23

Psychologically and physically exhausted, we finally came within a furlong of the Suburbs, which stretched ahead of us as we mounted the ridge that hid the Country from the Suburbs and its people. Although Beta was rather less than enthusiastic at leaving behind green fields and forests for the neatly aligned houses on the square grid of Suburban planning, I felt a distinct warming. I was almost home again, at last.

In front of the rows of Suburban streets was the Art Gallery, a building I had never seen before but had often heard about, built at a time when the Suburbs had grandiose pretensions beyond its present status. It towered incongruously high above modest semi-detached roofs, built on a peculiar design that blended elements of many different ages and cultures in a bizarre heterogeneous mix. There were Corinthian pillars, Byzantine domes, Gothic towers, Arabic murals and, in the long approach in front, were statues sprinkled about of its garden lawns. A thoroughly modern Formica display attached to its Norman arch announced unnecessarily The Art Gallery.

Beta gripped my hand tightly. “It’s enchanting!” She gasped. “We must have a look. We’ve got the time, and anyway I need the rest. My feet are aching.” She lifted up the sole of one, bent back and brushed off small grass leaves that had attached themselves there.

I nodded. “I wouldn’t mind the detour myself.” So we crossed the field to the road, mounted a stile and walked along the spotless tarmac towards the gateway to the Art Gallery grounds. A pig was sitting in a chair wearing a dark navy blue uniform and a peaked cap. He raised his bowed head slightly as we approached, judged us to be harmless and dropped his head again. We ambled along the gardens, past antique lamp-posts regularly alternating with waste paper bins, by which were empty benches, each distinguished by a plaque donated by patrons of the Art Gallery. The statues on the lawn were as miscellaneous as the architecture. Some were of great antiquity, portraying nude men possessing incredibly muscular build and remarkably tiny penises, and naked women of graceful curvature and combs in their hair. Some were abstract and suggested forms and shapes, exquisite in themselves but remote from concrete reality. Some were composed of a jumble of materials that might have been found on any rubbish heap, but were put together in a harmony of shape and form.

There were very few people around. Beta remarked on this with a frown. “Surely such a large and splendid Art Gallery this should attract people from all over!”

I smiled. “I don’t think very many people from the Suburbs are especially enthralled by Art,” I speculated. “If this were the City, I’m sure there’d be very many more visitors.” I looked around. “Still, it’s not totally deserted, so it can’t be closed,” I commented indicating two eurypterids eating sandwiches on a bench and a family of pigs playing around a statue of an enormous scorpion whose tail was menacingly poised to strike. “There’ll be more people inside, I’m sure.”

However, after passing the pig seated by the Art Gallery doors hidden by the shadows of the tall Palladian pillars at the top of a steep rise of steps, there seemed to be a paucity of visitors inside the building’s immense interior. Along the balcony ringing the entrance hall, a diprotodon was viewing a set of miniatures and a centaur was stretching his head up to look at a very tall statue of an eminent gentleman in a frock coat at the further end of the hall. The only other people were two very bored women sitting behind the glass of the museum shop amongst a collection of posters, post cards and fine art books.

The hall was not empty, though. Its impressive space was adorned by statues, paintings and murals from all ages, in all styles and often of quite monstrous dimensions. Huge statues representing famous brontosaurs, scorpions, mastodons and psammeads were dotted amongst immense paintings of naked women, wealthy patrons, vases of flowers, triptychs of heaven, hell and purgatory, or Midgard, Asgard and Armageddon. Monstrous chandeliers swung above our heads supported by massively thick chains and the rear view of the outspread wings of an albatross in a dress suit.

Beta gasped. “There’s so much here! Have we got time to look at it all?”

“We’ll see as much as we can,” I remarked, striding past a statue of Heracles cracking open a lion’s skull with a rock, and underneath a Pop Art painting of the Mighty Thor to enter the smaller galleries beyond. Beta followed, her eyes darting this way and that, at the tiled murals, the luscious geometric carpets, the erotic statues of couples indulging in bizarre sexual gymnastics, and grandiose canvases marked by single massive brush strokes or an abstract mess of thickly dripping oil paints. The whole building had an aura of reverence and silence highly conducive to Art appreciation, locking out all mundane daily affairs.

