Читать книгу The Road of Excess - Ingrid Winterbach - Страница 8

Twenty-five days after Eddie Knuvelder’s visit to his studio, and eight days after that disastrous Sunday when Aaron read the newspaper interview with Knuvelder, Wanda, one of Knuvelder’s two personal assistants, phones Aaron. (Wanda is slightly older than Zelda, but for the rest they’re the spitting image of each other. Both of them bottle blondes, perfectly made up and manicured.)

For a second, his heart almost stops. So great is his hope. His ears buzz and he feels slightly dizzy. He’s been saved – all is not lost! Knuvelder has decided to include him. All is forgiven. He should have known Knuvelder wouldn’t leave him out in the cold.

Mr Knuvelder has a request to make of you, says Wanda. A pair of young artists are due to arrive in Durban in two days’ time for a fourteen-day residency with master printer Duncan Cavendish, in Balgowan in the Midlands. Might Aaron see his way clear to driving the two of them there by car? Mr Knuvelder realises it’s a lot to ask, but he’s convinced the pair of them – two really exceptional young artists – would also like to pay Aaron’s studio a visit. Aaron will profit greatly from making their acquaintance. Mr Knuvelder will be sure to return the favour some time. And, naturally, he undertakes to cover all Aaron’s costs.

(Where did the woman learn to talk in such an affected manner? It hadn’t struck him quite so forcefully before.)

“Hello?” the woman says. “Hello, Mr Adendorff, hello! Are you still there?”

“Yes,” says Aaron, “I’m still here.”

“And it’s so much more personal than to let them travel in a hired car,” she adds.

As she talks, a series of thoughts flash through Aaron’s head. He considers saying to the woman that, as far as he’s concerned, Knuvelder can shove the two exceptional young artists up his backside.

“Why is Mr Knuvdelder not making this request himself?” he asks.

“Mr Knuvelder would most certainly have made the request himself if he were in a position to do so,” the woman says, “but unfortunately he’s on his way overseas.”

“Send me the flight details,” he says, putting the phone down.

He should have known it. And when he looked at the newspaper article again, just to make sure, there were the two names, larger than life: Jimmy Harris and Moeketsi Mosekedi.

It was at Jimmy Harris’s exhibition that the picture of Knuvelder was taken; Aaron is familiar with Mosekedi’s work.

What should he make of this? Is Knuvelder subjecting him to some sort of a test? Does he have something up his sleeve? Putting Aaron though a series of obstacles so as to teach him something – humility, patience? Or does he want to compel him – for his own good – to reassess his own work via exposure to these two young artists? What is Knuvelder thinking? Does he in fact want to do Aaron a favour with all this – now that he’s as good as blocked his way completely? Eddie might just as well have been wearing blinkers during his visit to Aaron’s studio. He was unwilling to see the work; he did not open himself up to it. He refused, obstinately, myopically, to take anything outside of his own agenda into consideration. Powerful, innovative work – as good as, or even better than, anything Aaron has made in the past. For this blindness, he blames Eddie Knuvelder; this he cannot forgive him.

*

The same day, he receives the following messages from Stefaans:

Just got word

of Josua Reinecke’s death!

Our lives, from the beginning,

an unholy alliance.

And remained so.

And:

Last saw Josua in ’95.

Then never again.

I didn’t want to see him again.

My uncharity!

On him, too, I turned my back.

And:

Reaching out to poor Josua

in a mythical space

might be redemptive.

*

When he spots the two men walking through Arrivals, Aaron’s spirit plummets. He’s prepared to give Moeketsi Mosekedi the time of day, but the moment Jimmy Harris crosses his path, his hackles begin to rise. Something about the young man’s attitude gets his goat. The way his feet splay slightly outwards when he walks. And the insolent look on his mug. For a moment, Aaron considers turning on his heel, right there and then, and getting the hell out. He would’ve done it, too, if it weren’t for the fact that he still carries a (ridiculous) sense of hope that this favour might make Eddie Knuvelder change his plans.

Moeketsi’s wearing a long, sleeveless shirt that emphasises the soft contours of his body. He moves with a slight awkwardness, but noiselessly, and slightly hunched. Jimmy’s T-shirt sports several food stains. Aaron greets them and loads their baggage into his car. In complete silence they drive past sugar factories, refineries, mosques, Indian temples, billboards on both sides of the highway. Sitting in the back seat, Moeketsi takes pictures with a digital camera. In front, Jimmy listens to music on his iPod. Aaron drops the pair off at a guest house and agrees to meet them for dinner. (He should have invited Bubbles to come along, just for the hell of it. She’d have sorted these two out in no time at all.)

