tweedehands

“To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one moment is to be free.”
(Winterson, J., The Passion)

Short story no. 204. May 22 2006.

The curator says that I suggest that my backgammon competition evenings are as peripheral as a neighbourhood exhibition of amateur painters around the corner. She says after applying amateurism in my paintings, I now create a physical space to question art and taste. But, I say, art space is fluid and follows the artist everywhere. Moreover, audiences nowadays can easily grasp performances in public space, an invisible protest, an imaginary painting or a journey with one spectator, as art objects. Curators have taught us that.

The curator and I had started to write each other love stories.

The curator sees that the generation of feminists before her doesn’t understand the political and economical aspects of art. I ask: Is that the reason that in the end they fall back on searching for essences of art? Maybe there is nothing more to art than politics and economics. It is product of its time: Philosophical if wished, controversial when granted.

In one of her love stories the curator asks if there is any morbidity in desiring herself through the eyes of others. I answer that only if it coincides with the popular “loving oneself to be able to love someone else” she needs to be careful. I know how being conscious of the use of audiences and the importance of their presence, can paralyze a writer. It is not the awareness of how most artists applied the same desire to write the same fiction as oneself does, that could make one decide to stop writing, but the incapability to deal with of one’s own abuse of power. If she isn’t finding this out herself, I am not going to be the one to tell her.

I tell the curator that I stand for the emancipation of the desirer. Anybody can be the desirer, the spectator, and the artist. Luckily we can decide for ourselves which artists we would like to be witnesses to. Is the moment when one isn’t one’s own audience anymore, a reason to stop or to continue making art?

The curator travels a lot for her work. She likes making photographs and sends albums with traces of her journeys to my email address. She makes fairly good photographs, like the ones we see in newspapers, magazines and photography museums. The comments she has written under her photo’s make me laugh. Cleverly she creates a fictional context for her photographs. She writes me a story between the photographer and the photograph, and she makes the narrator of this story object of my desire —which I use to paint. My backgammon paintings are meant to be played on by her and me, so I can watch her looking at my work and follow the moves she makes above my painting. As long as the checkers move on the board, there is space for me to be my own audience. The board occasions a temporary utopia.

I know a photographer who used to make photographs of himself in landscapes. Every year he went to the inlands of Portugal or Spain for two months and parked his car at places where he would was sure he would not meet anybody. He slept in the car next to his camera. He used daylight, headlamps of his car or the flames of a fire, to construct his photographs. The photographs were beautiful. The audience understood it were no self-portraits. Sometimes it was unclear if the person photographed was indeed the artist himself. Sometimes the person photographed could be a woman or a man. Did the photographer make such beautiful photographs without the help of an other? Through the imaginary eyes of who was he desiring himself?

The curator says artists often have used Doppelgängers, alter egos or partners to make art. I answer collaborations often go wrong when there is a sexual relationship between the collaborating artists. One can’t have sex with the person one only temporarily desires to be. Either they stop having sex, either one of them becomes the invisible working force instead of the object of desire. This last category consists usually those who are too intelligent to be an artist. In general, artists deserve partners who are wise enough not to want to be storytellers. I don’t think to be free is an achievement, but rather a display of power. Playing backgammon on my paintings makes neither her nor me free, but reveals the rules to our game. Moreover, she can beat me. She can desire to be her own audience.