere. They adore wringing others around their deadening fingers, gently abuse their power to sublimate their sadism, she said. If I want to get anywhere with my art, these are the people I’m supposed to get on with, the invisible orthopaedic collar sect, a bunch of snobs unashamed of exhibiting their stuck-up symptoms, she said. Not all of them were like that. But there was a game they played that became contagious. The blanking game. Barbaric as it was, it was a practice that everybody ended up more or less playing at some point. It consisted of nobodifying others through a permanent non-eye contact until the person felt completely invisible. It was a non-rapport that told you: you don’t exist. Perhaps it was played out of insecurity, perhaps out of a pathological sense of superiority rooted in a pervasive feeling of worthlessness. It definitely had to do with status, denying others the status of visibility while only acknowledging those who could forward their career. With all probability, it functioned as a chain reaction. Somebody blanked somebody who blanked somebody in turn who in turn blanked somebody ab aeternum.
We were too young, we were shocked at the way the world worked.
Blanking.
Nobodifying.
Shocked.
Mary Jane finally agreed not to show the brutalised toys, she would only show the new ones, a different kind of trauma, the trauma of the new, the trauma of the aseptic, her hope was that at a later stage she could show the brutalised ones. And when she was offered to show the brutalised ones, she said no, she had changed her mind, she wanted to explore the trauma if the new. She wanted the baby toys to convey a surgically icy mood.
The night of the opening Mary Jane smiled awkward smiles. She would usually look at me, look at that lot there, so perfectly superior, that’s what Mary Jane’s complicit glance at me usually meant. The problem was that Mary Jane actually believed in art, in the work itself, she didn’t want to realise that it was the possibility of money which vitiated everything, including art. At that time, I hadn’t realised either. But the night of the opening Mary Jane’s complicit glance meant something different. That night, Mary Jane was diffusing her hurt. She had put her bitterness aside. It was her night. Artists were complementing her work, even if it had been pushed at the back of a room in a tiny space. In any case, hardly any superior beings had turned up. It was a small gallery, it was mainly artists, artists exchanging similar delusions of grandeur, confessions of helplessness, relaxing, being themselves.
Mesmerising, magical, beautiful, I heard and overheard compliments of this sort.
My mother’s shoes, which I finally called ‘Leather- bound Stories’ were exploded all over a medium-sized room. It was mainly Mary Jane’s friends that were interested, violence-addicted men. A well-known gallerist walked in half-way through the show tensing up the air with her blonde pony tale, her frigid eyes, her crimson lipstick, her severe stance. This superior being glanced at the exploded shoes as if she saw explosions of objects all the time and walked off. Then she was lost an unusually long time on Mary Jane’s fragments from infant reality. Most of the exhibits were the kind of objects that are sucked and cuddled by babies, loved objects. But in the cold atmosphere of the gallery they seemed to oscillate between affection and utter detachment, their auras were cold auras, yet they were imbued with a strange power. Mary Jane had chosen the objects carefully. They were all pale pink and blue, not primary red, blue, yellow, the current garish but warm baby toys. And when taken out of their supposed context, these objects seemed to lose their friendliness. How could such objects have ever been seen as reassuring? Considered loveable? They were objects to be handled by caring humans babbling away absurdities, not to be displayed on immense empty white walls as enigmatic power objects. The superior being gave Mary Jane her card. She loved her work, so beautifully cold, so traumatically poised. Suddenly Mary Jane was ready to sell her soul to what she used to call the taste Nazis. The woman spoke about the possibility of shows in Los Angeles, in Milan, in Düsseldorf, then she left. Mary Jane’s ego levitated. She was going to have a break. She was drunk, she started to cry. Everybody had left for the pub. We glided on the streets towards the pub. Mary Jane had been chosen. She was that little bit nearer to her dream, to be able to do her work.
The next few days we popped in the gallery to show our faces, to see whether there was any interest, to take transparencies of the work. Mary Jane’s superior being would be ringing within the next couple of weeks. Knowing Mary Jane, I knew she would be answering the telephone all the time, hair raised, then disconcerted, no, not this time, the superior woman never called, was always unavailable when Mary Jane rang her, yet again, same game. I told Mary Jane the most difficult thing in life was to learn not to expect.