In the restaurant, Aaron watches the two of them as if they were poisonous snakes. Moeketsi Mosekedi has just returned from an extended artist’s residence in Berlin. (Knuvelder’s assistant sent him CVs for the two, along with the flight details. He’d studied the documents very carefully.) Moeketsi Mosekedi is young and black. He arrived on the art scene a few years ago from almost nowhere (some small township or other on the platteland).Even then his work was inexplicably sophisticated for someone with little or no exposure to contemporary art. An exceptionally rich imagination. He worked with just about any waste material he could lay his hands on: cement and plastic bags, hide and rags, cheap house paint and grease, engine oil and blood, objects he found on rubbish dumps. All of it he transformed into something astonishingly ingenious. (The art magazine image that remained with Aaron was one of torn cement bags rubbed with fat and grease, flapping on a washing line in a township back yard. But he also likes the man’s later work.) Mosekedi was instantly swept up by the white art community, funded, and sent overseas. He received major international exposure and attention. Scarcely seven or eight years later, his notebooks were exhibited in Amsterdam, where he spent a few months at an artist’s residency. Some of his most recent work is being exhibited in Barcelona. Already, he is represented at Documenta. His notebooks are in English, with words and phrases in Dutch, German and Spanish; just an incidental phrase here and there from his mother tongue, Sesotho.

Mosekedi has rounded facial features and soft, dark skin. The palms of his hands are white. His thumbs are fleshy, as are the insides of his long fingers. He talks softly, with a slight accent. Doesn’t say much. The whole night he occupies himself with a small digital camera. Takes shots of the parking area and the night sky. He’s vegetarian. Drinks fruit juice.

Aaron can see how his blackness, his cultural impenetrability, his slight aloofness – could make him massively attractive to Europeans. Because he is difficult to place and talk to, people want to embrace him and be noticed by him, linger in his presence, pamper and caress him, kiss him on his smooth, soft black cheeks.

He seems to take all of it in his stride: the attention, the success, the exposure.

Jimmy Harris is a different matter. Comes from some godforsaken southern suburb on the Rand, Aaron guesses. Of average height, but corpulent. Flabby flesh under the big T-shirt – with soft breasts like those of a woman. An unhealthy complexion (greenish skin tone). His hair’s been bleached straw-white (quicksilver in the moonlight). Nasty little mouth and small, suspicious eyes. Not a pretty boy. Not someone you want to embrace, like Moeketsi, or whose cheeks you’d like to caress, or whose soft body heat you seek to absorb. Jimmy doesn’t say much, but the few comments he does make are without exception critical and dismissive. He’s clearly determined to contradict every statement made in his presence, question every assumption. Between one enormous bite of steak and the next, he rejects most of the art being produced in the country as “modish posturing, the work of opportunists, foppish fools, vacuous attempts at meaningful content”. When Aaron asks him to name a few examples, he waves him away with an irritated hand gesture, laying purposefully into the chips on his plate.

Harris is a meat-eater and Mosekedi a plant-eater. Harris works his way through a steak of unimaginable size while Mosekedi consumes gallons of fruit juice. Harris is a nail-biter, too; his nails are bitten to the quick, Aaron notices.

Aaron’s the one who has to keep the conversation going. (Damnation upon Knuvelder. May he burn in the how-manyeth circle of hell along with all the other traitors. Why subject him to this? Is it deliberate? To purify him, help him – force him – to shed the burden of his ego? Test him first, then reward him? Or is it just plain thoughtlessness? Knuvelder doesn’t do anything thoughtlessly. He’s far too calculating, too crafty for that. Too set on his own designs, his own profit.)

Where do they come from?

Jimmy comes from Langlaagte (Langlaagte – in the shadow of the mine dump!) and Moeketsi from a township somewhere in Mpumalanga.

And what are they currently busy with?

Moeketsi’s doing video and digital camera, but he’s also drawing and painting. Jimmy does mainly video and installations.

He asks them about the artist’s residencies they’ve both come back from.

Moeketsi did a digital project in Berlin, drawing and painting too, while Jimmy busied himself with video work in Oslo.

And, he carefully asks, how did they come to know Eddie Knuvelder?

Both of them had met him a year or two ago in Amsterdam.

(That was when Aaron was struggling with his kidney. The time he almost didn’t make it. When death was busy in the room next door like a manic patient in striped yellow pyjamas. When, like a beached fish from the effects of chemotherapy, he lay on the couch in his studio, thinking he would never work again.)

And do they know if their work’s been selected for Knuvelder’s exhibition in Berlin?