We walked through a series of corridors, admiring different species of Art, through a room painted black and containing only a single used and collapsed washing-up bottle, past a pile of loosely arranged bricks guarded by a panoply of security devices, and around a vista of videos featuring different views of the same uninspiring terraced house on different times of the day. Our eyes were dazzled by the sights, but our feet were aching more than before we’d arrived. So much for coming into the Art Gallery to rest.

We entered a smaller room than most, featuring modernist paintings and sculptures from the surrealist to the abstract expressionist, from op art to found art, from the photographic to the neoraphaelite. In the middle of this room stood a large canvass on an easel, behind was a man in his mid-thirties wearing a black beret, a purple smock, and very baggy black trousers. In one hand he held a long paint brush from which globules of paint were threatening to drop while his arm supported a palette kept in place by a thumb through a hole.

The Artist’s long nose peeped out from behind the easel, and he scrutinised us coming in with one eye squeezed close and the other along the length of his arm and measured by his upright paint brush. “Good afternoon and welcome, fellow æsthetes,” he greeted us. “You come to admire and appreciate the illustrious panoply of Art the Gallery is proud to display, I deem?”

“It’s very impressive,” I admitted. “There’s so much of it, and so varied.”

“Not varied enough, I believe,” the Artist mused, lowering his brush. “Many fine and illustrious schools are mysteriously unrepresented. Great hiatuses in the grand diffuse tradition of representational art are hidden from sight. Where, for instance, are the metaconcretists, the neomodernists and the protoromantics? Why such paucity of quasisurrealists, aural art and brochure montagists? It is a disgrace they are not represented here. Schools of art which have emerged over the centuries - such as the Marxist school, the Feline expressionists and the heterodoxians - not displaying their great deserved worth.”

“That’s a lot of different schools of art!” exclaimed Beta. “Which do you practise?”

“All and every one,” the Artist announced proudly. “I am willing to employ any style appropriate to the effect I visualise and which best encapsulates its ultimate Truth.” He raised his paint brush again and scrutinised Beta. “You are a vision rarely encountered in these environs. A woman so unlike those from the Suburbs who most often venture into these galleries. I presume that the Country is your abode. Your bearing and dress is so typical and so worthy of pulchritudinous immortality. It would be an inestimable privilege and a precious opportunity were you to sit for me. Your composure inspires me. I crave to render you in oil: capture your essence, your inmost coherence and your déshabillé. Grant me my wish, I beg.”

Beta smiled, clearly flattered. “Do you want to paint a portrait of me?”

“Most assuredly so. Future ages and cultures must not be denied your beauty.” He gestured towards a chair on which sat a bowl of chrysanthemums and daffodils. “Pose for me here and now. I feel the imperative to capture your soul on my canvass. Remove the vase and flowers. My still life can be completed another day.”

“I’m not sure we have the time,” Beta remarked uncertainly. She looked at me for guidance, but I nodded. The opportunity to rest my feet seemed desirable in itself. “Well, maybe we can. How long will it take?”

“Not long at all, I assure you,” the Artist said, strolling towards the chair, picking up the vase and setting it carefully on the floor. “Sit here. Relax. You must agree. My muse must not be denied!”

Beta lowered herself into the chair, crossed her legs and rested her arms on the chair rests. I sat on the padded seats provided by the Art Gallery. The Artist walked back to his easel, removed the painting he’d been working on and carefully placed it against the wall. It was probably intended to be a portrait of the flowers that had earlier been on the chair, but except for a splash of yellow that might have represented the daffodils there was little in the viscous broad strokes and amorphous puddles of paint which at all resembled flowers or vases. It seemed nothing more than a random mess of oily paint.

“That’s fine!” the Artist said approvingly, studying Beta with the aid of his paintbrush. “Now put on a more solemn expression. Remove the idle humour of your smile. Suggest more pathos and regret. Uncross and slightly open your legs. Lay one hand on the upper thigh. Place your other hand behind your exceptional bouquet of hair. Slightly tilt the ankle. Raise the wrist ever so slightly.”

Beta obediently followed each of the Artist’s instructions, adopting an increasingly uncomfortable and extremely unnatural pose. She ached with each more elaborate demand. At last, the Artist was satisfied, while Beta was on the verge of toppling off the chair and knocking over the vase.

“Perfect!” he said at last. “Uncompromising. Suggestive of idyllic rural grace. Beautiful. You shan’t regret this.”