Words, so easy to utter.
Then, a few days before the exhibition closed down, I got this call from the gallery. A curator was interested in touring ‘Leather-bound Stories’, but they were only interested in the shoes as historical artefacts, not in the explosion per se. The curator was from a shoe museum in Toronto. I didn’t know shoe museums existed, but they do. Thus my mother’s shoes, Nina Chiavelli’s shoes, started their comings and goings, a two-year tour during which I went to Almería to visit my father five, four times, while my mother’s shoes travelled the world. Stilettos were not neutral fragments, they were objects invested with libidinal splendour. Some English critics wrote rigorous castration anxiety rubbish about my mother’s shoes, others wrote about ‘quasi-objects’, others about the truth each pair embodied, about the world being made up of so many truths. In Milan, a critic wrote about the sheer cultural diversity of ‘Leather-bound Stories’, about the fact that although so many were made there, in Italy, these shoes pointed to so many directions, to the north, to the south, to the west, to the east, there were sandals of Native American origin, wooden sandals, Moroccan sandals, Dutch wooden clogs with flowers painted on them, the traditional Scottish shoe with laces, British plastic flip-flops, Spanish espadrilles, moccasins, cowboy boots, eastern mules. In Frankfurt, a critic mentioned the mountains of shoes in Auschwitz, the fact that no shoe poetry could be written after these mountains of sorrow. In Paris, an Yves Klein blue pair went missing and was recovered thanks to modern surveillance. The gallerists hinted at the identity of the thief, an art critic who had written a meticulous review where the obscure terminology revealed the riddling recesses of a mind chronically lost.
In Toronto, ‘Leather-bound Stories’ was shown next to a hair-raising show about the Chinese regional variations of Lotus Shoes. The Lotus shoes show broke my heart. I did know about Lotus feet, about Chinese foot-binding, the minute size of the shoes, the deformation of the feet, but I had never quite understood their actual size, the utter immobility they implied, I had never actually seen them before. I had never quite taken in that these Lotus shoes, made out of silk or cheaper fabrics in the case of the poor, tragically embroidered with flowers and plants symbolising good luck, fertility, longevity, were the foot-size of a four year old girl, let’s say the size of a small female hand, even smaller. It was only seeing the show that hammered home that these women’s revered feet had been brutally shrunken into girl’s little feet and utterly misshapen in the process.
Then Nina Chiavelli’s shoes encountered a potential buyer in London, while still touring. I got a call from the gallery. An anonymous collector was seriously interested in ‘Leather-bound Stories’. I went quiet. I had never thought of selling the shoes. I couldn’t say that to the gallery. I couldn’t say that I wasn’t interested in selling them. How could I sell my mother’s shoes, my father’s sentimental museum? There was no contract, there was only a verbal agreement. I said that I wanted to meet the Collector, talk to him before a sale was agreed. She would arrange a meeting, the gallerist said, reminding me in a whisper of the forty per cent commission they were supposed to keep.
Even if I didn’t want to sell my mother’s shoes, I was intrigued by the prospect of an art collector’s interest in them. I thought of ringing Mary Jane, but I didn’t. I had rung her about the touring exhibition, said I was sorry, I would try to help her, felt her silence, a silence that had the contours of disappointment. It had been around those days, the days that my mother’s shoes went on tour, the days that she had been waiting for a call, that Mary Jane had started talking about organising her own disappearance. Now she was doing it. The experiment, that’s what she called it at first. It was around the time that ‘Leather-bound Stories’ were in Frankfurt that Mary Jane decided that she was not going to put a foot outside her house as long as she could endure it. She was going to abandon the world. Bye bye, world. Sam would do the shopping, deal with necessary outings. But she herself was going to initiate a disappearing action, she didn’t want to be part of this world, she was going to become a runaway. I visited her every so often. Other people did as well. She was quietly angry about ‘Leather-bound Stories’, loudly angry about everything else. I knew that I wasn’t an artist anymore. I knew that it would be an irony if I gained anything doing nothing, while Mary Jane gained nothing after years of dedicated work. Art was Russian roulette, a racket, another game to mimic things being out of joint forever. We were still in the process of learning that. Sometimes the work mattered, sometimes it didn’t, sometimes it was the last thing that mattered.