Probably. It’s been a long time since either of them had any contact with Knuvelder. (Hope wells up. Maybe all is not lost. Although he actually knows. He knows.) It’s clearly not something either of them is losing any sleep over. If it’s not Berlin, then it’ll in any case be Tokyo or New York. Not at all fussed, it seems, about whether they count among the five selected (favoured) artists. If it’s not this exhibition, it’ll be the next one.

Moeketsi Mosekedi has an upcoming exhibition at Knuvelder’s gallery and Jimmy Harris exhibited there just a month or two ago. Aaron thinks: he must not postpone it any longer. He must pin down the exact date of his next exhibition with Wanda or Zelda, as Knuvelder said he should.

He realises he shouldn’t have let himself in for this. Nothing good can come of it. He does not feel well disposed to them. Rancour is what he feels. He begrudges them their success. (Especially Jimmy Harris. The self-satisfied dog.) It grieves him to witness their youth and energy. The fact that Knuvelder holds them in his favour is like a thorn in his flesh.

Neither of them asks Aaron about his work. They express no desire to visit his studio. They clearly have no interest in seeing any more of the city or getting to know it better. When Jimmy’s not eating, he’s checking his cellphone for SMS messages. Moeketsi’s still busy with the digital camera. He takes pictures of the table; of the food in different phases of consumption.

Aaron groans inwardly. Oh, God. His injured kidney hurts. His bones feel porous. At more than one point he considers standing up, excusing himself, and walking right out of the restaurant, leaving the two of them to their own blasted devices. He’s Knuvelder’s lackey and he knows, without a shadow of doubt, that this will do him no good at all. Whether or not he does this favour for Knuvelder, the result will be the same. He wants to go home and unplug his telephone. Let the dead bury their own dead. Let Knuvelder and his two pig-hoofed nymphs take the work of these two fuckers to every corner of the earth. Let them parade with it like whores in full public view wherever they wish. Could he be bothered? No.

*

After dropping the two of them off at their guest house, Aaron sits for a long while in his studio. He stares at the work he’s been doing over the past few months. Looks at it long and hard. In this time, after his illness, he’s been working with renewed intensity. He has, in this new work, finally made things he can identify with.

He has succeeded, he thinks, in keeping two conflicting elements in a state of equilibrium: the formal order, and a burlesque use of images that threatens to overthrow this order. His subject matter has been stripped down to a few elements: a disembodied head (rolling down a hill with a staring eye); bloodied fists; shields; a wall; the sea; a table; an upside-down ladder (Jacob’s struggle with the angel); the hand of God that doubles as the hand of the painter; the naked light bulb (another comic-strip motif). Apocalyptic imagery. A flood with drifting heads: a self-portrait and the faces of his parents and brothers, the heads frequently stylised, reduced to little more than a staring eye. Everything partially under water, swept away by the flood. Death by water. Cadmium reds and pinks. The works form part of a series of paintings he calls “End of the World”. Large canvases. He’d studied Uccello and Signorelli’s depictions of the flood. In a separate work, Signorelli’s portraits of the doomed are replaced with Aaron’s own head, and the disembodied heads of his brothers. A piled-up heap of human debris: drastically simplified, deliberately heavy, awkward shapes; fingers and bones; chopped-off penises. Comic, chaotic, raw; inspired also by the static monumentality of Piero della Francesca’s battle-scene frescoes. A primary palette of cobalt blue and cadmium red, with a few black and white accents. Tactile forms. All of this he has achieved. All of this Eddie Knuvelder was unable to see – or chose not to see.

Burlesque figures and apocalyptic visions. His new work is rawer, cruder, weightier, more real.

He thinks: painting is an old, an archaic form. It’s a physical process. Like a blind man in a dark room, making an object from clay. Tangible. Earlier he’d felt that he was moving horizontally across a great plain; now he feels he’s going down a narrow but deep shaft. Mining a smaller surface more deeply. It’s been a laborious process. He’s had to move through layers of the self to arrive at this point. (Worked the terrain like an earthworm and still hasn’t come any closer to his own salvation.) The work must be complex. It must be full of contrasts, full of concealments, ungraspable. Life is complex. Emotions are complex. Relationships. Has Eddie Knuvelder forgotten about complexity? Aaron thinks he’d still rather look a thousand times at Piero’s Flagellation or his Baptism than at anything more contemporary – the Pieros are so much more mysterious, so much fuller, more complex. Chaotic, trembling, on the edge of chaos. More impenetrable. Painting is a harrowing business, harrowing. It’s a fight to the bitter end. It’s a miracle to come up with something that’s worth the effort, that doesn’t contribute to the growing heap of rubbish and noisy excess out there in the world.

