Creative Writing
Two Artists: An Un-Artsy Story
By Denise Carvalho
Based on Two Journalists: An Unlikely Story by Anton Chekhov
Andrea Tulliani, a tall and bony artist from Dead-but-Living Artists Gallery seemed agitated and fussy, walking in circles in his studio. He glanced joyously at his newly purchased Colt 45, which for a second appeared to him more as an apparition. The gun lied on an overly messy table next to jars and tubes of acrylic paint, and brushes inside an El Pico coffee can. As he sipped his cold coffee, he walked around the studio, thinking, worrying, sometimes stopping again in front of his gun, observing it. Its metallic body showed an inscription, AT. Its long black muzzle and its wooden-covered handle were captured minutely. As a painter, he learned that the finished piece would only be successful when it reached all its possibilities as a non-representational object, and that abstraction was superior to realism. Contradictorily, he also needed to understand the reality of the object first, to then turn it into something else. That piece had to become a thing-in-itself, abstract and real at the same time.
A new canvas still wrapped in plastic stood against the wall behind the table. Andrea had a strange grin on his emaciated face, his attention splitting between the gun and the canvas. He was contemplating his project. For him, it was a somber apostasy, he chuckled. “Would the splashes be enough to make a final statement?" he said to himself, although he knew he would not be able to experience the outcome. Who cares? he thought. It was enough to be misunderstood by obnoxious critics or taken as privileged information by obtuse investigators. What mattered to him was that it would be done. Since he was a known-artist, his final piece could end up in the wrong hands, which he didn’t want. Can you imagine the canvas hanging by dear taxidermy in the home of gun lovers? That would be a complete reverse of fortune, which probably life would do it intentionally, he thought as his eyes gloomed, anticipating his fate. It was strange to be looking at something made to kill as he had never killed any living thing before. He lit his cigar not in celebration but in a lonely awareness of his hidden despair.
Then, he looked himself in the 4 x 6 inch mirror hanging by a rubber band on the wall. It wasn’t a surprise that he was a contradiction. He remember his dad had a collection of guns. They were like relics to him, completely absorbed cleaning them. Slowly, he held one by one, firmly and respectfully, as if he was holding the hand of god. He was a deeply religious man, yet he didn't spare life. The guns made him calmer, in tune with himself. Elsewhere, he was a complete chaos, drunk, kicking things around the house, kicking and beating on his children, shouting to his wife. Now here was his son, who once hated guns, contemplating a Colt 45. Life could be ironically cruel as Andrea saw himself having turned into his dad.
No one would have known what happened or could have happened if it wasn’t for Nathania Lyons, an old acquaintance of Andrea, and a flamboyant abstract artist represented by Off Limits Gallery. Her petit and energetic body came bustling through the door. “What the hell happened with you? I waited for you the whole afternoon. Did you forget we were supposed to meet?” she said vigorously, not even kissing him as she often did. She went on, not letting him answer. “Don’t say a thing. You missed up big time!” euphoric, almost to the point of hysteria.
This was her normal state of being, often was on the edge, which made her more obsessive and controlling. She could be overemphatic about every issue happening in the art world and ready to pick a fight, an activist as she thought of herself, a warrior, an avenger of hopeless situations. “’The artist is murdered by the art market!’ look at it! It is at the cover of Art Pun,” she pushed the art magazine toward Andrea’s chest. “Come on, at least read it!” she yelled. "Don’t be a lizard. The art duel is very much alive in the streets of Manhattan. You can see good galleries closing while shitty, obnoxious gallery owners who know nothing about real art, made by real artists, spread like vines in an abandoned yard,” she finally sat down, but continued talking.
“The only place where anything interesting really happens today is in the studio. Don’t you agree?” she asks Andrea, who was searching for his cigar on the other side of the room. Her eyes circled around the studio looking for something. “Can one get a cup of coffee here?” she stared at him as a mutt roaming desperately for a mate.
“Here,” he fetched her a cup, patiently.
After she took a sip of her coffee, she started again. “This is bullshit! It is about the duel” exaggerating the quotes on the word ‘duel’ as she was trying to make a play with words with the word ‘dual’.
In the 1980s, when Nathania began her career as an artist, many competitors and friends were saying the same thing again and again, that painting was dead, regurgitating on a two-decade old statement made by a renown art critic, whose name she would not mention for obvious reasons. “Art is dead, art is dead! What a pile of crap!” For her, it was not about Pop art or abstract expressionism, or about a renewal interest in representational art now, but about how easily people bought into these stupid statements. Every night she thinks of her father, an artist himself, who once left his wife and kids, since he couldn't make a living. She could just remember he never gave up, never stopped making his art. When he finally had the courage to leave, Dorothea, his wife, finally had a chance to file for abandonment and was able to survive with a monthly check from the state of New York. The memory of what happened to Jim, Nathania’s father, fueled the intricacies of her neurotic discourse.