The Museum of Relevant Moments
I didn’t meet the anonymous Collector at the gallery. The anonymous Collector left instructions for his number to be forwarded to me.
A collector, an artist’s dream.
A few indecisive days went by. I kept thinking if I could persuade him to buy my aphorisms as works of art, I could rent a bigger flat where I wouldn’t be spatially besieged by my possessions. I finally rang him, left a message on his answer-phone, got a call back the following day, met him the day after in Harley Street, a street made out of overpriced doctors, jaguars and gingko trees. It was the first time that I walked along this street, unaware that it was a self-perpetuating circulatory system of tradition, medical excellence and elitist affluence.
Grand spider lights, grand staircase, the perfect scenario for Cinderella to lose her slipper. As I went up the steps, the words ‘posh bastard’ came to my head, if my father had taught me something it was resentment towards the wealthy. I met the Collector at his wife’s surgery. His wife was a neurologist specialised in autism. The surgery looked like a swanky office: spacious and swish minimal. Two comfortable chairs, a huge desk, a chair behind the desk, a non-descript water-colour on the wall, a photograph of the Collector on the desk.
I used to be a wanker, the anonymous Collector said with a smirk when I sat at his desk, an introduction that threw me off making my face transpire puzzlement. A banker, he clarified. Futures. But all that is over now, thank god for that, at least the futures part. I’d like to do my bit for the world now, he laughed. I laughed queasily with him, appreciating his honesty but wondering what its purpose was. They used to call me ‘The Alligator’, he said, and I looked at the small crocodile embroidered on his jumper thinking that he was good at self-parody and that that was a skill that we should all learn. It’s a fake label, he said, part of the thriving Brick Lane counterfeit industry, I bought it myself yesterday. He had an accent that I hadn’t quite heard before, as if his mouth was full of misplaced air. He coughed and spat into a Kleenex a blur of green phlegm. I actually saw it in slow motion: green, slimy, disgusting. He apologized, I’ve got a cold, he said, and coughed again. The Collector, an old man with flowing white hair who still seduced through spirited talk, sparkling piercing blue eyes, a natural charm that cancelled out his shortness, a knotted green silk scarf that pointed to a flirtatious nature and an ambiguous grin that made you forget the world of absolute privilege from which he came.
He tried to seduce me into his world. I thought it was his strategy to make me sell. I was flattered to have a collector at my feet. But then I realised that he was a natural seducer, he would have seduced anybody, regardless of interest. Also, the Collector wasn’t just any type of collector. Behind his wife’s family there were a few centuries of related collectors. He said that he collected moments, relevant moments. And then, the ignition of empathy. He asked me whether I knew Buñuel, the Spanish surrealist film maker. When he mentioned Buñuel I knew that it was a case of objective chance. Synchronous chance. Double chance. I think that perhaps we wait all our lives for another chance encounter that will confirm as singular a previous chance encounter. A unique repetition that will dust our lives with a spellbinding trail of purpose. But Buñuel? What did my mother’s shoes have to do with Buñuel?
Of course I knew Buñuel, I said. I joked, I said that I could never separate Buñuel’s slight squint, his oblique gaze, from the way he looked at things. I knew about Buñuel’s disruptions of the real, his long life romance with the irrational, with the problem of sense. Long story, the Collector said. He was fascinated by Omar Sharif and had acquired the dagger and the black Arab robe that Omar Sharif had worn in Lawrence of Arabia. I loved that film, I said, the desert, the music, and then all these beautiful men. He grinned, then coughed, then said that he wanted to build a rather personal museum based on his collection, primarily a collection of cinema memorabilia, objects, scenarios that had appeared in more or less well known films, but mainly Buñuel’s, that was his main interest, the core of his collection, he was hooked to Buñuel.