Knuvelder looked at this work, but either he didn’t want to see or he was in fact unable to see. What’s Eddie’s case? Has he been struck blind by an angel of God, or has he come so under the influence of those pig-hoofed assistants that he’s lost any remnant of good judgement, discerning eye, visual acuity. Has he allowed himself to be blinded by the prescriptions of the market, the pressure of gatekeepers, is he caught in the trap of political correctness?

If that which you do is not true, destroy it. If it is not anchored to the canvas, destroy it. In his work, this is Aaron’s bottom line.

Nowadays, he feels he’d rather look at the healing shadow in Masaccio’s fresco The Healing of a Blind Man than at most contemporary work which, under pressure from God knows what, feels itself obliged to address whole arsenals of social issues. Predictable work. Often thin and ill-considered. Visually uninteresting, too, thematically clichéd and above all, PC. There’s a stone in the pit of his stomach and something heavy and relentless in his spirit. Masaccio using light as a physical rather than a metaphysical phenomenon, daring, in this fresco, for the first time ever, to depict shadow! The first-ever painting of shadow! Just the thought of it enables Aaron to breathe more easily. The light, the clarity of space, the gravitas of the figures, the drama of the faces, the wonder of the healing, the colour – all of this gives him a sense of relief, opens up a space in his heart.

*

The next day, Jimmy Harris sits next to him in the front of the car again. This morning he’s swopped his winged sneakers for sandals. His toenails look distressingly short – will he chew them too, once he’s finished tearing his fingernails to the quick? Moeketsi Mosekedi sits silently with his camera in the back of the car. Around them, the moving landscape unfolds. Aaron’s thoughts skip, by turns, from Knuvelder to the two weasels in the car with him, to his own work, and then to the poor, recently departed Josua Reinecke. Aaron knows he can count on it that Stefaans will soon subject Josua, and probably also his poor deceased father, Samuel Reinecke, to an intense, substantial inquest, a profound post-mortem scrutiny. He will follow them right down into the underworld (typical of Stefaans – an Orpheus at large). In his early SMS messages, he was already paving the way for this theme.

As on the previous evening, Aaron feels obliged to keep the conversation going. (For the sake of that swine, Knuvelder. And for what? Out of a kind of perverse pleasure, perhaps, a masochistic self-flagellation?)

“Do you understand Afrikaans?” he asks Moeketsi over his shoulder.

Yes, says Moeketsi, he understands Afrikaans. It’s not for nothing he grew up on the platteland in Mpumalanga. Aaron recalls that phrases and fragments of various European languages make their appearance in Moeketsi’s new work.

“Is your mother still alive,” Aaron asks him.

“Yes, she’s still alive,” he says.

“Does she still live in the same place where you were born?” he asks.

“No, she doesn’t live there any more. She lives in Soweto now.”

“Do you visit her?” he asks.

“Yes, I visit her.”

“Are your parents still alive?” he asks Jimmy.

Jimmy laughs softly. His large body shakes. He’s gnawing at his thumbnail. Yes, they’re still alive. The only time his family knows him is when they need money.

Moeketsi sits quietly in the back of the car. With his head turned to the left, he watches the landscape as it rushes by. He keeps his digital camera at the ready. Seldom, if ever, does he say anything on his own account. This morning Jimmy Harris is more talkative than last night. Loud and eloquent; ready for an argument. For a long while he sits motionlessly, then without warning lifts himself out of his deep reverie and delivers a long, mostly theoretical monologue on some art issue or other or the theory underlying his own work. Aaron can feel the hairs on his neck rising and the sweat in his armpits pricking his skin. Jimmy’s addicted to theory; he gets high on it. Theory has taken the place of art. Aaron’s irritation with this man is extreme. He would love to give him a sideways smack, right on the ear. Tell him to be quiet for the rest of the trip.

The artists in this country who are making art that’s worth the effort are so few and far between he can count them on the fingers of his one hand, Jimmy claims. He’s well on his way now, with an unhealthy blush rising slowly from his neck to his pale green cheeks. He raises his hand for emphasis. From the corner of his eye, Aaron flashes a glance at the hand. Jimmy’s palm is broad, the base of his thumb unusually fleshy (anarchic energy), while his fingers are surprisingly slim, the nails bitten down to the flesh. And who, asks Aaron, does he think these artists are? The few names that Jimmy mentions, Aaron doesn’t recognise.

Moeketsi mentions the name of one, a painter.

