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D

The Fantasy of the Novel is a novel that examines a the process of creation of an artist’s novel. The v i protagonist is in the position of a detective who d tries to understand the conditions under which M

an artist decides to write, and how such a thing is a r

possible within an artistic setting. His discoveries o appear in the form of clues that connect all the t o different layers of the project.

David Maroto

The artist’s novel is an art project featuring five

episodic performances and an exhibition. The

Fantasy of the Novel tells the story of each T

instalment and how they come about as the H result of a collective effort. The creative process is affected by the conditions in which it is E THE FANTASY produced, most crucially intersubjective F relationships usually invisible to art audiences. A This is the story of the trajectory that goes from N OF THE the artist’s fantasy (how he initially envisions his T artist’s novel to exist in the world) to the reality A of the work (how it is actually read and received). S NOVEL The narrative gets increasingly intricate chapter Y by chapter, connecting recurring images, O references, and ideas that reflect the rich F complexity of the project. T A Novel H E

N O V E L The Fantasy of the Novel

The Fantasy of the Novel

David Maroto

PhD

The University of Edinburgh

2018 This novel is Part II of the PhD thesis The Artist’s Novel: The Novel as a Medium in the Visual Arts Copyright © 2018 David Maroto All rights reserved ISBN: 978-1719006354 ISBN-13: 1719006350

It’s hard being a character in somebody else’s novel.

David Antin

The Fantasy of the Novel

Cast of Characters i Prologue The Book Lovers 1 Chapter 1 Not a Concept but a Story 5 Chapter 2 What Is Hell for Many Can Be Heaven for Some 25 Chapter 3 Turn Down an Empty Glass 38 Chapter 4 Inevitable and Unnecessary 56 Chapter 5 Unresolved Oedipus 65 Chapter 6 Reading the Unwritten 83 Chapter 7 Taming the Fantasy 92 Chapter 8 To Represent Fiction You Must Participate in It 104 Chapter 9 The Third Wheel 122 Chapter 10 The Ferryman of Hades 132 Chapter 11 Obsession and Obstinacy 152 Chapter 12 The Sleuth 171 Chapter 13 Presence of Mind 198 Chapter 14 Light at the End of the Tunnel 221 Chapter 15 My Last Longings Depart 239 Epilogue 244

Cast of Characters

Alex Cecchetti: Italian artist based in Paris. He published a novella called A Society that Breathes Once a Year and a performance- book called Marie and William. Joanna Zielińska: Polish curator based in Warsaw. She is the head of the performance department at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA). David Maroto: Spanish artist based in Rotterdam and Warsaw. Joanna’s husband and partner in The Book Lovers, a research project about the artist’s novel. Małgorzata (Małgosia) Ludwisiak: CCA’s director. Jarosław (Jarek) Lubiak: CCA’s vice-director. Aleksandra (Ola) Knychalska: Head of the artistic projects coordination department at CCA. Michał Grzegorzek: Ola’s auxiliary in the same department. Paulina Tyro-Niezgoda: Exhibition designer. Novylon (Marek Novilicki & Karina Doctorowicz): Graphic designer duo. Jakub (Kuba) de Barbaro: Graphic designer. Styrmir Örn Guðmundsson: Icelandic artist based in Warsaw. Agata Cieślak: Artist and student at the Dutch Art Institute. Glass Duo (Anna & Arkadiusz Szafraniec): Glass harp players. Tim Etchells: Artist, actor, and writer. Ola Maciejewska: Dancer and choreographer. Francis McKee: Curator, writer, and editor. Director of the CCA Glasgow.

i The Fantasy of the Novel

Charlie Dance: English artist based in Warsaw, graduate of the Dutch Art Institute. Monika Kulczyk: Actress and detective. Ramona Nagabczyńska: Contemporary dancer, Kuba’s partner. Natan Kryszk: Musician with synaesthesia. Johanna Bishop: Translator.

ii

PROLOGUE. THE BOOK LOVERS

Y earning to read the end of the story, the solution to the Tamam Shud mystery, I quicken my pace back home with the book under my arm. Speaking with Joanna after six years of estrangement made me realise how much Alex’s art project resonates with my current situation: what it means to be dead, what it means to be obliterated. I also want to know, is it possible to write after death?

I first met Joanna in New York in 2011, we were both residents at the International Studio and Curatorial Program, and she came for a studio visit. The moment I saw her long red hair and melancholic look I knew I was in love. I showed her my artist’s novel, Illusion, which I had just published, trying to keep her curatorial attention, when her eyes alighted on a slip of paper on my desk. It was a brief list, with no more than eight or ten

1 The Fantasy of the Novel titles, of other novels written by artists that I had put together just to satisfy my personal curiosity. If she hadn’t picked it up, I would have moved on to another work, leaving Illusion and my interest in artists’ novels to join the body of my other unsuccessful projects. But Joanna thought the list could be the starting point for research: how many artists’ novels are there? Who wrote them? And, more crucially, why do artists write novels? Explaining why my novel was an art project rather than a piece of narrative literature had been extremely difficult for me up to that point, so I figured that pursuing Joanna’s idea of researching other artists who were involved in a similar kind of practice would help me situate my own work in the field of the visual arts. That studio visit marked both the beginning of our collaboration and our romantic relationship. Later, when Joanna came up with the name of The Book Lovers, my primary reaction was thinking that she meant ‘lovers’ in the romantic sense. To our surprise, we found out that there were no books, no studies, no exhibitions, nothing that could assist our research. If art critics, historians, and curators had never been interested in the artist’s novel, it meant that everything remained to be done. For the next few years, after our return to Europe, Joanna and I did everything we could to cover that gap: an artists’ novels bibliography and collection acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp; exhibitions in New York, Barcelona, and Krakow; a symposium in Warsaw; an artist’s novel pop-up bookshop in Amsterdam; involvement in the London Art Book Fair, and many other international events. Through such accelerated activity, Joanna and I learned to use the term ‘artist’s novel’ with more precision, exclusively to indicate those instances in which artists employed their novel as an artistic medium. The culmination of all of our work came with the publication of Artist Novels, an anthology, the first book ever to address the topic of the artist’s novel. It sold out in six months, which felt like a decent end to The Book Lovers. We had done

2 The Book Lovers everything we could, with the publication wrapping it all up nicely. The Book Lovers had always been a project, an activity that would have to come to an end sooner or later. I was ready to accept the inevitable and move on to other projects, but Joanna wasn’t. She saw a correlation between the history of The Book Lovers and our personal relationship: since both had started simultaneously, she feared that the end of one would irrevocably imply the termination of the other. She believed that there was room for yet one more contribution to the field of the artist’s novel: so far, we had only shown art projects that were already produced, and only presented artists’ novels that were already published. However, if we were to engage seriously with the reality of this medium, we needed to get involved in the creative process as it happened. Although I yielded to Joanna’s point, the desired framework could only be articulated by commissioning a new artist’s novel. Luckily, she had just been appointed curator at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), in Warsaw. Luckily too, both the new director, Małgosia, and vice-director, Jarek, were very receptive to our proposal, which we called The Novel As Fantasy. We decided that the best way to find our artist would be via an international open call. In the guidelines of the announcement, we explained that the idea wasn’t to apply with the intention of writing a novel, but of producing a two-year- long art project, during which an artist’s novel would emerge somehow. The ‘somehow’ would be dictated by the relationship between the artistic and writing processes, which was for the selected artist to define. We offered 35,000 zloty to produce the art project and publish the artist’s novel, plus travel and accommodation if the selected artist didn’t live in Warsaw. In the meantime, Joanna and I got married in a secret ceremony in New York, the city where we first met. Two months later, in July 2015, I moved to Warsaw with her, to a modest but comfortable flat on the top floor of a tower surrounded by a peaceful garden. Though I still kept my house

3 The Fantasy of the Novel in Rotterdam, I was ready to spend the next couple of years in Warsaw. Being the last project of The Book Lovers, I would invest all my time and energy into it.

4

CHAPTER 1. NOT A CONCEPT BUT A STORY

O n catching sight of CCA’s towers looming above the surrounding treetops, Joanna held my head between her gloved hands and kissed me. Her warm mouth contrasted with the cold tip of her nose against my cheek. I was accompanying her in a dark morning at the end of January to meet Jarek for the final stage of the open call’s selection process. The Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art lay in the middle of a park: its cornerstone from 1624, the building looked more like a mansion than a castle to me. In 1985, at the end of the Communist regime, it became an art centre to service an emerging Polish art scene eager to catch up with the international trends of the moment. The ground and first floors were public: exhibition rooms, cinema, library, bookshop, a restaurant and a bistro, project spaces, and educational rooms, all of it arranged around a central yard that was sometimes used to host concerts and opening receptions. Outside, in an adjacent building called the Laboratorium, there was an artist- in-residence programme, with the capacity to accommodate five

5 The Fantasy of the Novel artists simultaneously. It also contained a black box: a fully equipped multifunctional theatre space. With such an infrastructure, an artist with ideas could do anything at CCA’s premises. On the second floor there were the offices, accessed via a series of identical doors set at regular intervals along four corridors that formed a rectangular structure around the yard. That level retained an early 1990s flavour in the colour and smell of its materials, the fluorescent lamp light, and creaking parquet. Inside the offices the small rooms were oddly shaped by the original castle’s architecture. Three or four employees would share the same working space, resulting in a Kafkaesque atmosphere. Jarek was waiting in his office. Joanna’s superior in CCA’s hierarchy calmly greeted us with his deep bass voice. As we were sitting down around the table he reserved for meetings, I had to make great efforts to avoid gazing at the prominent scar that crossed his face starting at the mouth. I never learned how he got it. Joanna and I proceeded to summarise our preliminary conclusions about the seven projects we shortlisted out of the 230 applications we had received from around the world. Jarek was interested in a New York-based artist. ‘The issue with him is that he’s not intending to create an artist’s novel, but to work around the idea of the novel’, I said. ‘Is that an issue?’ Jarek asked. ‘He’s definitely interested in fiction, but not in narrative’, Joanna said. ‘His proposal is great and could work in another context, but it doesn’t embrace the writing process, and it doesn’t contemplate the creation of a readership. It’s more about the novel as a concept’, I insisted. ‘Besides, we’re considering personal factors as well, since we’re going to be working with the same artist for a two-year-long protracted engagement.’ Jarek frowned. ‘So who’d be your ideal artist?’ ‘I guess a young or mid-career artist’, I said. ‘Not too famous, because we don’t want their commitment being

6 Not a Concept but a Story jeopardised by other, more important projects. And not too young. It should be someone with substantial professional practice, since it’s going to be a collaborative project that requires some experience in dealing with other people. But then again, it should be someone without too much professional trajectory. That would ensure their enthusiasm and investment. Someone who doesn’t come across these opportunities often.’ ‘David is describing himself ’, Joanna quipped. ‘What about this other one? Tamam Shud, by Alex Cecchetti’, Jarek said. Joanna and I exchanged a look of complicity. ‘That’s actually our favourite’, she said. ‘He defines himself as artist, poet, and choreographer’, I said. ‘And he’s already published a novella’, Joanna added. ‘I happened to read it a few months ago, it’s really good’, I said. Actually, I thought but didn’t say out loud, it was well written, but a bit boring too. Alex’s writing skills were noticeable in his application. It began straight away with a narrative passage that struck Joanna and me as one of the best written among the many we received:

It is very embarrassing to propose a new project to the living now that I am dead. My body was found in 2014, somewhere between Los Angeles and Warsaw, dismembered. My identity is still unknown. Nothing can be used for identification. The labels of the clothes, fingerprints, and the number of shoes have been carefully unstitched, deleted, washed, bleached, and delivered to oblivion. Only clue, in a secret pocket sewn inside my trousers, detectives have recovered a fragile piece of paper torn from the pages of a book, written there, the words Tamam Shud, ‘this is the end’.

7 The Fantasy of the Novel

The application text blended fiction and reality claiming that he, the artist, was dead, and that he had decided to investigate his own death. Someone had taken great pains to remove the traces of his existence. To his own surprise, the artist was starting to gather evidence that he was the one responsible for both his death and subsequent oblivion. Tamam Shud was a murder mystery artist’s novel. As for the art project that would lead to its publication, the application indicated that:

Collective incantations, disappearing paintings, flower artificial hybridisation, a tour guide of heaven and hell, score paintings for orchestra and other actions and objects are just few of the clues that will appear in the show, and reflect the passing, the transformation and the disappearing of things. Regularly a performer will guide the visitors through the investigation upon his/her murder. The book, written as a first-person narrative, will be the guide and the story of this scenario.

Tamam Shud wasn’t so much a concept as it was a story, and this feature was decisive for us. Alex’s application reflected both a certain clarity of ideas and a good deal of ambiguity; his proposal was structured and open at the same time. It proved that he knew what he was doing whilst reserving enough space for uncertainty or, put differently, to make sure that he didn’t completely know what he was doing. This was important, because it was the sign that we were dealing with a work that was eminently processual, not conceptual. If the concept of the work had been the main defining trait, it would have been precisely outlined from the outset, and the process would have consisted in its mere execution, a ratification of the idea conceived by the artist. ‘Besides, he seemed like a nice guy during our Skype interview’, Joanna added to help persuade Jarek.

8 Not a Concept but a Story

‘He radiated positive energy through the screen’, I said. ‘He was very excited, perhaps a bit unsure about how to deal with us, which gave us the impression that this project means a lot to him.’ ‘It seems like we have a winner’, Jarek said. ‘Okay, you can write him and begin the arrangements to start the project.’ As we walked out of Jarek’s office, Joanna smiled at me, ‘You got it your way’. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Alex is exactly as you anticipated, remember? Mid-career, not too famous … He’s even your age.’ ‘Not exactly, he’s one year younger.’ Joanna was right, we had devised the project as one that I’d have liked to have been offered by a curator. I was an artist after all. Even though The Book Lovers required that I take up curatorial responsibilities, becoming a curator had never been my ambition. I wondered if, unconsciously, I was trying to fulfil my own fantasies vicariously through another artist, and if such an identification would influence the creative process. I liked to think of myself as a pragmatic person, but I feared that my judgement could be clouded by my desires and my impatience to attain them. Luckily, I thought, Joanna and her curatorial know-how would bring some balance to our relationship with Alex. The next day we were looking at Alex’s face on Skype, with his beard and his aquiline nose. He was exultant: ‘Dear David and Joanna, the good news really fills me with joy! I’m very much looking forward to starting this great adventure together.’ Living in Paris for many years had laced his Italian accent with a hint of French. ‘We’re very excited too! We’re hoping to launch the project by the end of April. Will you be available to come to Warsaw?’ Joanna asked. ‘I’ll be in Brussels around those dates for the fair and a performance festival, but yes, it’d be possible.’

9 The Fantasy of the Novel

‘The idea is to organise a public event, something simple, like a conversation between you and us’, I said. ‘The open call created so much hype that we want to announce the result to everyone who has been following the selection process. And to present your project, of course.’ ‘Okay, yes, but it’d be good for me to visit CCA before that, to get to know the place, meet the people inside (meet you in person!), and see what’s possible and what’s not, so I can start thinking how to produce the project.’ ‘Sure, when are you planning to come? David is teaching in the Netherlands for the next few weeks, but I’ll be in town’, Joanna said. ‘How about 7 to 12 April? I’m free on those dates, after I am back from Sri Lanka.’ ‘That would work for me as well. I’ll show you around the building and will arrange some meetings for you.’ ‘I’m sorry I’ll be missing you’, I said. ‘But I’m sure we can catch up via Skype when you are in Warsaw.’ ‘Of course, everything will be fine’, Alex promised with a smile.

Małgosia, CCA’s director, invited us for dinner with a group of international artists who were part of Joanna’s first curated exhibition at the centre. When we arrived at the restaurant, we sat down opposite her at the table. We had only seen each other at work meetings, so it was a good occasion to chat with her in an informal setting. It was the moment to give a good personal impression beyond my professional commitments. Having CCA’s institutional support wasn’t enough, I wanted to get the director’s personal approval and appreciation for the project. I found out that, being Polish, she spoke good Spanish, a circumstance I tried to take advantage of by starting an exclusive conversation no one else could join. Judging by the

10 Not a Concept but a Story way she laughed at some of my jokes, I think I did a decent job. At dessert, Małgosia stood up to give a little speech: ‘Joanna’s show, which you are part of, is of particular significance for CCA because it marks our programme’s kick- off. I took the director’s position one year ago and, as usually happens in these cases, we have been running the previous director’s programme until now. There is always an interim period when you arrive at an institution, during which you apply some changes, hire new people, and so on, until you are ready to do what you were appointed to do. I am glad to say that this phase is now over and we can begin implementing our own programme.’ Visibly proud, she proceeded to describe the highlights of the new CCA programme, the ones that were meant to make a difference, in her view. I was expecting to hear a mention of The Novel As Fantasy at some point, if only as a courtesy to Joanna and me. Unfortunately, that moment never came. I felt disappointed by the omission of what I thought to be a special project, very different from what other art centres commonly offer. When she finished her speech, I leaned towards Joanna: ‘Did you notice the omission?’ I whispered. ‘Don’t blame her’, she said, stroking my cheek. ‘Perhaps we didn’t explain our project adequately. It’s kind of complex, you know. If it isn’t entirely clear to her, she won’t know how to speak about it in public.’ ‘Okay, that’s understandable, because we selected Alex just a few hours ago and we don’t have an actual project to speak of yet. But there’s The Book Lovers project, crystallised in The Novel As Fantasy’s framework. She could at least have spoken about the framework? About the fact that CCA is producing an artist’s novel, even if the title isn’t known yet? Isn’t that something to be proud of as CCA’s director?’ ‘I’m sure that she’ll be able to engage with the project when it’s a bit more developed’, Joanna said. I had to admit that Joanna had a point: I didn’t really know how to speak about Tamam Shud either. I decided that, if I

11 The Fantasy of the Novel were to curate the project, I should understand it better. I spent the next days collecting the details of a story that, for some reason, Alex hadn’t told us about. What I learned is this: Tamam Shud was loosely based on real facts. On 1 December 1948, a man was found dead on Somerton Beach, in Australia. The resemblances between the coroner’s inquest, written on 17 June 1949, and Alex’s application text were striking:

The body was clad in clothes of fairly good quality. All tags which might have led to the discovery of identity had been removed. … The only articles in the clothing were some cigarettes and matches, two hair combs, a packet of chewing gum, a single uncancelled railway ticket …, and lastly a piece of paper on which were printed the words ‘Tamam Shud’. This paper, which was in the fob pocket of the trousers, and which was not found for some time afterwards, was, I am satisfied, torn from a copy of the second edition of Fitzgerald's translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. The printed words are the concluding words of the poem and mean ‘The End’.

The autopsy could not determine the cause of death. Although it was suspected the man had been poisoned, there was no conclusive evidence. The only clue was the scrap of paper, torn from the Rubáiyát, a book of poetry written in the twelfth century by the Persian poet Omar Khayyám, which deals with the transient nature of life and the preoccupation with death, to which the poet responds with an exaltation of life and its pleasures, wine and sex, carpe diem, advising the reader to live to the full and leave the world with no regrets. Two neighbours found the copy of the book from which the scrap of paper had been torn. They assumed it had been dropped by someone in the back of their car, where they found it. To add more mystery, a phone number was handwritten on the book’s back cover, which belonged to a nurse called Jessica Thomson.

12 Not a Concept but a Story

Last pages of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.

13 The Fantasy of the Novel

Jessica lived at a mere 400 metres from the spot where the body had been found. She, however, denied any connection with the dead man, though she admitted that she had presented another man with a copy of the Rubáiyát when she was working at a hospital during World War II. This man had been working as a spy during the war. When the police followed this lead, they found him alive and well in his house in the suburbs of Sydney, still owning his copy of the Rubáiyát with its last page intact. Investigators were never persuaded by Jessica Thomson’s claims not to be connected with the case, especially after she nearly fainted when she was confronted with a cast of the dead man’s bust. At the end of 1948 she had a sixteen-month-old baby and was about to get married. Her child was later discovered to share some rare physical features with the Somerton Beach man’s ears. Today, the case remains unsolved. It isn’t known who the man was (a spy, a heartbroken lover?), nor the cause of his death (poison, natural death?), nor the reason of his demise (suicide, murder?). Alex wanted to use it as the base for a narrative work about death, mystery, and self-obliteration, a project that interrogated what it means to be dead. He deliberately wanted to create a confusion between him, the artist, and the fictional character as victim, investigator, and narrator. Tamam Shud, the artist’s novel, would be the victim’s investigation of his own assassination, a first-person account by someone who only knows that he’s dead, but can’t remember who he was or why he died. Moreover, he doesn’t know why the traces that could lead to the discovery of his identity have been meticulously erased. In preparation for his first visit to Warsaw, Alex sent an addendum to his application, in which he, in what was becoming a recognisable style, clarified how the themes and structure of the Rubáiyát would pervade his future artist’s novel:

The Rubáiyát starts with the awakening of the main character by the light of the sun, an old man calls him to

14 Not a Concept but a Story

action. The last poem ends in a garden in which the main character finally gives his glass of wine to someone else before the nightfall. How this structure will be used, as much as the final chapter of TAMAM SHUD, will be kept a secret till the publication.

At that point Joanna and I started to notice how each time Alex disclosed some information about the project, he was, simultaneously, creating a new blind spot. Since we had never been given a whole and clear description of the Tamam Shud project, we began to suspect that, far from being the consequence of a faulty communication, it was the result of a premeditated strategy. Alex wanted to use mystery not only as a literary device, but also to define the relationship with everyone involved in the project, Joanna and I included, so that we would have to discover what it was about gradually. Each project instalment would release clues to unveil aspects of the narrative like pieces of a puzzle, so that we, the curators, would not only unravel the secrets contained in the story – who the protagonist actually was, who killed him and why, and so on – but also the very mechanisms of the art project we were curating. We knew that he wanted to interweave a series of performances, an exhibition, and the artist’s novel writing process. But how these elements would actually connect to each other still escaped us. The first clue was in a drawing that Alex had scanned from a page of one of his notebooks. It depicted three interlocked circles, each one respectively labelled PERFORMANCE, SHOW, and BOOK. The first circle in the Tamam Shud project would be a series of four episodic performances. Again, the contents of each performance were never explained in advance but, by putting together bits and pieces of information from conversations and email exchanges with Alex, I gathered that he was intending to re-enact some previously existing works, which in principle weren’t thought to be part of the Tamam Shud project. At first,

15 The Fantasy of the Novel

Tamam Shud art project structure (sketch from Alex Cecchetti’s notebook).

16 Not a Concept but a Story it seemed an unjustified move to me, but, in successive conversations, the motivation became clear. The re-edition of the performances would apply the method of canovaccio. Originated in the Italian commedia dell'arte, canovaccio is a scenario based on dialogues and situations that leaves plenty of room for improvisation. Alex wanted to replay these performances in a different framework, that of the artist’s novel in progress, expecting that such an operation would be able to redefine their original meaning. ‘The performance is then a schizophrenic act in which the artist does not recognise himself’, he said. He also told me about his interest in the notion of estrangement, how he wanted to become alienated from his own work: ‘So the challenge is, “I’m going to show these objects, how am I going to fit them in the narrative?” So the object itself will transform the story, because suddenly the story has to deal with a presence that is completely a stranger. It’s a stranger in the story.’ The Tamam Shud narrative would alter the meaning of the works as much as the works would alter the course of the narrative. The results of this experiment would be integrated in the artist’s novel afterwards – in a way that was still a mystery to us. The second element, the show, had also a performative nature. He imagined a series of rooms, each of them containing a different artwork that would be activated at specific times. As was the case with the performances, many of them did not originate in the Tamam Shud project, yet they were going to be part of it. For example, in the Dance Room there was an installation called Arabesque, made of staircase banisters modified in such way that, as he explained, ‘If the spectators touch it and follow it from the beginning to the end, touching and following the curved line and twists of this handrail, they’ll end up doing a movement that is a movement that ballet dancers do. So they will dance.’ Such was the idea behind the work as originally conceived, and I thought it made a lot of

17 The Fantasy of the Novel sense given that he was also a choreographer. Now, inserted as an element of the Tamam Shud exhibition, it was possible to see this piece in a different light: I remembered the passage in the Somerton man’s autopsy that described his calf muscles as extraordinarily developed, like those of a dancer. When Alex mentioned that the handrail’s shape was going to be like the magnified traces of handwriting, I figured that, if writing was inscribed within the shape of the banister, the spectator would be able to read those signs through her dancing movements. The third planned element was the artist’s novel itself, the project’s very reason to be, yet the one Joanna and I knew the least about. We were going to be the managing editors of the publication, something akin to be the curators of the artist’s novel, meaning that we would have oversight of the general progress of the project, but we wouldn’t copy-edit it at the level of grammar and punctuation – for that we’d hire a professional. But it occurred to me that Alex would benefit from hiring a copy editor not to correct the text at the end, when it was completely written, but earlier in the process, to check the text’s consistency and readability. I spoke to a friend who had edited another artist’s novel and she told me that the artist tended to deliver an impenetrable text. Implementing artistic processes in order to produce a long narrative does not ensure that it’s going to adhere to literary conventions – it might be the opposite. And this is when the copy editor becomes essential, as she is knowledgeable about such conventions, about what a novel needs in order to be readable. The copy editor’s key role in the creative process, however, compares only to her invisibility, as Raymond Carver’s case famously illustrates. Ten years after the writer’s death, the public learned how Gordon Lish had had no qualms about cutting down some of his original stories by 50% or 70%. The crux of the matter is that it was precisely Lish’s heavy editing that shaped Carver’s famous writing style. Whilst Alex agreed with my suggestion, he didn’t like the idea of working with a copy editor in an orthodox way. Rather, he thought of staging the copy-editing process as a performance

18 Not a Concept but a Story

Dance Room, including Arabesque (sketch from Alex Cecchetti’s notebook).

19 The Fantasy of the Novel in which he would read his manuscript out loud in front of an audience and the copy editor would work on the text on the fly. Alex wasn’t sure he’d actually use her feedback, he just wanted to put her in the position of a detective. ‘I don’t know how we can do that’, he said, ‘how we can technically solve it. But it’d be nice if, while I read the text of the chapter, you can see simultaneously, at my back, this guy moving and deleting. I don’t know how we will do it, but we’ll see. This is the image. Technically, I don’t know.’ Alex wasn’t too worried about the possible deviation between the imagined artworks and their actual materialisation. After all, this is what being an artist is about. Now, the artist’s novel was a different business. Alex had written narrative fiction before, but Tamam Shud posed an unprecedented challenge. I realised that he wasn’t completely familiar with all the complexities of this medium when I visited him at his guest room in the Laboratorium. This happened a couple of days after Episode 1 had been performed. We had hardly had the opportunity to speak to each other in person, so I wanted to have a conversation with him. He looked a lot calmer in the aftermath of Tamam Shud ’s first event. I asked him: ‘Who would be your ideal reader? Somebody who understands that the artist’s novel is part of an art project? What would happen if somebody only reads the artist’s novel?’ ‘I think the latter would be my favourite reader’, he replied. ‘Of course, people who saw the show and stuff will recognise some codes, they will have more keys to open different doors. But I think I’d like it if the book is an object in itself. If all those metanarratives, or secret doors, or different layers open is good. But, otherwise, when you read the book there are so many other doors that you don’t even need to know the existence of the art. So I think the book must be a book.’ That same week we had nearly closed a deal to publish the artist’s novel with Sternberg Press. Alex was very happy about this opportunity because it ensured an optimal distribution of Tamam Shud in specialised art bookshops. But when I

20 Not a Concept but a Story listened to the depiction of the ideal reader that Alex had in mind I observed a little incongruity: ‘Right. I was just thinking, because we already agreed on the publisher, which is an art book publisher, and their distribution network is quite tied to a kind of art audience, I was wondering, how possible would it be that someone from the art world would read it just as any novel?’ ‘Yes. Probably the context influences the category of the reader.’ He paused for a few seconds. ‘So you think we chose the wrong publisher?’ He laughed at his own question, but his laughter could not conceal a hint of concern. It was contradictory to wish to reach non-art related audiences while at the same time limiting the distribution to the art world. Like any other artist, Alex wanted to achieve success in the art world by presenting an innovative art project in an innovative medium, as the artist’s novel was at that time. Seen from that perspective, it made sense working with a publisher like Sternberg Press. But, on the other hand, the art world works in such a way that the artist who aspires to contribute something significant – not repeating established practices in the art field – must venture into realms not yet considered artistic. However, her efforts will be futile if simultaneously the artist doesn’t make sure she’s being watched by art audiences that can sanction her gesture as art and hopefully as challenging or groundbreaking. This is the art world’s logic, in force since the day Duchamp presented a urinal on a pedestal. Alex’s fantasy, the future imaginary scenario in which he pictured Tamam Shud being both read by art outsiders and being appreciated as a successful artwork, harboured a paradox that, at that point in time, seemed insoluble. We needed to run the art project till the end to see how the materialisation of his fantasy panned out. ‘I don’t know, we’ll see’, he laughed again. ‘You know, there’s always a second edition, we can publish a second edition with Penguin Books. If it works, if it’s good.’

21 The Fantasy of the Novel

‘Yeah, like Tom McCarthy.’ ‘Yes, exactly, Tom McCarthy started with Metronome Press. And Metronome Press was an art publisher. And then he found his way to …’ ‘… a mainstream publisher.’ ‘Hollywood even bought the rights to make a film based on his novel.’ No matter how far-fetched it sounded, it was an accurate description of his fantasy. The pleasure of the fantasy lies in the fact that it doesn’t account for the obstacles that it will encounter in reality. At that moment, at the beginning of our project, Alex was allowed to daydream, even if in a tongue-in- cheek way. A Hollywood movie based on his future artist’s novel was a representation of his desire, an image to chase, the motivation to commit his time and energy. For him, Tamam Shud was not so much a project as it was a moment in his practice at large. It did not begin with The Novel As Fantasy and it would probably live afterwards in other ways.

Coinciding with Alex’s induction visit to CCA, I was spending a few weeks in Rotterdam because of teaching commitments at the Dutch Art Institute. I opened Skype to speak with him and Joanna from my studio. I had acquired the habit of not turning the camera on when skyping with Joanna, because the internet connection at CCA was unreliable and the sound worked better when there was no image to transmit. Through the speakers I could hear that Joanna and Alex were in very high spirits. ‘So, how’s the visit going?’ I asked. ‘Fantastic, everyone here is so nice, and the building is amazing!’ Alex replied. ‘I’m glad to hear that. Maybe we could use this conversation to discuss the public launch, as we agreed?’