Come along, he said. And he opened a side-door in the surgery as if he was about to show me the lateral contents of his mind. The door opened onto a large room with shapes covered by large pieces of grey felt. As I would later learn, he was no stranger to pulling off conjuring tricks. He carefully uncovered one of the amorphous shapes, the central one. The room revealed a huge cross on the wall facing the door. Then he uncovered another one on the left and through the corner of my eye I saw a white wedding dress. I walked towards the cross, looking furtively at the wedding dress on my left that the Collector had just uncovered.
Buñuel.
That is how it all had started, he said. Or almost all. His family had been vaguely related to the Viscounts de Noailles and through a series of avatars they had come to possess the cross covered with hair that appears in L’Age d’or.
Did I know L’Age d’or? You see, he said, this cross is both a collective religious object and a hair fetish. The hair is female hair. The hair attached to the cross is an act of brutal sadism, the victimisation of a varied sample of women. It could have been male hair, but the context was Sade’s sadism. In any case, the cross already evoked male sacrifice, male masochism as a path to redemption. The film portrayed not just one type of violence, but a variety of violence.
You can’t tell that the heads of hair on the cross are female heads of hair, I said. Apparently Buñuel had been unhappy about the way that it wasn’t all that clear in the film, the female heads of hair hung flaccid on the cross looking like flaccid horse tails, he said. Buñuel had wanted to hang a notice that shouted: THESE ARE FEMALE HEADS OF HAIR.
Next to each Buñuel memento, there was a framed still from the film where that memento had appeared. I looked at the small black and white film still framed and hung two meters away from the cross. It was strange seeing the black and white picture from this anthropological fetish next to the real thing, which was three-dimensional, in colour and a hundred and twenty-five times bigger.
I looked at the cross again. I thought aloud, my thoughts emerging as I spoke. It was interesting that violence to women had been superimposed onto the initial founding violence of Christianity, making it at least as ancient as Christianity itself. But the brutality implied by the wrenched hair seemed to go back to even earlier times. In fact, the cross looked like some kind of totem, a totem where a double act of sadism was inscribed, fierce tearing out of hair surely preceded the construction of torture devices.
The Collector hadn’t seen it that way before, a female Christ tortured in her sexuality, had I been to Torcello?, there was a female Jesus in Torcello, a baby one, sat on Mary’s lap. Then he said that he had many other mementoes from Buñuel’s films dispersed throughout the world. I listened to him. I said that I would love to see his dispersed collection, said that Buñuel had a special sentimental value to me as well, if he ever carried out his museum dream, I would definitely visit it.
I spun slowly around the whole room. I felt as if I was playing a part in an imaginary plot. I thought that maybe he had Jeanne Moreau’s ankle boots, the pair that looked like my mother’s. I asked him whilst remembering my gigantic hallucination where Jeanne Moreau’s boots became my mother’s boots, and he said that he had searched the earth for them. He had given up, he would never find them, he said. I thought of telling him that they reminded me of my mother’s, but I didn’t mention it. I asked him instead whether he had the piano with the donkeys and ropes from Un Chien Andalou, that image had been so important for art, for installations, a memorable image born of a cruelty that would be unacceptable today: the donkeys had been shot for the sake of this image. The Collector coughed. Then told me in a whisper that at the time they had tried to stuff the donkeys but it had all gone terribly wrong and the whole thing had been incinerated, that image only existed as an image, not as an embodied fact, as an embodied fact it was lost forever.
Then he spoke about magical invocations. I followed him and we stopped in front of another shape covered by grey felt. He removed the fabric. Underneath the felt there was a diagonal stripy box and a tie. He asked me if I remembered the scene where a woman magically invokes a man through the ridiculous feminine frills that he was wearing at the beginning of the film and then adds a diagonal stripy tie. Unfortunately, the feminine frills had gone missing, unfortunately because the whole thing was an invocation of an androgynous being, but here in front of us we had the diagonally striped tie and the diagonally striped box. After all, that film invoked the diagonal all throughout, as if inhabited by an oblique, transversal logic, not horizontal, not vertical, but diagonal, beyond black and white oppositions, he said. Buñuel loved magical invocations through objects, as if objects were a shortcut to intense memory, he said. Perhaps an invocation was always an evocation. Then he walked towards the white wedding dress. There was also a white wedding shoe. There was a label to the side that said Viridiana, 1961. That was useful, for I used to confuse the titles of Buñuel’s films sometimes, didn’t even remember whether I had watched that film. Then I realised that there was a torn corset as well.