He laid his palette on the floor and picked up a large thick pencil which he used to draw on the canvass. From where I sat, it was impossible to see exactly what he was doing, but it appeared fairly random and uncoordinated. The pencil slashed backwards and forwards in large broad gestures, pausing occasionally for particular minutiæ that seemed worthy of more attention. On occasion he raised his pencil, with the same gesture as with the paintbrush, to measure Beta’s relative height and sometimes that of objects nowhere near Beta, including the doorway behind him and the neon lights above our heads.

“The paintings and sculptures here are very impressive,” I remarked idly.

“You think so?” The Artist remarked. “True, they apprehend some of the rich tradition of Art but there is such a meagre representation of living Art. Art should be seen as it is, not preserved like fossils and antiques. Art is of the moment: vibrant and urgent. It should evoke the time in which we live in all its plurality, eliciting both poverty and opulence.” He gestured towards a large canvass on the wall which consisted of a collapsed and rather worn bicycle tyre glued on to a mass of paint and random cuttings from women’s magazines. “Like this masterpiece, which flaunts the very essence of our time.”

“It does?” wondered Beta. “It doesn’t look quite as impressive as some of the other paintings. Like that one of the pigs dancing in a field in the main hall.”

“Pigs dancing in a field? Could that be Cannelloni, or is it Bratwurst? Such naïve art of the Vermicelli school is the very antithesis of this Art. Whereas Puddle’s classic mirrors to us the ineluctable chaos and complexity of our age, urging one to reassess ones very raison d’être and revealing, satirically and subtly, our relationship with travel and the media, - the two main aspects of our age - both deflated in a swirl and posture of free thinking expression; the other is just an illusory image of a time that never existed and probably never will.”

“But we saw pigs just like that playing around a statue of a scorpion as we came in,” Beta objected, wearily holding herself in position. “I’ve never seen bicycle tyres splattered amongst paint and scraps of paper before.”

“That is because you are a Country girl,” explained the Artist. “In your idyllic romantic world, all is play and nature: so to you it seems unaffected. But to most people, deprived of tactile sensual pleasure, the deflated bicycle tyre is more real and more poignant. Particularly so in those City districts so poor that the motor car rarely encroaches. The most consequential and potent images of our time are urban and Suburban.” He lowered his pencil and leaned back to admire the lines he had sketched on the canvass. He bent down, picked up his palette and brush, and stood back while contemplating where to place the first brush stroke. “Art is not intended to comfort. It should challenge, discomfort, undermine, re-evaluate and disassemble. Art should be a kick in the face, a punch in the groin, or a garrotting in the dungeon. It must hurt, disillusion, deconstruct and destroy. The beholder must reel in shock, cough in rage and splutter in incoherence.”

“That’s not the Art I like most,” Beta argued. “I prefer Art to be beautiful, illuminating and enhancing.”

“And what is more beautiful than that?” insisted the Artist, diagonally tracing a broad stroke of red paint across the canvass. “What enhances more than that which confronts rather than comforts? What is more beautiful than chaos, disorder and anarchy? No doubt you still subscribe to passé notions of beauty, expressed by elegance of shape and form, harmonised by balance between foreground and background, evoking geometric structures of simplicity and symmetry. Surely it is better to subvert such idealistic romantic notions, and capture the nonlinear, nonharmonious whole of our world.”

“Shouldn’t Art achieve more than that?” Beta objected. “Isn’t it Science that should explore such things?”

“Au contraire,” the Artist reacted. “The Scientist’s rôle, and that of the Artist, is to see and describe. The two are identical. The difference is in the nature of that observation and description. The Scientist is analytical and rigorous. The Artist is impressionistic, abandoned and sensuous. The Artist and Scientist represent two aspects of the same Truth. The Scientist reduces the world to axioms, theories, hypotheses and definitions. The Artist exposes its greater, irreducible whole. While the Scientist’s tools are those of matriculation and exegesis, those of the Artist’s are imagination and technique. The Truth exists in abstract expressionism, cubism and deconstruction. Remove the surface and turbulent disorder reveals its own resplendence and purpose.”

“But not all Art is like that,” I remarked. “Many of the contemporary pieces here are much more real and representational than you suggest.”