22 Not a Concept but a Story

‘Oh, about that’, Joanna said, ‘we decided to start the project right away.’ ‘What do you mean?' ‘No public launch. Alex thought it’d be best to begin directly with the first performance in the series.’ ‘Really? So soon?’ ‘Well, we also changed the date, it’ll be on 13 May instead of late April.’ ‘13 May? That can’t be, I’ll be in Scotland that week.’ ‘Can’t you cancel it?’ ‘No, you know perfectly well I can’t. I can be back to Warsaw the day before the performance, in the evening. That’s the earliest, but I’ll be missing all the rehearsals.’ ‘Oh, don’t worry, we’ll manage’, Alex said. It took me a minute to understand the situation. They weren’t asking my opinion, they were informing me about the change of plans as a fait accompli, without the slightest intention to discuss it with me. The decision had been made already, so I could only agree with it. They proceeded to describe what the performance would be about. It included two opera singers, a glass harmonica, and quite a lot of preparation. It was Tamam Shud alright. At full blast. ‘I don’t know guys, we spoke about a public conversation between Alex and us, something simple. The first performance was supposed to take place in September’, I said. I could barely conceal my apprehension. I didn’t want to be a wet blanket, but I didn’t believe that such an elaborate performance could be arranged in just five weeks. Not in any satisfactory way. But Alex and Joanna didn’t stop for a second to consider the additional efforts that such a drastic modification would entail. Besides (although I didn’t say this out loud because it felt embarrassing), it meant my exclusion from the process. I would participate in the first Tamam Shud episode as a spectator rather than as a curator. That such a big decision could be made without considering my opinion made

23 The Fantasy of the Novel me doubt my position. I was the curator, but not a curator like Joanna. I was an artist, but not the artist. If anything, I was a detective trying to figure out what the project was about and how to place myself in it.

24

CHAPTER 2. WHAT IS HELL FOR MANY CAN BE HEAVEN FOR SOME

U nassumingly, as if wearing seventeenth-century wigs and an ashen makeup that gave our faces a ghostly look was the most natural thing in the world, Joanna and I opened the doors of the Laboratorium’s black box. The audience that had been waiting in the lobby walked in gazing at us with curiosity and amusement. It would have been a funny moment had I felt not so exhausted. I had arrived in Warsaw just a few hours earlier, late at night, hungry and tired, in a delayed flight from Edinburgh. I noticed something funny in Joanna’s mood just as I came home, a stiffness when I tried to kiss her. ‘Everything okay?’ I asked. ‘Your dinner is in the fridge’, she said in her coldest tone. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ ‘You left me alone to deal with a week of rehearsals! Even Alex noticed your absence. He complained that you only care about your own work.’

25 The Fantasy of the Novel

Berating me wasn’t like Joanna. To be in such an agitated state she had to be stressed, but nothing could justify such an unfair accusation: she and Alex had changed the dates and, in fact, the whole scope of the event. But I already knew that arguing with her would be pointless, when she was like that she wouldn’t admit the slightest responsibility. ‘I lost my appetite’, I said. Not being able to find the energy to start a quarrel, I picked up my coat, which I had just hung up, and left for the street again. I walked aimlessly for an hour, until the fresh air slowly cooled me down. When I went back home, Joanna was already in bed. I lay beside her, but I remained tense throughout the night and couldn’t sleep a wink. The next morning, being the day of the performance, I tried not to make things worse and just went quietly to CCA with Joanna, even though I was feeling drained inside. Now Episode 1, titled When Everything Is So Clean It Is Difficult to Remember Something, was about to begin. The black box where the performance was going to take place was a large room with no elevated stage, just a sizeable empty space in front of a metallic grandstand that the audience had to walk around upon entering the room, before reaching the central space. The walls, the floor, and the ceiling were painted black; the lights had been carefully configured in such a way that everything but the central space remained in darkness. The 35 or so members of the audience gathered together in the middle of the room, whilst the grandstand, where they should normally have taken their seats, was occupied by two standing figures escorting a man hanging upside down. It was Alex on the very top of the structure, surrounded by the singers: a countertenor and a contralto, the former being the highest pitch in a male voice, the latter the lowest of the female vocal range, so that they met somewhere in the middle. Indeed, when they began singing the melancholic Henry Purcell’s ‘O Solitude’, it was difficult making a distinction between their voices. The countertenor was wearing makeup all over his face, dark blue with purple tones and plenty of glitter. The contralto

26 What Is Hell for Many Can Be Heaven for Some

Episode 1: When Everything Is So Clean It Is Difficult to Remember Something. Countertenor and contralto.

27 The Fantasy of the Novel had the same colours on her face, though her design was shaped in the form of an inverted triangle. In the back corner of the black box, Anna and Arkadiusz Szafraniec, better known as the Glass Duo, operated their glass harp, a musical instrument made of a number of wine glasses arranged by size: the smallest ones on the left, where Anna stood, and the largest ones on the right, by Arkadiusz. They were displayed on a table whose top was tilted so that the rims of the glasses were all levelled at the same height. A small metal box with water was all they needed to moisten the tip of their fingers and produce any note by caressing the rims with circular movements. The ethereal sound of the instrument combined with those exceptional voices produced an hypnotic effect. And yet the glass harp had come as a second option, because Alex initially asked for a glass harmonica, a rare and old instrument that could not be found in Poland. It is an extremely fragile object too, and the costs of shipping one from abroad would have been astronomical, not to mention the difficulty of finding someone able to play it. The plan B, getting a glass harp, wasn’t easy to accomplish either, as the Glass Duo were the only existing players in the country. As for the singers, there were only ten like them in all of Poland, so we had been extremely lucky to find those two on such short notice. If we had these musicians on stage it was thanks to Ola, CCA’s producer. Being the head of her department, it would have been easy for her to pass this mess on to one of her assistants, but she wished to be personally involved. With great efficiency, and only in a few weeks, she had done an incredible amount of research and arranged everything necessary for such a complex performance. Apart from the musicians, the grandstand, and a large black beanbag, the room was mostly empty. In the absence of actual props the space was filled up with sound. Episode 1 was a performance based on Alex’s narrative, music, singing, and light design. Above the grandstand, in the twilight and out of public sight, Ola and the light and sound technicians followed each

28 What Is Hell for Many Can Be Heaven for Some sentence uttered by Alex on the script. It was essential to keep perfect coordination between his cues and the operation of the stage lights, which shifted between the different scenes. Styrmir, an Icelandic artist based in Warsaw, and a friend of me and Joanna, was the last one to enter the black box. He winked at us for a greeting but we, being in character, couldn’t express more than a quiet smile. We closed the doors behind him and joined the audience at the centre of the room. Alex was still hanging upside down, changing positions and smiling while the notes of ‘O Solitude’ continued to sound. It was the first time I saw him in person, he was shorter than I expected. I recognised his outfit as reminiscent of the clothes worn by the Somerton man at the moment of his death: a white linen suit with a green undone bow tie around his neck. His awkward posture reminded me the picture he included in his application to the open call, in which he posed lying upside down over the steps of a spiral staircase, playing dead, his legs crossed in the shape of a number four. Knowing his fascination with Tarot, I guessed it was no coincidence that the inverted composition in the application picture and now also in Episode 1 was evocative of card XII, The Hanged Man. It was a bit too early for me to make sense of what the repetition of this visual motif would signify for the project, so for the time being I limited myself to making a mental note. As the song came to an end, Alex abandoned his weird body position and, standing in front of the audience, said through a hands-free microphone attached to his face: ‘Yes, I died here. I know it’s uncomfortable but I guess you have no choice when someone kills you. … I died here, look at this.’ He went down to meet the audience, lay on the floor, arms stretched and legs wide open, and said, ‘I died here, very frontal. Now, it took two weeks for the cleaning lady to understand I died.’ Alex got up and walked around, swinging his arm, ‘BFFFFF – this is her, passing the hoover – BFFFFF. Then my leg was bothering her.’

29 The Fantasy of the Novel

He gestured as if lifting a leg on the same spot where he had been lying down just a minute ago. ‘BFFFFF, paf!’ He imitated the sound of his leg dropping with a thud. ‘Then my arm was bothering her, BFFFFF, paf! And you know what – my head was bothering her. And the next week she did the same: BFFFFF. I think she understood I died when I finally couldn’t pay her anymore. Poor lady. Detectives said that they found nothing in my pockets. They asked the cleaning lady, she said she found nothing in my pockets as well. But I think she checked. I mean, how did she know?’ He kept walking around, very close to the audience. ‘The strange thing about detectives is that I died there, and they check other people’s pockets. I died there and they follow other people’s steps. I died there and they check your pockets, your fingerprints, your bank account’, he said, pointing at Styrmir. ‘What for? I hate microphones. What for? To know who I was and how I died. Who I was, I have no idea; how I died … neither. See, this is a crime scene. Usually, in a crime scene there’s blood, hair, dust, little pieces of skin, nails, body fluids, like sperm and shit like that. But here, someone is used to cleaning everything twice: the cleaning lady. See? She comes twice a week, it’s so clean you can lick the floor.’ He lay on his stomach and proceeded to demonstrate it. He got up and said, ‘That’s why it’s so hard to remember anything when everything is so clean’. Alex moved around ceaselessly, now shouting, now grabbing a spectator by the shoulders, now making up another one with glitter, or playing mother and son with another one. His continuous changes of tone kept the audience’s attention focused on the narration. The story was filled with what I suspected were clues that would be developed in future episodes. For example, through most of the performance, Alex was dragging the black beanbag around, which he called ‘a couch’. Surely this object can’t be irrelevant, I thought. It could become an important element later on in the project, perhaps as

30 What Is Hell for Many Can Be Heaven for Some a piece of evidence that the detectives had missed when searching the crime scene. But even I, who had more background information than the rest of the audience, couldn’t be sure. At some point, he lay down on the beanbag and said: ‘I don’t remember much about dying, but I know that, for some strange reason, my first memory and my last one collide. For some cosmic reason, they are the same: first and last one, the same memory, more or less.’ He invited the audience to get closer around him. He gestured to Marek Novilicki, a graphic designer friend of Joanna, ‘Come on big boy, here, I don’t bite’. The audience laughed. He then described the experience of being a baby in a pram, ‘I was lying down. And then, right there [he pointed upwards] there were these trees. And on top of these trees there were green leaves. And they were trembling, and going backwards. And the sun behind the leaves was flickering, making light games, very beautiful. Everything was going backwards. Everything was so beautiful. Sometimes someone feeds you. Sometimes you sleep and someone sings to you. Sometimes you shit and someone cleans you up. And life at that time was beautiful, really beautiful.’ I could identify what we were listening to as a description of the video that was going to be projected on the ceiling of the Death Room in the future Tamam Shud exhibition. He stood up again: ‘Now, if it was possible to die twice in a lifetime, I really would like that my last memory was me in my mother’s arms.’ He reaffirmed his words with energetic nods. ‘Just me in my mother’s arms … and my little bow, aiming proudly at a faraway haystack.’ He gestured as if holding a bow and arrow. ‘“Come on boy, shoot. If you shoot, mommy will give you the thing that you want so much”’, he said, impersonating his mother’s voice. ‘I don’t remember what that thing was, but I think I really wanted it, because I shot. Fuck, I shot.’ He rearranged everyone to stand in a semicircle. ‘You ask about my father – I mean, you didn’t, but this is part of the text. Death is really funny. Death is a little bit like:

31 The Fantasy of the Novel

Boo! You see, I’m not funny, but when death does it, people are scared to death. Bad joke … I don’t want to speak about my father. What happened to my father is not important. I mean, what happened to my father’s leftovers is not important. I cut him in little pieces and put them in little plastic bags. Blue. Now, he was a big boy.’ Next, he gave the floor to the singers, who interpreted Rossini’s ‘Duetto Buffo di Due Gatti’. It was an uplifting moment, everyone enjoyed it, and some even danced with Alex. Close contact with the audience, making comments on their actions and reactions was part of the performance. In his speech, Alex alternated the fictional narrative with intentionally humorous remarks addressed at particular spectators, following the method that he had referred to as canovaccio, leaving a lot open to improvisation. It enabled him to mingle Alex Cecchetti, the fictional character who told his story post-mortem, with Alex Cecchetti, the artist and author of the performance. It blended past (the time of the narrated events) and present (the observation of the immediate reality around him), death (the narrator’s) and life (the performer in front of us). This strategy created a playful and enticing confusion. Most of the time his lines were funny: ‘Look at me, I look perfect, right? You know, I’m old, it’s one year since I died. It doesn’t look like that, right? Thank you.’ At some point, he was tucking in his shirt and said, ‘See, the problem is that I’m joking with you now, but look at me, look at me! How much I want you to know that I died (you paid a ticket for that), otherwise, how could you ever know that I lived?’ His performative attitude also had a reverse side. For some reason, he tended to tease his audience. Grabbing one guy by the shoulder, he said: ‘What do you think? Here, see? It’d have been much better to die on the couch, don’t you agree?’ ‘Much better’, said the guy.

32 What Is Hell for Many Can Be Heaven for Some

Episode 1: When Everything Is So Clean It Is Difficult to Remember Something. Alex and the audience.

33 The Fantasy of the Novel

‘You don’t have to talk, it’s my show.’ Then, turning to another spectator, ‘Try tying your shoelaces, in the air’. The second guy gesticulated as if knotting some shoes. ‘Don’t be pathetic’, Alex said, and everyone cracked up a little. Then turning to the rest of the audience, ‘Don’t look now, but what colour is your underwear?’ He even teased Ola several times throughout the performance by asking her to give him his cue, which was always the same line, ‘I don’t remember much about dying’. Though Ola made a serious effort to follow the script and read it out loud whenever he requested, for him it was a jest, a device to repeat the same line over and over. After sipping on a glass of red wine, he said, ‘Fuck. It’s bad, no? I mean, I don’t know what you drink here in Poland, but in Paris it’s not like this. I’m sorry about this, just shove it down, like vodka.’ And, after cracking a joke most people didn’t catch, ‘Maybe we should change the city, do this show somewhere else’. Judging by the visible reactions, many in the room didn’t get this kind of caustic humour. There was even a group of three spectators – I recognised one of them to be Paulina, an exhibition designer with whom Joanna had worked in other projects – sitting in the darkest corner, keeping a safe distance from Alex’s reach. As far as I was concerned, he wasn’t exactly hilarious, but he wasn’t too offensive either. However, there was one unfortunate incident that I thought shouldn’t have happened. At a certain point, he invited everyone to lie down on the floor: ‘When you die …’ He hardly had begun his line when he interrupted it to address Ola directly through his microphone. ‘I know, I’m cutting a lot.’ He was warning her about his intention to skip some parts of the script, so she and the technicians should be careful to manage the lights accordingly.

34 What Is Hell for Many Can Be Heaven for Some

‘So let’s die.’ He dropped on the beanbag. The first notes of Pergolesi’s ‘Stabat Mater’ were produced by the Glass Duo while the lights were dimmed. But the lights didn’t go off completely. ‘Can we turn off the light?’ he asked Ola, but nothing happened. His improvised jumps in the script had made her lose her cue. The lights were still on, causing Alex to lose his temper. He turned to where Ola and the technicians were, gesticulating wildly with his fists clenched, veins popping out on his forehead, and a mad expression on his face. Many in the audience, me included, thought that it was a scripted situation, one of Alex’s practical jokes, and we smiled. But the situation turned out to be like Tommy Cooper’s death on stage: a magician so famous for his jokes that, when he had a stroke and died in front of the audience, everyone laughed like crazy at what they thought it was another hilarious gag. It took us a minute to realise that the miscommunication between Alex and Ola wasn’t part of the performance. After some tense moments of confusion the lights finally went off. It took him a little while to regain his composure. ‘How can someone die if the technicians use drugs? It’s been five days of rehearsal for this. These technicians, I don’t know if they understand improvising.’ Joanna and I exchanged a puzzled look about the situation we had just witnessed. Getting angry at the technicians in front of everyone was out of place and, frankly, a bit disturbing. The lack of coordination between him and them was an obvious consequence of the short time they had for rehearsals. The idea of the performance had been accepted too hastily, one or two more days of preparation were missing. After the incident with the lights the performance followed its course: more stories were told, more songs were sung, and wine was served by Joanna and me. For the final act, a large screen descended over the back wall. A silent video was projected depicting a car driving through the streets of Los Angeles, seen from the passenger’s point of view. Alex was standing in front of the picture, with his back to the public,

35 The Fantasy of the Novel pretending to be driving while recounting his dialogue with an Algerian LA taxi driver. He had a funny expression on his face. ‘“What is hell for some is heaven for few”’, Alex said, impersonating the taxi driver. And then, turning to the passenger, he added, ‘“By the way, what’s your third wish? I’m very curious”’. “‘Come on, I never had the first two”’, Alex replied, impersonating the passenger. ‘“Oh yes, yes, yes, sir. You had them. It was beautiful. You just don’t remember because the second wish was I want to forget all my life.” ‘“Forget everything?” ‘“Yes, sir, everything. Now, sir, I don’t have time. So, what’s your third one?” ‘“Well, in that case, I wanna remember everything.” ‘“Oh, my God, what a plot twist! Remember everything? Yeah, that I can do. It’s strange though, because this was also your first wish.”’ The taxi driver burst into loud evil laughter while contralto and countertenor began to sing ‘Miserere Mei, Deus’, by Gregorio Allegri. With it came the end of Episode 1 after 70 minutes of performance. The audience applauded, the performers (including us, the curators) bowed, and everyone lingered around for a bit longer to finish their wine and share their impressions. It was then that I noticed CCA’s director, Małgosia, among the public. I approached her to invite her for a glass of wine. She was delighted: ‘I joined half an hour ago, so I missed part of the performance.’ Luckily, the lights incident too, I thought. ‘But what I saw was absolutely fantastic. He’s a genius!’ It was comforting to notice her change of attitude in relation to our project. I emphatically supported her opinion because I genuinely believed that Alex had done an engaging, imaginative, and complex piece of work and, also, because I

36 What Is Hell for Many Can Be Heaven for Some wanted to cement her appreciation for what ultimately was the result of the art project I had conceived. ‘I’m also surprised by the power of his performance. After all, it’s the first time I’ve seen his work live’, I said. ‘The more I think of it, the more details I find.’ All the rushed efforts had been worthwhile, and my initial idea of hosting a curator-artist conversation seemed now so conventional and boring to me. Małgosia finished her glass and left, still in very high spirits. I searched for Alex to congratulate him. Joanna, Ola, the technicians, the singers, and the musicians, everyone had been working with him while I was away and I wanted to feel part of the team. When I approached him he was talking to Ola, so I thought it was a good chance to thank her for all her hard work as well. But, as soon as I joined them, I noticed something was wrong. Visibly altered, his face contorted with anger, Alex was taking his frustration out on her: he couldn’t let the incident with the lights go. Barely holding back her tears, Ola tried to defend herself, to no avail. When a big tear eventually rolled down her face, Alex left her to speak to someone else. I didn’t know what the relationship between the two was, I only knew that she had taken on a huge load when she accepted the production, in just a few weeks, of a performance that, under normal circumstances, needed months of preparation. I tried to console Ola by telling her that, but she was too agitated to actually listen, and she walked away.

37

CHAPTER 3. TURN DOWN AN EMPTY GLASS

R eporting the financial status of the project, Ola was back to her calm, slightly aloof, yet friendly self: ‘Alex has the tendency to increase expenses beyond the stipulated limits. For example, he said that he needed €700 to shoot a video but it will eventually cost €1,400. I’m afraid that, even though Jarek agreed to raise the initial 35,000-zloty project’s budget, there’s still a risk of it being insufficient.’ We were having a meeting to evaluate the progress of Tamam Shud so far. ‘What video is this?’ Jarek asked. ‘Belladonna, he shot it in a garden in Paris, walking backwards’, I said. ‘It’s included in the show’, Joanna said, ‘in an installation called the Death Room, with the spectators lying down on the floor watching the video projection on the ceiling, silent, because the soundtrack will be whispered by a performer in their ear.’ ‘Shall we say that we cover €1,000? Something in between?’ Ola asked. 38 Turn Down an Empty Glass

Jarek agreed. Ola carried on detailing the estimated costs for each part of the project, particularly the exhibition, which had grown both in scope and price in the few months since the open call. She said: ‘Alex wants to work with a carpenter for the Music Door, a botanist for a new breed of hybrid flower, a flute maker who can build thirteen animal bone flutes …’ ‘Bone flutes?’ Jarek asked. ‘He claims to see one at the feet of Tarot card XIII, Death’, I said. ‘In the exhibition there’ll be a room called Botanical Garden, where Alex wants to show a new breed of flower created through hybridisation’, Ola said. ‘I consulted a botanist, and he assured that the operation will take at least two years of work and an investment of about 1,000,000 zlotys.’ Jarek looked at Joanna, Joanna looked at me, and I looked back at her. ‘Clearly, that’s not happening’, Joanna said. ‘Also, we recently learned that Alex isn’t writing his novel in English but in Italian. Hiring a translator to rewrite the manuscript will cost a lot more than a copy editor would charge to correct it’, Ola said. ‘How much are we talking about?’ Jarek asked. ‘The project’s total cost is now three times higher than the amount we offered in the open call’, Ola answered. ‘There are a few things we can do to compensate, though. For example, spreading the publishing costs to the next year. If we go to the printer in 2018 instead of at the end of 2017, it can be paid for from the next year’s budget.’ ‘That sounds okay, let’s do it’, Jarek said. I was a bit amazed that everyone tried to find the best way to accommodate Alex’s ambitions without questioning them. He was lucky to have such a friendly team. If, under other circumstances, I was the artist invited to do a project and I tripled my expenses just like that, I’m sure the curators would have offered a little more resistance.

39 The Fantasy of the Novel

After Ola finished the financial report, Joanna said: ‘David and I want to create a loyal audience in Warsaw who can follow Alex’s investigations over the next two years.’ ‘Which should be compatible with Alex’s wish for people who attend a single performance, or who only visit the show, to have a satisfactory experience’, I said. ‘We can have it both ways’, Joanna continued, ‘it’s a matter of communicating the episodic structure to the audience. However, if we want to achieve this, we need the promotion department to change their attitude. We’re concerned about the way they dealt with the publicity of Episode 1. They failed to send out the invitation for the event in time. Only thanks to our insistence did they finally agree to send it, reluctantly, just 48 hours before the performance, way too late for the announcement to have any effect.’ The lousy work of communication had, no doubt, affected the attendance. We asked Jarek’s permission to launch our own communication strategy. We wanted not only to attract more audience members, but to also create a sort of visual identity that would enable the different project’s instalments to be recognisable as part of a whole. We proposed hiring some like- minded graphic designers to carry out Alex’s idea of using press releases, invitations, and newsletters to convey fragments of the narrative. Jarek agreed, once again, to enlarge the project – and its budget. Then he broke the bad news: due to some complicated internal CCA programming issues, it was necessary to change the dates of the exhibition. The problem he was oblivious of was that the exhibition constituted an essential device in the creation of the Tamam Shud narrative. We estimated that we could produce the performances of Episode 1 and Episode 2 in 2016 and, afterwards, in 2017, the exhibition, followed by two more performances and the publication at the end of the year. The show would take place in the middle of the project, so that Alex would have enough time to apply whatever narrative it produced to the artist’s novel. Rescheduling it to September

40 Turn Down an Empty Glass

2017, almost at the end of the project, would reduce its influence in the writing process, because it would be too close, if not overlapping with, the very publication of the artist’s novel. I worried that the exhibition would become useless in the overall scheme, but Jarek was inflexible, the change of dates had to be implemented in order not to upset CCA’s general programme. There was no way round it. Besides, he had been so generous with the growing demands of the project that it was difficult to battle him for what seemed reasonable compensation. In the subway back home, I asked Joanna how we were going to tell Alex about the change of dates and the impossibility of producing the new breed of flower. I was concerned about his possible reaction. ‘It’s like we are taming his fantasy. I’m not really sure this is what my job should be about. I am not sure I feel comfortable in this role’, I said. ‘Don’t worry króliko, I already suggested Ola should play the bad cop in everything relative to the budget. She’ll be the one informing Alex. As for the new exhibition dates, we’ll talk about it the next time we meet him in person.’ ‘I’m surprised at how easy it was for Jarek to accept enlarging the project.’ ‘I can tell you something that I think played in our favour – you were in Rotterdam and didn’t see it. During Alex’s first trip to Warsaw on 7 April, I introduced him to people who would be involved in the project, and we also had lunch with Jarek. As we entered CCA’s restaurant, I could see that Alex had spotted Jarek right away even though he had never seen him before. But, you know, Jarek does look like a curator.’ ‘With his shaven head and invariably dressed in smart suits’, I said. ‘That’s what I mean. So, after we ordered lunch, I proceeded to explain the details of the Tamam Shud project: the artworks in the novel, the novel in the artworks, performances writing the mystery. It’s a bit complex and I saw it in Jarek’s face, he was getting lost in the nuances of the plan. I

41 The Fantasy of the Novel think Alex noticed it too, because he opened his bag and produced a notebook that he placed in the middle of the table so that Jarek and I could see its contents. It was full of ink drawings, handmade and very appealing sketches and annotations for future works that he used to explain his ideas. Our attention was trapped by his voice describing the pieces as he imagined them, he did it in such a passionate way that Jarek and I fell into a kind of trance, only interrupted once, when Jarek pointed at the drawing of a door with holes. ‘“This one is the Music Door ”, Alex said. “It’s a piece I dreamed of, a door with embedded flutes that plays music as you open it. In my dream, I visited the studio of another artist, and the door was there, it belonged to her. When I woke up, I decided to steal it from her.” ‘And when I said, “I’m curious to see if a dreamed object could function the same way in real life”, Alex responded: ‘“According to a traditional Scottish ballad, if the hairs of a victim are played on a guitar or a violin, the singer will sing the name of the murderer. There’s a story called ‘The Two Sisters’, which exists in many variants throughout Europe, about an elder sister who, driven by rivalry and jealousy, pushes the younger one into a river. Days later, when the corpse comes up, someone uses her bones and hair to make a harp. When played, the instrument sings the story of the murder.”’ ‘If that’s true’, I said, ‘I wonder what kind of clue the door’s sound will produce for the solution of the Tamam Shud murder mystery.’ ‘He also told us about his fascination with Tarot. He sounded very proud when he said that he actually met Alejandro Jodorowsky, you know, the Chilean filmmaker, poet, and writer.’ ‘And magician.’ ‘Alex told us that for twenty years Jodorowsky has been giving free Tarot readings every Wednesday at the café Téméraire in Paris. So many people turn up seeking his counsel

42 Turn Down an Empty Glass

Music Door (sketch from Alex Cecchetti’s notebook).

43 The Fantasy of the Novel that he has developed a lottery system to select the lucky ones who will undergo a Tarot session. It was in one of those that Alex met him.’ ‘I think Jodorowsky calls it psychomagic, he doesn’t use it to predict the future but as a healing method.’ ‘Anyway, Alex went on telling more anecdotes, ancient tales, and jokes. The notebook presentation became truly a performance, it was impressive to see what an imaginative and curious mind he has.’ ‘I’m so glad to hear that we made the right choice’, I said. Indeed, when we sifted through 230 applications, we inevitably had doubts about whether we had picked the best. Upon listening to Joanna’s account, I was reassured and, if I had to be honest with myself, felt validated too. ‘At some point an incoming text message on his mobile phone broke the magic. Jarek and I had to laugh when he took an old Nokia out of his pocket. But even that he turned to his advantage, saying “I do have an iPhone, but I always keep it at home. I never use it. If I started to make photos with my iPhone, I’d stop making drawings.” Isn’t it brilliant?’ Joanna and Jarek experienced, first hand, Alex’s ability to charm those around him. His lively presentation was the product of a calculated pretension. He knew that his companions knew it was pretentiousness, if only tacitly, but it didn’t matter. If anything, it made his performance more persuasive, because pretentiousness is a valuable quality in the art world. Learning to master it is essential to thrive in its social milieu, where key decisions are made over a dinner, or on a first impression. The attitude, the ability to sustain an interesting conversation, even the body language displayed at social situations – an exhibition opening, for instance – are factors that can be of vital importance. Charm and pretentiousness were part of the set of social tools that Alex, like so many other artists, cultivated in order to obtain his desires. There is nothing reproachable in this, it’s just the way an informal institution like the art world works. The factors that contribute to someone’s

44 Turn Down an Empty Glass success are not formally measurable; it could be due to a fortunate encounter. For Alex, meeting CCA’s vice-director at the restaurant could be one such encounter, so impressing him became imperative. ‘After he had gone through the notebook’, Joanna continued her narration, ‘Alex excused himself to make a phone call. Jarek used the opportunity to confide to me in a low voice: ‘“He makes you feel like you want to give him everything he wants.” ‘And it was a good thing that Jarek felt this way, as you have seen in our meeting today …’ ‘… when we asked his acquiescence to raise the budget initially estimated for the project’, I said. ‘Yes, thank you króliko, you did a lot while I was away, in Rotterdam and afterwards in Edinburgh, I will try not to miss any more rehearsals.’ The memory of our quarrel upon my return from Scotland still lingered, it was time for reconciliation. ‘Dawidku, I love you so much, you’re so sweet’, she said, with the same melancholic look that seduced me when we met in New York. She wrapped her arms around my neck, and we kissed. At home, I took my shoes off and dropped on the couch with a sigh. Everything had happened so quickly since the end of the open call. Luckily though, the next episode was scheduled for the autumn, so there would be enough time to catch my breath. Just as I was getting ready for bed, my phone chimed with an incoming email. It was Alex. He suggested organising an additional performance in July, in Paris. Before I replied, I wanted to talk it through with Joanna, who was already under the sheets. ‘The idea of outsourcing parts of the project has been on the table from the beginning’, she said. ‘Yeah, I guess we can do that. I’m just a little concerned about the audience in Warsaw, they’ll never get the whole project, but fragments of a larger narrative.’

45 The Fantasy of the Novel

‘But you always say that an artist’s novel is like the narrative key that reconnects the fragments scattered throughout an art project into a coherent whole, don’t you? At least they’ll have that. We shouldn’t refrain from having a little adventure in Paris.’ ‘Can we reply to him tomorrow? I’m dead.’