I thought that he was going to speak about ritual, but the Collector explained that the wedding dress referred to an erotic invocation where a middle-aged man, a fetishist of memories, caressed his dead wife’s wedding clothes in adoration. The man then proceeded to slide his foot in one of his wife’s white wedding shoes, caressed her wedding corset, and tried to put it on but was interrupted. The wedding dress, the wedding shoe, the corset were an erotic invocation connected primarily with absence, with the absence of a cherished person, a cherished deceased wife. These objects clearly spoke about a moment of disavowal, but disavowal of the supreme loss: death, actual physical death. Death, loss, lack, absence, separation, this is what this image spoke about, he said. These objects were a memorial to the supreme loss. A female wedding shoe elevated into a transcendent symbol of death whilst being at the same time a denial of death. Suddenly, a shoe had become a monumentalised sign of mortality, the ultimate separation. That was what the white wedding clothes were about, the youthful innocence that denies the end-game of death. In the hands of a fetishist of memories these clothes became sacred, in the hands of the drunk leper who stole them, put them on and parodied a dance, they had become defaced, an opportunity for carnival, the torn corset captured that moment, a sacred object had become a profane one.
Then he unravelled a razor. It was a historical razor, historical because it was banned in Spain after the film Viridiana from 1961, he said laughing. It was a crucifix-razor, very popular in Spain at the time. A crucifix-razor, he smiled. He stroked the blade. In the film it appeared as part of the personal belongings left by the protagonist’s deceased father. Another anthropological object, more mortality, more fusion of contraries, a playful paradox, if you like. Do you collect anything? he said. I collect everything, I said, realising as I was saying it that I collected bits of knowledge, knowledge from all fields, from all walks of life.
The Collector said that his collection was made out of relevant moments. He had ended up calling it The Museum of Relevant Moments. He had already chosen a space for his museum, an abandoned convent in Mexico which he wanted to convert. At the moment, the collection was a museum without walls, or rather, a museum with multiple walls. He had bits of his collection in all his houses. They had family houses in Paris, Amsterdam, London and Mexico, but had chosen Mexico, wanted to die in Mexico, that was what he wanted to leave to Mexico.
How did you come by ninety-five pairs of shoes? he said. Here and there … car-boot sales, I said, mortified at the sale-question being raised. I was a writer, I wasn’t an artist anymore. The exhibition that he had seen was an exception, I said. My friend, Mary Jane Prendergast, had invited me to put something in a show to go with her baby toys, she was an amazing artist, I found her work spellbinding, more interesting than Jeff Koons’ or Mike Kelly’s, you should see it, I said. ‘Leather-bound Stories’ had gone on tour, it had all happened beyond me. These shoes were not for sale, I said. Undaunted, the Collector suggested that maybe instead of the whole collection I could just sell a pair. He mentioned an exorbitant figure. Then he handed me a picture of my mother’s collection of shoes and pointed to a black pair. This one, the black pair of innocent high heels with a double strap, he said. They weren’t necessarily the best shoes. They weren’t the most beautiful ones. I blushed. He said we could forget about the gallery, they didn’t need to know about this small sale and then added that he loved what I had written about the shoes for the show, all that stuff about penises and the penis nightmare. Did I know Lecour? Anton Lecour? The notorious French philosopher? he said. I revered Lecour. He created the most beautiful and pristine systems of irrational thought. Lecour was going to write about The Museum of Relevant Moments. Maybe I could write a small preface to Lecour’s text? he said. Me? A complete unknown nobody together with Lecour? I was interested in that, but I wasn’t sure about selling a pair of my mother’s shoes. I thought that his suggestion that I wrote an introduction to Lecour’s writing was inextricably linked to the sale of my mother’s shoes. But then if I sold just a pair of my mother’s shoes for the price he offered I wouldn’t need to worry about money for a while. And The Museum of Relevant Moments was an interesting concept. I wondered what this guy wanted to do with my mother’s shoes. I said that I would have to think about the shoes, they were still on tour, but I was definitely interested in the writing, in fetishism. Fetishism? he said. He wasn’t sure whether his collection of relevant moments was entirely about that, he wasn’t interested in ‘isms’. He then said that he would send me the relevant Buñuel tapes, made a note on his diary and added that the high heels with a double strap that he had pointed at in the photograph reminded him of another pair of shoes that had appeared in one of Buñuel’s films.