Without ceremony, Jimmy announces: “Painting is dead in this country, my friend. There isn’t a single painter here who’s making worthwhile art. Painting in this country lags seriously behind.”

Moeketsi laughs softly and says he still paints.

“Your video work is more cutting edge,” Jimmy says.

Now Knuvelder’s the one who’s coming under fire. Knuvelder’s a pushover, Jimmy reckons. He’s not tough enough in his selection of the artists he exhibits. He’s uninformed; allows himself to be led far too much by unexamined ideas. He’s not intellectually rigorous enough. Doesn’t understand his own preferences and prejudices. (Aaron feels he and Jimmy might agree on this matter, but he suspects they occupy opposite points on the spectrum.) Knuvelder doesn’t take big enough risks. He’s afraid to stick his neck out.

Afraid of what, asks Aaron. That he’ll lose his PC buyers?

Moeketsi laughs quietly in the back of the car.

And his choice for the Berlin exhibition, Aaron queries – is that not daring enough?

It’s okay, says Jimmy.

And the two assistant curators? Aaron presses on.

Stupid, says Jimmy. Uninformed.

(At least on this matter they agree a hundred percent.)

And, Aaron asks Jimmy, does he think Knuvelder’s Berlin exhibition is important?

Yes, it’s important. Important enough. But it’s still not at the forefront, the cutting edge. It’s not yet in the hot spot. Not yet Takashi Murakami. Insufficiently multimedia. A far cry from take no prisoners. Not confrontational enough. It doesn’t challenge his own assumptions stringently. Not enough of an assault on any established high culture.

By now Harris is sporting a deep blush on his otherwise pale cheeks. With his teeth, he tears at one of the bitten-down nails.

Behind, in the back seat, Moeketsi takes pictures of the passing veld, the soft undulations of the hills and dales, the changing cloud formations.

And does his own work satisfy the very high standards he upholds? Aaron asks Jimmy.

He’s working on it, Jimmy says, he’s working on it. Carries on chewing his nails. Tearing them off. Self-mutilation.

Langlaagte, Crown Mines, Mayfair, Aaron thinks. He can imagine the light there in winter, at twilight.

In Mooi River they stop at a Wimpy for something to eat.

Aaron feels slightly unwell. The taste of anaesthetic in the back of his throat. (He’s been getting this a lot since his operation.) The veld is dry. Moeketsi takes pictures of the sparse clouds up against the rocky ridges. Jimmy devours a giant hamburger, reads something in a photography magazine.

It’s the beginning of July. Still autumn in the Midlands. They drive past land that is stripped bare, poplars with yellow leaves. A tree with flaming leaves. Black veld.

For a while, Jimmy remains silent. Aaron wonders: in what language does Moeketsi think? His notebooks are in English. Was his mother tongue crowded out by exposure to a variety of European languages? Or do comforting Sesotho words still come up in his mind as he looks out, straight ahead, the camera now on his lap? What thoughts are unleashed in him by the passing landscape? What comes up to the surface? What losses? What longings?

So how does he read the international art scene, Aaron asks Jimmy.

Jimmy laughs softly. His womanly breasts jiggle.

“The name of the game is money, my friend,” he says. (Aaron objects to this mode of address.) “Where there’s art, there you’ll find the spirit of the times. The Zeitgeist. That is to say: the world market. Private collectors in their corporate jets pitch up in their hundreds at the doors of artists. They bid at the biggest art auctions in New York and London. Push the price of contemporary art up fucking sky high. These prices are way, way out. Astronomical. The market’s hysterical. Whoever can profit from art, does so. They’re doing it, and they’re doing it big time, my friend. No holds barred. Don’t even try to understand the art market. It’s haywire. Been like that for a long time already. Hysterical. It’s international, it’s big, it’s crazy. If you think there’s a difference between art capital and ordinary capital, think again. Don’t kid yourself. Both are subject to exactly the same laws. The laws of money run the art market. Stuff aesthetic considerations! Artists, dealers and galleries, collectors, buyers – individual as well as corporate – auction houses, art consultants and advisers, art investors, museums, art fairs, biennales, international art forums like Documenta and Manifesta, you name it – each has its own role. It’s competitive. It’s a jungle out there!”

Jimmy takes a deep breath, tearing harder at his thumb nail.

“And everyone’s targeting the young artists. A mad clamour for young talent. Everyone wants to discover the next Warhol, the next Basquiat. The collectors are like vultures. They sit there like paedophiles, watching the kids at big art schools. Who’s the next genius about to pop up? The art market’s driven by an influx of younger buyers and collectors. Prices in the Old Masters category are not rising at the same tempo as sales by younger artists.”