The unexpected Episode 2, called Belladonna, gave us the opportunity to test our new communication strategy. Joanna contacted a graphic design duo she had worked with before in other shows: Marek and Karina, who went by the name of Novylon. They weren’t the kind of graphic designers that work on demand, exactly. They had quite an autonomous approach to their profession and saw themselves as artists in their own right. I really liked the stuff they had produced for Joanna: wildly imaginative, a bit kinky, definitely smart. Plus, they had attended Episode 1 with their kids (Marek was the one Alex called ‘big boy’), so they were familiar with the project. As soon as we put them in contact with Alex we observed with satisfaction that, on the creative side, they were in tune with each other’s ideas and, on the personal, they got along very quickly. In a few weeks Novylon prepared a catchy email invitation addressed to what Joanna called our Very Important Friends, VIF for short. It included an adaptation of the Rubáiyát ’s eighteenth quatrain, rewritten by Alex:

Never blows so red The rose on buried land As every flower grows From some once lovely head So in this tender herb so green Lean upon it lightly and hear For who knows

46 Turn Down an Empty Glass

From what once lovely lips This green springs unseen

Accompanying the poem, Novylon edited a video trailer from some footage shot by Alex. It showed a lush garden seen from a subjective point of view, as if from the eyes of someone walking backwards. In the soundtrack, over the sound of tweeting birds, Alex’s whispering voice could be heard: ‘I am dead. Therefore, I am compost. Therefore, my assassin must be the gardener. Therefore, the paradise is a garden.’ The reference to the garden as paradise resonated with the title of the future Episode 3, which Alex had advanced to be Nuovo Mondo: Tour Guide of Heaven and Hell. If, during Episode 1, he had recalled his first memory from the perspective of a baby in a pram (‘The green leaves were going backwards, everything was going backwards’), Novylon’s video trailer could be a perfect visualisation of his last memory, as if he had been killed in a garden and this was the last image seen by his eyes from the subjective viewpoint of his body being dragged by his murderer. Joanna and I arrived in Paris a couple of days before the event in order to help Alex with the arrangements. After dropping our luggage in a room that the Polish Institute had kindly offered to us, we took the subway to Alex’s studio, located in the Cité des Arts, a sort of artists’ village in the heart of Montmartre. I was sixteen the last time I had been in the old artists’ quarter. While searching for Alex’s address in Google Maps I couldn’t help getting lost in memories of drunkenness and first sexual experiences. In a way, it was good to be in Paris again, if only to acquire new memories to overwrite the old ones. Pleasant as they were, they had become a cliché, a story to be told that, like anything that had happened to me before I met Joanna, I wasn’t interested in telling anymore. We arrived in the Cité des Arts area, but finding the access gate wasn’t that easy. As we passed by an equally disoriented

47 The Fantasy of the Novel group of tourists for the second time, I began to get a little nervous. I was checking the map in the screen of my phone for the tenth time when we heard a familiar Italian-accented voice calling behind us. It was Alex: we had distractedly passed in front of the entrance without noticing. He opened the gate and hugged Joanna. ‘You look wonderful!’ he said. Then, turning to me, he added, ‘You don’t’. The remark came accompanied by a smile to indicate that I shouldn’t take it to heart. Before anything, he took us for a walk around the Cité des Arts. Seventy artists lived and worked in individual studios surrounded by an impressive wild garden, crossed by multiple paths, big enough for an inexperienced visitor to lose her orientation. Episode 2 would consist of two parts: a guided tour through the garden and a poetry reading in what Alex mysteriously called ‘the cave’, actually the cellar of one of the studio buildings. Going down a flight of stairs we accessed a cluster of interconnected rooms with a ceiling so low that we had to bow our heads. Some wine bottles were arranged in a rack, the rule being that, if you opened one, you should replace it with a new one, so that the number was always constant and every guest would always have something to drink. Everything was very dark and dusty but, when lit with candles, it created a warm atmosphere ideal for an evening of poetry and wine. After showing us both garden and cave, Alex took us to his studio. It was interesting to be inside his world. I found a piece of banister laying against the wall, a fragment of an early version of Arabesque. There were also many plants, most notably a beautiful large orchid. A long line of notebooks, all the same size and colour, were arranged on a shelf. He picked one up and showed it to us: it had an original drawing by Jodorowsky on the cover. Inside there were more drawings that the Chilean master had made for Alex in an attempt to explain the mysteries of Kabala. The notebooks looked a lot like the dOCUMENTA (13) publications series. In 2012, the Kassel macro art event commissioned the publication of a hundred booklets, one of

48 Turn Down an Empty Glass them a facsimile of Jodorowsky’s own notebook. I acquired a copy and spent many hours trying to unravel its esoteric drawings and handwritten annotations on the meaning of certain Tarot cards. Alex’s notebooks had a similar air, both in the nature of the contents and the graphic style. Alex wanted to buy wine and snacks. He also suggested dividing the guests into two groups, so that he could take a dozen or so on a tour while the others remained in the garden. Drinks, food, and music would make the wait for their turn more pleasant. Since we had some spare time, Alex took us to the Gustave Moreau’s house, a mere 15-minute walk away. This visit, I must say, gave me a greater insight into Alex’s world than his studio did. The house of the famous Symbolist painter had been turned into a museum. The two lower floors, formerly the artist’s home, were cluttered with hundreds of paintings. But the most interesting area was the studio on the upper floors. As we were climbing upstairs, Alex confided to me: ‘Most of the ideas for my project come from this house.’ For the future Tamam Shud exhibition Alex wished to recreate not only the atmosphere of Gustave Moreau’s old house, but also some very concrete objects in it. For example, the studio was divided into two floors connected by a spiral staircase. As soon as I saw its handmade banister, tailor-made in capricious twists to fit in that particular corner, I knew where the inspiration for Arabesque had originated. Alex also showed us Moreau’s drawing cabinet, a piece of furniture containing frames that held his drawings inside glass panels. The panels were hinged at the side, so that they could be swung open like casement windows, giving access to more drawings inside, following a sort of Russian doll structure. The cabinet, just like the spiral staircase, was specifically crafted on commission to satisfy Moreau’s needs. Joanna and I were inspecting it when Alex said: ‘I want to produce a replica to display my own drawings in the Erotic Cabinet.’

49 The Fantasy of the Novel

Spiral staircase and banister in Gustave Moreau’s studio.

50 Turn Down an Empty Glass

‘It’s a beautiful idea, but do you know how much it’ll cost?’ Joanna said. ‘But surely carpenters in Poland are cheaper than in Paris?’ Alex replied. ‘I know, but still, the price to make such a piece of furniture will be astronomical. If we put it together with the Arabesque banisters you want to make, we are going to blow the whole exhibition budget.’ ‘For a choreographer like Alex, the twisted handrails piece is important’, I said. ‘Choreographer?’ Alex looked at me. ‘That’s what your website says, doesn’t it?’ ‘Actually I’m not. I’m a visual artist.’ ‘But then why …’ ‘Okay, we’ll talk about it later’, Joanna interrupted. ‘It’s time to get to the wine shop.’ On the way out of Moreau’s house, I told Alex about my concern regarding the change of dates for the exhibition, which I thought deviated too much from the original plan. After giving it some thought, he looked at me and said: ‘I think it’ll be fine. The show is already working on the novel. The production of the show is the show for me.’ These words opened my view to a new, and perhaps more interesting approach to the creative process. Instead of using the exhibition as a tool to concoct the narrative text, which, in other words, meant separating the artistic and writing processes in two consecutive but different moments, they would develop in parallel. Besides, there was still a month or two between the end of the show and the publication of the artist’s novel, so that the former could still influence the latter. After all, it was going to be a performative exhibition, meaning that something might happen during the manipulation of some of the artworks that would rewrite the events in the artist’s novel. However, if I was completely honest with myself, I had to admit that I still didn’t know for certain the way the exhibition and the artist’s novel were connected and, by the look of it, nobody

51 The Fantasy of the Novel around me did either. But, since nobody seemed to worry, I decided to follow suit and go with the flow, letting the events run their natural course. The next evening a considerable number of people came to the garden. The weather was excellent. We arranged a large table with wine and food outdoors. Guests crowded round it; the drinks, the music, and the relaxed atmosphere prompted friendly chatter. After an hour of a continuous influx of visitors, the guided tour began. Alex and I walked away from the table with a first group of fifteen people while Joanna remained engaged in some small talk with those who stayed waiting for their turn (we would switch these roles at the second round). When we were far enough to be heard, I gathered everyone round me to give a short introduction to the tour. The expectancy in the group was palpable. As previously agreed with Alex, I explained the Tamam Shud project in a narrative blend of fact and fiction, which began with a matter-of-fact description of how Joanna and I commissioned Alex’s artist’s novel, to gradually and surreptitiously slip into fictional mode. When I explained how the artist had been found dead in 2014, and yet the story continued to be written, the faces round me were mesmerised, ‘What is he talking about? Is it possible to write after death?’’ Alex took the group through the garden for the next half hour, stopping here and there to pick up a tiny flower or to tell a story about a particular plant, discovering the many narratives concealed in the seemingly banal vegetation. Sometimes they were personal memories, other times they referred to a plant’s mythological origin. Once again, as had happened in Episode 1, his storytelling style enthralled the audience. I followed the speech as much as my rusty French allowed me to, which was enough to learn about the poisonous nature of some apparently innocuous little plants. I couldn’t always appreciate the nuances of the stories that were told, but I could see and hear smiles and laughter. The sun was going down by the time the second group began the tour. This was my turn to stay by the table. As

52 Turn Down an Empty Glass

Episode 2: Belladonna. Guided tour through the garden.

53 The Fantasy of the Novel

I saw the visitors disappear in the greenery, my mind evoked the Rubáiyát’s final scene, which takes place in a garden at nightfall. In it, Omar Khayyám laments his future disappearance and invites the reader to drink a glass to his health:

Ah, Moon of my Delight who know’st no wane, The Moon of Heav’n is rising once again: How oft hereafter rising shall she look Through this same Garden after me—in vain! And when Thyself with shining Foot shall pass Among the Guests Star-scatter’d on the Grass, And in thy joyous Errand reach the Spot Where I made one—turn down an empty Glass!

Alex had done the guided tour in the Cité des Arts garden quite a few times before he met Joanna and me. Yet, even if the participants in the performance weren’t aware of it, the garden setting and the presence of wine were two central elements shared with the Rubáiyát. As in the poem, night time and wine would be the prime elements of Belladonna’s second part. Darkness had fallen and half of the attendants had already left when Alex summoned the remaining audience to visit the cave. In the dim candle light we opened some bottles and listened to Alex recite a number of poems picked from the pages of one of his notebooks, which he had brought for the occasion. Earlier that day, he had explained to Joanna and me how he used to transcribe his favourite poems and how, each time that he performed Nuovo Mondo (which was coming to Warsaw as Episode 3), he prepared a different selection to read during the performance, a selection that was made in dialogue with the architecture of the building where the tour took place. Now, in the cave, he was following a similar reading method, acting as a poetry DJ of sorts. He gave a short introduction before each poem and, again, he resorted to the same harsh humour to address his audience. For example, to someone who was

54 Turn Down an Empty Glass opening a bottle, ‘Can you do it very quietly, like you don’t exist?’ At first, it elicited some laughs among the audience but, past a certain point, his jokes, if they were jokes at all, began to fall flat. There was a moment when he invited a young woman from the audience to read a poem out loud: ‘Would you like to read one?’ ‘Do I have to?’ Overcoming her initial reluctance, she started, ‘Our ship needs wheels to sail across these waves of stone if Medusa is our figurehead … ah, it changes languages afterwards’. ‘The time is over’, Alex snapped. ‘No, I was reading differently …’ ‘… and it was a bad reading. But you have a second chance.’ ‘I don’t really want a second chance’, she said. ‘Someone wants to read it?’ he asked around. ‘No one.’ ‘You scared everybody’, the young woman said. ‘I’m not mean, it’s just the character.’ ‘David wants to read a poem in Spanish’, Joanna said. Indeed, we spoke about it earlier in the day, but Alex ignored the request altogether. In spite of these awkward moments, everyone enjoyed Belladonna, no doubt aided by the effects of wine. Before they left, many of the attendants approached us excitedly praising the combination of performance, writing process, and social event. Joanna and I were happy too, but there wasn’t any time to rest on our laurels because we had to get ready preparing for Nuovo Mondo.

55

CHAPTER 4. INEVITABLE AND UNNECESSARY

E pisode 3 couldn’t count on Ola’s assistance. She said she was too busy with other projects and delegated her responsibilities to Michał, a young man from her department. Joanna didn’t know if Ola’s absence would be temporary or permanent. I suspected that it had to do not so much with workload as with not wishing to repeat her experience during Episode 1. Joanna and I also wanted to avoid repeating the same situation with the publicity of the performance. But CCA’s promotion department didn’t make it easy for us. One of them was off sick because of malaria, another had undergone heart surgery, and a third one had changed jobs and now worked for another museum. CCA hired two new people to fill the deserted department, just to see them resign a few weeks later. I was starting to lose my patience but, fortunately, this time we had Novylon, who did a great job publicising the performance. They designed a simple and beautiful ‘Save the Date’ card that was spread through Warsaw with the message, ‘WHAT IS

56 Inevitable and Unnecessary

HELL FOR MANY CAN BE HEAVEN FOR SOME – Guided Tour of the other world’. In preparation for Nuovo Mondo, Joanna and I searched for a venue that fitted Alex’s request. The idea was doing a guided walk in which he would halt at each room to read a poem from his notebook. He specifically asked for an old building where we could be granted access to areas normally not open to public. Eventually, we chose the Królikarnia Palace (the Rabbit Palace, in Polish), an eighteen-century building that was home to a sculpture museum. The depots, situated both in the cellar and the upper floors, were filled with countless sculptures displayed on shelves at different levels and also directly on the ground. The palace’s former kitchen was a circular structure separated from the main building, connected by underground tunnels closed to public access, a circumstance that suited Alex’s demands perfectly. The whole compound was surrounded by a gorgeous garden descending a slope behind the palace, which gave way to a spectacular view over a pond. Once we fixed the venue, we set Episode 3’s date for Friday 28 October. We also contacted two performers that Alex wanted to work with: actor, artist, and writer Tim Etchells, and Ola Maciejewska, a Paris-based Polish dancer. In the meantime, Novylon worked on a short video trailer to be launched in social media, which took the viewer for a virtual 3-D trip through the rooms of the Królikarnia Palace. Joanna and I thought that its making took an amount of time and effort not compensated by their fee. We would have been equally happy with something simpler, an animated GIF or something like that but, for some reason, Marek was very keen on realising his idea, willing to invest as many hours as necessary, so we let him do it. The preparations for the performance seemed to go on smoothly until one day I woke up and read an email from Alex. Subject, ‘Novylon’. The message, ‘What is their problem?’ I hurried to read the long thread of emails exchanged the night before between Marek and Alex: they had managed to get

57 The Fantasy of the Novel themselves into a quarrel of escalating proportions while Joanna and I were sleeping. Novylon’s irritation had mainly to do with Alex’s bossy tone. It was true that he had the tendency to write his emails very quickly, as if they were short text messages, one liners that lacked any ‘please’ or ‘thank you’. Joanna and I were used to his style and didn’t attach great importance to it, though we could understand Novylon’s point of view, so we tried to solve the conflict with another email. Marek replied: ‘Alex doesn’t present us his ideas – he asks us for changes because he is a Super Star with a Super Ego, which makes this cooperation really bad and uninteresting. This is the most frustrating pro I have worked with in the last months: lack of communication; Star-Servant approach; ignorance and demands for corrections make it a real hell. Today I feel really stupid and angry for being so naive and trying to add some extra value to my work. I was so sure we could reach a higher level of interaction – my fault.’ On top of that, he blamed Joanna and me for not having mediated in time, but the truth was that if bad blood had been brewing between the two of them, they had concealed it so well that we didn’t notice anything – until it was too late. Joanna phoned Marek to relieve the tension, only to be shouted at. I wrote another apologetic email in the evening, which he answered with a long diatribe that ended with his refusal to finish the video trailer. Three days passed and, even though we were aware of the serious impact it would have on the attendance, we were about to give up on the idea of having any promotion at all when, suddenly, and of his own accord, Marek resumed work, acting as if nothing had happened. It was all jokes and camaraderie again: ‘I am beginning to like it, rendering – change – rendering – change – rendering – change – rendering … it’s like a prayer. But we’ll all go to hell – this is probably the only consolation for me.’ Joanna and I breathed again, but trust had been broken and the question we had to ponder now was whether we should

58 Inevitable and Unnecessary continue working with Novylon in the future. This time it was just about a video trailer, but the next time it could be about something bigger, the promotion of the exhibition, for example, or even the book design, and there was no guarantee that Marek would not flip again, leaving us in the lurch. The whole issue had an unsettling effect on me. In my twenty years as an artist I had never been in such a confrontational situation. I might have had some differences with people I worked with before, but they were settled without drama and bad manners. For me, an art project meant quite simply work that had to be done; feelings ought to be kept in check for the greater good: the art project as collective result. It was always advisable to keep a professional distance with your collaborators, though of course sometimes you might befriend them: for example, Joanna and I once invited Novylon for dinner to our house to discuss the project. To me, at the time, good communication was essential in a collaborative project, by which I meant a respectful dialogue aimed at producing a result everyone involved could be proud of. A collaborative dream, maybe, though I preferred seeing it as a pragmatic approach to work. I hated wasting emotional energy on unnecessary conflicts, an energy that could be best invested in the project. But conflicts, as I would soon learn, are sometimes inevitable, even if they are unnecessary. My collaborative dream had turned into Marek’s nightmare. And yet, in spite of all the mayhem, Novylon’s campaign was a success. Joanna and I had expected to accommodate 35 people at the performance and we received 80 reservations: an unmanageable crowd to walk through the narrow tunnels of the palace. Alex thought of splitting the performance in two parts: at 7pm it’d be a guided tour of hell starting in the subterranean tunnels; at 9pm a guided tour of heaven beginning in the garden. Apart from that, the route through the building would be almost the same, although the script and the selection of poems would be different.

59 The Fantasy of the Novel

The day Alex came to Warsaw to prepare the performance I was again teaching at the Dutch Art Institute. But, having learned my lesson from Episode 1, I made an effort not to miss the rehearsals, so I took the first flight I could, even though it meant sleeping less than four hours. When I landed in Warsaw the weather was horrible and the traffic was a mess, as is usual for a rainy day. The airport bus in which I travelled braked abruptly, sending passengers and luggage in the air, causing a nasty accident: one girl hit the back of her head on the floor and was lying unconscious. The bus driver pulled over, everyone got off, someone called an ambulance. After waiting for ten minutes in the rain, and seeing that we weren’t going anywhere, I took my suitcase to the closest subway station. When I emerged, I had to walk nearly a kilometre to Królikarnia, still in the rain. I entered the museum’s café soaked, cold, tired, and feeling miserable. Joanna, Michał, and Alex were waiting for me. I ordered a tea and began relating my ordeal until Alex blurted, ‘Already complaining’. Caught off guard, and not knowing how to react, I sat down, sipping my tea in silence. Joanna told us that there was a problem with the tunnels that connected the palace’s main building with the kitchen. They had been closed down for so long that the air had become infected with Aspergillus and Actinomycetales, microorganisms that could pose a respiratory threat to sensitive visitors. Królikarnia’s director wanted to send an email to those who had already booked informing them about the health risks, but Joanna and I didn’t think it was a good idea, because it would create alarm and a lot of cancellations. Upon hearing this, Alex proposed paying a visit to the director: ‘I will wear a lot of perfume and walk in her office. It will be easy to persuade her.’ Joanna and I exchanged a look of complicity. We asked him to wait till we found a suitable solution.

60 Inevitable and Unnecessary

‘It’s like he can only relate to people through seduction’, I said to Joanna after he left to rehearse his poems around the building. ‘You mean he can only relate to females through seduction. Didn’t you notice he can’t work with males?’ I raised an eyebrow. ‘Come on, you must have noticed by now’, she said. ‘Yeah, it’s true, I have. When you write emails Alex always replies with a “Dear Joanna”, but when I sign them, he avoids addressing me directly and answers with a generic “Dears”. It’s his way to obliterate me from the conversation.’ ‘But why would he need to do that?’ ‘How should I know? You should ask him!’ I could have come up with a few more examples, but I didn’t want Joanna to interpret my list of affronts as signs of jealousy. Of course, I had noticed that Alex was flirting with her, but it was too subtle and I didn’t want to draw her attention to it because desire is contagious. I preferred acting as if nothing happened, or at least as if I was aware of the situation but chose to stay above it. My capacity for concealment, however, was soon put to the test. The next days we spent many hours at Królikarnia: Alex, rehearsing the tour; Joanna, Michał, and me at the café, which had become our temporary headquarters. One evening, when, after a long working day, Michał said he’d stay a bit longer to finish managing the reservation list. Alex remarked: ‘Let’s go, we are not necessary’, jestingly implying that Michał was the only hard worker among us. As we were leaving, Alex turned to me and added: ‘David, you are not necessary.’ Once again, I didn’t know what to respond. Marek had felt treated like a servant, but I didn’t even belong to that category. From Alex’s point of view I was useless, I could be perfectly ousted with no consequences for the project. After all, he only needed Joanna and CCA’s support to fulfil his fantasy. However, we were bound to work together by a contract and I

61 The Fantasy of the Novel thought, perhaps a bit naively, that we should keep the atmosphere between us as pleasant as possible. Obviously, Alex didn’t share the same opinion, but I didn’t want to react to his broadsides because I thought it necessary to keep my composure for the good of the project. Besides, although I was getting tired of being the target of his attacks, he disguised them as jokes that others could find laughable, putting me in a position where I couldn’t express myself openly for fear that others might believe I was being neurotic. Later that evening we toasted the project with red wine in a nearby restaurant. It is a custom to look at your friend’s eyes when taking the first sip, but the way Alex stared at Joanna was quite a different thing altogether. He was greedily ogling her, oblivious to what I might think. I started to have doubts about my own behaviour. Should I keep pretending that everything was fine? And for how long? Things got worse when Joanna and I arrived home: ‘I’m going to the theatre tomorrow’, she said. ‘Okay.’ ‘I got tickets for Alex and me.’ ‘What about me?’ ‘For some reason, I thought you wouldn’t like the play.’ ‘Well, you were wrong, I really want to see it.’ The truth was that I couldn’t care less about the play. At that moment what I needed was to stay home and catch up on my sleep. But I had to prevent things going off track, I had to keep an eye on them. I was away for just one day and this is what I got on my return. I found my growing confusion increasingly hard to conceal. The next morning Joanna wrote a group email to Alex, Ola Maciejewska, and Tim, to discuss some practicalities before the performance, which she started with ‘Dears’, exactly as Alex habitually did. I advised her to use ‘Dear all’ instead. Later that day Joanna told me that she had been speaking with the curator of an art institution in Los Angeles about the possibility of co-producing and showing the Tamam Shud exhibition, which would relieve some of CCA’s

62 Inevitable and Unnecessary budget load. Although chances of success were slim, it occurred to me that she had never done such a thing for me. ‘You never promoted my work to other curators.’ ‘Are you serious?’ ‘Don’t evade the question.’ ‘Are you jealous?’ ‘Should I be?’ ‘Oh please, don’t be silly.’ Inadvertently, I had been placed in a competition for Joanna’s attention, caught in an absurd situation created by the dynamics around the production of the art project, whether I liked it or not. Eventually, Alex said that he was too tired to join us for the theatre, so we went with Ola Maciejewska instead. By Friday 28 October, the day of the performance, we had solved the fungus problem. Some of the hell visitors were given the chance to switch to the microorganism-free tour of heaven. Additionally, we’d wear overalls and masks when walking through the tunnels. At first, I thought that such bothersome requirements would throw people off, but Alex found a clever way to integrate the necessity of wearing the protective gear into his narrative. Since it was about a walk through hell, he played with the idea of danger of death by breathing the fungus. Whilst I appreciated his ability to adapt his work to changing conditions, I found that Joanna was going a bit overboard with her admiration: ‘For him, an artistic idea isn’t something to stick to rigidly all the way, but a tentative scenario that takes definitive form in a particular setting. With Alex, art is something that happens. It happens to him, to me, to you, and to those around us.’ It wasn’t the first time Joanna praised Alex’s creative abilities, she had told me about their lunch with Jarek and the enchanting notebook presentation, after all. However, on this occasion, it had a disturbing ring to it. But I didn’t want him to be the reason for another quarrel before a performance, so I opted to repress my thoughts and focus on the production issues.

63 The Fantasy of the Novel

The original idea for Nuovo Mondo had undergone several changes since our arrival to Królikarnia – for instance, becoming two different tours instead of one – and this, I presumed, would have an impact on the writing process. However, Joanna and I still didn’t know how the performances and the artist’s novel connected with each other, so it was impossible to figure out how modifications in the former would affect the latter’s development. Actually, we started to suspect that neither did Alex. Perhaps he wasn’t keeping a secret about the inner functioning of his project, perhaps he was in the dark just as much as Joanna and I were. When we selected him in March we thought that he had a master plan that we were only allowed to get glimpses of. By the end of October, we had the feeling that he was playing by it ear, pretty much applying the method of canovaccio not just to his performances but to the whole project.

64

CHAPTER 5. UNRESOLVED OEDIPUS

A gata, a Polish student at the Dutch Art Institute where I taught, had volunteered to be our assistant during the performance. In spite of the darkness and the cold rain, the first batch of 35 guests arrived at the meeting point, Królikarnia Palace’s front entrance. Agata checked the names on the list and handed out packets with white overalls. Her big round eyes, blonde hair, and dark eyebrows reminded me of my first girlfriend, long ago, when I was about Agata’s age. But that wasn’t the only reason I felt a special appreciation for her. Her artistic interest in narrative and fiction, and the fact that she had quoted me in her application to the master’s programme, made me take her under my wing, so to speak. Episode 3 began at 7pm, another Tamam Shud performance held in the evening. I was excited to recognise some familiar faces from Episode 1, because it meant that our plan to create a loyal audience was coming to fruition. One of them was Paulina, the exhibition designer who kept a safe distance during the first performance, always standing a few metres from the rest of the audience. It surprised me that she’d

65 The Fantasy of the Novel come for more, but there she was again. Joanna had been insisting on the necessity of hiring an exhibition designer for Alex’s show, dropping her name on various occasions. Paulina smiled at me while struggling to wear the overalls on top of her winter clothes. I was about to approach her and mention Joanna’s ideas when Alex, already wearing his protective clothes, emerged from the shadows of the garden with one of his notebooks in his hands. He became the centre of attention right away. It looked like a bizarre ghosts’ get-together with everyone, including Joanna and me, gathering round him donning our white overalls. He shouted: ‘Now, if you come with me I’m gonna take you to a guided tour of heaven and hell, and you’ve been just selected for hell, I’m sorry about that … If you want to go to hell, I’m sorry, but first of all you have to die.’ With these words he led our group around the building. We followed him through the damp garden, down the slope, until we reached a strange place at the back of Królikarnia. Seemingly disconnected from the main building, it was a kind of large porch made of brick, protected by a metal fence, big enough to contain the whole group. Once sheltered, Alex announced that the guided tour was actually going to be a seminar on poetry, a narrative dictated by the different spaces through the route and the things we were going to encounter. ‘We’re gonna walk a lot, because walking and thinking go very well together. It’s like flowers and poems. Because poems, like flowers, are something that bloom.’ With this, he proceeded to read ‘One Art’, a poem by Elizabeth Bishop, out loud from the notebook:

The art of losing isn’t hard to master; So many things seem filled with the intent To be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster Of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

66 Unresolved Oedipus

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster: Places, and names, and where it was you meant To travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! My last, or Next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, Some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident The art of losing’s not too hard to master Though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

It was telling that Alex started the tour of hell with a poem about loss. ‘I lost my mother’s watch’ resonated with the anecdote he told during Episode 1, with his mother encouraging him to shoot an arrow, and his childish fear to lose it if he did. Through the poems of Nuovo Mondo, the mother’s absence began to be outlined as a central theme in the Tamam Shud narrative. Alex proceeded to open a door in the porch, leading our group through the first tunnel while warning, ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here’. Masks were put on. We all marched on in a single file until we arrived at the palace’s former kitchen. The lights along the itinerary had been carefully arranged, so that most of the tour was held in dim light. We halted at the centre of the deserted circular building to listen to a poem by James Tate, ‘Man with Wooden Leg Escapes Prison’. Although a more humorous poem, it is also about loss – a missing leg.

67 The Fantasy of the Novel

After that we entered another tunnel, at the end of which there was another door that brought us back to Królikarnia. It was a small kitchen, nothing to do with the place we had just visited, but a room in use for the workers of the museum. We got rid of the overalls and masks, and the microorganisms that adhered to them. Alex opened another door and, as if by magic, we found ourselves in the museum’s underground sculpture depot. There were a great many pieces by Polish avant-garde artist Xawery Dunikowski: models for monuments, busts of Lenin, angels, portraits of anonymous women, and lots of heads, some huge and some life-size, made in plaster, wood, and stone. I found it miraculous that he could move a group of 35 people through these crammed rooms without crashing into any artwork. After listening to a story about Dante, mathematics, and geometry, he read one more poem, Charles Simic’s ‘Stone’:

Even though a cow steps on it full weight, Even though a child throws it in a river, The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed To the river bottom Where the fishes come to knock on it And listen.

I didn’t notice at the time, but the river and the stone were clues about the Tamam Shud mystery that would reappear at the exhibition one year later. We moved on and entered a large, circular room with even more Dunikowski sculptures scattered across a low vaulted ceiling. Tim was at the centre in a plain T-shirt and jeans. I wasn’t very familiar with his work, though I had read his artistic statement, where he claimed to use ‘strong, simple, sometimes comical means to get to serious ideas’, describing a practice that ‘shifts from performance to visual art and fiction and concerns itself with questions of contemporary identity and urban experience, exploring contradictory aspects of language in

68 Unresolved Oedipus playful and poetic ways’. All those points were corroborated by what we watched next: moving around restlessly, Tim’s voice reverberated under the vault stuttering disjointed sentences, alternating trembling whispers with shouts: ‘We … we let go of each other’s hands very, very slowly, slipping past each other until only the … fingers were … touching. Until only the … fingers were touching. We let go of each other’s hands! Slipping past each other until … until only the fingers were touching. Only, only the fingers … only the fingers. Until only the fingers were touching. Until only the fingers were touching. Until only the … fingers were … were touching. We let go of each other’s hands. We let go of each other’s hands until ... We let go of each other’s hands very, very slowly, very slowly. We let go of each other’s hands very slowly. Until only the fingers were touching. Only the fingers … only the fingers … only, only the fingers. Only the fingers were touching.’ It was an emotionally charged performance in which he was desperately trying to build some sense through the patchwork of his incoherent speech. Later, he told me that it was based on sentences he’d been collecting since year 2000 from all sorts of sources, from conversations overheard in the street to newspaper headlines. For Nuovo Mondo, he had made two different selections based on the ideas inspired by the words ‘hell’ and ‘heaven’. We left Tim carrying on with his declamations as we exited the room. We entered a dark hallway that led to an ascending spiral staircase. When we were following Alex upstairs, he suddenly turned back yelling like a mad man: ‘Sooner or later we’ll be at the end of the staircase!’ Another spiral staircase to add to the Tamam Shud mystery, along with the one at Gustave Moreau’s studio and the one in the photo in which he posed as a corpse upside-down. I wondered what significance this motif could have, but there was hardly any time to think, the pace between rooms was diabolic. We hardly caught our breath from climbing the stairs

69 The Fantasy of the Novel

Episode 3: Nuovo Mondo: Tour Guide of Heaven and Hell. Tim Etchells’ performance.