“How terrible the murdering of artists by the art institution!” she continued, making fun of the idea. “Even the galleries are complacent to these murders. They don’t care about the artists. They only care about the money. It is always about the money!!!”
“Nathania, stop. I need quiet today. I am trying to do an important piece,” Andrea said almost whispering but firm.
“Hey, what is this? You want me to leave the artists undead, so the galleries can suck their last drop of blood while raising the value of their work?” she was making a joke, but he didn’t laugh. “Hey, I hate you for not laughing at my jokes,” she obsessively responded as she never let anything go. Her narcissism was brilliant though, just like that of the contemporary vampires of capitalism. “Yes, that’s what they say. You can still sip the last drop if you keep the body warm.” She closed the magazine and threw it in the trashcan near the table, finally noticing the gun lying on the table. “What the hell is this?” She said, with an almost masculine voice. She hated guns, since they represented everything she despised, the cowards, the killers, the passive aggressive man batters who lack virility and used a gun to enforce their power. She could be a feverish speaker against any form of violence, even though her temperament was always on the brink of war.
“Welcome, Nathania. You are always welcome!” Andrea said sarcastically as he was still referring to the coffee he brought her minutes before that she didn't even blinked from her speech to acknowledge it. He liked her anyway. He liked her brutal honesty.
Andrea thought of himself a wise guy, someone who knew everything he needed to know, as he hated people trying to preach him moral lessons. But he didn't see Nathania in this light. He thought of her as an exception, a passionate, demented soul, craving for love and respect. Together they were a contradiction. He was 20 some years older than her, sharing willingly their irreconcilable differences. They had been lovers, but since they fought all the time, they restricted the sex so they could manage each other better. Sex pals today, tomorrow mortal enemies, entitled to argue about anything and everything.
Nathania grabbed Andrea's red cap, hanging onto a nail on the wall, and handed to him: “Let’s go to the city center. It will be lots of artists there, and we can try to support their fight against these bloodsuckers.”
“Do you even know which side you are? Don’t answer. It doesn't matter anyway. It is not worth to take sides. It does not change a thing," he said pausedly, sipping his cold coffee between each sentence. “There has been nothing new since the invention of the wheel,” he continued, “and this makes us, skeptics, agnostics, atheists, cynics, and more in tune with reality. See it as a blessing in disguise."
Nathania exploded, "That is a contradiction, a blessing to an agnostic? Don’t tell me you believe in that?" Andrea waited to answer, showing how detached he could be from her passion. "I am a non-believer," he said, "but I can still use words, can't I? My point is, there’s nothing new in art,” stating aloofly. “It has been this way since art, as we know it, was invented. The galleries are just doing their jobs. They serve the art market and support artists to continue making their art. There is no mission, no higher purpose, no magic. That is all there is to it,” closing with a puff from his big and smelly cigar.
“What are you trying to do?” Nathania unexpectedly changed the subject. “I didn’t know you had a gun. What is it doing next to your canvas? Is this another of your strange abstract expressionistic phases?” she added grinning and with a hint of sarcasm.
“No, but you are right, my friend. I have been contemplating my last piece. I’ve had it. I am sick of art. I am sick of everything. All’s been done, but one thing: to kick the bucket goodbye!” His face was illuminated, as when he had major breakthroughs in his art. He pretended he was reserved, even unsympathetic, but when things got flared-up, he could join the drama, and could even show cowardliness with exactitude, but only between the lines, and quickly return to his remoteness. In this sense, both Nathania and Andrea were not so different; their differences were not differentiated, therefore not differences at all. Perhaps, they were good for each other. His pragmatic words would be the blotches of red paint on his clothes and hands, and the small blue spots near his nose, which made him look clownish, absurd, like a Beckett or Ionesco character, ready to put an end to it all as part of an act or a joke. Her outburst passions could ignite his own lust for life.
Here and now, Nathania looked unusually objective, trying to keep her state of disbelief in perspective, even to the point of admiring his blue eyes, now sharper than ever. His thick eyebrows almost joined in a straight line made her lips put on a quirky smile. Like a surrealist painting of Magritte’s room, the scene of the studio and their personalities were ridiculously oppositional.
The direct sunlight coming from the large window had taken over the walls of the studio, with the blue sky as a background. Andrea's initials on the gun was eerily reflected on the wall. Everything looked larger from the angle they looked, everything seemed timeless and closer to their bodies as they faced each other. With all of that to delight themselves with, they chose to argue about something so trivial and so present: life itself. “What kind of stupidity is that? What has the art world done to you?” She finally broke into a loud and boisterous laughter.