The nail finally rips.

“Each new big art event follows on the heels of the last: the Venice Biennale, Documenta, the Sculpture Projects Muenster, Art Basel. From one centre to the next, art moves at the speed of light – New York and Berlin to Shanghai and Tokyo. You name it. All the places with money. All the cities where there’s big capital. Although, America remains at the top of the world market for contemporary art sales; more than half of all sales happen there.”

He starts on the next finger.

“And anything goes. Art’s no longer alternative. The diversity of possibilities is endless. Anything can be justified: figurative, abstract, New German Painting, performance, video, kitsch. Any bloody genre or style. Any aesthetic approach. Any political or societal or what-have-you point of reference. Take your pick. It’s the era of diversification of production and distribution, my friend. There’s no consensus about what’s important, or what’s setting the trend, what’s left-field, or what’s pioneering any more. The prevailing taste in the art business is the taste of the dudes who prevail. Any Tom, Dick and Harry with enough capital, a big enough infrastructure and staff can construct his own standards, each in his own niche or network. Take Roger Buergel and Robert Storr, the directors of Documenta or the Venice Biennale, for example. They’re both heavily into political aesthetics. The director provides the overarching concept. If he chooses a concept of politicised aesthetics, then that’s the name of the game in that context. Then that’s the cutting edge. There’s no agreement about what’s important or what’s at the forefront or what’s avant-garde. Where are the great art debates? Dead. Non-existent.”

“And you choose video as your medium,” Aaron says.

“Yep,” says Jimmy Harris. “Video has come a long way, my friend. It’s come far since the sixties. Nowadays it’s serious stuff. Head-on. Angst-free. A cool take on contemporary life. Without the aesthetic baggage of painting. From the beginning it was associated with television and newsreels, so it arrived without aesthetic expectations. It’s free to explore, man – freer than any other art form. Painting comes with too much aesthetic baggage. In painting you can hardly move your arse any more. If you try, you bash into some constraint or other. Artists like Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas and Nam June Paik opened up a new chapter in art history with video. They paved the way, man!”

“And painting is dead?” Aaron asks.

“Painting’s not dead. Painting can always still be justified. But it’s heavily burdened, ruled by the tyranny of the object, the precious object. Painting’s okay, but video’s showbiz. You can improvise and edit like crazy. Video’s got scope – it’s got anarchic scope. It’s way more polished and self-contained than it was in the beginning.”

Jimmy’s otherwise pale-green cheeks are now blush-red.

“It undermines the preciousness of the object. It fucks the boutique market right up the arse. Exactly where it needs to be fucked. Video can make art do things that objects like paintings can’t. It makes new audiences, new routes. Variation lies in the degree of digital engagement. It’s all about speeded-up production and marketing. A mind-blowing mix of pop fantasy and neo-tribalism. It’s cool, it’s unfazed, it’s zany. It’s virtual-utopian. It engages with the attention-deficit internet culture. People like Ryan T, Kalup Linzy, man, they’re taking video to new heights. And lengths. Feature-film lengths. Radical. Serial soap opera stuff. High art and low art, my friend. The boundaries have collapsed.”

“Attention-deficit culture. How inspiring,” says Aaron.

“Take it or leave it,” says Jimmy.

“I’ll leave it,” says Aaron. Thinking about Masaccio’s cool orange shadow in The Healing of the Blind Man. The first-ever depiction of shadow.

Jimmy shrugs. Softly, Moeketsi laughs in the back of the car.

“Thanks for the information,” says Aaron. “Now I know.”

Jimmy takes out a little notebook and starts scribbling in it. Moeketsi turns his round head with its soft black cheeks to the left; looks out the window. What’s he thinking, Aaron wonders once more.

“Deathworks,” Jimmy says, putting the notebook away. “It’s a term coined by the sociologist Philip Rieff. Artworks that celebrate creative destruction. Rieff was especially interested in artists who use their bodies as works of art – the more masochistic and repugnant, the better. Someone like Chris Burden, who shot a bullet into his own body and documented its effects – cool man, head-on.”

Jimmy Harris stares out ahead, reflectively. Works on the nail. Words, he says. At the moment he’s working with words. Combining video and words. Isolating and investigating their ideological load. The word “death”. And “destruction”. “Downfall”, too, Untergang. The word as a form of linguistic repression. That’s what interests him at the moment. The linguistic and political reality of the word – an act of reading constructed through the act of naming. The authorial deed. The intention of his new piece is to destabilise the locus of this authorial act, reclaim it from the heteronormative structures that seek to naturalise it. The ideological load of the word “destruction”, the word “death”, says Jimmy. That’s what interests him.