“Quelle dommage! That is regrettably so. Too many Artists shy away from the deeper and more profound truths. They attempt to capture an unreal perfection of shape, form and purpose which illustrate how little they fathom the higher pursuit of Art. But, heureusement, there are sufficient who pursue a greater quest. Not just in the visual Arts displayed here in the rooms and halls of the Art Gallery; but also in the aural, theatrical and olfactory arenas. There are symphonies and concertos that dispense entirely with the need for musical instruments, notation or structure. Novels that have abandoned the imprisonment of language, syntax and punctuation. Plays that are random, uncoordinated and interminable.”

“Won’t they be rather boring?” Beta wondered, squinting her face in the pain of her posture. “How can a play possibly be worth watching if it has no plot or characters?”

“Isn’t life just like that? Is it not just a directionless meandering from birth to death? All the structure that there is in life is that which is imposed on it by timetables, conventions and routine. Traditional theatre betrays its imperative for accurate representation when it suggests more form, structure and purpose than actually pertains. It becomes nothing more than yet another idealisation of a brutal, unpleasant Truth. Real theatre, like real visual Art, is that which shows the pointlessness, the waste and disorder of life: mundane, disorganised and, yes, boring. But boredom is an inappropriate response. Boredom is a state of mind which refuses to see the power and beauty in the tedious, the monotonous, the unstructured, the interminable and the anticlimactic. Boredom is only one of many possible responses. One can also feel annoyed, irritated, uncomfortable and somnolent. Just as one feels emotions of enlightenment, joy, rapture and purposiveness. When Performance Artists cover themselves in pig swill and excrement; ride around naked on tricycles many times too small for them; wallow in blood from fresh carcasses from the abattoir; lie under a mass of scorpions; or regurgitate nails and used condoms through their nostrils: then they are all capturing the ultimate essence of life, the universe and everything!”

“If such Art has the effect you say why is there not much more of a response to it?” I couldn’t help asking. “Very few people ever seem to be that troubled by it.”

“That is not true,” the Artist assured me. “Although it is often said that indifference is the worst fate that can befall Art: in truth it is oppression and censorship which most bedevil it; even when it also results in some of the most profound oeuvres. And I am afraid the forces of intolerance and repression are even now gathering to suppress the finest flourishes of our culture. The religious bigots and fundamentalists damn nonrepresentational and experimental Art as contravening an imperative to celebrate the world. The Coition government often threatened to deprive Art of its lifeblood of funding. And now some of the parties who have set themselves up in opposition to the Red Government attack contemporary Art with a rare ferocity, as if politics were the only province of Artistic enterprise. The Red, White and Green Parties have always been ambivalent friends of Art. The Blue Party has criticised Art but never threatened to destroy it.

“The Black Party shows no such ambivalence. Their very manifesto is a vicious diatribe of ignorant slander, demonstrating a deep and wilful misunderstanding. If there were a Black, rather than a Red, Government, no Art would be permitted which did not feature heroic figures in classical poses in simplistic tones and colours. Music would become a military march, theatre would become a hackneyed expression of propaganda and the great legacy of the Art of our century would be pulverised into its original components. The Black Party are danger enough, but they have been a force which has commanded little general support beyond their widely scattered racist strongholds. The danger, however, is exacerbated by the Illicit Party, about which I know little but what I do know is that their Chairman Rupert is no friend of Art. What is further alarming is that his excitable followers have displayed their vituperation and violence in a much more active and organised way than the Black Party have ever done. They disrupt exhibitions, firebomb theatres, wantonly destroy monuments and physically attack exponents of contemporary culture.”

“There seem to be rather a lot of Illicit Party supporters heading towards the Suburbs,” Beta remarked. “We saw thousands of them marching through the Country.”

The Artist looked more than a little frightened. “Did you say that there are thousands of these hooligans marching on the Suburbs? Goodness! They could march on the Art Gallery. They could destroy it.”

“Surely, they wouldn’t do anything like that,” I remarked, a little uncertainly. “They’re coming to search for the Truth, not destroy buildings.”

“It wouldn’t be untypical of what we’ve seen of them,” Beta disagreed. “Every time we come across them they pick fights and destroy things. If they could start that fire in the forest, why couldn’t they do the same here?”

“It just doesn’t seem very likely.” I argued. “It doesn’t seem possible that ...”