“It has done all it can. Any thought makes me want to put a permanent stop, a bullet stop in my own memory." Looking out the window he continued, "Look at the art scene today, full of shallow art viewers making the meaning of art obsolete. What about the art magazines that choose their articles according to the ads placed by galleries? Now they assign art critics whose writings favor their purely commercial editorial agenda. The same happens with museums and art universities that now function like corporations, faking knowledge, claiming canons, while exceeding the value of their collections. And artists have become corrupted. Most are dilettantes, enjoying relational aesthetics as a new form of frivolous sociability, going at openings to talk about themselves or to gossip about other artists, but never to look at the art. Envious they are of others’ successes. This is not different among collectors and dealers, lying, robbing, double-crossing each other and their artists, so they can make a killing. There isn’t much to hold on to. Nothing inspires new work.”
“What do you mean there is nothing that inspires new work? Even you just did it with your disgraceful speech. I, for one, keep having great ideas. I even wished I could clone myself ten times and there would still be plenty of work to produce,” stepping onto a small stool to look herself in the mirror.
“No, there is nothing to paint. Everything has been done. Everything in art has been exploited to its limits, appropriated, contextualized, redefined, and then claimed again and again, always being reinvented.”
“Art reinvented the wheel by reinventing itself?” she responded with a grimace, “Preposterous.”
“It is the biggest lie ever told. And the irony is that everyone believed it and still believes it. The first lie was that the early art had an aura, something we could contemplate through the beauty of form, a thing in itself, with a life or lie of its own. We could think of this aura as something supernatural, even as god, which made the artist feel special,” raising his voice almost as if he was on a stage, passionately.
“Oh, stop it!” she said unapologetic.
“The second lie superseded the first,” he continued. “… that the aura was dead by the rise in photography, by the bending of film, and now by the use of new media, video, etc.”
“What? Are you saying that the internet and digital media is the new aura? That is crazy!”
“It is an irony, dummy. I am surprised that you can't follow this idea,” he said annoyed. “I meant that the internet now is another aura which never dies. I wish it did,” he continued, almost as if he was talking to himself.
“I can think of Andy Warhol’s silkscreens. Is that what you mean? Are you trying to tell me you think that it was by repetition that art lost is aura?” Nathania had a bit of enthusiasm in her voice as she thought she was getting it.
“You are getting warmer,” he said patiently. “The grand gesture of contemporary art was transformed into pedantic teckne through a flimsy info-culture,” he said almost with his last breath as he was exhausted to try to make a point.
“I don't follow you,” she went back to her own incapacity of grasping the idea.
“And finally the third lie,” he continued, “… that art became something anybody could do. The invention of the talent disappeared. Anything could be claimed as art. Maybe these lies were what killed the artist, not the market. Life, art, money, all is in vain since the meaning of life or art has been simulated, made into a simulacrum. When art was invented, art simulated life; now that art is dying, life simulates art, or what is said to be art. They wrote so much about this that now the world is confused. Art has nothing else to add, nothing to surprise me with.”
“Absurd! Everything is constantly changing. There are so many ideas out there, so many new avenues for success, as long as the artist is alive and kicking.” Nathania was about to start unwrapping the plastic of the new canvas on the wall, since their inflamed dialogue was making her wanting to paint, to begin moving her body in front of the canvas as if conducting an orchestra.
“Stop it! He told her, referring to the canvas. “Don’t touch it,” he went on. “The artist represents little or nothing in this debate. The artist is only a small grain in the desert of ideas. There are no new ideas in the world and in art. The world is a black hole swallowing itself, slowly but surely. If only art could give us a glimpse of hope?” mockingly. “If making art would prove to cure cancer or another major disease, which means art would debunk the hierarchy of science, it could be an interesting twist. Or if artists would found a new political party with a full time artist as elected president, that would be worth some news. Or if Islamic fundamentalists would use images to decorate their Mosques! Or even if someone would pay one billion dollars for an unknown artist’s work just for the sake of doing the right thing, maybe I would have something to cheer about, something would renew my unfaithful faith in the art world and in art. What is the big deal about artists being murdered by the market, by mainstream culture, by a corporate mentality? This is just a continuation of what has always been. Things are the same. Even in death we are all equitable.”
“Your skepticism is depressing,” lighting a cigarette and sitting facing Andrea. “When my father gave up on his life for his career, he did it because he had no recognition, no money, nothing left. His art had ruined his life. But this is not the case with you. You have so much to look forward to, to feel proud and privileged. Your death would mean nothing, don’t you agree?” attempting to unbutton his shirt. He removed her hand softly.
“Look, Nathania, the artist is a product of the art, and art is nothing other than a social symptom invented as an excuse for the cultural displacements and replacements made in the original structures of our human society. Like the chicken and the egg, art belongs to the social misfits of culture, we are all social misfits; your father, me, you. Art itself makes no difference in our lives. The only difference it makes, if any, is in the discourse of its invention.”