What the hell do you know about death, Aaron wants to shout out aloud. With screaming brakes he wants to bring the car to a standstill, pluck Jimmy right out of the car, shake him by the shoulders until his teeth rattle, and say to him: What do you know about death, you fucking Martha? Have you ever heard Death moving about in the room next door? Have you heard him unpacking his shaving kit in your bathroom?

At 3.30 that afternoon he drops the two of them off in Balgowan. He doesn’t stay for tea, despite the lovely quiet of the environment and the hostess’s friendly invitation.

As he pulls away, he has the urge, still, to roll down the window and shout at Jimmy: Sooner or later, life catches up with all of us. You can count on it! But he bethinks himself, holds himself back. Pulls away so fast the gravel spatters out from under his wheels. His heart is turbulent, his spirit troubled.

Not once did either of them ask him about his own work.

*

What must he make of this? What was Knuvelder thinking when he sent these two smart-arses to his door? Aaron has yet to achieve clarity on the matter. He can see various possibilities. Perhaps Knuvelder wants to punish him. But why? Teach him a lesson. But what kind of a lesson? Are both Bubbles, with her tapes, and now Knuvelder, too, launching a campaign for the upliftment of his soul? For its kneading and proving, so it can be elevated through an apprenticeship in patience, endurance, and humble acceptance; so the ego can be laid aside. (The hungry ego that wants to grab everything for itself. Everything. All the honour, the glory, all material and spiritual profit.)

The sun sets over the bare veld. The entire outstretched landscape is gilded by the last of its rays. Now Aaron conceives of a different possibility. Knuvelder’s sending him a message – and Harris is the messenger. Harris with his sandals, his androgynous body, the bleached hair. His partiality for the spoken word. Harris as travel-guide – so this is Knuvelder’s intention! Did Harris not lay out the inner workings of the art market for Aaron’s benefit? It was as if he’d taken Aaron by the hand and allowed him to survey a vast area – the great and labyrinthine landscape of the international art business. Art as capital. And is it therefore, finally, not his task as messenger to guide Aaron’s sinking soul down into the underworld? (Because make no mistake, death has already grabbed him by the ankle. Of that Aaron is deeply aware, and in all likelihood Eddie too.) Is Knuvelder not doing Aaron a favour by sending this man to him, this man who, like Mercury, the god of travellers, must open up infinite – and ultimate – possibilities for him? Mercury with his double nature: both devil-monster and child-philosopher. Was there not something devilishly unrelenting, but also childishly uplifting, in Harris’s belief in words, in his cool, utopian vision of video?

In the last rays of the sun, Aaron is overcome by nostalgia for Joseph Beuys – European, deceased, in conversation, twenty-five or thirty years ago, with a dead hare. It is to Beuys’s work that he now wants to return. Beuys in conversation with the dead hare, his head covered with gold leaf and honey. Beuys locked inside a space with a coyote, with his formulas and his hat, his felt and his fat. Crazy, brilliant, compulsive Beuys, who found it necessary to create an alternative artist persona for himself.

A final possibility. The landscape is now blanketed in cool air, a certain bleakness. Knuvelder is blissfully unaware of the effect these two fellows may be exercising on Aaron right now. No. Not Knuvelder. He’s no fool. He’s a calculating bugger. Cunning, all the way down to his manicured fingertips. Dog! A planner and strategist. Aaron has seen him in action before.

Whatever. Enough speculation. The time has come for him to talk to Eddie Knuvelder personally.

Just as the sun finally sets, he stops in Nottingham Road, at the first hotel bar he finds. He targets the healthy, the damaged and the shrivelled kidney with a total onslaught of alcohol. Systematically and deliberately, he inflicts harm upon himself. He drinks one whisky after another, and smokes half a pack of cigarettes. In the course of the evening, a man materialises next to him at the bar counter, as if from nothingness. He strongly resembles Savonarola. Savonarola with his crazy black eyes, unruly beard and long hair. With his mad gaze, he holds Aaron captive. He gives off a smell of sulphur as he expatiates widely on the rise of sectarian movements in the country, his face close to Aaron’s. When Aaron eventually stands up to resume his journey, he realises he’s in no condition to drive. He has no option but to overnight in this second-rate hotel. In the dining room he eats a dismal dinner, along with three other visitors, each in his own comfortless corner, each caught in his own downward spiral. A waitress stands sentry at the door, using the fingers of one hand to clean the dirt from under the nails of the other. During the night, Aaron is as sick as a dog. He crawls on all fours down the passageway to the bathroom. He no longer has any resistance to alcohol and nicotine. The next morning, he also discovers his wallet’s been stolen. He suspects the Savonarola character. This too now, on top of everything else. All of it must be laid at Knuvelder’s door.