70 Unresolved Oedipus when we arrived at the museum’s offices. Under the dim light of a table lamp, Alex resumed the seminar on poetry by putting an upside-down vase on his head: ‘You think the vase has become a hat. It’s not. I became an upside-down flower.’ The audience muttered in admiration. ‘If you get this, you get the power of poetry. Thank you. This way.’ We crossed another office (the director’s) and entered a second sculpture depot, which contained the museum’s contemporary section. The tour had the admirable capacity to surprise at every turn. There was no way to guess what was in store for us behind the next door: infected tunnels lead to a kitchen, the kitchen to a sculpture depot, the offices to another depot, and so on. Under the light of a 1980s neon artwork, Alex introduced an American poet called Bill Knott: ‘This is from my favourite poet. He died in 2014, like me.’ The name sounded familiar to me, I remembered that Alex had read a few poems by him in the cave, in Paris. He continued his seminar with quotations from literary critics, ‘Bill Knott’s poems are so naive that the question of their poetic quality hardly arises. … Bill Knott’s work consists almost entirely of pointless poems that say disgusting things. … Bill Knott bores me to tears. … Bill Knott sucks. … Bill Knott should be beaten with a flail.’ His poems, which Alex proceeded to read, were haiku-like, sometimes as long as just one line (‘Outside, the snow is falling into its past’). Both in Paris and now in Warsaw, I found them quite lame, especially in contrast to a ‘seminar’ where we were treated to Sylvia Plath, William Blake, or Dante Alighieri; so much so that I initially believed Knott to be a character made up by Alex as a vehicle for reading his own poems:

I recently killed my father And will soon marry my mother My question is:

71 The Fantasy of the Novel

Should his side of the family be invited to the wedding?

But Knott, I later found out, was real, and his life had a few interesting parallels to the fictional biography of Alex, the Tamam Shud protagonist and narrator. In 1968 Bill Knott published a book, The Naomi Poems, under the pseudonym of Saint Geraud, a fictitious author who allegedly had committed suicide two years earlier. Knott even sent a letter to other poets, critics, and literary magazines informing them about his own death. Convinced of being ignored and ridiculed by literary circles and the publishing industry, he wallowed in a state of permanent self-deprecation. As Alex said in his introduction, Knott died in 2014 like his fictional alter ego in the Tamam Shud narrative, that is, two years before the beginning of our art project. In a certain way, with his capacity for self-obliteration and his ability to write after death, Bill Knott represented a suitable alter ego for Alex. We moved on to the next room, spacious in comparison to the previous ones. It was empty, save a grand piano at the centre, and dimly lit. Through the windows it was possible to see the dark garden outside. Alex stroked the piano strings like a harp and recited a few poems from Giorgio Caproni, ‘Death will never get me alive … Death never ends’. It was becoming increasingly clear that, after loss, death was the main theme in the tour of hell. We abandoned the piano room and accessed a large and luminous staircase dominated by a big chandelier. We walked downstairs, back to the ground floor, to the lobby where the museum entrance tickets were sold during daytime. After reciting a final set of poems, Alex led the group to the last room, a great circular space crowned by a high, imposing neoclassical dome. Dancer Ola Maciejewska was waiting for us, in silence, laying on the ground next to a circle made of black fabric stretched onto the floor. Alex introduced her character as the personification of the Devil. Slowly, she crawled under the black circle. She jumped, and her head popped up through a

72 Unresolved Oedipus hole in the middle, revealing that the piece of fabric was actually a dress. She started to dance without music, moving in circles, spiralling, making the black fabric swirl in a spectacular manner. The performance was reminiscent of Loie Fuller’s serpentine dance, which I had seen before in a short film by the Lumière Brothers. Just like Fuller’s, Ola Maciejewska’s performance wasn’t centred on the body, but on the motion that animated the dress, producing a mesmerising visual effect. After some ten minutes she began to arrange the dress on the floor back to its initial configuration, a moment that Alex used to usher the audience out quietly to Królikarnia’s café, where glasses of red wine were awaiting. Alex toasted, indicating the end of the tour. Everybody loved it. This time he hadn’t mistreated the audience as much. Or maybe he had and the audience had grown used to it and didn’t care anymore.

There was hardly any time to rest. The second tour, heaven, was about to begin. Joanna, Michał, and I left the hell visitors finishing their wine and walked to the designated meeting point in the garden, next to a Dunikowski’s sculpture suitably called The Soul Escaping the Body. Agata was already there checking everyone’s names on the list. At 9pm the new group was complete. I saw Jarek among them. And, again, I identified some people who were returning after having attended Episode 1. Styrmir’s tall figure stood out from the rest. ‘I’m so happy you came today’, I told him. ‘I really enjoyed the first performance, so here I am again.’ Styrmir was a man of few words, but when he spoke it was always in a friendly tone. ‘It’s funny that you say that because I heard some people say they found his jokes somewhat offensive.’ ‘Actually, I think he’s a very charismatic performer.’

73 The Fantasy of the Novel

Episode 3: Nuovo Mondo: Tour Guide of Heaven and Hell. Ola Maciejewska’s dance performance.

74 Unresolved Oedipus

Styrmir was also a performance artist, perhaps his point of view wasn’t that of the average spectator. Or perhaps, being Icelandic, he hadn’t felt insulted by Alex’s jokes on Polish bad wine. ‘You know what I’m thinking now that I see you? If you continue to attend the rest of this project’s events … I was wondering how your reading of the artist’s novel will differ from a casual reader who will have never seen the art project. It’s like we are producing two kinds of readers.’ ‘I don’t know, but it’d be interesting to do the test’, he suggested with a smile. Alex joined the group with his notebook under his arm. This time round we began with a walk in the garden, which was even darker and damper than before. He brought us under an apple tree, he put his hand inside a hole in the trunk and extracted one apple after another. In the morning I had seen kids playing and hiding them there. Alex tossed them out, saying: ‘Yes, we play with apples and holes. I like playing with holes. Do you?’ And then he said something that, at the time, I didn’t register as significant but, at a later stage, would become central to the Tamam Shud mystery: ‘In poetry, as much as in heaven, we have to understand two things. The first lesson comes from Sade, who’s a poet, and he says, “To be patient, in love as much as in poetry, is a condition of the wisdom in the archer. Because once the arrow leaves the bow, it returns no more.” The second piece of advice is from a Chilean poet, his name is Roberto Bolaño, he says:

‘Violence is like poetry, it doesn’t correct itself. You cannot change the path of the knife nor the image of dusk, forever imperfect.’

I had read Bolaño’s poem before, both in Spanish and English, and I could tell that Alex’s was a slightly altered

75 The Fantasy of the Novel version from the translation I had seen published. He had changed the second line, from ‘You can’t change the path of a switchblade’, perhaps just to simplify it for the purpose of the performance. As to Sade’s quotation, I had never heard it before, but had read elsewhere that he used the image of the arrow being shot from the bow as a metaphor for ejaculation. The image gained a weird undertone when connecting it to the memory Alex had related in Episode 1, with him as a child and his mother asking him to shoot his arrow. But there was little time for musing, Alex had started to lead the group towards the building, yelling: ‘Now, heaven. If you wanna go in heaven, first of all you have to fall in love.’ He announced he was going to read a poem by Nicanor Parra:

All letters of love are Ridiculous. They would not be love letters if not Ridiculous.

Many times during the tour he’d paraphrase these lines, shouting like he was out of his mind, ‘Be ridiculous when you are in love! Say pathetic things when you are in love! When you are in love you have to be ridiculous! Love is like a roller coaster, you know. People on the roller coaster, they scream, they grab their fucking heads, I saw people vomiting on the roller coaster! When you are in love … vomit when you are in love!’ But, as I worked out later, Alex had made a mistake, because the poem isn’t Parra’s but Fernando Pessoa’s. ‘Come on, be ridiculous. This way!’ He guided us around the building until we reached a small door that led directly to Dunikowski’s sculpture depot. From that point onwards the tour followed the same route as the previous one, except this time the selection of poems wasn’t about loss and death, but about love. We arrived in Tim’s room,

76 Unresolved Oedipus the blacksmith, as Alex called him. Tim’s performance was also a bit different, and I must say that I enjoyed it more than the first version. His language was more playful: ‘Train drivers. And train drivers fucking kindergarten teachers. And kindergarten teachers fucking soldiers. And soldiers fucking experimental scientists. And experimental scientists fucking grave diggers. And grave diggers fucking lap dancers. And lap dancers fucking accountants. And accountants fucking women that work in a morgue. And women that work in a morgue fucking train drivers. And train drivers fucking private detectives who fall in love with cardiac surgeons. And cardiac surgeons falling in love with flower shop owners. And supermarket workers and virgins fucking refugees. And refugees fucking lap dancers. And priests fucking hairdressers. And hairdressers fucking grave diggers. And grave diggers fucking philosophers. Fucking philosophers. Fucking, fucking philosophers! Fucking philosophers.’ If Tim’s previous performance had been built around the notion of loss (‘we let go of each other’s hands’), now it was about sex and love, resonating with the meaning that Alex had imbued the idea of hell and heaven with. The tour carried on upstairs, halting again at the Królikarnia’s offices. There, Alex addressed the audience in his idiosyncratic manner: ‘Don’t be sad again, you Polish people! It’s just the food. It’s just they give you bad food and then you have this bad humour. Come to live in Italy!’ Nervous laughter ran through the audience. ‘You know William Blake, right? You know William Blake, yes. And you never read a single line, but you love it. I’ll read you a poem by him, so at least next time you can say “yes, yes”:

‘Nought loves another as itself, Nor venerates another so, Nor is it possible to thought

77 The Fantasy of the Novel

A greater than itself to know.

And, Father, how can I love you Or any of my brothers more? I love you like the little bird That picks up crumbs around the door.’

He finished reading the first two quatrains of ‘A Little Boy Lost’ by whistling like a bird. In hindsight, I suspect that he deliberately read only the beginning of the poem so as to not to identify the word ‘father’ with the priest who speaks in the next quatrain. Alex wanted us to think he was addressing his words to his father, to express the impossibility of loving him as much as his father demanded. This idea was further stressed by the contrast with the next poem, which was an expression of maternal love, Diane di Prima’s ‘Song for Baby-O, Unborn’:

Sweetheart when you break thru you’ll find a poet here not quite what one would choose.

I won’t promise you’ll never go hungry or that you won’t be sad on this gutted breaking globe

but I can show you baby enough to love to break your heart forever

78 Unresolved Oedipus

He took us to the second sculpture depot where, under the blue neon light, he pointed to a large white spherical sculpture and said: ‘When we are in love, how many of us have been struggling in front of this piece of rock, telling it our secrets. It’s just a piece of rock. You see, this is the power of metaphor. And metaphor doesn’t need to be true. When I say, “You are like the moon in the sky,” I do not mean that you are a fat and white piece of rock that spins around me without knowing why and doesn’t shine of its own light. This is not what I wanna say. See? This is the power!’ That sounded to me like Bill Knott’s mixture of bad taste, cheesiness, and pathos. I could see why Alex admired him so much. At the piano room, a young guy from the audience sat down and began to play, accompanying Alex’s poetry reading of Sandro Penna. The effect was awesome. The tour, as Alex had announced, was indeed a roller coaster: moments of true beauty were succeeded by gross, outlandish passages. For example, towards the end, when we went downstairs and gathered in the lobby under the chandelier, Alex gave us a crash, and crass, course on stroking a clitoris. It followed the narration of a memory from his childhood that described his mother looking at her vagina in a mirror. The fact that he was including this memory in a performance about love was very telling. This was the second time that his mother (the fictional Alex’s, that is) appeared in the Tamam Shud narrative. The guided tour of heaven ended at Ola Maciejewska’s room, this time representing not the Devil but ‘desire itself’. Love, sex, desire, and motherhood: the tour of heaven was composed of a combination of notions that spoke of an unresolved Oedipus complex. As I watched her silent spiralling movements, I remembered once again the moment from Episode 1 when Alex said, ‘I really would like that my last memory was me in my mother’s arms’. I instinctively associated that line with the recollection of Pergolesi’s song, ‘Stabat

79 The Fantasy of the Novel

Mater’, that was played also during Episode 1, because ‘Stabat Mater’ tells the story of a suffering mother (Maria) watching her child die (Jesus Christ):

She beheld her tender Child, Saw Him hang in desolation, Till His spirit forth He sent.

And it ends:

While my body here decays, May my soul Thy goodness praise, Safe in Paradise with Thee.

A decaying body (compost), paradise, a hanging dying man: three motifs that had appeared in the Tamam Shud project and found an echo in that song. I reproached myself for being a lazy investigator, I should have paid more attention to that music.

For the second time that evening I found myself in the café holding a glass of red wine, and for the second time we toasted at Alex’s request. The audience was as thrilled as the first. Everybody was engaged in a lively chatter except for a man who was standing alone. It was Jarek. ‘Do you fancy a wine?’ I said as I approached him with two glasses. ‘No, thank you. I shouldn’t drink, I’m leaving early.’ ‘So, what do you think about the performance?’ I put the rejected glass aside. ‘Oh, it was very good.’ It was hard to tell if he was actually happy. I deemed it appropriate to feed him with details about the Tamam Shud narrative, so he could better appreciate what

80 Unresolved Oedipus he had just seen and heard during the tour. I told him how it connected to Bill Knott, to the spiral staircase, to the narrator’s mother. I told him all of that but he didn’t seem very impressed. ‘Okay, those are nice details but, to be perfectly honest, I still don’t see why the writing of a novel is so relevant, even if he’s an artist.’ I couldn’t believe my ears. At that stage of the project he still didn’t understand what was at stake in the artist’s novel? After having been exposed to our discourse for more than a year, having had conversations, read our Artist Novels publication, attended the performance – after all that, he still didn’t know what the project was about? Noticing my perplexity, Jarek added: ‘Maybe it’s just me, I’m quite conservative.’ ‘Well, you know, the point of the project is not exactly to have an artist writing a novel, but to use the novel as a medium in an art project. The project becomes pervaded by those traits characteristic of the novel: narrative, fiction, imagination, and so on, which establish a specific kind of bond with the audience.’ I was having a feeling of déjà vu, those were the very same arguments with which I pitched the project to him months ago. ‘It’s also about emphasising the process, decelerating the experience of art, protracting the engagement with …’ ‘Fine, but at the end of the day Alex is just writing a novel. Why should I read it differently than any other novel? I don’t see why him being an artist changes anything.’ If Jarek doesn’t understand the project’s basic ideas, why did he give it a green light in the first place? I thought to myself. ‘That’s a fair question’, I replied. ‘I’d say that what we are doing here is not a regular novel. We are using artistic tools to produce something that appropriates the conventions of a novel in an artistic context, to push an artistic agenda. That’s what the project is about. So the question should rather be, how do we read the artist’s novel?’ Jarek didn’t look very convinced. ‘I don’t know. I’m a conservative person.’

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I started to perspire. If Jarek didn’t get the point of the project and the relevance of the artist’s novel in general, what could we expect from the rest of the audience? Perhaps the world wasn’t ready for our project. Or perhaps we had failed in communicating our intentions. I gulped my wine. ‘Though the truth is’, I said, ‘Joanna and I still don’t know how all this is helping Alex to write his novel.’ ‘Is he writing about the things that happen during the performances?’ ‘I don’t know. I don’t think he’s transferring events directly.’ ‘Maybe you’ll end up in the fiction’, he laughed at his own remark. Although Jarek seemed to enjoy this idea, I was sure that Alex wasn’t making a direct transliteration from actual situations to his artist’s novel, but I didn’t have any evidence to support this. Joanna and I had been so focused on the development of the art project that we had overlooked the progress of the artist’s novel itself. I decided that it was about time to take a look at that text.

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CHAPTER 6. READING THE UNWRITTEN

D ays later, I asked Alex to send us a sample of his writing. This request had a triple purpose: to test a possible translator for the artist’s novel, to enable Joanna and me to actually read the very text we were commissioning, and to stimulate Alex to start writing in case he hadn’t done so yet. For the translation we contacted Johanna Bishop, who had previously worked with him on his novella A Society That Breathes Once a Year. By early January 2017 Alex had written the initial chapters of the story in Italian. A few weeks later Johanna Bishop sent them back in English. That morning I was alone at home. With great anticipation, I printed the chapters out while pouring myself a coffee. The first thing that caught my attention was how readable the text was. How much of it was down to Alex, and how much was the translator’s merit, was something that I couldn’t tell. When Joanna and I accepted hiring a translator we also accepted that we would never get unmediated access to the Italian manuscript. Nevertheless, I was inclined to assume that the text’s enjoyability was, for the most part, an inherent trait of Alex’s prose.

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Translating from Italian instead of copy-editing an English- written manuscript was an extra expense that we accepted only on the condition that the total word count wouldn’t go beyond 60,000 words, since that was all we could afford at the rate charged by Johanna Bishop. Translating was also a slow process that required three additional months, causing the end of the project to be significantly delayed. So the word limit was also meant to prevent Alex from going overboard with the artist’s novel’s length and pushing the timeline even further. The second thing that I noticed was the length of his chapters. There seemed to be a rule by which none of them exceeded three pages, which introduced a lively pace and a feeling of satisfaction, of getting something accomplished. The first ten chapters took some 6,000 words, so I estimated that the final manuscript would end up around 100 chapters. From a purely creative point of view, demanding that Alex tame his writing with a word limit sucked, but there was nothing I could do, budget and timeline set the project’s boundaries. As Alex had anticipated, the story was narrated from the point of view of a dead person who follows the investigation of a pair of detectives into his (the narrator’s) own death, about which he knows nothing. There were many passages I recognised as having been part of the performances:

I don’t remember much about life. Everything has been scrubbed clean, bleached, recycled. … Death is like dawn or dusk, they’re so much alike it’s hard to tell whether a day is ending or another is beginning. So the last thing I remember is just like the first, they almost overlap. For some cosmic reason, the first thing I remember and the last are aligned, like planets. Caaw Caaw Caaw.

‘Caaw Caaw Caaw’? The sound of crows in the graveyard where the story begins interrupted the narrative every now and then. It didn’t take much to notice that the cawing wasn’t inserted at random, it followed a pattern of long and short cries.

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Caw Caw Caw Caw. Caw. Caaw Caw Caaw. I had a hunch that it was trying to send a message. I wrote down its recurrences and put them in an online Morse code translator:

.... . -.- -. --- .-- ... .- -... --- ..- - -..- ---- .. - .- .-.. .-..

Which reads:

HEKNOWSABOUTITALL

‘He knows about it all’ sounded terribly familiar. I opened the PDF file that contained a scanned version of Fitzgerald’s edition of the Rubáiyát, and there I found it, in a passage about God playing bowls with humans:

The Ball no Question makes of Ayes and Noes, But Right or Left as strikes the Player goes; And He that toss’d Thee down into the Field, He knows about it all—He knows—HE knows!

I figured that Alex got the idea of introducing coded messages from the actual Somerton man case since, on the back cover of the Rubáiyát, next to Jessica Thomson’s phone number, the Australian police found a handwritten code that consisted of five lines written in capital letters. The second one had been crossed:

WRGOABABD MLIAOI WTBIMPANETP MLIABOAIAQC ITTMTSAMSTGAB

It proved to be undecipherable, mostly because it’s very difficult to crack a code with only one short sample. Some thought that it wasn’t a code at all, but an acronym, with each

85 The Fantasy of the Novel letter standing for a word forming sentences, in which case, and considering the second crossed line a writer’s mistake, it’d follow the Rubáiyát ’s quatrain format. Was it a message written by the Somerton man knowing that only Jessica would be able to read it? Alex’s ciphered message, on the other hand, was meant to be discovered and was much more playful, more ambiguous too. Even after I read it I wasn’t sure of its meaning. ‘He knows about it all.’ Was it trying to warn the reader that the narrator, contrary to his claims, was fully aware of who he was in life and who was responsible for his death? If so, why did he lie to the reader? Furthermore, who wrote the crow code and inserted it in the narrator’s story? Whose voice was it, really? And why was this voice trying to reach the reader? ‘He knows about it all’ sounded like a warning. Against what exactly? A warning about God’s omniscience, about the impossibility of escaping the father figure’s surveillance and control? Solving one mystery only led to more questions.

The alignment of these two memories happens right here. Caw Caw Caw. The last thing I remember and the first. I was like this, stretched out just like on this lawn. Caw Caaw. Like this, stretched out, lying down, and up above, up there, the trees with those green leaves fluttering against the sky and the sun behind those leaves casting glimmers, casting spells. And everything was moving backwards, trees, leaves, clouds, like on a boat slipping calmly down a river. Who knows, maybe someone was pushing me.

The coffee was too bitter, I reached for the sugar pot. The first chapter was called Alignments, of birth and death, of two identical moments in the memory of the protagonist: moving backwards in a garden, or a forest, an image employed in Episode 1, in the video trailer for Belladonna, and that would keep coming back in the future Episode 5 and Death Room. Maternal love and the nostalgia for a feeling of completion,

86 Reading the Unwritten recurring motifs in the art project, were openly expressed in the artist’s novel:

And back then everything was so simple. When you’re hungry, someone feeds you. When you’re sleepy, someone sings to you. And when you crap someone else cleans up. You don’t have to do anything but live. And if this is life, I thought, I want to live forever.

So the story, as told in the first Tamam Shud chapters, goes like this: the detectives exhume the narrator’s body for an autopsy one year after his death. The coroner, called ‘chef’ (Alex wrote proper names in lower case), finds no evidence about who he is and how he died. Reading about the autopsy resonated, in a way, with my own attempt at examining the manuscript, proceeding like an investigation of a corpse: dissecting it, opening it up, searching for answers, and getting more questions instead, just like the detectives, when they finally find

a tiny, fragile piece of paper in a clear plastic baggie. The scrap looks like it’s been torn from the page of a book or something, and on it, in black letters, are the words Tamam Shud. And that means nothing to me. Zip, zilch. But I’d been wearing it stitched into my underwear for God knows how long.

I realised how much stuff Alex was reintroducing from When Everything Is So Clean It Is Difficult to Remember Something into his novel. For example, the line, ‘I’m getting old. I died a year ago, nearly two. It doesn’t show?’ was almost an exact reproduction of the one he said during the performance, ‘I’m old, it’s one year since I died. It doesn’t look like that, right?’ Also, chef telling the detectives, ‘Death is funny, when it goes boo it scares your socks off’, replicated a line Alex delivered during Episode 1, ‘Death is really funny. Death is a little bit like: Boo! … People are scared to death.’

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The detectives go to visit someone who could offer answers about the scrap piece of paper, a man in his seventies, who wears a Hawaiian shirt and a kimono but is neither American nor Japanese, who lives in a house crammed full of books and bizarre artefacts, accompanied by a girl, barely of legal age, ‘wearing nothing but a pair of underpants’. Hold on, I said to myself, I know the kimono man character. It was Seth, straight from the pages of my own artist’s novel The Wheel of Fortune (I had given a copy to Alex months ago). I first met Seth Siegelaub in 2006 in Amsterdam when I opened my solo show about artists who had abandoned art, featuring a number of pieces about his decision to quit the art world in 1971. Of course, he was an art dealer and a curator, not an artist, but considering that he was an early promoter of Conceptual Art, his work wasn’t very different from that of the artists he curated. I invited Seth to come to my show and he quite liked what he saw. We became friends and, from that time on, I often visited him at his small flat, crammed full of books, artworks, and textiles from all sorts of lands and epochs. Seth passed away in 2013. Shortly after, when I was writing The Wheel of Fortune, I paid my personal homage by incorporating a character based on him in the fiction. He was more than a friend to me, he was a kind of paternal figure. I don’t know if he ever felt that way, but that’s how it was for me. He was intelligent and generous; he lived the life he wanted to live, he was a role model for a young artist like me at the time, and I still miss him. I made an illustration of Seth for The Wheel of Fortune based on a photo portrait of him wearing one of his Hawaiian shirts. Alex had obviously seen it and mixed it with another published image of Seth that accompanied an interview in an art magazine, in which he posed wearing one of his Japanese kimonos. The protagonist of my artist’s novel meets Seth to get help in the form of advice in a room where it’s nearly impossible

88 Reading the Unwritten

Seth, the kimono man, with a Hawaiian shirt.

89 The Fantasy of the Novel to move because of the accumulation of hoarded books and exotic artefacts. That space had been extrapolated to Tamam Shud along with its dweller. But Seth, in turn, was based on another character I created earlier for my first artist’s novel, Illusion, in which the protagonist visits a professor called Victor, whose house is fully packed with all kinds of mysterious objects and books. In both versions of the same scene, there are long conversations with Victor and Seth, respectively. In Illusion’s last chapter, called Casa Diógenes, the protagonist enters the flat of his recently deceased father, who turns out to be an extreme hoarder. Casa Diógenes is a description of the bizarre discoveries he makes in the house and, ultimately, a metaphor for how personal identity is constructed by the unconscious appropriation of external memories, ideas, and desires. I wondered if Alex had also read Illusion, or if he had taken inspiration from the hoarder’s house motif indirectly, via its re-elaboration in The Wheel of Fortune. I didn’t mind him borrowing elements of my artist’s novel for his, I had been robbed of ideas and even entire installations before. It just felt a bit weird. So, in Tamam Shud two detectives visit the kimono man hoping to get some advice. I wondered if they were projections of Joanna and me in the fiction. Their behaviour is both opposite and complementary to each other, echoing other literary pairs, like Bouvard and Pécuchet. The image was too strong not to make the connection with Flaubert’s posthumous and unfinished novel. What’s more, I had read elsewhere that the famous copy clerks were in turn based on Turkey and Nippers, another couple of scriveners, colleagues of Herman Melville’s Bartleby. One has a horrible temper in the morning while the other one is in a great mood, only to reverse roles in the afternoon. I also knew that this ping pong dynamic served as inspiration for Kafka’s Arthur and Jeremiah, the annoying aides assigned to K., The Castle’s protagonist. They too, like a pair of rubber balls, bounce at regular intervals. The Tamam Shud detectives’ names, twiggy and ginger, offered more clues,

90 Reading the Unwritten for Ginger Nuts is the name of the third employee at Bartleby’s office. But also, as Alex would later confide, they were based on Sergeant Pluck and Policeman MacCruiskeen, from Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman. I guessed it made sense to have such a book in mind, for it is also narrated by the protagonist after his own death, although he doesn’t realise he is dead. I sipped my coffee. So that was it. The art project wasn’t meant to trigger real situations that would end up fictionalised in the artist’s novel, as Jarek had suggested. The relationship between the making of the artworks and the writing of the artist’s novel was subtler than that. They both shared the same narrative, came from the same place. The narrative was articulated by means of the episodic performances (and, later, by the exhibition) and expressed in the artist’s novel’s text. Not that one would breed the other, rather, they were communicating vessels within the same system. The art project was the recipient of a lot of ideas, motifs, dialogues, and imagery spawned by the insertion of new and old works in the Tamam Shud universe, and the rewriting undergone by both the host narrative and the guest artworks was trickling down into the manuscript that was being produced. I didn’t believe that Alex could have written this stuff in the solitude of his studio at the Cité des Arts. Where would the kimono man be then, if Alex had never met me? What about the death and birth alignments, without Novylon’s video for Belladonna? What about the cleaning lady, without Episode 1?

In the house where they found him, not a trace on the door handles. That was probably due to the cleaning lady, the twiggy cop says.

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CHAPTER 7. TAMING THE FANTASY

S ometimes, especially at the weekend, Joanna and I would go to our favourite café, not far from home. It was a spot preferred by the liberal young families that populated our neighbourhood: tattooed fathers with hipster beards took their babies and MacBooks there. The service was terrible and slow, like everywhere in Warsaw, but they had an excellent bakery. That day Joanna had taken her laptop with her, so that we could discuss work. While we waited for our cheesecake, which we had learned to love during our time in New York, she said: ‘Dawidek, I have some good news and some bad news.’ ‘Good first.’ ‘CCA hired a new promotion team, the whole department has been replaced. This should compensate a bit for the fact that we lost Novylon. By the way, do you know what they’ve done?’ ‘Novylon? No, I haven’t talked to them since …’ ‘They were invited to be part of a group exhibition …’ ‘In CCA?’

92 Taming the Fantasy

‘No, in Warsaw but not in CCA, in the Museum of Modern Art. And guess what.’ Joanna placed her laptop on the table, opened it, and showed me the museum’s website. The curatorial text said that the exhibition was about ‘the turn to affect, emotions, and personal experience in contemporary culture’. ‘I don’t see their names in the artists’ line-up’, I said. ‘They go now by the name of post-Novylon, but for this show they call themselves alexalex.’ ‘What?’ ‘Hold on, there’s more. Their contribution is a bot system also called alexalex. Look at this.’ She took us to the website that hosted the bot. There was a text box, we typed a random ‘Hello’. Alexalex replied: ‘Do not get offended, but it seems to me that, in the context of this exhibition, so few things are important.’ ‘Króliko, this is nonsense’, I said. ‘That’s the idea.’ We played along, we typed back: ‘No offense taken. But please explain your point.’ ‘Blanket and home. Or, anyway, out of the home is our private-public performance? If each of our posts is another link seemingly? Whether we are actors 24/7?’ ‘I don’t understand’, we insisted. ‘Sorry, there is a new post by Zofia Krawiec, just watch. Sad Girl.’ The game soon became tedious. I turned from the laptop screen to Joanna: ‘They really can’t let go. Is this a weird kind of revenge or what?’ ‘I worked with them before, I never had any trouble at all.’ ‘They became obsessed. The Tamam Shud project is doing this to them.’ ‘Do you want to hear the bad news now?’ ‘I guess.’