“What a splendid speech, one has to agree. Coldly and detached but a great story, a story inside a story, looking at yourself while doing yourself. Wow! Genius! Andrea, you are a genius. But do you care about the consequences of not seeing the result of your final act?” she said yelling.
"You can be a witness of my final act. I grant you that," he said with a smile.
“Andrea, your death would not change anything either. You would just be a tiny fraction in the law of physics, reduced to a moment about to disappear, following the order of things, in life and in art. What you are saying is what inventors have been saying since Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, that there is nothing more to invent. On the other hand, your speech now was the best speech I heard for the validity of art or of any innovation. Things are not one way or another. The world is about contradictions, or better, fragmentations. Life is fragmented. There is no unity in the world today, so why should it be different with art? I think we are finally agreeing on something, don't you think?”
“Are you trying to seduce me? That could help to lighten things up. But I am not up to it. Seduction also can be like art, abrupt, messy, indescribable. But I repeat, I am not up to it."
“Hey, I want to remind you that a few seconds ago, you just rejected my touch,” she said egoistically. “I felt like kissing you and you turned away, with words, which makes me as sick as you.”
“Enough with the preaching! Enough with art. Even sex now is redundant. Get out! I have something important to do. I can’t have you here while I need focus.”
“Oh, come on, let me stay,” hoping to still persuade him to stop.
“For you, even my death is an art statement, a new phase in my work, something to be written about or to be sold for a lot of money. For me it is a mere suicide note, and a humble attempt to register my single last act,” he said ceremoniously as he walked toward the gun, stretching his arm toward the canvas, and writing something on its back. Nathania followed his moves with her eyes. “Read it to me,” she pleaded.
“This last work witnesses the silence of art,” he muttered. He placed the canvas on the easel, measuring the space with his eyes, as artists often do, searching for the exact angle between himself and the canvas. Without blinking, he took the gun in his right hand as he sat on the chair. He put the gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger. Bang! Pow! Whaam! Kaboom! Like Lichtenstein’s benday art, all fragments in the second. Nathania did not see it coming. She was frozen by the sound of her own tears. Andrea’s blood and brain cells splashed all over the canvas, as he had methodically planned. There he had it! He should be proud; his final act was successful.
His friend fell back on her seat in disbelief, pondering what else she could have done. “You miserable, self-centered prick,” she squalled in despair. “What am I to do now?” whether to call the police or rushing out pretending she was never there. After an eternal second past, she froze. As she sat semi-conscious, she noticed the red blood splashes still dripping on the canvas behind his head, which due to the strength of the shot moved his body over the easel, now slumping over the wall. The work reminded her of Jackson Pollock’s, but without the artist. She started thinking of Pollock’s tragic ending, and connected the dots. Both Andrea and Pollock were killed before their time, she thought. She had an epiphany, remembering his work continued to develop even after his death. Whispering to herself, “Like everything else, the artwork is subject to change, it keeps evolving.” She was baffled by her own thoughts as she looked at the canvas.
Now the single piece of evidence that can prove Andrea’s suicide beyond reasonable doubt was also the seed ready to burst into pieces of bubbling paint inside her brain. Is this her chance to appropriate Andrea’s masterpiece? It would be like paying honor to her friend and lover.
She started imagining a series of snapshots of his final work in process, with his body still present but absent, inanimate but animated in his blood traced all over the canvas. She could see a connection with so many great works, the link between life and art. This could be a powerful series, something to get a lot of press, but also something that payed tribute to Andrea, her oldest friend, her lover. “I don’t want to forget my first impressions,” she said to herself sternly, while taking notes on an old restaurant bill she took from her purse. She didn't feel guilty, since she had pleaded with him for his life, as she pleaded for the artist's survival in their conversation.
She couldn't avoid thinking of what she was about to do with it all. She felt consumed with hope and enthusiasm for the next phase of her work, enlightened by her thoughts of the immortality of art. She took snapshots with her cell phone, obsessively covering every angle of the room. Then called her gallery and revealed her excitement her a new idea, a photographic series made in the studio of her best friend Andrea, who had just killed himself in front of her very eyes. She stressed how important it was for her to acknowledge his last wish: to appropriate his last piece through her own series of works made on site. A white lie to support Andrea’s art would be a great form of recognition of his work. She called his gallery and arranged for a posthumous exhibition of his work. Then planned to write a series of articles about art after death, and kept thinking obsessively of what else she could do.
Nathania promoted her own work and made lots of money, while Andrea's work was recognized worldwide after his death. The art world exploded, with more artists being born every year. And art? Art and its meaning, ever changing, ever deceiving, was alive and well.