*

He phones the gallery the following morning. He wants to talk to Mr Knuvelder as a matter of urgency, please.

“Mr Knuvelder is not in the country at the moment,” says Wanda, or is it Zelda? (How is it that the two female assistants both have almost exactly the same intonation, the same style of formulation, the same affected accent, and the same neatly packaged optimism?)

“When do you expect him back?”

“He’ll give you a call the moment he returns from his treatment.”

“Treatment,” says Aaron. “Are you telling me he’s ill?”

The woman hesitates just a split-second too long before replying; a moment during which Aaron realises without any doubt: she’s spoken out of turn.

“Not at all,” she says firmly, “everything’s just fine.” (It is Zelda, he thinks, the younger one – Wanda would not have hesitated for even a split second, and she would never speak out of turn.) “He’ll be in touch with you the moment he returns.”

Might Knuvelder be ill? Aaron didn’t notice anything amiss when they last had lunch together. Knuvelder was as princely and manicured as always. No problem with his appetite. He sucked with obvious pleasure at the little bones of his osso bucco. Or is “treatment” code for a vacation in Tuscany with that little tart who does such unbearably pretentious work? Or for something like an extended stay in a spa: mud baths and liposuction, god knows, maybe even a facelift and botox. Not that Eddie, with his full-blooded lips, would ever need such a thing. Pectoral reconstruction? Who knows? Eddie can afford it; he pays careful attention to his appearance.

Later that morning, the doorbell rings. Mrs Sekete opens up and calls to him in a strident voice. He wants to strangle her. She knows full bloody well he doesn’t want to be disturbed, but since when has she given a damn about his instructions.

Bubbles stands in the doorway. She’s wearing a mask: a gorilla with a smirk on its face. He can see it’s her. The same running shoes, the same spandex pants.

“Take that thing off,” he says.

She ignores him.

“Where were you,” she asks in a smothered voice, as if from deep within the cave of Machpelah.

“Have you now become my self-appointed guardian?” he asks scornfully.

“Man,” she says, “I just had this gut feeling everything wasn’t right with you.”

How much of his green gills and battered state can she see through the narrow slits of her mask, he wonders.

“Everything’s perfectly fine with me, thank you,” he says.

She remains standing there. So does he.

“Aren’t you going to invite me in?” she asks.

“No,” he says, “and for God’s sake, take that ridiculous thing off.”

She continues to ignore him. (Where does she find these things? A big full-faced gorilla mask made of rubber. Not the modern plastic kind, either, but rubber, like when he was a child).

“Where were you,” she persists.

“Bubbles,” he says, “I was away. Let’s just say that, like Hercules, the hero, I was out on one of my labours.”

“The man from the gallery asked you to do something for him,” she says.

“Yes, to tell the truth, he did,” says Aaron. “At his request, I took two individuals to Balgowan. Two of the ones he’s possibly chosen for the exhibition.”

“You let yourself be taken for a sucker!” she exclaims, her voice even more smothered and distorted by the ridiculous, grimacing mask.

He says nothing.

“You should have let me know in time,” she says. “I’d have helped you teach those two lighties a lesson. There are ways and means. We could have sorted them out in no time at all. Dumped them somewhere in the Valley of a Thousand Hills. No cock would have crowed about it afterwards. Believe me. Once the two favourites have been removed, you’ll stand a much better chance of winning.”

“Bubbles, this isn’t exactly about winning and losing,” he says.

“To be included. Whatever. I thought this was important for you.”

“It is important for me.”

“Fate played into your hands but you didn’t take the gap! You could’ve shown those buggers who’s the boss. A small show of strength. Then they’ll capitulate, withdraw, and disappear with their tails between their legs over the nearest hill.”

“Bubbles,” he says. “Goodbye. I have work to do.”

Just before he closes the door, she calls out: “I need a lift if you’re going into town anytime soon.”

Without a word he closes the door. Locks it.

He gives Mrs Sekete an accusing look before going up the stairs to his studio. But she takes no notice of him. Singing on, she continues with her daily tasks. Je-su, Je-su, she sings, with pious and energetic surrender. Even through the closed door, her voice is clearly audible. He should be able to join in with her. Together they should be singing a two-tone song in honour of Je-su, their Redeemer and Saviour.