93 The Fantasy of the Novel

‘CCA has implemented a graphic design house book of style so, from now on, every element of communication has to be crafted through a template. And it’s pretty rigid, we’ll hardly have any freedom any more. Graphic design choices are preset and everything coming out of CCA will look pretty much the same.’ ‘Wanting to have a kind of corporate visual identity is understandable, but this is taking things a bit too far. I guess we can forget about being creative with the promotion of Tamam Shud.’ There was a silence. If I knew Joanna, after the drama, a solution would follow. ‘Thank God we have Kuba’, she said. ‘Maybe he could come up with ideas about how to manoeuvre around the new CCA regulations.’ Kuba was a graphic designer with whom we had worked on our Artist Novels publication. He was our choice to fill in the gap left by Novylon in the promotion of the project and, later on, he might also design Alex’s book. ‘Okay, let’s invite him over to brief him about the project’, I proposed as I saw the cheesecake finally landing on our table.

Kuba came to our flat a couple of evenings later. After a few glasses of wine and a description of the Tamam Shud project, Joanna spurred me to tell him some of the narrative’s meaty details, which I did. His enthrallment with the Somerton man case encouraged me to go through other clues that Alex had planted and to explain things I had never told anyone before. Kuba was completely spellbound by the story’s many mysterious sides. I showed him Belladonna’s video trailer; the sketches for the different rooms at the future exhibition; The Hanged Man Tarot card. The proliferation of connections among all those motifs and images made Kuba very excited. Pouring another

94 Taming the Fantasy glass of wine, I showed him the application picture of Alex playing dead on a spiral staircase and I connected it with the other occurrences of spiral staircases in the project. Kuba interrupted: ‘Maybe that’s getting a little far-fetched. Spiral staircases are very common, you can encounter them everywhere.’ ‘Sure, but look, it appears here, and then in Moreau’s house, and then …’ ‘Are you sure your imagination isn’t playing tricks on you?’ I had no reason to believe he was unfairly curbing my enthusiasm since he had shown only fascination for everything I had told him so far. I had to accept that maybe he had a point, maybe the spiral staircase wasn’t significant, my mind just made the connection. Discerning the difference between clues purposely planted by Alex and what was merely a figment was becoming increasingly arduous. Plus, I was on my fourth glass of wine, so yes, maybe I was stretching things a bit too far. In spite of the scepticism about the spiral staircase detail, Kuba was very committed to the project. What we lost from Novylon in terms of visual and creative solutions we gained with his expertise in printed matter. He was very good at everything concerning paper, binding, and fonts. Besides, he had attended Episode 3, so he had experienced the project first- hand. ‘But I must say that, intriguing as the clues you are revealing are, I didn’t get any of them during the performance at Królikarnia’, Kuba said. ‘And, honestly, I don’t think I was the only one to feel this way. For most people it was an extravagant guided tour, no one got the sense that there was an underlying mystery to be solved.’ Joanna and I remained silent. Kuba was voicing the audience’s point of view, confronting us with the project’s failure to communicate a narrative. ‘You may want to think of this’, he continued, ‘do you want to say things? Or do you want to be heard?’

95 The Fantasy of the Novel

Tamam Shud project’s narrative connections at the time of Episode 3.

96 Taming the Fantasy

‘You mean that we should present clues more explicitly as clues, so audiences will be lured by the mystery’, Joanna said, wrestling with the corkscrew. ‘There’s a limit to what we can disclose though’, I said. ‘After all, it’s Alex’s story and we don’t want to spoil it. Besides, the artist’s novel will eventually offer the key to unravel a narrative that is too large to be comprehended in one single performance.’ ‘But by the time the artist’s novel is out it’ll be too late for your audience if you want them to be engaged during the creative process’, Kuba said. ‘What you need is a call to action, to activate the audience to investigate.’ ‘But this will change Alex’s relation to the audience’, I insisted. ‘We don’t need to be intrusive, there are other ways to spread information’, Joanna said, gently stroking my arm. ‘We don’t have to instruct the audience, just to share the knowledge about some things that have been said and done but passed over unnoticed. For example, we could publish a booklet with an overview of the whole project, from the episodes that have been performed already to the future exhibition and artist’s novel. A little publication that offers some background information to those joining at any point during the project.’ ‘It could employ the mixture of narrative and informational styles we have been using for the press releases’, I said. ‘That’s a very good idea’, Kuba said. ‘Just one more question: do you think I can use the stuff already designed by Novylon? I mean graphic and visual elements if we want to keep some consistency with their work. But then we’d need to ask them for permission.’ ‘I don’t think it’s necessary to stick to what they’ve done’, I answered. ‘We should move on and accept that we are at a different stage now. From the beginning, we knew that these situations may happen working with the same artist for two years. I’d prefer to be honest to the process and keep the traces, even if they are the result of a conflict.’

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Joanna and Kuba nodded in agreement.

Over the next few days, Joanna and I brooded over Kuba’s observation about wanting to be heard. For some time, we’d had the impression that we were developing the Tamam Shud project in a critical void. No one was writing about it, no journalist was reviewing it, it made no impact beyond our own little sphere. We realised we needed to reach people external to the project, to engage other art world professionals. Since we were preparing Episode 4, we though it could be a chance to divide it in two parts, so that, in addition to Alex’s performance, we’d reserve some time to contextualise the project within the broader phenomenon of the artist’s novel. We’d invite a critic, a writer, or a curator, to join us to discuss our project in public. No sooner had Alex agreed with the idea than Joanna and I contacted Francis McKee, director of the CCA Glasgow, publisher of an artists’ fiction journal called 2HB, co-author of the collectively written artist’s novel PHILIP and, most importantly, author of a recently released novel called Even the Dead Rise Up. Francis was a friend and an excellent speaker, so we were very happy to receive a positive response to our invitation. There were some striking parallels between Tamam Shud and some motifs that appeared in Francis’ novel: mediums, ghosts, people who spoke after their death, and, above all, Tarot: the cover featured an image of the major arcane XX, The Judgement. For the second part of Episode 4, which Alex titled Reading the Unwritten, he wanted to read some of the translated Tamam Shud excerpts and then write a new chapter with the aid of Tarot cards. The idea was still evocative of the first intention to edit the artist’s novel live on stage with the help of a guest copy editor qua performer. Even though he had discarded the idea, he was still interested in exposing the

98 Taming the Fantasy creation of the narrative text in front of an audience, not knowing what the next chapter would be, as it was dependent on what the Tarot cards told. Along with the discussion of Episode 4, we also informed Alex that it was time for him to sign a new contract for the second year of the project. A few days later he wrote to Ola saying that he had some objections to his fee before he signed. He also disagreed with the deadline to deliver the final manuscript, which we set up the day after the end of his show, on 1 October. He wrote:

Dears, It would be great to have at least one month after the end of the show to include some ideas that maybe blooming with the show, in order to incorporate the show to the story in a proper way, would this be possible to move the deadline to the first of November? Let me know.

When Jarek forced us to move the exhibition at the end of the project, instead of doing it in the middle of the timeline as it had been initially conceived by Alex, we assumed that the impact of the exhibition in the writing process would be diminished. Still, if he had written it in English (as was our preference), Alex could have had a few extra weeks to complete the artist’s novel after the show. But his obstinacy to write in Italian entailed a translation that shortened the time available for him to write. As to increasing his fee, I knew Ola was supposed to be the bad cop in everything related to financial issues, but I couldn’t help replying in another email:

Please consider that the initial budget has been multiplied 3x by the growing scope and ambition of the project and we can’t expand more in terms of costs. One of the reasons is having the novel translated in English (as opposed to written in English and then edited, as we suggested), which has a huge impact both on the budget and the

99 The Fantasy of the Novel

timeline. Johanna Bishop needs three months, so instead of Dec 2017 to finish the project we’re talking now of at least March 2018. This is really off limits and, in order not to get into a two and a half year project, we’d like to keep the manuscript delivery on 1 October. We’d like to suggest that you don’t wait for September to complete the novel, but please keep going with the writing. We cannot have more costs. If anything, we can cut other expenses, in which case we’d be willing to discuss cancelling Episode 5 Walking Backwards in June.

My contract expired in December and I wasn’t very fond of dragging the project into a third year, so I was transferring the pressure onto Alex. I knew full well that the manuscript would be delayed, I counted on that, but I didn’t want to make it easy for him because, if we agreed the deadline to be in, say, November, then he’d surely deliver the manuscript in December. As to cancelling Episode 5, it was obviously a bluff, but we needed him to realise that our capacities had a limit. Even though we had tripled the budget, he was asking for more money, and a higher fee. He replied:

It is a pity to cancel Walking Backwards, especially because the gardens are so beautiful and I think it can give a new fresh perspective on the Tamam Shud quest, less dark and more colourful, a happy touch about death ... also in the novel there is a part about a garden ... Maybe we can cut other things? Let’s talk about it with Ola and I am sure we can find a solution.

Alex became aware, for the first time, that we could no longer just provide the material conditions for his fantasies to be realised. We had been doing it for the performances, but the exhibition was a different matter. The bluff had the desired wake-up call effect and Alex took some initiative to make the show financially sustainable, he began to use other

100 Taming the Fantasy opportunities that came his way to pre-produce some of the works. For example, for an exhibition he had in Birmingham he managed to make two out of three banisters for the Dance Room. Obviously, shipping these pieces instead of producing them in Warsaw would be much less costly. It was also interesting to notice that the piece he had shown in Birmingham wasn’t called Dance Room but Conversation of the Arrows (Duet). This was consistent with his intention to have works existing in their own right only to insert them afterwards in the Tamam Shud constellation and see what happened. The artworks’ meaning would be altered because of the new narrative context. But the context, and the narrative, would also be altered by hosting a collection of artworks not intended, in principle, to be part of it. Alex had called it, and rightly so, a schizophrenic act.

Joanna invited Paulina over for dinner to discuss the upcoming Tamam Shud exhibition. She was very fond of Paulina’s neat and professional work: for every problem, be it technical, aesthetic, or a mix of both, she always had a solution. As Novylon and Kuba before her, she was another case of an audience member who became absorbed by the project. I prepared some tapas and opened a bottle of wine. I had never worked with an exhibition designer before and I had to admit that I shared Alex’s concerns about having too many cooks in the kitchen. He resisted the idea of working with Paulina because of the justified fear of repeating the ‘Novylon situation’. This, however, wasn’t enough to change Joanna’s mind. She thought Alex was a great performer but she had some doubts about his ability to manage such a complex exhibition. While munching a slice of jamón, I explained the Tamam Shud mythology to Paulina in a similar fashion to the way I did with Kuba.

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‘It’s becoming a rite of initiation for anyone willing to work with us’, I said. Paulina listened to the story with an intelligent gaze. Now, she had attended both Warsaw-based episodes, so she had something to say: ‘As an audience member, you don’t pay much attention to what Alex says because you are rather busy trying to stay out of his reach. I didn’t want to be picked out by him after seeing how he treated some members of the audience. Yet, you want to stay close enough to hear what he says. It’s a difficult balance.’ As she said this, she stared at me for what felt a fraction of a second too long, longer than a conventional social situation would require. I wondered if Joanna saw it. ‘Hence the importance of the artist’s novel as the textual expression of a narrative created during the project’, I said. ‘It’s like Lindsay’s strategy’, Joanna said, referring to Lindsay Seer’s It Has To Be This Way, an artist’s novel with copies available only at the exit of her exhibition. ‘Inside her video installation (a “theatre of memory” as she calls it), there are characters and events that only make full sense when you read them articulated afterwards in her story.’ ‘Yes, but the problem is that the gap between the artistic experience and the reading of the artist’s novel is too large in the case of Alex’s project’, Paulina replied. ‘Lindsay played with the spectator’s memory of her installation merged with the reading experience of the novel. But in a two-year-long project people won’t remember what they saw or heard even if it reappears in the novel.’ After saying this, she sneaked another furtive look at me. I couldn’t believe Joanna didn’t notice it. Paulina’s was the second testimony we heard in a few days from the audience’s viewpoint about the project’s failure to do what it was supposed to do. We had fantasised about setting up a murder mystery story that would draw people in episode by episode as the project progressed but, at the end of the day, spectators felt more alienated than intrigued. Kuba hadn’t got

102 Taming the Fantasy the point, and Paulina had been avoiding interaction with the artist. It was easy to blame Alex for his particular behaviour with the public, but we, the curators, had an obvious responsibility too. We had been so bent on a specific communication strategy and it hadn’t worked. ‘That’s why we should close the gap by bringing the artist’s novel into the experience of the exhibition’, I suggested. ‘We could use the textual layer present in any show: the curatorial statement, the introductory wall text, the captions … and replace them with passages straight from Tamam Shud.’ That was something I had always wished to do in my own exhibitions, but I had never got the opportunity because no curator had invited me to have a solo show for a long time. ‘For example’, I continued, ‘if you enter the Dance Room without the mediation of this narrative text it’ll be basically the same old piece as Alex conceived it some time ago, like in Birmingham. By adding a few lines from the fiction, dance is suddenly connected to the Somerton man’s calves, it becomes one more clue to solve the mystery.’ I assumed that Joanna and Paulina’s silence signified assent. ‘Okay, told like this it’s a bit rough, but I’m sure it’s something that Paulina can work out as part of the exhibition’s design.’ We all agreed on that, and on meeting with Alex when he was in Warsaw for Episode 4. Hopefully that would settle his doubts about the necessity of having an exhibition designer in the team.

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CHAPTER 8. TO REPRESENT FICTION YOU MUST PARTICIPATE IN IT

O n 12 April, the day before Episode 4, being pretty much done with rehearsals, Joanna, Ola, Alex, and I decided to use a spare hour to prepare the next episode in June, Walking Backwards, by visiting the botanical garden where it would take place, not far from the CCA building. We met a botanist who guided us around the place, answering Alex’s many questions about the hidden stories behind the seemingly anodyne plants. The previous week had been bright and warm but now the weather was damp and grey, so when the botanist excused herself to pick up her son from school we hurried inside a nearby café to get dry. The conversation quickly split between Ola and Joanna, on the one hand, and Alex and me, on the other. ‘You stay in Warsaw for very long?’ Alex asked me. ‘Actually, I live here.’ ‘I thought you lived in the Netherlands.’

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‘I still go there sometimes to do some teaching, but I don’t have a fixed position, though I’d really like to have one.’ Speaking with him alone felt slightly awkward, as we hadn’t had the chance to do so very often. After one year working together we still kept a distance between us. At the beginning of the project, before we selected him, I had expected to get to know the artist through what Joanna liked to call our ‘adventures’ during the creative process. But no, for the most part Alex still remained a mystery to me. ‘Do you struggle?’ he asked. ‘Yes, like everyone else.’ Through his questions I could picture the image he had of me: a petit bourgeois with a comfortable life and a regular job that provided a secure income. Ridiculously unreal, but he didn’t know much about me and that was the way he filled in the void. I was also a mystery to him. ‘You know’, I went on, ‘I always thought that I belonged to the academy, that art’s value lies in its capacity to produce knowledge rather than wealth. I guess that’s why I never got to work with a commercial gallery, even though I’m 40. But I can’t find my place in academia either.’ I hoped that playing the male friendship card would correct Alex’s distorted vision of me, that chatting with him would reverse his persistent mistrust. I wasn’t the curator he thought I was, just a simple artist, like him. ‘I never did art academy’, Alex said, which surprised me a little. Of course, there are successful artists who, like Elmgreen & Dragset or Maurizio Cattelan, didn’t have a formal education but, for some reason, I expected everyone to have an art degree, as if by default. ‘What did you study then?’ ‘Geometry in high school, but I didn’t continue.’ ‘Guys, let’s go to Ola’s office’, Joanna interrupted. ‘Alex still has to sign the agreement for this year.’ We walked back to CCA. Once in her office, Ola laid the document on her table. As Alex signed it, I noticed that the birthdate written on it was 1973. That was three years older

105 The Fantasy of the Novel than Joanna and me. But so far we had thought he was one year younger than us, because we had read 1977 in his application and even in his Wikipedia article. Didn’t the same article say that he was a choreographer? It was nuts. If Alex was a mystery, these might be glimpses of the truth. It was one thing playing the game of pretentiousness like everyone else in the art world, myself included, but it was a different thing to lie about basic facts. Or perhaps he wasn’t lying, perhaps it was part of a fictional persona he was creating for some reason. He had also written elsewhere that he died in 2014 (the Polish translator of our newsletters actually believed it), so maybe everything was an infiltration of his narrative in the real world. Whether these fake data were elements of a metafictional scheme, or just plain lies, it meant that he was in his mid-forties, a revelation that exposed a certain concern about the passing of time and the moment at which he saw himself in his professional career. Seen in this light, the line I read in his manuscript gained new undertones, ‘I’m getting old. I died a year ago, nearly two. It doesn’t show? But I am getting old.’

The next day came and, with it, Episode 4, Reading the Unwritten, at 6pm. Joanna and I had got our artists’ novels collection shipped on loan from M HKA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp that had acquired it. We displayed most of the 460 titles over the steps of the Laboratorium’s grandstand, available for public perusal. Only a few collectible items were displayed in a glass box. About 40 people came, some were familiar faces like Agata, Paulina, and Styrmir. Not a bad number but, again, well under our expectations. All the hopes we had in the renewed promotion department were shattered, the new team had turned out to be as inefficient as the previous one, if not worse. I had written the press release and worked on the images with Kuba. We had

106 To Represent Fiction You Must Participate in It prepared all materials for them, they didn’t need to do anything, just to post it online, but they never did. Joanna had been pressing them almost every day to publicise the event, to no avail. For reasons unknown to us they refused to do the simplest job in the world, just to click a button to put the stuff in circulation. If we got some people at the event it was only because Joanna and I were again forced to invite our friends personally. The lack of information about the event was so bad that Małgosia posted on Facebook advising people to wear rubber boots. It took us a while to understand the reason for such an odd request, until we realised that Małgosia believed the performance to be Walking Backwards and was concerned about people walking in the garden, still muddy at that time of the year. We let the crowd browse the collection for a little while. Among the books we had scattered some free copies of the booklet. Kuba had done a great job, it looked awesome, as if its pages, bearing Alex’s beautiful drawings printed in blue ink, had been torn from a novel. The spatial distribution was similar to Episode 1: the grandstand was in front of an empty space that served as a ground level stage. The setting was very simple: just one couch for Joanna and me, and a little table with two microphones, a copy of Francis’ Even the Dead Rise Up, and a laptop connected to a large video projection on the wall behind us. The evening was about to begin. Through the microphones we asked everyone to sit down on the grandstand leaving its centre clear for the artists’ novels collection. We started to speak about the notion of the artist’s novel, going through the history of the projects we had done together as The Book Lovers. At the end, when we reached Tamam Shud, we explained it exactly the way we had explained it to Kuba: when we spoke about the Rubáiyát and Omar Khayyám’s fondness of wine and gardens, we showed images of Episode 2 at the Cité des Arts, with the garden and the cave, and the many bottles we drank. When we talked about the alignment between Alex’s first and last

107 The Fantasy of the Novel memories, we illustrated it with video excerpts from Episode 1 (with the line about being a baby in a pram, ‘Everything was going backwards’) and Belladonna’s video trailer (with the image of a receding garden). When we explained The Hanged Man motif, we accompanied it with an image of the Tarot of Marseille arcane XII, Alex’s application photo playing dead upside down, and another video excerpt from the first performance: the ‘O Solitude’ moment when he was hanging with his feet strung up. Showing fragments from previous episodes was meant to have the effect of a TV series summary, something like a ‘Previously, on Tamam Shud ’. After thirty minutes, we invited Francis to join us on stage. Joanna chose to sit down among the audience, leaving a free spot on the couch for Francis. I began the conversation by reading the passage of Even the Dead Rise Up that describes the Tarot card XII:

In the Marseille deck he hangs upside down by his left leg while the right leg is bent at the knee making an L shape or an inverted 4. Although he’s dressed in a blue body stocking, his right leg is green, a similar colour to the two trees that flank him tightly. The trees have been thoroughly pruned and the branch stumps are bright red. With his wild blonde hair almost brushing the ground, the hanged man’s head is a dropped sun and like a good sex pistol, his tongue sticks out defiantly.

Behind us there was a projection of Francis’ novel’s cover. ‘Also a Tarot card’, he said. ‘Also a Tarot card’, I repeated. ‘There’s going to be a lot of Tarot tonight.’ ‘I wrote my novel because it’s easier to talk to the dead in a book than for me to speak to the dead in reality. They are very quiet.’ Francis chuckled at his own remark. ‘It’s easier to lie, basically. The whole set up is a lie, so you can lie happily within it.’

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‘It reads as a kind of essay under the disguise of a novel’, I said. ‘It makes me think of Chris Kraus, of fictocriticism, even of Fuck Seth Price, which is the title of Seth Price’s novel.’ I pointed at where it was lying among other artists’ novels on the grandstand. ‘It uses some conventions of narrative fiction but, in reality, it’s very reflexive. I was wondering if you had that also in mind.’ ‘You put that beautifully, I’m not that coherent. I read the first few chapters of Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick, then I stopped. I haven’t read Seth Price and I haven’t read many other people, but I’ve read a lot of essays, so there were things I wanted to write about, like the history of spiritualism, or the anthology of photography. But I needed to write a narrative and embed it into that narrative, because I thought that idea of the distance between theory and reality being too far. I thought I could actually talk better about the anthology of photography if I was actually describing examples in the text, in the narrative, that I could use as evidence, so you could see the dynamic I’m talking about in the people I’m describing in a certain situation. So it’s an odd mixture but it is definitely fiction and criticism. I wouldn’t mind writing a proper novel, I’m reading all those books, “How to write a novel”.’ The audience laughed. ‘Are you learning a lot?’ ‘I am learning a lot, yeah. I know exactly how many chapters, how many words … I know my hero’s journey. I figured all that out.’ ‘You missed all that in your previous book?’ I asked, pointing at the copy of Even the Dead Rise Up on the little table beside us. ‘Well, the hero was me, which wasn’t very heroic. But I got a different hero for the next book, and it’s a she. I know where she’s going, I know what she’s doing and why she’s doing it. I know how many chapters she’s going to do it in. I know when she learns all those extra skills to fight.’ Francis executed some martial art movements with the hand.

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‘With a little bit of luck we’ll see it in WHSmith soon.’ ‘Yeah, it will become a movie, like Rogue One or something.’ ‘You’re joking about it but I once talked to an artist (I won’t say the name) who fantasised his novel might end up as a Hollywood movie.’ ‘I’m not joking, but I have to write a really good one.’ ‘Why did you choose this cover?’ ‘That’s when God is calling all the dead for the Judgement, so everybody rises up.’ ‘It’s like a call to action.’ ‘Yeah, and the Tarot is kind of functioning like that. They are just pieces of cardboard, but when you put them down on a table people respond to the image, depending on their mood and what happened. And then you feed them something back in response to their initial comment. And they feed you something back, and eventually you get some kind of analysis on what’s going on. People tell you what’s going wrong but they don’t know they’re telling you what’s wrong, they tell you the answers rather than you telling their future. Their body tells you, the body language is everything: how you are sitting, how you put your hands, what you’re doing with your head – all those things are your body telling me stuff you don’t know it’s telling me, so there’s a cool reading there, but it’s actually about having some empathy, and listening, and then construct a narrative from what people are saying and react to that. Which weirdly is like art, suspiciously. The symbols are incredible, they are very ambivalent, they are very well thought-through to persuade you to think further, they are open-ended.’ ‘As I read somewhere, a machine for imagination.’ ‘Yeah.’ We had consumed the time for the first part of the event, so I thanked Francis for his talk, the audience applauded, I announced a short break and invited everyone to have wine outside while the technicians changed the stage. Once everyone was in the lobby, I saw Joanna busy chatting with Francis and

110 To Represent Fiction You Must Participate in It some friends of hers. I searched for Styrmir but I couldn’t find him. Instead, I met Paulina, who was sipping her wine. ‘I don’t know if Joanna already told you’, I said, ‘but we have to delay the meeting we were planning with you and Alex. He’s still unsure about a third opinion in the exhibition’s design.’ He also said that we could better employ her fee in other production costs, but she didn’t need to hear that. ‘That’s fine, just let me know when you are ready’, Paulina said. ‘I kind of understand why he thinks that way, but Joanna really wants your expertise. Maybe it’s just to help us choose the materials, or some furniture, or to make a 3-D model of the space, I don’t know, she must have something in mind.’ ‘Like I said, just tell me when you figure it out.’ She fixed me with her gaze as she took another sip of wine. I was starting to enjoy the game between us. If Alex was trying to seduce Joanna, why couldn’t I do the same with Paulina? I was getting excited by the proximity of her body. I couldn’t tell what exactly attracted me to her, though. Her short height made her abundant long blonde curly hair seem longer than it actually was. I could sense that she felt comfortable, that she didn’t need a conversation to justify being with me. But I felt an awkward obligation to camouflage the tension between us with the appearance of a conventional social situation. The problem was that I hardly knew her and I didn’t have much to say. ‘What do you think of Francis?’ ‘Amazing guy, I didn’t know him.’ The banality of the conversation was killing me. When I was younger, before I met Joanna, I used to be funny. Giving Paulina the small pleasure of making her laugh with some witticism would have been easy. But I had become rusty and couldn’t come up with anything smart to say. Right at the point when the silence was starting to feel too long, Ola came to inform us that the performance was about to resume. I said goodbye to Paulina and went back to the black

111 The Fantasy of the Novel box along with the rest of the crowd. I sat down among the audience, far from Joanna, who was on one side of the stage broadcasting the performance via Facebook Live. The stage was dark and quiet. The couch had been replaced with a music stand and a camera pointing at it, connected to the large video projection behind. The device was intended for Alex to display the Tarot cards in a way that everyone could follow his movements. The lights went on, Alex appeared from the back of the stage running towards us with open arms, wearing a purple kimono jacket, and, I observed, carrying one of his notebooks in his right hand. He spoke into his hands-free microphone: ‘Long time no see you. Remember the last time we were together? Remember the castle of rabbits? You were all dressed in white, with the overalls and shit. You looked so ridiculous. Even me, we were all so ridiculous. Remember how great it was? I was dragging you from the tunnel to the garden, from the garden to the tunnel. Remember the fungus? “Oh, no one will come, there’s fungus!” But it was full of people, they all wanted cancer. Remember? Anyone has cancer now?’ He paused for people to grasp the fact that he was cracking a joke, a few timid laughs could be heard. ‘So I’m writing a public journal, and one day it will be published and will become a book. Can you imagine this? Who’s going to read it? Probably me, my mom, and David. And David only for professional reasons. What a horrible destiny this book will have.’ That was something new, it was the first time he addressed me directly in a performance. I wondered why only me and not Joanna. Standing at the centre of the stage, he proceeded to explain what was going to happen. First, he’d summarise the story written so far, basically the ten chapters I had read. Then he’d write two new chapters of his novel by predicting the fate of some of the characters with the use of Tarot. Alex’s performance reminded me of The Man in the High Castle, a

112 To Represent Fiction You Must Participate in It novel that Philip K. Dick wrote partially with the use of the I Ching. It also brought to my mind Alejandro Jodorowsky’s free Tarot readings, which, as Alex once said, he carried out every Wednesday in a café in Paris. ‘Let me introduce you to ginger. I call him ginger because he has red hair’, Alex said, reaffirming my assumption that the two detectives were based on red-headed Joanna and me. ‘So why are the detectives lying on the floor, and why is there a seventeen-year old girl pleasuring a seventy-year old man in a kimono?’ Alex approached a girl in the audience. ‘How old are you?’ ‘Twenty-five.’ ‘Aw, too old.’ He walked back to the centre of the stage. He opened the notebook and started to read passages of his artist’s novel: ‘The case of the numberless man, you must have heard about it, the ginger cop says. Found dead God knows how, not a drop of blood on the ground, no sign of poison or illness or heart attack, nothing. In the house where he was found, not a trace on the door handles. That must have been the cleaning lady, twiggy cop says. The guy has no fingerprints, ginger cop continues, bleached off with acid, perfect teeth, his photo was in all the papers, on TV, on social networks, nobody claims him. Or nobody needs him, twiggy adds. Clothes, shirt, trousers, underwear with no labels or tags, not even his shoe size. He’s probably about an eight, says twiggy. It’s been a year now, we’ve found no names, or numbers, or causes. Until this morning, when we found this’, Alex raised his hand as if showing an object to the audience. ‘Inside of a plastic bag there’s a little piece of paper – can you see it? – torn from the pages of a book, probably, that’s what they think, and in black and white is written Tamam Shud. The detectives think it’s Arabic or Japanese.’ He stopped reading and addressed the audience: ‘How does it feel to have your life in the hands of two assholes like this? Do you start to get close to these characters?

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Do you love twiggy, maybe, is he better than ginger? Both the same assholes? I kind of prefer ginger. I mean, twiggy is nice, but ginger has more character, doesn’t he?’ Of course you prefer ginger, I thought. He dropped the notebook and took a deck of Tarot of Marseille cards out of his kimono’s wide sleeve. ‘I like books with very short chapters because then I don’t need to buy them. I can go to the bookshop and read one chapter every day, it just takes two minutes or three. That’s a good strategy, I think. We’re gonna follow this strategy, David.’ That was the second time he addressed me directly, or the third if I counted his mention to twiggy. I started to feel the audience’s attention turning towards me, which was a bit uncomfortable. Alex explained the system: he’d pick up someone from the audience to be the ‘writer’, who would in turn pick a specific number of cards: one to define the character whose future was going to be written, another to define what kind of writer it’d be, and another three cards to set up the action. ‘Who would like to be Chapter 11?’ he said, and took a young woman by the hand, guiding her from her seat to a marked spot on the right side of the stage. ‘You have a great responsibility, you are going to help me write the book. You will give your email to David there’, he pointed his finger at me, ‘he’ll pay you in advance.’ He extended his arm offering the cards upside down, fanned out for her to pick one. ‘Choose a character. Don’t show it to anyone, don’t look at it.’ Alex placed the card onto the music stand. Arcane XIIII, Temperance, appeared on the big screen. ‘It’s a woman. She’s probably working in a hospital, taking care of somebody. She’s very friendly to this person, very compassionate. Also, she’s got yellow eyes.’ The lights bathed the entire stage in yellow. Alex had arranged for some lights to be turned on at some specific moments during the performance: blue, red, and yellow, the three basic colours in the Tarot of Marseille deck.