My sentence was abruptly truncated by a loud crashing noise from elsewhere in the Art Gallery. Beta, the Artist and I hushed to determine what the noise could be. The Artist took up a tense pose, his paintbrush held frozen in mid-air and his face a deathly white. Beta’s pose was actually more relaxed than it had been for more than twenty minutes, but her expression was no less tense than the Artist’s. I tried to imagine what the noise might have been, its echoes still reverberating down the corridors. It sounded too close to be an aeroplane, and the sky was far too clear for it to be thunder.

“I didn’t like the sound of that at all!” Beta remarked.

“What was it?” the Artist asked.

“Perhaps it was ...” I started, but Beta abruptly shushed me, placing a finger over her lips and a cupped hand over her ear to gesture that we listen. I did so, and heard the distant noise of people running about and shouts that sounded inappropriately loud for a place associated with quiet contemplation.

“I think we should get out of here!” Beta remarked.

“I think you’re right!” agreed the Artist cautiously, putting his palette down and placing his paint brush into a glass bowl by the side. “Whatever it was I don’t know, and I don’t want to find out. There’s no ...”

As if echoing the Artist’s fears there was another catastrophic crashing sound, louder than the first, accompanied by the distinct sound of smashing glass. There came a series of self-congratulatory shouts and yelps.

“Let’s move!” Beta said, running towards me.

The Artist nodded, gazing mournfully at his canvass. Beta and I briefly examined his painting, which really resembled Beta no more than his previous painting resembled flowers. It seemed nothing more than random brush strokes over a series of pencil lines, in which it was just about possible to make out what were either Beta’s eyes or her nipples. The Artist sighed: “It would have been a great work of art. One of my very best. It would have redefined beauty, and captured the very quintessence of rural innocence.”

“It can’t be helped,” Beta said, unimpressed by the Artist’s portrayal of her. “How do we get out?”

“There’s only one way, and that’s the way you came in,” the Artist answered.

“Well, let’s get going!” I said, grasping Beta’s hand.

We dashed out of the gallery we were in, with the Artist in tow, past canvasses and sculptures, towards the source of the commotion. We soon came across evidence of the cause of the noise. An abstract statue of what may have been a large pig was lying in several broken chunks on the ground, part of it projecting outwards through a smashed skylight. All the paintings in this gallery were slashed by knives, several almost to ribbons, and a pile of tyres which had previously been mounted in the shape of a submarine were scattered widely about.

“The vandals! The vandals!” cried the Artist in genuine distress. “What have they done to Paella’s classic sculpture? And they haven’t spared even the finest Plunkett. And that torn canvass is the famous Tropic of Scorpio by the great Spam! How can this have happened? Have they no soul?”

“Come on!” cried Beta urgently. “We’ve got to get out!”

She ran on, with the Artist dawdling behind, in shocked disbelief at the damage strewn ahead. A pile of bricks had been dismantled and its constituent parts used as missiles to crack glass cabinets, punch holes in paintings, smash the faces of sculpted children and to lie in a heap at the foot of a chipped and nearly unrecognisable statue of a naked woman.

“It is the Illicit Party!” exclaimed Beta. “Look at that!”

She pointed at some coarsely sprayed graffiti across a series of sketches of country scenes. Rupert Rules OK! read one. The Truth! read another.

“They can’t even spell!” remarked the Artist bitterly, pointing at the words sprayed along the length of a toppled statue: Death To The Avent Guard! “All this Art! All this Culture! Priceless! Immeasurable! Uninsurable! Destroyed forever! I hate the bastards who did this! I hate, detest and loathe them!”

We ran down corridors, passing only one figure: a capybara sprawled apparently drunk by a frame that had been pulled to the floor and its canvass torn out and ripped into shreds scattered across the gallery. In another near encounter, we heard the sound of shouting, chanting and destruction coming from a gallery to one side as we dashed past without being seen. The Artist bent his head back and grimaced as a painting came crashing to the ground, and the glass protecting the surface shattered into jagged fragments. Our good fortune in avoiding any encounter with the perpetrators eventually came to an end, and this was when we entered the main hall where we at last came face to face with those responsible for the vandalism.