As I was descending the grand staircase, drunk with the high figure the Collector had installed in my head, drunk with Lecour, confused by this persuasive short man with a taste for the incongruous, it occurred to me that perhaps he had known my mother, had had some kind of affair with my mother, that that was why he wanted her shoe collection so much, even if it was just a pair.
Anything strang
A museum of relevant moments? My museum of relevant moments was made out of precisely that, moments. A wild instant made out of an intense encounter that could only be lived through the gaze, a starry night where the Milky Way became visible for the first time, a bird singing at dawn, even looking at a bit of fluff. My museum of relevant moments was made out of moments of revelation, it was intangible, the Collector was talking about the tangible, he had sought to possess embodied moments that were relevant for him. I desperately needed the money. These shoes, my mother’s shoes, Nina Chiavelli’s shoes, just a pair of them could now become my keep. I got informed. Nobody would have paid the sum that the Collector was paying. Unknown actresses’ shoes had no value at all. I spoke to Sotheby’s. I talked to friends. I rang the Collector. I was told that he was in Amsterdam. I rang Amsterdam. He was still interested, said that I could meet him there, he would pay the expenses. I rang the touring curator and asked her to urgently send me the pair of shoes that the Collector wanted, as my mother’s shoes were in Toronto at the time. She was baffled by my request, but did as I told her. The following month I flew to the capital of Holland. We arranged to meet in the Vertigo Café at the Filmmuseum. I was surprised to find him with his wife, Kathy, and his assistant, a French guy of interesting features called Zacharie, an emissary of sensuality who hunted for movie collectables. Kathy was much taller than the Collector, a wrinkled face that insinuated inner beauty. She hadn’t had plastic surgery like some rich women do, nor concealed her grey hair with discreet dyes. She had a long silver fringe that covered her blue eyes almost completely. She kept pushing it away every now and again. I looked at her from head to feet, surprised to find that she was wearing delicate silver sandals that matched her silver hair. We walked across Vonderpark towards their house, Kathy’s ancestors’ house.
‘Anything strang’. This dictum summed up Kathy’s ancestors’ passion for the unclassifiable. Miraculous substances, exotic imports, relics, rarities, automatons, uncanny still life and then later, African fetishes, subversive objects, surrealist ready-mades, each generation collecting the improbable, a rich anatomy of their gaze, perhaps an anatomy of excess. Kathy showed me some of her family portraits where their fascination with the exceptional, with the anomalous, had been faithfully recorded. Portraits that dated back to the so called Rosicrucian Enlightenment, glossy portraits painted by malicious painters that had mixed the pigments with a shiny trickle of death. She showed me some bits of yellowed hand-made paper from that time, some inventories where the listing impulse was at the service of a list of wonders. Showed me her family’s collection of wonders, the contents of their Wunderkammern, their curiosity cabinets. Her ancestors’ erudite hand-writing on fragile yellowed paper discussing natural magic, hermetic philosophy, celebrating anything that defied classification as a wonder of God’s creation, letters quoting Francis Bacon affirming that the wondrous provided a novel sense of fact, fragile yellowed letters from wealthy men demanding from merchants ‘anything strang’, written like that, spelled without the ‘e’ at the end, letters talking about meteorites, about Siamese twins. I caressed the old letters. Then realised that Kathy had seen me through the corner of her eye and smiled with complicity so that I wouldn’t feel embarrassed.