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‘She could also be an angel. But to understand who the main character will be, we need to understand what kind of writer will be.’ He went back to the young woman, who picked The Magician. He placed it beside the previous card. ‘Do you know what kind of writer he is? He likes playing with characters and plots and narratives. He’s the kind of writer that makes me think of Milorad Pavić. He’s great, I love him. He wrote a book that you can read with the Tarot. You just play Tarot and it’ll tell you which page to read. And it’s gonna make sense. It also makes me think of Flann O’Brien. You know this one, with The Third Policeman?’ ‘No’, the young woman said. ‘It’s gonna be hard to write this chapter if you don’t know these writers.’ He cleared the cards and came back to her shuffling them with the rest. ‘I usually write three-page-long chapters.’ She picked a new card for the first page: it was The Magician again. ‘He’s trying to reconstruct who he was and who killed him. He’s very obsessed, because now he knows that there’s a piece of paper and, written on the piece of paper is Tamam Shud. And it comes from a book. So, when you look for a book, what do you do? Where do you go?’ He approached the young woman so close that she could be heard through the hands-free microphone attached to his face. ‘To the library’, she said. ‘Now, in Paris there’s a beautiful library, and you search around and you look for your book, “Omar Khayyám, Rubáiyát, Omar Khayyám, Rubáiyát ”. And you finally arrive and in front of you is the book, but you are just a ghost.’ He gestured as if trying to grab a book from a shelf that passed through his hand. ‘A piece of evidence is in front of you and you’d like to collect it. But how can we grab this book now?’ He turned to the young woman, ‘Second page of the chapter’. The next card was The Devil. ‘If you wanna grab this book, you need an idea. There’s a superpower you have as a dead man. You go through things, you go through bodies, right? Maybe we can use this power …

115 The Fantasy of the Novel how?’ He offered the card deck to the young woman once again. The third card was The Moon. ‘Are those two dogs? Why do they meet up? Outside of the city there are two towers in the background. One is a dog and the other one is a wolf, and both are barking or howling at the moon. Singing to the moon. You like that?’ The young woman nodded. ‘It’s boring?’ She shook her head. ‘A beautiful place to meet and explore. “Go where you are afraid of.” This is what the card is saying. So what can we do with this card now, how does this chapter end? We need to manipulate somebody to take that fucking book. Now, this person is probably sleeping, probably dreaming. Maybe we can sit down on the same chair and start advertising, “You like poetry. You like poetry. Now you’re going to stand up and grab that book of poetry.” He doesn’t move. It doesn’t work, we need something else instead of poetry, “You’re horny”.’ He turned to the young woman and said again, ‘You are horny’. ‘You are horny’, she repeated. ‘“You like that girl in front of you. The best thing is to read poems. There’s a poet who is amazing, it is about carpe diem, and love, and gardens, and having sex, and drinking wine. It’s over there, take it. Please take it. Stand up.” Then it ends here, because you are Flann O’Brien and you don’t give the next chapter away. Stand up. It’s magic, and the chapter ends here. Suspense.’ He cleared the cards, the lights went down. ‘Thank you’, and the young woman went back to her seat. Alex carried on writing another chapter. This time he went through the same process with two young men from the audience. The first card to appear was The Judgement. The lights turned blue. A murmur run across the audience. ‘I would like to explain the physics of the metaphysics in this card. You know how the Catholic Church tried to explain the Trinity, physically, the same way they tried to explain the sex of the angels. Physically, like “angels have no sex because of this and this and this”. They wrote entire chapters about this. Now, in The Judgement the physics of the metaphysics is wonderful.

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Episode 4: Reading the Unwritten.

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You know how come the angels can rise up the dead? At the sound of their trumpet the dead will rise up. How is this possible? There was this scholar who came up with this wonderful idea: the angels don’t blow the trumpet, they suck.’ He made a slurping sound with his mouth. ‘And this is how they suck up the dead.’ That was a successful joke, there was general laughter, the audience loved it. The second page was dictated by card XIII, Death. ‘Beautiful card, uh? Do you see a musical instrument in this card? There’s a flute. This card is very yellow.’ The lights changed again. ‘This card is wonderful, it’s total transformation. It’s the moment when something has to be transformed for ever. For ever.’ The last card was The Fool. The juxtaposition of The Fool and Death was a curious one. The former card has its name written, but not a number; the latter has a number, but no name. ‘Who’s the dog?’ he asked the two young men while pointing at the dog depicted chasing The Fool on the screen. ‘It’s the secret lover of the detectives. Detectives need to have a secret lover.’ And then, turning once again to me, he said, ‘The Fool. Does he remind you of someone? He’s looking at the stars while walking on the ground. For the people who do this two things may happen: they get lost or they fall. Just like a fool, just like you, David.’ I froze on my seat. That was unexpected, calling me a fool in front of everyone. Some people in the audience laughed. ‘There’s actually a third thing that may happen to someone who walks this way’, he strolled around the stage looking up to the ceiling. ‘Maybe someday he’s going to grow wings, see? And it will save his life.’ I saw that he was trying to fix his previous invective with a poetic conclusion, but the damage was already done, he’d humiliated me in public. I felt angry and impotent. Reading the Unwritten arrived at its end. People lingered around for a little while, to browse the artists’ novels collection a

118 To Represent Fiction You Must Participate in It bit longer, to chat with Alex, or simply to have one more glass of wine with their friends. I felt like having a cigarette. I didn’t smoke regularly, but sometimes it helped me to relax. Luckily, tobacco was cheap in Poland and I carried a packet with me that evening. Francis had to leave early the next day, so I went out of the building with him. It was dark already. I thanked him again for a great conversation and we shook hands. As I was looking at him walking back to his hotel, Agata came out to wait for someone. ‘I see you became a Tamam Shud fan’, I told her, lighting a cigarette. ‘Yeah, I wanted to see how the project carried on after the last episode.’ ‘What’s your verdict?’ ‘I think the presentation you did with Joanna at the beginning helped a lot to get people in a detective mood. It exposed the mystery as mystery. When you revealed the existence of clues, I understood Alex’s invitation to investigate them, which wasn’t explicit in previous performances, at least not in Episode 3.’ ‘I’m glad it worked.’ ‘But I didn’t like the second part much. I got his performative attitude at Królikarnia, but this time most of the jokes didn’t work for me. I don’t like to hear those things being told to the audience.’ ‘He has a particular sense of humour.’ It was strange that I would defend Alex, but the criticism of his work was in part my responsibility too. ‘Besides, it isn’t clear what use the Tarot has in his writing’, Agata said. ‘For example, for Chapter 11 he said that the character was a nurse, but eventually it was about the ghost trying to get a book. It sounds like he brought some preconceived ideas for the plot, instead of creating them live as he promised.’ That was an acute observation. But it was hard for me to believe that Alex would cheat his own creative process.

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‘And there was this moment, when Alex picked The Judgement card, which I found too much of a coincidence: among twenty-two cards, how come that it’s exactly the one on the cover of Even the Dead Rise Up?’ ‘Do you think it was a scripted situation?’ ‘I suspect that The Judgement is a clue intended to make sense in a larger work of fiction, another piece in the puzzle which Francis, in spite of having been introduced as an external guest speaker, is part of.’ I couldn’t help listening with a certain enjoyment how even Agata, who had been following the project for a while, couldn’t identify the limits of the fiction. ‘I much preferred the part when you spoke with Francis.’ ‘Oh, thanks.’ ‘Do you know that you both have a very similar voice?’ ‘Francis and me?’ ‘No, you and Alex.’ ‘You say that because my Spanish accent and his Italian accent sound similar to your Polish ear, but our voices have nothing to do with each other.’ ‘No, no, I really mean the tone of your voice, you sound very much the same.’ I didn’t feel comfortable with that idea, so I returned to the subject of unfunny jokes. ‘So what do you think about the joke he played on me?’ ‘What joke?’ ‘The moment when he compared me with The Fool. I found it so insulting.’ ‘I didn’t notice that. What did he say exactly?’ ‘He said I didn’t see where I was going, just like the Tarot card. Didn’t you hear it?’ ‘Um, no. It would have been really rude to say that in front of everyone.’ ‘But he did say it! I’m telling you.’ ‘Okay, you don’t have to get angry at me too.’

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I took a long drag on my cigarette, trying to regain my composure. Agata was my student and I wasn’t behaving properly. Whether I had misheard Alex during the performance or not, I had reacted openly to his provocation. What had stayed so far within the limits of an internal conflict started to spill out. I didn’t know what was more worrying: my growing bewilderment, or the fact that Alex may have never said it.

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CHAPTER 9. THE THIRD WHEEL

I often heard curators say that they work with people they want to spend time with, but I always distrusted this opinion, as it easily degenerates into a kind of art world nepotism or, as some call it, a cartel. You may have the best ideas in the world, projects that may change the course of art history – all to no avail if you are not a cartel member, because the real opportunities are only presented to them. The unwritten rules to become part of this elite are complex, mostly based on your ability to represent the interests of a certain group. There is also a social factor involved, by which members of the cartel are usually from the upper middle class, although, by virtue of downward mobility, they tend to identify themselves as politically engaged lefties. That is, leftish as long as the discussion doesn’t touch social class: the art world’s elephant in the room. In fact, cartel members never admit the existence of a ruling caste, as the mere idea would stimulate class consciousness in the other 99%. I for one was never part of the elite that runs the mainstream art world, a situation somewhat unsatisfying but, at

122 The Third Wheel the same time, gave me the freedom to choose my companions based on what they did, not who they were. This is how Joanna and I came up with the idea of finding an artist by means of an open call instead of resorting to our network. Of course, in the selection process we not only factored the quality of Alex’s proposal but also fell for his apparent friendliness, although, after more than a year alongside him, his behaviour was giving me an internal contradiction: he was difficult, but he made great work. I had read that Bill Knott was also complicated to work with, and that part of his failure to publish was due to his personal attitude. His publisher, Jonathan Galassi, in spite of having brought out two books by Knott, said that the poet was ‘pretty hostile’ – a statement I could relate to. Galassi decided, in the end, that ‘it was just better to admire him from a distance’. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the luxury of applying the same strategy with Alex. During the first months of our collaboration I tried to keep a professional distance, but with him everything felt too personal. No, I couldn’t act like Galassi, at least not until the project had run its course. And the end still seemed so far away. On one of those days I spent at home on my own, because Joanna was working at CCA, and later at the gym, I received an email from the video editor we hired. He was sending a video trailer we had commissioned to advertise the upcoming Episode 5. After our presentation, Joanna and I had the idea of creating a short video teaser mimicking the format of the ‘Previously on …’ summaries that appear at the beginning of some TV shows, which could be projected in cinemas and published online. We had accumulated a lot of material from the performances that could be used to promote the project, giving the audience a hint that the next iteration wouldn’t be a loose piece but the latest in a narrative series. I was playing it on my computer when I got Joanna’s phone call: ‘Have you seen the trailer?’ ‘I’m watching it right now. It’s good, isn’t it?’

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‘It’s fun, it’s catchy, and it has a great rhythm. I just sent it to Alex for his approval before we release it.’ ‘It relies perhaps a bit too heavily on Episode 3’s footage, but you are right, this is when the funniest moments happen.’ ‘I love it when Alex is wearing the white overalls, trips off the stairs and nearly falls over! And that line from Bill Knott’s poem about marrying his mother – it’s hilarious!’ ‘I also like the frenzied end with Ola Maciejewska smashing the black fabric against the floor with Tim’s voice over, “Talk dirty to me, talk dirty to me, talk, talk dirty, talk, talk, dirty talk, dirty talk!”’ Just as I was saying this, we got an incoming email from Alex:

Dears, thank you so much for sending this. I watched the trailer, I know you like it and it is embarrassing to say, but I feel very uncomfortable with it. The video is too violent, there is no poetry, no mystery, people around seem not to have fun. I do not know what goes wrong in terms of communication with this editor but I would like to have less violence and more magic instead, less action and more mystery. Maybe we can talk to him, or if it is necessary I can edit the material here in Paris with someone else? Let me know please, I am sure we can find a solution to be all happy about it.

‘That’s disappointing’, I said to Joanna. ‘Should we put him in contact with the video editor?’ ‘No way, do you want to wind up with another Novylon situation? No, this time all communication goes through us.’ ‘But he’ll never accept this trailer. You know him, he’s very stubborn. He abuses the audience but he can’t stand watching them “not having fun”. It’s shocking, the distance between the

124 The Third Wheel image he has of himself and his work, and the way others see him.’ ‘I don’t find the video violent’, Joanna said. ‘Neither do I.’ ‘So what do we do?’ ‘This will end up being a waste of time and effort.’ ‘But it’s a shame to throw this material away. I say that we project it in cinema theatres here in Warsaw, Alex will never notice.’ ‘Królik, that’s not right.’ ‘Then we cancel it altogether. I wonder why we work with collaborators, he never likes what they do. It’s so frustrating.’ ‘I know. Things have to be exactly the way he pictures them in his head, otherwise he’s not happy.’ ‘Dawidku, I have to leave. We can continue this conversation tonight.’ I received another email from the video editor, this time with a different attachment: the recording of Episode 4. As I was skimming over the footage in my computer, I listened to Alex again saying: ‘Who’s the dog? It’s the secret lover of the detectives. Detectives need to have a secret lover.’ I paused the video. I hadn’t paid much attention to that particular line the first time but, now that I listened to it again, it implied more than it seemed. I played it once more to make sure I didn’t mishear it. I turned pale. If I was right in assuming that the detectives were a projection of Joanna and me in Alex’s narrative, he, in front of everyone, had stated that we needed to have a secret lover. He was publicly announcing his position in the triangle that he himself had fabricated, as the third element that disrupted the peaceful balance between Joanna and me. From Bouvard and Pécuchet to Turkey and Nippers, the literary lineage of duos that twiggy and ginger were inspired by always required a third element, like The Third Policeman; like Ginger Nuts, the third scrivener; like Arthur and Jeremiah, and their third wheel, K.

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But Arthur and Jeremiah weren’t the only triangulation to appear in Kafka’s work. I remembered Blumfeld, the protagonist of one of his short stories who, one day, opens the door of his house and finds two small balls, bouncing at opposing intervals. From that point on, they chase him everywhere he goes. Pretty much like K. in The Castle, Blumfeld tries to get rid of these unsolicited companions, which he finally does, locking them up in a closet. Alex’s literary references had become a significant source of clues to solve his mystery, so I shouldn’t take them lightly. There was something in the interpenetration of duos and trios that felt seriously unsettling, for it pointed at a triangle he was creating between Joanna, me, and him; a triangulation that could only be resolved with the return to a binary relationship by getting rid of one of us. I suspected that Blumfeld’s story contained elements that could guide my investigation of what was going on in Alex’s mind. But I had read it many years before and I couldn’t remember the details, so I googled ‘Blumfeld’ and I shivered when I read the full title: Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor, as if I was reading the description of the future Alex had in store for me. Someone could have argued that I was taking things too far, that these were machinations of my own imagination and, even if my investigations were correct, they belonged to the realm of fiction. But fiction, when it spills over into reality, can cause very noticeable effects. Up to that point, I had concealed my bewilderment because I wasn’t entirely sure of my suspicions. But I needed no further proof, the time had come to take the initiative, to counterattack, to defend what was mine. I determined to speak with Joanna about Alex’s intentions when she came home in the evening. Slamming the door with no regard for our neighbours was the unmistakable sign that Joanna had returned home from work. I was setting the table for dinner when she entered the living room; I could see excitement in her face. ‘What’s up?’ I asked.

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‘Do you remember we had an invitation to give a talk about artists’ novels in Tallinn?’ she said while sitting at the table. ‘Well, we got another invitation to do the same in Riga. And, do you remember that curator from Vilnius I met some time ago? She wrote today asking if we could give a talk in the CAC Vilnius!’ ‘Wow, are we invited to lecture in all three Baltic countries?’ ‘Yes, and I managed to arrange the dates in a way that we can do them all in the same week. What do you think?’ ‘I think we should call it the “Baltic tour”’, I said. ‘We should use the same lecture we gave a few months ago, that one we called Not a Concept but a Story, beginning with an explanation of the theoretical aspects of the artist’s novel, and then move on to talking about our experience curating these kinds of projects.’ ‘The history of The Book Lovers’, Joanna relished the idea. ‘Exactly, so we can use what we’ve done so far and the projects we’ve curated.’ ‘But maybe this time we should speak about Tamam Shud.’ ‘Of course, we’ll reserve some time for it at the end’, I said. ‘No, I mean, we should really centre our talk on Alex’s work.’ ‘This is a lecture about The Book Lovers, not Alex. Tamam Shud is one among many other projects we’ve done.’ ‘But Alex is now part of The Book Lovers!’ ‘So we are now three lovers!’ ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘Don’t deny it, he’s been flirting with you and you know it.’ I could see that Joanna was preparing an angry reply, but shouting wasn’t her style. ‘You’re acting so weird lately’, was her only answer. She got up and withdrew to the bedroom without having touched dinner. What was the matter with her? We had got ourselves in that mess first of all because of her unwillingness to accept the

127 The Fantasy of the Novel end of The Book Lovers, because she had somehow connected it with the end of our relationship. Ironically, as it turned out, commissioning a new artist’s novel looked like it might be the beginning of the end of our working and romantic relationship. I was jealous, I had to admit it. I put the dinner in the fridge, poured a glass of wine, and walked to my desk. The printed chapters translated by Johanna Bishop were still lying on it. I turned on the table lamp and went through them again. So far, I had thought that in Alex’s narrative the mother occupied a preeminent role whilst the father had been obliterated from the text. However, when rereading the Tamam Shud excerpts, I stopped at a passage that hadn’t felt particularly relevant before. In it, chef, the coroner, tells the story of the ghost of Hamlet’s father to the two detectives:

Hamlet’s father dies of unknown causes. So all the dead king can do is carry out the investigation on his own. When the ghost of Hamlet’s father appears to him there are no loving words.

I slurped the wine. Then it became evident: the passages that related to memories of the mother were all about love and tenderness, about the beginning of life (‘When you are hungry, someone feeds you. When you’re sleepy, someone sings to you’). By contrast, the father was associated with violence, revenge, and oblivion. Hamlet’s father came back from the dead to find out who killed him, pretty much like the Tamam Shud protagonist, who also has the ability to possess the bodies of the living, in a way evocative of how Hamlet’s father haunts his son to recover the mother. Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges once said that Dante wrote the Divine Comedy as a device that enabled him to reunite with his beloved Beatrice, even if such event could only take place in the realm of fiction, because Beatrice was dead. The idea that the Italian poet had created such a monumental apparatus only to fulfil his own selfish goal resonated with Alex’s project. It was completely plausible to

128 The Third Wheel suspect that he was creating the whole Tamam Shud universe for the simple purpose of recovering his mother (just as Hamlet did before him) or, if not exactly his mother, at least a lost feeling of completion, which he identified with paradise. Unfortunately for me, his oedipal projections didn’t stop in the fictional realm. Alex saw in The Book Lovers the parents of the Tamam Shud project, with me as the father figure who ought to be eliminated and Joanna as the mother figure that ought to be seduced and possessed. For him, I was the embodiment of law that had to be transgressed, the authority that had to be scorned and ridiculed, preferably in public. Not for nothing, his favourite poet, Bill Knott, wrote:

I recently killed my father And will soon marry my mother My question is: Should his side of the family be invited to the wedding?

There was a glitch in his perfect oedipal fantasy, though. I fundamentally disagreed with a fictional scheme in which I hadn’t been asked to be included, especially when assigned such an unfair position. I wasn’t an incarnation of the Name of the Father. I had never identified myself with any particular male trait and wasn’t going to do it now only to satisfy Alex’s imaginary love triangle. He had reserved for me the role of the bad guy who deserves to be debased and ultimately defeated, but I hadn’t done anything to earn such punishment. I was just an artist trying to help another artist to develop a kind of practice I believed should be supported. His wasn’t my game, I didn’t want to enter into competition to be Joanna’s object of desire. It was all so unnecessary, so disturbing. Earlier, I figured that the best way to disrupt the family triangle he had invented would be by disappointing his expectations, showing him that I was not an authoritative figure, adopting instead the role of the male friend, behaving as a kind curator on his side, supporting his dreams of success; proving that, although I was an artist like

129 The Fantasy of the Novel him, I wasn’t his competitor. But I underestimated his capacity for autosuggestion, he was prey to his own subjectivity, nothing I could do or say would change his opinion about me. Worse still, I feared that my frustration with Alex’s attitude had begun to affect my commitment to the project. I finished off the glass of wine. I needed to breathe fresh air, so I put on my shoes and went out for a walk. Warsaw has a lot of defects: many people don’t shower; bus drivers think they can dispose of the passengers’ lives; attacks on foreign people in public space proliferate; and Jesus Christ is the declared King of Poland. But it has its positive aspects too. For example, you can walk through connected gardens and parks for kilometres. That night in early June the weather was nice and flowers bloomed everywhere. However, even the pleasures of early summer could not help my internal conflict. Episode 5 was approaching fast and I didn’t have any desire to get involved in yet another of Alex’s performances. I, who had always advocated collaboration in art practice, was feeling worn out. I considered my options as I walked the dark streets: obviously, I couldn’t abandon the project, it would be professional suicide and an extremely clumsy personal move that would fulfil Alex’s very desire of seeing me out of it. Quitting wasn’t an option, but I couldn’t carry on pretending that nothing had happened. I was wandering lost in thought when I heard voices whispering behind me. I turned and saw two figures a few metres away. In spite of the darkness I could discern one bulky male and one thin female who were coming my direction. For a second I believed them to be Novylon, but I quickly gave up the idea because they lived very far from my area. Besides, it was late at night and they would be home looking after their children. I kept walking, trying to return to my reflections. But, when I turned a corner and, just a few seconds later, they turned it too, I started to suspect that they were stalking me. I halted, pretending to check something on my mobile phone. I looked from the corner of my eye: they were standing still too, keeping

130 The Third Wheel the same distance as before. I resumed walking, at a faster pace now. When I reached the next corner, I used the angle to look over my shoulder and get a glimpse of my stalkers. She had long straight hair and wore large glasses reminiscent of the 1980s. If it wasn’t Karina, she certainly looked like her. They also quickened their pace. I began to head towards home, still hearing their steps behind me, closer than before. If they were actually Novylon, shouldn’t I just stop and greet them? If they were still sore because of the way things had turned out between us, this wasn’t the way to settle it. And, right at that moment, when I was considering turning around to wait for them, I heard him yelling something at me. I started to run. I looked back, they were running too. However, I was a good runner (I trained three times a week) and I was sure that they wouldn’t be able to follow me for long. I didn’t know about Karina’s physical condition but, certainly, Marek wouldn’t be able to cope with my speed. As I expected, they gave up after a few hundred metres. I kept running till I arrived at my building. I quickly went all the way upstairs to my flat. I closed the door quietly behind me, I brushed my teeth, undressed, joined Joanna in bed, and cuddled up beside her. As my heartbeat slowed down I began to doubt whether those two were in fact Novylon because, if they were, the whole situation would be too wild. If I told Joanna the next day she wouldn’t believe me. Still, I could have sworn it was them.

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CHAPTER 10. THE FERRYMAN OF HADES

C offee in the morning was the only thing that helped me get on my feet. Waking up was for me an arduous and slow process that involved a long ritual of yawning and noisy stretching. I slept very lightly and woke up numerous times through the night. Joanna, on the other hand, always jumped out of the bed full of energy. She slept soundly without interruption and woke up in the same position as she went to sleep the night before. Sometimes, before going to work, she would bring me a cup of coffee in bed. It was the day of rehearsals for Episode 5, Walking Backwards, a few weeks after the Novylon chase episode. I could hear Joanna settling the kettle. She came into the bedroom with two cups of freshly brewed coffee. ‘It’s like you are Céleste Albaret and I’m Proust’, I said. ‘Don’t talk about Proust, he’s not a good example for you.’ ‘Yeah, he was a tyrant, but she admired him. She loved him! She probably suffered from Stockholm syndrome, anyway.’

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‘Today Alex is rehearsing his performance at the botanical garden. Michał will be with him.’ Joanna paused waiting for my reaction. ‘You haven’t even asked how the project is going.’ It was true, I wasn’t involved in the preparation of Episode 5. I didn’t know they were already working on location, nor did I have any intention of joining them. Joanna understood that much from my silence. The atmosphere between us had become increasingly rarefied since the Baltic tour quarrel. We had stopped having sex. Not that our sexual life was as intense as it used to be at the beginning of our relationship but, overall, it was definitely not as poor as it was for some other married couples. For the last weeks, however, it had become non- existent. ‘Alright then: how is the project going?’ By way of an answer, Joanna produced a piece of paper. ‘It’s the press release for Episode 5’, she said. ‘I didn’t want to bother you, so I asked the promotion department to prepare a text advertising the performance. Take a look.’

Anyone can write the next chapter of the crime novel with the artist! If you want to become a co-author of the novel Tamam Shud, all you have to do next Thursday and Friday is, for example, walk around backwards in the park in front of the Castle. A preview of the next chapter of the future novel can be seen in September in the form of an exhibition.

‘Godverdomme!’ I said. ‘Not only do they give false information (“anyone can write the next chapter of the crime novel with the artist”), they also omit the essential fact that this is the last in a series of performances connected to an artist’s novel. They really don’t have a clue about the project!’ ‘And it’s having consequences’, Joanna said. ‘Yesterday I heard Małgosia saying that the Tamam Shud exhibition will be an interactive project in which the audience will write their own

133 The Fantasy of the Novel story. They are misinforming people; can you help me correct this shitty situation?’ I looked at the coffee cup in my hands and said: ‘I’m sorry Królik, but I don’t do this anymore, I’m not paid for it. There’s a whole department and I’ve been doing their job for too long. I can’t be responsible for their ineptitude.’ I was so disappointed with the way our communication strategy had panned out. We wanted it to be part of the narrative but, at the end of the day, no one understood our intentions. We had to accept that we had failed. Besides, constantly fighting against the promotion department was exhausting. I kept repeating that to myself but, as soon as Joanna left for work, I began to feel guilty for not helping her. Walking Backwards was integrated in a larger performance programme curated by her in CCA over the weekend, which meant for her taking care of many other artists and pieces. She had delegated the preparations for Episode 5 to Ola, who had been in communication with the garden’s botanist, who, in turn, provided Alex with the floor plan to design the tour, continuing the conversation they started in the first visit on 12 April about tales and properties attached to each plant: medicinal, poisonous, or aphrodisiac. I was still in bed finishing the coffee when I got an email from Ola: she was casting guides for the performance. So far, she had hired four people, all Polish, but she was still missing a native English speaker for the foreign visitors. I thought of a graduate from the Dutch Art Institute called Charlie Dance, an English boy based in Warsaw. He was perfect for the job, so I suggested Ola get in touch with him. Such a passing involvement in the project managed to rekindle my enthusiasm for it. Since Joanna would be busy around the CCA building with other artists from her performance programme, I thought my presence at the botanical garden would be appreciated during the rehearsals.

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Walking Backwards was the fifth and final performance in the Tamam Shud project before the exhibition and the artist’s novel publication. It consisted in a guided tour through the botanical garden on a one-to-one basis, in which each visitor, who had previously booked a specific time slot, was assigned her own private guide to take her for a 35-minute walk. With five performers plus Alex it was thus possible to do six walks per hour. Since the piece was spread over two days, 29 and 30 June, from 5pm to 9pm, it meant that a total of 48 people would be able to enjoy it. Alex trained the performers for three days before the performance. Like many of his previous pieces, Walking Backwards wasn’t new, he had already carried it out elsewhere. But now, in the context of his murder mystery writing process, it was supposed to acquire a different connotation. When I arrived at the entrance of the botanical garden, around 3pm, an old lady inside a booth started to scream ‘Panie, panie!’ I realised I hadn’t paid for the ticket, when Michał, Ola’s assistant and now also one of Alex’s performers, came to the rescue. After he calmed the lady down, explaining that I was part of the weird gang walking backwards in the garden, he told me where to find Alex. The botanical garden was large enough to lose sight of someone easily. As I moved through flower beds and intersecting paths, I remembered how grey and sad it looked back in April during our preliminary visit. Now, in late June, the bright weather illuminated its lushness. I walked past a couple of performers rehearsing: both were walking backwards, one after the other, keeping a constant distance, never further than one metre apart. The one acting as the guide was a professional actress (a thin, young blond woman, whom I later learned was called Monika) who whispered stories while pointing to this or that plant. It was evident that they had been doing it for a while, because their four legs, moving in unison, had acquired an odd coordination. I saw Alex from afar, instructing another performer who I presumed was Charlie. Although it had been my idea to hire

135 The Fantasy of the Novel him, we had never met before. His British accent, audible when he repeated the sentences he had to memorise, allowed me to identify him. Alex was standing behind him, teaching him how to pronounce certain words: ‘Sshhaadow, sshheelter, kiissses, woorsship, ssilence.’ They were so engrossed in their rehearsal that they didn’t notice my presence immediately; they only reacted when I was at arm’s length. ‘Oh, hi, David’, Alex said in an aloof tone. We exchanged some brief formulaic chit-chat, after which he went back to their training: both walking backwards, Alex in the role of the guide, reciting the script that Charlie had to learn. I followed them at a prudent distance, not to disturb them, yet close enough to hear what they were saying. Alex was very focused, he hardly spoke to me again, or noticed my presence for that matter. I quietly admired his capacity for concentration. In his place, I would have engaged in conversation with the curator who invited me, at the risk of breaking the working mood. They stopped under a linden tree. Alex said: ‘Its leaves have the shape of a heart. You can eat them, you can eat its flowers, and even its bark. You can make tea out of it, it’ll calm you down.’ They resumed their march, only to soon stop again next to a yew tree. Alex asked Charlie to touch its leaves, then said: ‘Don’t lick your fingers, don’t suck on them. Only one drop from its leaves killed the father of Hamlet. Only one arrow from its wood killed Richard the Lionheart. When Dante found the gate of hell, which forest do you think he went through? With the wood of yew, the first bow was made. Never rest under this tree, or you’ll see things that are not there, you’ll hear stories that aren’t true, from voices with no mouth. Don’t sleep under this tree, or you’ll never wake up again.’ There it was, once more, the juxtaposition of nurturing, calming, loving references, synthesised in the linden tree (which I associated with the values that Alex attached to the memories of his mother) and the yew tree, which served to introduce

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Hamlet’s father again, as well as stories about death, poisoning, and violence. Although Shakespeare never specifically said that Hamlet’s father was killed by yew (rather, he mentions a mysterious poison called ‘hebenon’), Alex identified the description of the symptoms, which the ghost describes to his son, with those associated with poisoning from a yew:

Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole, With juice of cursed hebenon in a vial, And in the porches of my ears did pour The leperous distilment; whose effect Holds such an enmity with blood of man That, swift as quicksilver, it courses through The natural gates and alleys of the body; And with a sudden vigour it doth posset And curd, like eager droppings into milk, The thin and wholesome blood; so did it mine; And a most instant tetter bark’d about, Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust All my smooth body. Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother’s hand, Of life, of crown, of queen, at once dispatch’d.