The enormous space which had before seemed cathedral-like in its solemn majesty and timelessness, now resembled the aftermath of a hurricane or earthquake. Enormous statues, including one of a scorpion, lay shattered in fragments on the gallery floor. A statue of Superman stood beheaded over the shattered glass cabinets in which his head was now resting. A mediæval triptych representing the temptation of Christ was covered with mud and had the javelin from one of the Spartan sportsmen embedded into its wooden surface. In amongst all this destruction more devastation was being wrought. A group of gorillas in black leather costumes were gleefully tossing antique pottery to each other. Three or four small dragons were tearing up the fabric of an enormous still life portrait of some flowers. Others were bludgeoning sculptures and paintings with the fragments of others. A stone club originally brandished by a stone Samson to demolish sinners was now being used to knock out chips from a monstrous statue of Snow White, whose face was now abused to an extent no human could possibly withstand. An array of video screens was smashed in by a large weasel brandishing the stone arm of a wart hog.

The Artist stood transfixed in horror. “That was a priceless Grillade! That was Peccadillo’s finest painting! That was the most important spiritual painting of the Parmesan School. And that mass of paper, wood and cardboard is all that remains of Eponymous Borscht’s greatest masterpiece!”

“What shall we do?” I asked in more practical concern. It seemed unlikely we could get across the main hall unnoticed.

“I suppose we’ll just have to hope they’re too preoccupied to concern themselves with us!” Beta answered optimistically. “But I don’t really want to risk it.”

We stood petrified in the shadows of the Art Gallery’s columns, unable to go forward and equally unable to turn back. However, our indecision was resolved after not too long, less by choice than circumstance. A group of eurypterids, some seven or eight feet long, were throwing broken chunks of sculpture at an enormous abstract painting just above an arch, and although their aim was not generally very good, some of their missiles hit the canvass, causing fragments of heavily layered oil paint to crack off and fall as polychromatic stalactites to the floor. The Artist mumbled to himself with abhorrence: “Don’t they know it’s a priceless Schwarzstein!”

Then driven mad with Artistic rage, he burst out from where he hid and ran towards them. “Stop it! Stop it! This is madness! Stop it!”

The eurypterids stopped just as he had bid, but not out of respect. They turned round and jeered at him. He also attracted the attention of a group of hyenas who had been chewing up a wooden Madonna and a velociraptor whose vicious claw had been shredding a painting of some naked women having dinner in a pigsty. They surrounded him, laughing and jeering.

“Just stop it! Do you hear!” the Artist shouted bravely. “Don’t ruin masterpieces which have survived hundreds and thousands of years. I beg of you! Leave them alone!”

“It’s a flipping Artist!” laughed a hyena.

“A flipping avant-garde Artist, I bet!” sneered the velociraptor. “He’s probably painted some of this stuff! What would the great Rupert think of that?”

The dinosaur clouted the Artist on the face causing him to collapse to the floor and out of our sight underneath the jeering predators.

Beta looked at me in horror. “What are they going to do to him?”

“I don’t think we should stay to find out!” I replied, running full pelt across the main hall, jumping over broken statues and glass. Beta ran behind me, and very soon overtook me, demonstrating again her better ability to run over and around obstacles. Our spurt took us through the main entrance, past the shattered glass where the shop had been: its books, postcards and posters spread torn all around the hallway. We darted down the steps, past the blood-stained body of the pig who had been guarding the entrance. His snout was a bloody mess and his coat was badly ripped. He snorted mournfully as we tripped down the steps, a pool of blood in front of him in which could be seen the image of a bearded figure in a halo reflected from the mural above the arch.

There were more Illicit Party supporters and others scattered about the Art Gallery’s gardens, but they were milling about with rather less purpose, and even seemed to be in cheerful holiday mood. Some were idly sitting around a statue of a large bear which they showed no interest in vandalising, and rather more in eating their sandwiches. Beta and I ran along the pathway leading out of the Art Gallery, past the sleeping figure of the first guard we had met, still unaware of the malicious damage being perpetrated inside.

Once out of the Art Gallery grounds, Beta and I stood by a tall lamp-post beside an ornamental hedge, panting and hawking in the late afternoon sunshine.

“That was horrible! Horrible! All that destruction! And who’s to know what they’d have done to us if they’d caught us!” Beta said through short gasps. “I hope that’s the last time I get a fright like that!”

I nodded sympathetically and sincerely. “So do I!”