She showed me more yellowed letters complaining about the increasing vilification of curiosity cabinets, complaining about scholars who considered wonder inconsequential, too popular, increasingly a definite outsider to systems of classification, to systems of taste, to the new scientific revolution and its claims to order, objectivity, rigorous taxonomy. Kathy showed me all these, and yet, her ancestors’ fanciful objects had been organised in what appeared to be a rigorous formal taxonomy. Then the Collector handed me a battered 1653 edition by an obscure author called John Bulwer who had been the first to compile a hand alphabet for the deaf. The book was about the honesty of the natural body and condemned the fact that all cultures altered the body artificially. The full title was a mad list that I copied on a scrap of paper: Man Transfrom’d: or, The Artificial Changling Historically presented, in the mad and cruell Gallantry, foolish Bravery, ridiculous Beauty, filthy Finesse, and loathsome loveliness of most Nations, fashioning and altering their Bodies from the mould intended by Nature; With Figures of those Transfigurations To which artificiall and affected Deformations are added, all the Native and Nationall Monstrosities that have appeared to disfigure the Humane Fabrick. With a Vindication of the Regular Beauty and Honesty of Nature.
This title is crazy, I love it, I said. They used to do that in the seventeenth century, long crazy titles, the Collector said. He then started talking about his museum of multiple walls, how he wanted to unify it under this convent in Mexico before his death. He talked about his nephews, said they had their own lives, that they were not all that interested in cinema memorabilia. Then he referred his fascination with specific cinema memorabilia to Kathy’s family’s curiosity cabinets, after all, at the time, their contents had also been deemed outside systems of meaning, outside reason. Reason, he repeated, that’s what had condemned these curiosity cabinets as irrelevant. Nothing ‘universal’ could be gleamed from them. As with the exceptional, the irrational. This century had acknowledged the haunting power of the irrational, had been shattered by the irrational, had eventually realised that the irrational had to be contained, not pigeonholed, as it comprised the backstage of our multifarious make-ups, constantly making us face the mesmerising music of disruptive contradictions, meaninglessness, the ineffable. And yet, the irrational was still condemned, anything that stood outside normalised systems of meaning was still condemned.
I listened to him thinking that today so many boundaries had been blurred that almost nothing was exceptional anymore. At least, in the world I inhabited. Then I thought about the mythology of reason, the murders and violence committed in the name of reason.
We walked along a narrow corridor. And then the Collector opened a door that led to a narrow room. The room had only a bed in it, and a window opening onto a garden. On the bed there was an old orthopaedic leg in pristine condition next to some underwear. The conjunction of underwear and orthopaedics pointed to the daily life of those whose bodies were different, whose bodies integrated a manufactured limb to make it whole. To people wearing orthopaedic limbs that must have been a more or less daily sight, sometimes connected to eroticism, sometimes an ordinary image of their existence, after a while losing any of the initial shock-value that it might hold for others.
But the conjunction of underwear and orthopaedics here was supposed to be unsettling. Brothels used to cherish prostitutes with a missing foot, leg, arm. Some men were sexually attracted to amputees, cripples, and why shouldn’t they? Negative fetishes, fetishes build around the absence of something which should have been present, a phantom fetish, an anatomy of desire based on negative space. So much for the irreducible materiality of the fetish.
The orthopaedic leg was Tristana’s orthopaedic leg. Catherine Deneuve came to my mind. Catherine Deneuve playing Tristana, Tristana, a horror film where resentment grows into sadism, perhaps into a grotesque loss, the loss of her leg.
You see, Kathy said, for some people absence becomes the only real thing. The negative of something is more real than the positive of something. The absence, the loss, that’s what is real.
And the severed head?
There was also a severed head of a bearded man placed on a small shelf.
Tristana’s protector, Kathy said. She said that there was a recurrent nightmare of a severed head in that film, the head of Tristana’s protector who abusing his position had seduced her during her adolescence, hence her poison, her cruelty, the severed head dream was a decapitation wish forecasting her resentment, the fact that she will become bitter, will exact revenge, will allow her sadism full reign. Hatred, a release, a consolation. In some ways, Tristana’s protector had mutilated her trust in those around her. Tristana settled the score, she set out to destroy her protector through perpetual humiliation.