A question crossed my mind: did yew kill the Somerton man as well? The coroner suspected that he died by the effect of an untraceable poison. For some time I thought it to be ricin – for no particular reason, just because it was the only undetectable poison I knew about, thanks to Breaking Bad. However, it turned out that evidence of poisoning by yew may be entirely absent too, so Alex’s assumption about Hamlet’s father’s death could be correct after all and, why not, applicable to the Somerton man as well. I wondered if Alex would follow this plot line in the artist’s novel. What did he say? ‘Only one arrow from its wood killed Richard the Lionheart. With the wood of yew, the first bow was made.’ This was the second occurrence of bows in his story.

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During Episode 1 Alex said, ‘I really would like that my last memory was me in my mother’s arms … and my little bow, aiming proudly at a faraway haystack. “Come on boy, shoot. If you shoot, mommy will give you the thing that you want so much.”’ Alex, as a little child, accompanied by his mother, shooting an arrow that would kill a king. And, what would be the reward, what could a child possibly want so badly? You can’t get it more oedipal than this. We continued the tour. Alex and Charlie halted again after some twenty metres. ‘Belladonna. All young ladies from Florence know what it’s for’, Alex said. While standing still behind him, he introduced a dark berry inside Charlie’s field of vision. ‘One berry, and your eyes become so big and pitch dark as an endless starless night. Two berries make your lips so fat, so red, ready for a kiss. Three berries and it doesn’t matter if your lover is ugly. Your heart will beat as fast as if you’re in love. Berries are for the first night, they open your body like a flower. It helps. But a girl thought the king would be a big king, and the night a long night, and she took five. Poor girl. On her first night with a king, she pissed on herself, on the bed, and on the king. “I like it”, said the king. “Can we do it again?”’ ‘But, Alex, I don’t see any belladonna plant around’, I said. He pointed at a spot a few metres away, ‘It’s over there, but so fucked up that I can’t let the visitors see it, so we tell the story from here’. I walked in the direction he indicated. It was true, the poor belladonna was completely eaten up by some kind of parasite. Beside it there was an equally devoured specimen of mandrake. When I was a child I saw a movie set in medieval Europe, called Flesh + Blood, that opens with a scene in which a young couple meet under a gallows tree. The girl digs in the dirt under a decomposing hanging man, where a mandrake has grown. She unearths the root, which looks like a human figure, and asks the boy to eat it with her, for when a couple does that, they fall in love forever. The young man accepts and explains the reason

138 The Ferryman of Hades why mandrake grows at that specific spot: it is said to sprout from a hanged man’s sperm when it drops onto the ground, following an erection at the point of death. I wondered why Alex hadn’t included that plant in his narrative tour. The mandrake’s association with death, love, sex, and the Tarot-like reference to the hanged man were impeccably Tamam Shudesque. I was so absorbed in my own thoughts that I didn’t notice Alex and Charlie leaving. I caught up with them in time to hear Charlie repeat ‘calluna, calluna, calluna’, as they passed by a bunch of low plants. As I learned later, calluna was used centuries ago to brew a kind of beer called gruit, produced extensively in the south of Europe before the use of hops. Its effects were aphrodisiac and stimulating, as opposed to the sedative effects of hopped beer, favoured by the Protestants. None of this was spoken by Alex, but the allusion to inebriation was obvious, further emphasised when we walked by a grapevine, ‘Grapes find the right drugs to keep us working for free’. I instantly associated the mentions of beer and wine with the Rubáiyát ’s dictum to enjoy the pleasures of life:

Awake, my Little ones, and fill the Cup Before Life’s Liquor in its Cup be dry.

And when, soon after, we passed by a hydrangea flower bed and Alex said, ‘White or yellow, hortensia will turn blue when it absorbs calcium from the soil. I wonder, who’s buried beneath?’ I couldn’t help but recalling Omar Khayyám’s original verse lines that Alex had adapted almost a year before for Episode 2’s email invitation:

I sometimes think that never blows so red The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled; That every Hyacinth the Garden wears Dropt in its Lap from some once lovely Head

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The fact that Alex called the flower hortensia triggered an involuntary memory in me. Arthur Rimbaud’s exhort, ‘Find Hortense!’, which I read in his poem H long ago – when I was the same age as Rimbaud when he wrote it – resonated in my mind. It was strange how the tour, even when experienced from a distance, was able to make me look back into my past. First Flesh + Blood (a movie that I had completely forgotten), and then Rimbaud, who, in spite of being one of the heroes of my youth, had long languished in a corner of my memory. We reached a crossroads. One path was leading back to the garden’s entrance, the other one to the exit. Michał, Monika, and the rest of the performers joined us. Alex went through the last lines for everyone to learn: ‘Do you remember the first time you ever saw something like this? You were little, you weren’t even walking. You were pushed, and the only thing you were able to see were those trees, those leaves, the sky, and the flickering light.’ Of course, I got the reference to the ‘alignment’ of the fictional Alex’s birth and death right away. ‘One day, many years from now, they’ll put you on a boat. They’ll slide you gently into the river, and the stream will carry you away. And the only thing you’ll see will be those trees, those leaves, the sky, and the flickering light. Every beginning is already its own end.’ At which point the guide would send the visitor off to the garden’s exit. And that would be the end of the performance. The guide would walk to the entrance and wait for the next visitor. Those words had a familiar air, I had read them in the first chapters of his novel, ‘Everything was moving backwards, trees, leaves, clouds, like on a boat slipping calmly down a river. Who knows, maybe someone was pushing me.’ The image of a boat at the moment of death evoked new connotations in the puzzle that my mind was trying to piece together from all clues and references scattered throughout the Tamam Shud mystery. It sounded a lot like a description of the Acheron River. I don’t mean the actual river in Greece, but the mythological river that,

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Episode 5: Walking Backwards rehearsals.

141 The Fantasy of the Novel according to the Roman poet Virgil, the souls of the dead had to cross in order to reach the underworld. The passage was facilitated by Charon and his boat, so that, I speculated, it would be possible to establish a parallel between the walk in the botanical garden and the transition to the afterlife. After all, the performance’s script said, ‘When Dante found the gate of hell, which forest do you think he went through?’ At the beginning of the Divine Comedy, Dante wanders in a forest that Alex claimed to be of yew trees, before being rescued by Virgil, who takes him for a trip through hell. It is known that Virgil, the actual poet, not Dante’s character, located the entrance of Hades, the classical underworld, in the midst of a dark forest. My conclusion was that Walking Backwards was a metaphorical journey through the forest (a botanical garden in this case) that precedes the transit to death, represented through the subjective gaze of the visitor (the dead soul), who is sent off by the guide (Charon) in a boat at the end of the tour. The funny thing, I thought, was that I, too, had used the image of Dante lost in a dark forest in The Wheel of Fortune. I was assailed by doubt: did Alex pick up this idea from my artist’s novel, the same way he had based his kimono man on my character Seth? No, the references to Dante appeared in his project before, they couldn’t be indebted to my work. Though, sure enough, there is a certain scene in my artist’s novel when Seth reads the following lines from the Divine Comedy:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita Mi ritrovari per una selva oscura, Ché la diritta via era smarritta.

Selva oscura means ‘dark forest’ in Italian, and I understood Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita (‘In the middle of the road of our life’) to refer to Dante’s age when he decided to commit his life entirely to writing, in his early forties or, in other words, during his midlife crisis. So that, in The Wheel of Fortune, the image of the poet having lost his way in a dark

142 The Ferryman of Hades forest serves as a call to action for my protagonist to take a drastic decision and do something significant with his life, following the example of Dante, who devoted his life to the creation of the Divine Comedy so intensely and so earnestly, that the end of his work signified the end of his life. The same can be said of Marcel Proust, who let himself die the moment he finished In Search of Lost Time. This is all marvellously explained by Roland Barthes at the beginning of The Preparation of the Novel, in which he confesses that he, very much like Dante and Proust before him, decided to change his life after the death of his mother – which echoed the death of Beatrice and Proust’s mother, respectively. Barthes’ plan was to write a novel whose preliminary title, as seen in his manuscript notes, was Vita Nuova, obviously reminiscent of Dante’s La Vita Nuova, ‘The New Life’. My train of thoughts was interrupted the moment Alex took the Polish guides aside to continue their training (they had to make their own translation of the original script into Polish) – but I made a mental note to continue my investigations later. Charlie went back to the beginning of the tour, and I with him. We sat down on a bench at the garden’s entrance, we had a few minutes before it was time for him to resume rehearsing. ‘How’s everything going?’ I asked – I felt a bit responsible for having got him involved in the performance. ‘It’s alright. It’s just a bit difficult to remember the exact itinerary, because I don’t see where I’m going when I walk backwards; also trying not to miss any line about all these plants.’ ‘I can imagine. If I were a guide, it’d be easier for me to learn the script, because I know the reason why certain plants are included in the tour. As a matter of fact, if I were Alex, I’d have explained a bit of backstory to you guys, for you to be aware of the meaning of the performance and make sense of it, rather than just memorising a seemingly random text.’ ‘Oh, so you can tell me what the piece is about’, Charlie said.

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‘I could. But I’m not going to. I don’t want to spoil Alex’s piece. He must have his reasons if he didn’t explain anything to you guys. Anyway, speaking about the meaning of his work isn’t his style. If I’ve got to know a thing or two about the project it is thanks to my own investigations, not because of him. So I don’t want to disrupt the working dynamic between you and him by disclosing too much information.’ I was sure that the guides would have engaged much more fully with their part had they been told about the inclusion of the linden and the yew trees, and the motifs (mother/love- father/death) that pervaded the Tamam Shud narrative. Or how some lines were directly inspired by the Rubáiyát, which could have been done without explaining why that particular book was so central to the project. But Charlie didn’t seem to care much anyway. He was happy with his limited role, so I didn’t press the issue. ‘It’s time for me to start a new round’, he said, ‘and I need someone to guide. Would you mind helping me?’ ‘Not at all, let’s go.’ At the start of the tour only Charlie walked backwards, so that we were facing each other. He began by taking me through the rose garden. Speaking of pollination, he proceeded to execute it first by rubbing his finger against the flowers’ pistils, then his nose, and finally his tongue. Hardly five minutes had passed from the start of the tour, when Charlie asked me to turn around and join his backwards walking style. ‘When you walk backwards, the future is on your back, and the past is longing in the distance in front of you, insisting on the horizon. You can mostly tell it goodbye’, Charlie said. ‘Your future is known, you’re confident.’ Yes, the future is known, because the future is death, and you are confident you are going to die, so you can live to the full with no regrets. It all sounded consistent with Omar Khayyám’s advice:

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Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring The Winter Garment of Repentance fling: The Bird of Time has but a little way To fly—and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.

I noticed that ‘fill the cup’ was a recurrent leitmotif in the Rubáiyát:

Ah, fill the Cup:—what boots it to repeat How Time is slipping underneath our Feet: Unborn TO-MORROW, and dead YESTERDAY, Why fret about them if TO-DAY be sweet!

Walking backwards felt weird, especially in a garden, where unexpected paths intersected with yours, or you’d get into the occasional ascending or descending slope without warning. There were parts of the itinerary that went off the paved path, crossing patches of dirt and grass. My only guide was Charlie’s voice; physical contact was restricted to when I walked the wrong direction or an unanticipated turn came. Walking backwards, what a simple thing. Yet, what a cinematographic experience it produces – you become fully aware of your body movements; your vision becomes akin to a camera dolly. As Charlie said, the past is there all the time, receding but always present. And the present is a constant surprise. New elements enter your field of vision: branches, flowers, bushes, and passers-by looking at you in awe. Walking Backwards was a truly performative piece, in the sense that it wasn’t only about the text recited by the guide, but about your bodily and visual experience, determined by your moveable, subjective point of view. Charlie’s hand appeared in my field of vision pointing at a cherry tree: ‘When I was older, much older than today, a young girl came here into the garden’, he said. ‘She was so beautiful I forgot how old I was.’

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I couldn’t repress an evil thought, Surely forty-four?, triggered by my knowledge of Alex’s efforts to hide his actual age. Charlie continued his tale: ‘“What can I do for you, my lady?” I asked. “Would you like to take some cherries for me, sir? Because soon I’ll have a son.”’ As he was impersonating the different voices, he spoke to my right and left ears alternatively, creating a sort of 3-D sound effect. ‘“What? A child?” I thought, A child means a father, and a father means a man. Blood rushed to my head and, full of rage, I said, “Why don’t you ask the father of your child to pick the cherries for you?” With a smile, she turned to the cherry tree, and the cherry tree bent its highest branches to let her pick the reddest of its cherries. Isn’t it strange?’ It was a strange story, indeed, but also typical of Alex, getting jealous of a man he’s never seen. I could recognise his hatred of the father figure, which translated into a hatred of men in general, and his ability to relate to women exclusively through seduction. The next tree Charlie took me to was a ginkgo: ‘This tree is very old, but still wants to mate. Trees have no shame. In a few months from now, the fruits will be on the ground, they’ll crack open, and everything will smell like vomit and sperm.’ I had read elsewhere that the smell of vomit typical of ginkgo’s fruit might have attracted some animals, now extinct, some thousands of years ago. This species is very old indeed, a kind of evolutionary survivor from another era. Wasn’t this a way for Alex to speak about himself? A man, in his mid-forties, who is obsessed about aging and therefore losing his libido? A man who, although becoming old, ‘still wants to mate’? We felt some rain drops. The weather had changed and it was raining lightly. Since it was almost 6pm, Alex gathered everyone at the garden’s entrance and called it a day.

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Episode 5: Walking Backwards. Ginkgo leaves.

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I went out for a run the next morning, 29 June, the first day of performances. As I came back home, around noon, I read Ola’s email informing us that the performance was fully booked for the day, and nearly full for 30 June. I will never forget what happened next. Unexpectedly, in just a matter of minutes, the sky turned dark. What ensued was the most violent storm that I’ve ever seen. In fact, I don’t even know if storm is the right word or if it deserves a higher categorisation. From the vantage point provided by my top floor’s window over the park, I watched an extremely wild wind throw enormous amounts of water, followed by hailstones the size of cherries. I had seen quite a few storms in the Netherlands, but this was something else. Being outside at that moment was simply life-threatening. Joanna called me from her office, fearing that I’d be still running. By 1pm the weather calmed down, and by 2pm it was sunny again, but the consequences were devastating: entire trees had been pulled up, their roots exposed; huge branches, sometimes half trees, broken, plenty of them scattered throughout the city. For the next twenty-four hours I could only hear the frenzied sound of sirens attending the many emergences caused by the storm. Ironically, Joanna and I had scheduled an outdoors performance like Walking Backwards in late June because it was summer time. At 2.05pm Joanna called me again: the botanical garden was closed to the public, even to the workers. Trees had fallen down there as well, and many branches were dangling dangerously. A municipal squad was there doing damage control, but our performance had to be cancelled, at least for the first day. ‘I’m going to work with Ola to reschedule as many people as possible. There are still a few time slots free for tomorrow’, Joanna said.

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‘You know what? You can give my time slot to someone else who needs it. I kind of did the tour yesterday, anyway’, I said. ‘I see that you are scheduled for tomorrow, 7pm.’ ‘Just scratch my name and offer the slot to someone who booked for today.’ ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Yeah, I already got an idea of the performance, more or less.’ ‘Okay then. I have to go, Alex is very upset about the cancellation.’ The next day, Joanna and I went to the botanical garden a few minutes before the beginning of the performance. The weather was cloudy but fine. The five guides were waiting at the entrance with Alex. At 5pm the first batch of visitors arrived. Everything went as planned, they were taken one by one by the guides at five-minute intervals. After a while, the first visitors re- emerged from the depths of the garden. ‘Look, Kuba’s coming out now’, Joanna said. He materialised wearing a stunned expression. ‘How was it?’ I asked. ‘I … I don’t know how to say this, but I think I had a hallucinatory experience’, he said. ‘It’s this walking backwards, it puts you in a hypnotic state. It’s uncanny, how the trees and the plants come to you, like in waves. The whole landscape was waving.’ Joanna and I stared at him. ‘I experienced a regression to childhood memories. It was at the end, when the guide spoke about being a baby in a pram, looking up at the treetops. It’s the exact description of my first memory, I remember being with my parents outdoors, just like that, in a pram.’ He left, still startled. I turned to Joanna and said: ‘I can see that the tour makes you focus on your past, because it’s supposed to represent the last moments of your life, but wasn’t he exaggerating a bit?’

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‘He sounded sincere.’ ‘But it’s a memory common to so many people, maybe he’s confusing Alex’s script with his own memory?’ Episode 5 had a stronger emotional impact on the audience than previous episodes. I wondered if it was because of the more intimate, one-to-one experience, or because the guides recited the script with little to no room for improvisation, which were the moments Alex typically used to insert his mean jokes. Relinquishing the method of canovaccio for once produced a less cynical engagement with the piece. A journalist approached us, she took Joanna aside for a short interview. They were done after ten minutes. ‘Who was she?’ I said. ‘She works for a national radio station, a programme about literature. She really liked the piece, she’s going to interview Alex now.’ ‘She’s the first journalist who’s paid attention to our project.’ ‘Not an art journalist, though, but it’s a beginning.’ ‘Yeah, it seems like people are enjoying the performance. Królik, I think we deserve a holiday after this.’ ‘But we have to start the preparations for the exhibition’, she said. ‘That’s why, before we get tangled up in work again, we should take a few days off. It’s summer, you know.’ ‘I can’t leave now, there’s too much to be done.’ ‘Don’t you feel tired? I need a break from anything related to Tamam Shud, to stay away for a little while, even if it’s just Rotterdam.’ ‘You can go to Rotterdam if you want, I’ll stay here.’ ‘Come with me, I’ll feel guilty if I go alone.’ ‘Dawid, you are not necessary.’ Seeing the effect her words had on my facial expression, she added, as if making up for being too harsh, ‘Ola and I can take care of the show’s arrangements. And we have Paulina too. There’s really not so much you can do until we begin installing the show. Go to

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Rotterdam, get a change of scenery and don’t worry, we’ll be fine.’

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CHAPTER 11. OBSESSION AND OBSTINACY

A lex’s exhibition dates were strategically planned to attract the highest number of visitors at the start of the art season, from 1 September to 1 October. Heading now for the last push before the publication of the artist’s novel felt like seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Joanna offered Alex the entire east wing on CCA’s first floor: a row of four consecutive rooms interconnected by a series of doors, which suited his plan of different thematic installations perfectly. There were also the castle’s towers, two smaller hexagonal spaces, one on each end, on both corners of the building. The north tower was separated from the last room by a corridor. Alex’s initial exhibition plan included many pieces we had been discussing, like a collection of erotic drawings displayed inside a replica of Moreau’s drawing cabinet we saw in Paris. In the Dance Room there would be three variations of Arabesque, two made of wood and one new version in marble, which had been commissioned by a collector in Bolzano. In the Death Room, however, Alex replaced the video installation Belladonna – projected on the ceiling, with the spectators lying

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CCA floor plan (first floor) with the Tamam Shud exhibition layout.

153 The Fantasy of the Novel on the floor and performers beside them whispering the soundtrack in their ears – for a sound installation called Cetaceans. Apparently, such a unilateral and drastic decision wasn’t worth being discussed with us, the curators. Alex changed things as he saw fit, regardless of financial viability and curatorial opinion. The absence of dialogue started to border on unprofessionalism. Quite annoyed, I wrote him an email:

Some months ago CCA paid €1,000 for the production of a video, Belladonna, that now turns out not to be part of the show. From CCA’s point of view, this is difficult to justify, because they are paying for an artwork unrelated to the institution.

As far as I can remember, this was the only time he actually listened to me; he backed down and restored Belladonna to the exhibition plan. In the same Death Room, he also wanted to hang an 1882 Fredrick James Shield painting called William Blake’s Room, which is part of the Manchester Art Gallery’s collection. On their website it’s described as:

A bedroom interior, with a bed in the foreground to the left, and small table and chair to the right, and a picture hanging above. There is an open window in the background inviting bright sunlight across the bare wooden floor, and red flowering pot plants are on the sill. A ghostly mist rises from bed, in the form of three figures with outstretched arms.

The description omits the fact that the three figures are female, that they are holding hands, and that, actually, they don’t emerge from the bed, but from the floor. For some reason, the three figures turn their heads looking straight at the spot from where they have risen. As was his habit, Alex didn’t explain why he wanted this painting in the exhibition. I was doing my

154 Obsession and Obstinacy best to investigate the meaning of the very project Joanna and I were curating, and the significance of each piece within the whole narrative, but some things just escaped me. The only reference I could connect it to was William Blake’s poem that Alex read during the tour of heaven in Episode 3:

And, Father, how can I love you Or any of my brothers more? I love you like the little bird That picks up crumbs around the door.

I could see how Alex’s interpretation of the poem, on the impossibility of loving the father, resonated with the oedipal theme in Tamam Shud but, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t fathom why he was so bent on getting that particular painting, even to the point of insinuating that, if CCA couldn’t get it on loan from Manchester, we should try to get another copy from the Delaware Art Museum, in the US. I checked their website and noticed that this second version didn’t have the ‘ghostly mist in the form of three figures’. I guessed that was the detail that made Manchester’s Alex’s preferred version. Tamam Shud was conceived as a performative exhibition: the rooms contained pieces that either were meant to be activated by the spectators (Arabesque, Music Door), or were the stage for a performance that would happen at set times during the four-week show. For example, in the Dance Room there would be two dancers on a six-square metre copper floor platform, ‘sliding, twisting, and spinning’ over river stones while, in the Dinner Room, a special menu would be designed by Alex and served ‘every day’ in coordination with CCA’s bistro, which was conveniently situated right below on the ground floor. The waiters would come upstairs and cross the exhibition, serving the food to anyone who booked dinner or lunch. Another performance, called Concerto Nuovo, would take place in the Music Room. Alex was making some oil paintings

155 The Fantasy of the Novel on Japanese paper that he wanted to mount on three large wooden structures, displaying them as three-metre-tall standing screens. They were conceived to compose a music score based on colours, which a musician with synaesthesia would interpret on a piano in front of an audience. Surprisingly, in Alex’s plan the Music Door wasn’t located in the Music Room, but in the corridor that connected the Death Room with the Erotic Cabinet. The production of the Music Door had become a little complicated over time – nothing strange considering that, in his dream, this piece didn’t come with an instruction manual. As he once said to me, ‘I don’t know how we will do it, but we’ll see. This is the image. Technically, I don’t know.’ He just had a vision, and it had to be realised, and the story of the Music Door’s technical development was therefore long and tortuous. Some months earlier, during one of Alex’s stays in Warsaw, the day after Episode 3, using a few hours before his flight back to Paris, Ola took us for a visit to some kind of musical instrument inventor she had hired to design a prototype of the piece. The model that he showed to us was underwhelming to say the least. He explained that the system Alex had dreamed of, a door with embedded flutes that played music as one opened it, couldn’t be made in real life, simply because not enough air went through the pipes in the short arc covered by a door. Instead, he devised a sort of accordion-door that, when opened or closed, would squeeze enough air from the inside to produce sound. The problem was, however, that it was really hard to press the entire door’s surface to push the air out of it. Discouraged by that visit, Alex found an experimental luthier in Paris, with whom he worked secretly for the next months. We found out shortly before the exhibition, when he passed the invoice to Ola. It was early July. Before I left for Rotterdam, Joanna and I went to our favourite café to discuss Alex’s exhibition plan. We sat at the terrace and ordered cappuccino for her, a black coffee for me, and cheesecake for both. I saddened at the thought that that was the last remainder of New York for us.

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We went through the exhibition plan sent by Alex. It included a File Room, a new version of the original Botanical Garden installation, still counting on having the hybridised flowers in it, despite the fact that we didn’t have two years or 1,000,000 zlotys to spend on them. He just wasn’t going to surrender his fantasy to the pragmatics of reality that easily. ‘In the File Room there’ll be a piece called Fleurs d’Ennuis’, I said. ‘A series of flower-like drawings made on documents that register tricky moments in his life: hospital records, letters from the tax office, warnings from the bank about delayed payments, stuff like that.’ ‘I remember he spoke about one of these drawings the last time we were at Ola’s office’, Joanna said. ‘He and his ex- girlfriend were flying to India, but his passport expired and he failed to renew it in time, so he remained in Paris and she travelled alone. Once there, she had an epiphany and broke up with him.’ ‘That’s what I call a Freudian slip. And now he’s using the visa document to make a drawing.’ ‘Did you notice that he barely speaks of his girlfriend and, when he does, it’s because of a quarrel?’ Joanna said. ‘For example, in the Dinner Room he wants to serve the meals on carved wooden furniture, you know, a table and four chairs that he’s using to make some Tarot-like wood engravings which will be hanging on the walls. Well, he told me, “I did a test with furniture in my house, which led to a fight with my girlfriend”. Isn’t it funny?’ ‘Yes, hilarious.’ I didn’t like the fact that Alex amused Joanna with his stories about angry girlfriends, but she didn’t pick up on my sarcastic tone. ‘You’re mistaking girlfriends, the one from the India story is a different person from the curved furniture, who’s the current one. It’s strange I haven’t met her yet.’ ‘You are the one who’s confused, because you actually did meet her.’ ‘Really? When was that?’

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‘In Paris, in the garden, at dawn. She was this slim, blond girl you were talking to by the table with drinks and snacks.’ I recalled talking to a blond, thin girl in a white dress. ‘Who is she, what does she do?’ ‘She’s a curator.’ The waiter finally brought our orders. When he left, Joanna continued: ‘Listen, that’s not important now, this exhibition plan needs to be streamlined. There are too many rooms, it’ll be a confusing experience for spectators, there’s too much going on. Also, too many performances, we can’t organise a different event each day: meals, dance, concerts, detectives, it’s excessive. Plus, who’s going to pay for all this? And the vintage furniture everywhere, I don’t like it, it’s so ugly. We really need Paulina to work with us.’ ‘We must speak with him first.’ ‘But you are leaving soon.’ She ate a piece of cheesecake, then she said, ‘I’ll handle this. I’m meeting Kuba next week. And I’m calling Paulina too, we need a realistic vision of the exhibition in the space. Then we can discuss the project with Alex.’

Joanna once told me that Alex could only work with women, and now the exhibition was basically being made by Ola, Paulina, and her. The closer we were to the opening day, the more central Joanna became in organising and managing the show. It didn’t feel right to be a passenger in my own project while she took on most of the workload. Curating a show is a complex process that requires the coordination of a lot of people, so I made myself available via Skype to be at least a sounding board while I was in the Netherlands. In one of our telematic conversations, she related her meeting with Kuba:

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‘I told him that he wouldn’t deal with Alex directly, that all interaction would go through you and me because we don’t want him to burn out. “Why do you think I would”, he said, “I’m used to working with artists.” And I said, yes, but he’s not the kind who takes suggestions. He just wants his ideas be made, otherwise he can write quite nasty emails, even if he doesn’t want to sound mean, but that’s the way it happens.’ ‘Anyway, the point is that Kuba’s already working on the show’s promotional stuff. We discussed the idea that, at the exhibition entrance, visitors pick up the booklet that we printed with the general info about the whole project and, inside, they find an insert with specific information about the show.’ The idea of the insert first came to Alex, Joanna, and me when we were brainstorming about how to convey the fact that the show was connected to the production of an artist’s novel without resorting to a conventional text in a conventional exhibition handout. Alex wanted to make a sort of map without the image of a map, guiding the visitor room by room through a dialogue between the detectives. Introducing the voices of two characters from the artist’s novel seemed a good way to link the visual with the literary. Eventually, working on that text together with Alex, merging the informative and the fictional, the curatorial and the narrative, would become my main contribution to the production of the show. Joanna went on: ‘Kuba said that it’d be good if, along with the text, we could send him more of Alex’s drawings. For example, he found the three-circle diagram very interesting.’ ‘The one that says “performance, show, book”? That’s an old one.’ ‘He understood that it gives a vision of how the three parts of the project overlap: the performance with the show, the show with the book, and the book with the performance, but he also observed, “Did you notice that there’s no overlapping area common to the three circles?”’ ‘Damn, he’s right’, I said.

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‘Kuba realised that the circles only interact with each other separately and wondered if it’s a flaw or a conscious decision.’ After considering it for a few seconds, I said: ‘Kuba’s theory might have been true at the time when Alex made that diagram, very early in the project, before his first visit to Warsaw, but there’s been some development since then. I’m talking about the two performers in the exhibition, the detectives, as Alex calls them. Because he’s is going back to Paris after the opening, they will be his eyes and his ears in the exhibition. They’ll observe what happens when visitors activate the pieces, and also during the events like the meals at the Dinner Room, the dance on river stones, and the synaesthesia concert. They’ll interact with the audience in different ways, and they’ll write reports about all this, and send them to Alex, so that he can write his artist’s novel based on that information. In this way …’ ‘In this way, performance, exhibition, and artist’s novel finally all overlap’, Joanna said. ‘The detectives are the latest addition to the project. At some point, Alex may have become aware of the flaw that Kuba saw in the diagram.’ ‘That’s fucking genius.’ It pained me to hear how her admiration for Alex remained intact whilst mine had been fatally tinted by rivalry and jealousy. I steered the conversation: ‘What else did you speak about with Kuba?’ ‘We discussed practicalities related to the future publication of the artist’s novel. Do you remember that we sent him a few translated chapters? He read them and found them really good. He said: ‘“The light tone is appropriate, humour is needed when you deal with heavy issues like death and murder. And I like the short chapters, the pacing keeps you reading. I don’t know what you’ll think about this, but this sort of writing is asking to be published in a serialised form. You know, like in the nineteenth

160 Obsession and Obstinacy century, like Charles Dickens, weekly, chapter by chapter, in a magazine or journal.”’ There was a silence for a few seconds. ‘We never thought of that’, I said. ‘And Kuba may be right, but it’s too late. For this idea of a serialised publication to work we should have thought about it a lot earlier. Alex has always wanted to publish Tamam Shud as a paperback edition, and we’ve been following his desire from the outset. He once told me about his fantasy of creating a readership beyond the art world, it’s his mainstream daydream.’ Joanna chuckled at my pun and said: ‘I know all that, and I tried to explain to Kuba how it’s always been clear that Tamam Shud has to be published as a book – at least no other alternative was ever considered. But he said, “Why? The artist’s novel isn’t finished yet.” To which I replied that maybe a serialised form would suit it better than a paperback, but we can’t change the plan now, there’s a timeline and there’s a budget we have to stick to. We’re even on our way to sign a contract with Sternberg Press. ‘And then he said, “That’s such a shame. I really think that the episodic formula would have served the short-chapter structure so much better.”’ When Joanna paused, I said: ‘I think Kuba has got so involved in the project that he’s been nourishing his own fantasy of the novel. And now, upon learning about the pragmatics that impede it, he can’t help but feeling disappointed.’