There are a couple of severed hands in his films, the Collector said. Even a hand without fingers that is supposed to be the main protagonist’s, but in fact is a maimed hand belonging to an extra. Too many severed hands in the surrealist game, too literal, he said, like the mysterious box in Belle de Jour. The beheaded head stands there for what it is: a head, maybe also a castration wish. But beheading is the ultimate act, much more threatening than castration. And ultimately, it’s the head which is a riddle, not the penis. Tristana is like a fantasy of seduction first in its seductive aspect, then in its traumatic form.
The severed head could be read in both ways, I thought. The seventeenth century painter Artemisia Gentileschi, one of the few female painters to have reached us from that time, came to my head. I thought about her Judith and Holofernes, the most powerful painting of beheading I could think of, and about the fact that she had been raped by her mentor. Of course, the beheaded head could be read in both ways, especially if you followed the joke and saw head and penis as interchangeable. Then I remembered a sequence where Tristana showed her breasts to a deaf boy. The deaf boy ran away in horror. Perhaps the deaf boy could hear what others might not want to hear, perhaps he could hear the overwhelming music coming through her breasts.
The last thing which the Collector showed me was a box full of high heels. He said that all of them had appeared in Buñuel’s films, that he was sorry that they were all like that, in a mess, as they were one of the most important parts of his museum of relevant moments. This is all I’ve got here, he said, but you should visit us in Mexico. There, I’ve got memorabilia from the films that were shot in Mexico. He then added with a prolonged guffaw that, although not completely apparent, high heels were a leitmotif in Buñuel’s films.
Before we went for dinner, I gave them Nina Chiavelli’s shoes, a dull black pair of plain high heels with a double strap. The Collector gave me the cheque, told me to spend it wisely with a smirk which I recognized as his trademark. I couldn’t conceal my euphoria, but then felt sadness as well, an absurd feeling that I was selling my mother, stealing from my father. The Collector didn’t mention the introduction to Lecour that he had offered me, it was just a bait, I thought, and I understood that I was supposed to forget about it. If there was something attractive about the Collector, it was the charlatan in him. We had dinner in a Japanese restaurant, drank warm sake as if it was tea. It was the first time that I ate sushi. I didn’t like fish at the time. I wasn’t sure about the nori’s rubbery texture. I nibbled it while my gaze went into soft-focus mode over Zacharie’s seductive features. He was now talking for the first time. He had a perfectly sensual mouth through which he muttered words in English with a husky French accent. He said that high heels were a symbol of female sexuality and that there was no equivalent symbol for male sexuality, wasn’t that interesting? There wasn’t any object close to the male body that signalled his sexuality. A gun? He didn’t like the idea of a gun, it signalled male aggression, not his virility. A pipe was the only thing he could think of. But how did a pipe compare with the sexual impact of a high heel as a symbol? Then he said that he was supposed to come to London soon and asked me for my number with an odd gesture where his tongue hang on his lips while in mid-sentence. It was an utterly out of place gesture, sort of sexy and disgusting at once. I had never come across such a gesture before. Nor afterwards. As I gave him my number, the Collector’s coughs interrupted my erotic reverie. He had a coughing attack. He pointed to the wasabi. Kathy tapped him on the back, said that he was coughing a lot of late.
Then she talked about Chiapas, the uprisings, the deaths on both sides, some say a hundred and fifty, some five hundred, she said. She talked with passion. Talked through the green tea ice cream about indigenous rights. About the fact that she didn’t like talking about autistic children, I don’t like talking about work, she said. After dinner, we went to the Red Light District, visited like good tourists the living museum of women displayed in shop windows, yawning, chatting, daydreaming, lost in thought, always somewhere else, they were there but they were not there. Perhaps for some people an object became much more real than a person, perhaps in their early days objects were always there, comforting. But money, money was definitely a fetish. Could a fetishist love a shoe as much as some people love the smell of money?