A week later, Joanna told me about the conversation she had with Paulina in her office at CCA, a semi-clandestine meeting behind Alex’s back, something that both found amusing: ‘Where do I start? Paulina thinks that Alex has a big imagination, but also that half of the show won’t work because

161 The Fantasy of the Novel the way he’s planned some of the pieces is just not producible. She gave the Music Door as an example: he wants to install the door at the beginning of a corridor, with a series of strings running through the ceiling, so that when the door opens or closes, it’ll stroke them producing music. But Paulina said that it’s very difficult to invent a new instrument. Even if the prototype works in Paris, that’s no guarantee that it’s going to work when installed in CCA’s gallery space.’ ‘Um’, I grumbled. ‘Then, there’s the Music Room with those three large panels holding oil paintings on Japanese paper.’ ‘You mean the piece called 500,000 Azaleas.’ ‘Yes, that one. Paulina said it’s a very fine kind of paper not made to support an aggressive material such as oil paint, it requires a special technique to paint on it. Fixing it to the wooden structure will also be problematic, it’s about getting the fibres of the paper the right way. In traditional techniques they use cherry tree wood, it’ll take a lot of time to stretch those drawings properly.’ ‘What else?’ ‘This marble piece, the one called Arabesque, Paulina thinks that the material won’t stand its own weight. It’ll collapse.’ ‘Jesus fucking Christ.’ ‘That’s exactly what I thought. Paulina told me, “I think you need to advise Alex about the technical feasibility of these works. He can’t produce them exactly the way he imagines them.” And I said, well, that’s precisely the issue here: he thinks he can. The Music Door, for example, he literally dreamed of it. ‘But then she said, “But you are the curator, you must make him understand that in the real world sometimes it’s necessary to make concessions if you want your work to see the light”. ‘I’d be able to do that in a normal situation, I said to her, but Alex will never compromise, he’s determined to realise his

162 Obsession and Obstinacy fantasies at any cost. Two words suffice to define him: obsession and obstinacy. ‘“Those are good qualities in an artist” was Paulina’s answer. And I must admit that she’s got a point, even though it’s making things harder for us.’ ‘Even if that means incurring unprofessional behaviour?’ I said. ‘Clashing with our collaborators, going over the budget, making decisions without discussing them first?’ ‘I know we’re going to have a problem with the furniture’, Joanna said. ‘He wants the rooms to look like Gustave Moreau’s house, but that’s an awful idea, I hate that kind of vintage stuff, besides it being too expensive. But I want to have a good show, I have to figure out how to convince him to accept Paulina’s advice.’ ‘I hope the conversation didn’t scare her.’ ‘No, she’s a very seasoned professional. But she did ask me why I think Alex acts this way. I told her that I don’t really know, but that you think that this project, this show in particular, means a great deal to him, because he’s in his mid- forties and he sees it as the last shot he has to “make it” in the art world, before he gets too old for this business. And this would be a source of anxiety that makes him behave in a way that people who work in the art context are not used to dealing with. And then she said, “It sounds like David doesn’t like him much”.’ ‘That’s awkward’, I said. ‘I told her that you admire Alex, you really do. But yeah, you have your ups and downs. And she said: ‘“The way I see it, the way Alex acts is the norm among many artists, there’s nothing extraordinary about anything you said. I’m sure you wouldn’t be saying this if you had worked with him just for a show, like curators and artists normally do. It just happens that you’ve been working together for so long that you’ve become a bit picky, that’s all.”’

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I decided to extend my stay in Rotterdam. I changed my plane ticket to arrive the day before the opening, which meant that I’d miss the thick of the production process and most of the exhibition’s installation. Nevertheless, I joined a Skype meeting once. CCA got a new internet connection, at last it was possible to use the camera without problems. On my computer screen I could see Joanna, Ola, Paulina, and Alex, who, surrounded by women, relished the absolute triumph that meant having me effectively expelled from the game. Being so far away, he didn’t perceive me as a rival any more, and that made him change his attitude towards me, not in the sense that he treated me in a friendlier manner, but in that he hardly acknowledged my virtual presence throughout the meeting. I remained quiet for most of the conversation, afraid of activating his mechanisms of defence at the sound of my testosterone-filled voice. Another detail that I couldn’t fail to observe was that Alex, who had been so reluctant about the idea of working with an exhibition designer, now loved Paulina. Smooth like melted chocolate, he accepted any idea that came from her. ‘The exhibition must be like a flat’, he said, ‘mostly empty, where people don’t live anymore.’ ‘Okay’, Paulina said, taking notes in her laptop. ‘In the first part of the novel the protagonist finds himself in this house, completely empty, as if someone was cleaning all the time.’ ‘Uh-huh.’ ‘For me, the first two rooms are like the beginning, finding yourself in a vacuum.’ Though no one else seemed to acknowledge it, that was an obvious reference to the first performance, Episode 1, with the cleaning lady hoovering, vacuum cleaning. ‘It has to be clear that you can sit on these benches, on the chairs, we have to welcome people.’ ‘Okay, would you like to have this furniture dark as well?’ Paulina said.

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I figured that Alex intended to recreate the victim’s flat after being almost emptied, so that the few remaining objects would be the artworks in each different installation. For example, a table with four chairs in the Dinner Room, a piece of furniture with smutty paintings in the Erotic Cabinet, a chaise longue and a library in the Reading Room (the actual name was Living Room but, for some reason, everyone except Alex kept calling it Reading Room), and so on. A direct transliteration of the artist’s novel’s fiction was going to be the spatial organising principle: the inextricability of both artistic and writing processes was more evident and significant than ever, it would be like walking into a literary space. I refocused on the conversation in time to hear Joanna, who had been taking notes in her doodle-filled notebook, say that the exhibition had one room too many, and that, in her opinion, the File Room had to go away. ‘First of all’, she said, ‘because we can’t produce the works that are supposed to be in this room, and yes, I’m talking of the flower hybridisation. Also, because we need to streamline the exhibition, not to overwhelm the spectator with an overabundance of works, but to offer a meaningful, well- structured artistic experience.’ Alex agreed, which was a good thing. I also appreciated Joanna’s point, and yet I couldn’t help thinking that the File Room, like all the other rooms, was a necessary part of the plan to write the artist’s novel. I wondered how its cancelation would affect the writing process. When a writer writes, she’s free to add or remove elements from her novel as she finds fit. But when an artist creates an artist’s novel she has to deal with the practicalities inherent to an art project, and a possible conflicting curatorial vision, which, in our case, was about not having enough money and space for the File Room to exist. It was a bit of a shame to do without it because, from a purely creative perspective, the presence of that room could have made an impact that we would never know about. I wished I had a time machine that allowed me to explore the alternative future

165 The Fantasy of the Novel in which we included the File Room and I could read the subsequent version of Tamam Shud. Once it was decided that the File Room was removed from the plan, Alex proceeded to describe the rest of his exhibition project: spectators would start at the Dinner Room, then they could access the Reading Room in the first hexagonal tower. From there, the visitors could only walk in a straight line through the space in this order: Music Room, Dance Room, Death Room, and then, the Music Door that gave access to the corridor connecting with the Erotic Cabinet in the north tower, which was the end of the show. Then he spoke about my most anticipated artwork: the detectives. He wished to have two, a male and a female. Joanna proposed to hire Monika again, and search for another actor for the male role. Alex immediately agreed, because he had got a very good impression of Monika during Episode 5. Coincidentally, she had a slim constitution and long blonde hair, just like Paulina and just like Alex’s girlfriend. ‘The detectives will approach some of the visitors and open secret drawers in the furniture, with one of these nipples.’ Alex held a kind of key he had designed, which looked like a nipple- shaped knob painted in a fleshy colour. He continued, ‘You can screw it inside the hole, and you open the drawer’. Paulina chuckled and said, ‘The nipple holder is fantastic, on the pine plywood of the chaise longue drawer it will look fantastic’. He described the many other ways the detectives would interact with the visitors, ‘reading’ some wall paintings (I just learned at that moment that there’d be some wall paintings in the show as well – My God, I thought, will he ever stop adding new pieces?), playing a few notes on the piano, doing Tarot readings, and, of course, sending him a weekly report. He was going to design a form that they’d fill in, pretty much like a police record of things that happened in the exhibition, which he’d use to write his artist’s novel. It was my suspicion that he had resorted to this creative solution to fuel his writing under

166 Obsession and Obstinacy the pressure of the deadline, which had been pushed to 1 October, the last day of the exhibition, due to the insertion of the three-month long English translation in the timeline. Confronted with the situation of not having time to finish the manuscript after the show, he had come up with a method that fed his writing process in parallel to the exhibition. The invention of the detectives as performers was a brilliant device, designed to solve a problem derived from the pragmatics of the project in a creative manner. He had managed to turn a hindrance into an art piece. ‘About the Dinner Room’, Paulina said, ‘I think it’s a bad idea to engrave the furniture directly, it’ll be difficult to make a good print from a chair or a table. It’ll be a lot easier if you make the woodcuts in smaller pieces and, after you make the prints, we embed them in the furniture. That process can be done here in Warsaw, so we’ll save the expense of shipping the table and chairs from Paris, too.’ ‘Also’, Joanna added, ‘we can’t serve meals every day. We should focus on the days when there’s a greater number of visitors: Thursdays, Saturdays, and Sundays. And you should let Paulina design the furniture for the exhibition, the vintage style you have in mind won’t work.’ She was really determined to get rid of the old furniture Alex had in mind. I must say that it wasn’t such a big deal for me, though I would have never used it in my own exhibition, but Joanna thought as a curator, a mediator whose expertise involves being aware of the spectator’s first impression in the exhibition space. Whereas I had a tendency to focus on contents, Joanna attached great importance to the aesthetic elements of the projects we curated. ‘Okay, okay’, Alex said. ‘I agree with making the woodcuts first and then embed them in the furniture in Warsaw. But I’ll look for an alternative furniture design.’ Joanna moved on to discuss the Death Room. Exerting her curatorial authority, she said that she preferred having the Cetaceans sound installation instead of the Belladonna video. ‘It fits better the concept of the show as a concert’, she said. As

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I understood it, Cetaceans would be a kind of music composition made with human voices singing whale songs. I didn’t really like the idea of the exhibition as a concert, or choreography, because the one discipline that the art project should engage with was literature. Wasn’t that the whole point from the beginning? Why were they all so bent now on music scores and dancers? Perhaps my absence was impairing their judgement; they were losing the true focus of the project and I wasn’t there to correct them. But I didn’t say anything. I thought it would be useless to voice my disagreement through Skype, as it was most likely going to be ignored after the meeting, anyway. ‘If I may add something about the Death Room’, Ola said, ‘I sounded out the Manchester Art Gallery about the possibility of getting the William Blake’s Room painting on loan, but it’s not gonna work. CCA is not a museum, our gallery rooms aren’t equipped with the necessary climate control technology. The changes in humidity and temperature are way beyond their requirements.’ ‘And one more thing’, Joanna said, ‘Paulina and I think that we should swap the Death Room for the Music Room, so that the sound from Cetaceans won’t disrupt the Music Door. Besides, the Music Room is the smallest space we have and, at the same time, it’s the one with more stuff in it: three large panels, a piano, etc. The Death Room doesn’t need that much space, but the Music Room does, so switching spaces makes sense. Moreover, the walls in the Music Room are already painted dark grey from the previous exhibition, so we’d save money by bringing the Death Room, which needs dim lights and a dark environment, in there.’ I couldn’t detect frustration from the image of Alex’s face in my computer screen, although the last ten minutes of conversation had been a succession of reversals of his initial ideas: no vintage furniture, no William Blake painting, no daily meals served, Cetaceans instead of Belladonna, rearranging the original order of the rooms, etc. But he didn’t react, he just

168 Obsession and Obstinacy looked at his interlocutors in silence. Was he accepting their advice, or just avoiding the discussion in order to do whatever he wanted afterwards? ‘I’ll think about it’, he said.

A few weeks after that I flew back to Warsaw on a late flight. The taxi from the airport dropped me a few metres from home. Walking in the dark street, I remembered the Novylon chase incident, thinking how nuts it was. Probably, I was so stressed at that time that my mind had played tricks on me. The surrounding garden was quiet at that time of the night. As I approached my block of flats, I noticed a little child playing under a tree. In all the months since I had moved in with Joanna I never realised it was a yew tree, but my knowledge in botany had increased notably since Episode 5. I knew that it belonged to a species of trees called Taxus, which comes from the Greek toxus, related to toxon (bow) and toxikon (poison), precisely as Alex said, ‘Only one drop from its leaves killed the father of Hamlet … With the wood of yew, the first bow was made.’ It was midnight, not a time for a child to be alone in a garden. I came closer to him to see if he was accompanied, or if he needed help to find his parents. He was digging a hole in the dirt with his bare hands. I couldn’t see very well, as he was crouched on a dark spot beyond the light of the street lamps. I took a step closer. The child unearthed a narrow cylindrical object, he removed the dirt with a few gentle strokes, revealing seven small holes in a straight line. He placed one of the ends onto his lips and blew a little, producing a whistling sound. He seemed pleased at the confirmation of the object’s hollowness. He blew again, more vigorously, covering some of the holes with his fingertips, producing actual notes, playing a flute, in fact. I listened attentively, I couldn’t believe my ears. I was about to say something, when an adult’s voice called him inside

169 The Fantasy of the Novel from a neighbouring block of flats, at which time the child ran away. I stood there, perplexed. I’d be damned if he hadn’t played Pergolesi’s ‘Stabat Mater’.

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CHAPTER 12. THE SLEUTH

N o sign of activity was noticeable when Joanna and I entered the exhibition space. Such quietness in the morning of the opening day was anything but comforting. ‘Where are the workers?’ I asked. ‘That’s what I’d like to know’, she said. The exhibition was far from finished and there was no one there to build it up. Framed pictures were waiting on the floor to be hanged; some of the drawings were not even in the gallery yet; the Death Room was a mess, with speakers and cables all over the place and the floor covered with a dirty plastic sheet; the lights still needed some adjustments; the Music Window, a sound piece in the Reading Room, wasn’t working; the menus were missing in the Dinner Room; the copper plates in the Dance Room were filthy; there were plenty of spots on the walls to be retouched; the shelf for the booklets at the entrance had to be installed, as well as the vinyl letters with the title of the exhibition; and there was a huge amount of debris scattered all around. We saw Ola coming, ‘Hey, nice to see you, David’.

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Though she tried to smile, her expression betrayed an exhaustion that was more than physical – she looked emotionally depleted. Her personality was naturally equipped to deal with the stressful situations attached to her job, but there was something about this project that was sapping the best of her. ‘Alex is working in the Erotic Cabinet, choosing the last drawings’, she said. ‘He brought a lot, but only sixty-nine will fit in the frames. The conservator and the twins are helping him.’ The twins were not siblings but two nearly identical CCA installation crew employees, both completely bald, who always worked together. ‘I’d advise you not to go close to the Cabinet for the time being, Alex always starts the day in a bad mood.’ It was amusing thinking that Alex was like Bartleby’s colleague Nippers, whose ‘irritability and consequent nervousness’, Herman Melville writes, ‘were mainly observable in the morning, while in the afternoon he was comparatively mild’. ‘Ola, can you please speak with the chief of the installation team about bringing the rest of the crew here?’ Joanna said. ‘We have just a few hours before the VIF preview.’ As Ola left searching for the crew leader, Joanna turned to me, ‘These guys have been working despairingly slowly. It took them five days to fix the window sills, and another five to install the Arabesque pieces. They refuse to work extra hours, and they didn’t come at the weekend either. They have such a bad attitude.’ ‘Why is that?’ ‘I’m not really sure, but I think it’s to do with some issues related to their trade union. They want to be paid more, so I think they intentionally slow down the pace to put some pressure on us.’ ‘It’s like an undercover strike.’ ‘Yeah, and they chose the worst moment to do it. You’ll see it when they come back: one’s working, the other one’s chatting; then they both walk away leaving the job half done; then they reappear after half an hour, they go on for a little while; and

172 The Sleuth start chatting again. It’s disheartening, we could have been done with this show yesterday.’ Ola came back, saying that the crew would return in less than an hour. It was ten o’clock, the VIF preview was at six o’clock, we had to believe that we’d make it on time. In the meantime, we walked through the rooms with Ola. She took us to one of the Arabesque pieces in the Dance Room, pointing to one particular spot: ‘The wood broke during the installation, it’s a very old handrail, it’s almost hollow, woodworms ate it from the inside. Alex must have got it from a flea market. It snapped when the twins were trying to place it in the right position. It took one day for our conservator to fix it, and it’s fine now, but Alex got furious at the workers’ carelessness.’ ‘You should have seen him’, Joanna said. ‘Also, when we were hanging the 500,000 Azaleas last Saturday afternoon, I left for a moment to eat something while Ola decided to skip lunch and stay in the exhibition to help Alex. Even though she was the only one here with him, he shouted at her “You don’t work hard enough!”’ ‘He was irritable because he had been working till late the night before to finish the wood engravings’, Ola said. ‘But another day he told me that he didn’t understand the tone in which we spoke to him, as if we didn’t trust him. He said, “Do you think I am not capable of doing what I’m saying? It never happened to me before. Please understand that this is a very important show for me and I’m working hard on it.”’ ‘And you know what he said to Ola about making constant changes in the exhibition plan?’ Joanna said. ‘“Only idiots never change ideas.”’ To me, it sounded like a lame argument to defend his inability to make up his mind about the actual display of his works. He had a very precise idea of the contents of the show, to the point that he didn’t want any discussion at all, but, when it came to definite, material choices, say, the distance between two framed pictures on the wall, it could take him hours to

173 The Fantasy of the Novel decide. The reason why many of the pieces weren’t installed yet was partly due to the workers’ lazy attitude, but the rest was on Alex and his tendency to delay any final decision. Thus, the arrangement of the Cetaceans speakers was still unknown; the selection of drawings for the Erotic Cabinet was still being made; the distribution of the wood engravings on the walls of the Dinner Room wasn’t clear yet, and so on. He was allergic to finalising things, he felt a visceral need to keep them permanently open. ‘This way of working may be okay for a performer or a dancer’, I said. ‘They can change their mind and introduce changes at the very last moment, even in real time but, when you are installing a show and there’s a whole crew waiting for you to build it up, it’s a different story.’ ‘That’s true’, Joanna said. ‘But, to be fair, this isn’t exclusive to Alex, but common to many performance artists I’ve worked with when it comes to making an exhibition.’ ‘Another day’, Ola carried on, as if the moment was ripe to let her personal list of affronts out, ‘he protested that we didn’t get all the books he ordered for the Reading Room. I told him that we had bought 42 out of 60 titles from his list, and that five more could be borrowed from the library, but that the rest were out of print. I reminded him that the budget for books was 2,000 zlotys, and we spent 3,000, but he replied, “I must have them all”. He stalked me that day, he sent me twenty messages about the missing books, even to my private phone number. I’ve never dealt with anyone like this before, he treats me like he’s my boss and I’m his employee.’ It was striking hearing how her complaints resembled those of Novylon. I sympathised with her. Alex had taken Ola as his sparring partner since the lights incident back in Episode 1. The workers returned to finish their job. Ola and Joanna left me to give them some directions. The dancers also came in. One of them was Ramona, a contemporary dancer who coincidentally was also Kuba’s fiancé. The other one was a male

174 The Sleuth classical ballet dancer (the combination of dancing styles had been Alex’s precise choice) who, in spite of being Polish, had a Persian name, a circumstance that I deemed deeply appropriate for the project. Ramona brought a set of computer speakers to play music for their rehearsals. I recognised the first notes of Pergolesi’s ‘Stabat Mater’. I was thinking, I wonder why this music is chasing me, when I sensed someone approaching from behind. I turned and saw Paulina, who had come to supervise the last touches in the exhibition. Joanna thought that Paulina had rescued the show. She changed the 500,000 Azaleas wooden frames for black metal structures that evoked the idea of a music score. She also discarded the marble handrail for a third wooden one. It’s true that it broke, but it was infinitely easier to fix a wooden piece than marble that was bound to collapse under its own weight. ‘Without her, we’d be still searching for second-hand furniture in flea markets’, Joanna had said, because Alex’s original plan for the Reading Room included three vintage couches and a rug, whereas now there was an elegant blue carpet, a one-metre-high skirting board painted in the same colour, and two especially handmade pieces of furniture: a chaise longue and a seat that Paulina based on Italian designer Enzo Mari’s idea, both nicely crafted and painted following her choice of varnish. The same design had been applied to the furniture in the Dinner Room: a set of a table and four chairs that was meant to host the meals, which Alex called Le Chevalier. However, Alex made sure that his fingerprints were all over Paulina’s exhibition design: he took away the shelves she had designed for the Reading Room, scattering all books on the floor, the chaise longue, and the window sills; he removed an arrow-shaped piece of carpet that protruded from the Reading Room into the Dinner Room, as well as the blue carpet she had designed for under Le Chevalier; lastly, and most importantly, the Death Room had remained where he wanted, next to the Music Door. In short, though Joanna hired Paulina to spruce up the exhibition, Alex found a way to revert a considerable

175 The Fantasy of the Novel amount back to his original plan, although, curiously enough, Paulina didn’t mind him meddling with her exhibition design. But he had also turned a deaf ear to Joanna’s advice: in spite of having apparently agreed to cancel the File Room, he managed to reintroduce some of its pieces in other parts of the exhibition: Fleurs d’Ennuis inside the chaise longue secret drawer that only the detectives could open, and a set of drawings called Amaryllis, one in every room. Fulfilling his fantasies during the previous five episodes wasn’t too problematic because performance was a medium he was an expert at, and also because some were re-enactments of pre-existing pieces. In the exhibition, however, the curve to have his desires realised was steeper, as it was a terrain in which he was less experienced, where dealing with the limitations reality imposes is a much bigger issue (budget constraints, technical impossibilities, etc.). Still, he mostly succeeded in overcoming these difficulties, thanks to his obsession with a set of ideas and images, and his obstinacy in seeing them materialise exactly as he wished. I had to give him credit for that. Although I disapproved his self-centred behaviour, I admired his drive to achieve what he wanted because, at the end of the day, the two of us wanted the same thing, even though I had to content myself with a vicarious satisfaction through his success. My admiration was coloured by envy of him having thousands of euros, lots of professionals, a whole art centre, and a publisher at his disposal. It remained to be seen what would happen with the artist’s novel, and if he’d also manage to make his fantasy prevail the same way. I was curious to see how he would deal with the restrictions that I, as managing editor, had already warned him about: word limit, timeline, and budget. Paulina and I were in the Music Room, looking at the 500,000 Azaleas: three large panels with 24 hanging oil paintings on Japanese paper that looked like colourful Rorschach test shapes made through a process of multiple folds and prints, described by Alex as flower breeding, as if bringing genetic data from one painting to the other, which was his way

176 The Sleuth to incorporate the File Room’s idea of flower hybridisation in the show, after all. ‘Azalea is a beautiful flower with a highly toxic nectar’, Paulina said. ‘Did you know that when someone sends you azalea flowers in a black vase it is a death threat?’ ‘You are funny. Where did you read that? Alex could have used that story in the botanical garden guided tour last June.’ In the middle of the room there was a piano with music annotations written down by Natan, the synaesthesia musician Ola had hired to translate the oil paintings into music. Behind the piano there were three frames with drawings composed of thin lines and, beside each of them, suspended from strings at 90 centimetres from the floor, three strange wooden objects. ‘What are these?’ I asked. ‘Bird callers’, Paulina said, proceeding to blow one of them. It sounded like a duck. ‘Do you remember that Alex wanted to show some bone flutes in the Music Room? Eventually, he discarded the idea for this piece, Songs of Solitude. These lines represent clouds and, at the same time, they function as a sort of music score to play the bird callers.’ ‘In the performance at Królikarnia, Alex read a poem by William Blake that says, “I love you like the little bird”. Do you think it’s connected somehow?’ ‘I don’t think so. I think it’s got more to do with bird music, animal music, which is also present in the voices singing whale songs in the Death Room.’ I hesitated for a second, then I decided to tell her about the child playing flute beside my flat. She was the first one to hear my story. In spite of its outlandishness, she seemed to take it seriously. ‘Digging up an object that plays like a flute reminds me of certain folk stories’, she said, ‘about unearthing dead people’s bones, making them into flutes, and playing a song with them that tells the story of the dead person’s life.’ ‘I didn’t think that the child was digging a human bone, but now that you mention it, Alex once spoke of a traditional

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Scottish ballad about a harp made with the bones and hair of a victim that sings the name of the murderer.’ ‘Actually, there’s a string instrument in the exhibition: the Music Door isn’t exactly a harp, but kind of.’ ‘I still find it strange that he didn’t include the bone flutes, which he believes he sees at the feet of Death in the Tarot card XIII, in the exhibition.’ ‘Well, the bone flutes made it into the show, have you seen the staircase?’ She was referring to the flight of steps leading to the entrance of the exhibition. Alex had painted (or, rather, had someone paint) a blown-up version of one of his drawings, an amusing scene in which two skeletons march limping, playing flute with their own tibias. Paulina was so intelligent, so alluring. She was wearing a summer dress, betraying her lack of feminine curves. She was very slim, not exactly my type, but she was smart and had a wonderful blond leonine hair. ‘Would you like to have dinner in here?’ I said. ‘In the Dinner Room?’ ‘Yes, tonight, for the opening. We’re still looking for guests. Alex reserved the table for his girlfriend and some collectors, but none of them are coming, so the table is free and we need some performers. I mean, you can bring some friends with you and I’m sure it’ll be enjoyable, but you must be aware that you’ll be the centre of attention.’ ‘They’ll look at us like monkeys. Yes, of course, thank you! It’s very nice of you.’ She looked at me with that fixed stare of hers. I couldn’t repress an inner feeling of satisfaction, finally I had succeeded in offering her a pleasant experience. The last weeks had been a constant drifting apart from Joanna; being with her wasn’t as it used to be. Now, Paulina’s smile filled me with the human warmth I was longing for.

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By the afternoon, the exhibition was miraculously ready. Joanna and I used the hour we still had free to eat something and change for the opening. She wore a pink dress, the one she reserved for great occasions. I put on my grey suit with a white shirt and a black tie, my most elegant bid. Back at the gallery, I stopped at the entrance to pick up a booklet from the shelf. Kuba had made a neat design. Since it was too thick to fit as an insert in the old booklet as we originally intended, it had become a foldable guide through the show sprinkled with Alex’s drawings, my informative text in black, and his detectives’ dialogues in purple:

– This job is killing me. – You mean waiting for something to happen? – I mean following, shadowing, putting together pieces of a life which is not mine. – No murder is perfect, we’ll end up finding the mistake. – What if it’s just his game? See? If no one knows, it never happened. Look how desperately he wants us to know that he died. Otherwise how could we ever know that he lived …

The last line echoed Episode 1, ‘How much I want you to know that I died, otherwise, how could you ever know that I lived?’ I was sure that it would be included in the artist’s novel. Alex, Joanna, Małgosia, Jarek, and I met at the Dinner Room and chatted excitedly for a few minutes until the doors opened and the specially invited VIF guests started to arrive. A waitress stood near the entrance offering a tray full of glasses of prosecco. As the director of the British Council in Warsaw walked into the room, the waitress lost balance and dropped everything in the middle of the gallery, making a mess of wine and shattered glass. A cleaning lady was called and Alex, who happened to be beside me, whispered with satisfaction, ‘Of course, the cleaning lady had to appear today’. And there she

179 The Fantasy of the Novel was, cleaning in the victim’s house, straight from the pages of the novel still to be written. A little crowd gathered around one of the walls in the Dinner Room, where there was a wall painting about four metres long, which resembled a sort of large, illegible handwriting in dark blue colour. The piece was called The Strange Signature (Alex wished to give it the flavour of a Sherlock Holmes’ title) and it wasn’t some kind of asemic writing, as a first impression might suggest, but a text that was waiting to be deciphered by the detective’s work. In the centre of the crowd stood Monika gesticulating, opening her arms, following the painted twists and curves, telling a narrative in Polish that I couldn’t understand. Alex had said of The Strange Signature, ‘Something that isn’t a text, becomes a text. That’s also true for the exhibition that becomes a novel.’ I resolved to come back another day to get the detective’s performative routine in English. I walked into the Reading Room. The Music Window was working: thanks to a high-tech system, some sensors attached to the windows transformed the daylight into sounds that Alex claimed favoured reading concentration. I skimmed over the books, they constituted a sort of bibliography of Alex’s background readings: the Rubáiyát, obviously; William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience; Dante’s Inferno; Elizabeth Bishop’s Poems: The Centenary Edition; Roberto Bolaño’s poetry collection The Unknown University, and many others. Absent were Bill Knott, Diane di Prima, and Giorgio Caproni, either out of print or prey of the budget limits – even though Ola had gone 1,000 zlotys over. Curiously enough, there was a book of poems by Nicanor Parra, but not by Fernando Pessoa, indicating that Alex was still unaware of his mistake. There was also a book of selected early poems by Charles Simic that included the one Alex had read during the tour of hell at Królikarnia. I thumbed the pages searching for it. How meaningful it became in the context of the exhibition!

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The Strange Signature in the Dinner Room.

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Even though a cow steps on it full weight, Even though a child throws it in a river, The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed To the river bottom Where the fishes come to knock on it And listen.

Because, just three rooms away, at the Dance Room, there were river stones placed on a copper floor onto which dancers stepped their full weight. The poem goes on speaking about ‘the strange writings, the star charts on the inner walls’. Didn’t it resonate with The Strange Signature wall painting? I went back to the Dinner Room. The VIF hour had passed and it was time for the general opening reception. A mass of people flooded into the exhibition, many more than I had anticipated. Le Chevalier was occupied by Paulina and three of her friends, they had begun eating while I was checking the books. The fact that, in the menu, there were poems instead of descriptions of food made it all the more playful and enjoyable, because you couldn’t tell what was going to end up on your plate. I must admit that, at first, the inclusion of ingredients such as nettle leaves and pine wood didn’t give me much faith in Alex’s culinary abilities, but Paulina was delighted, and the dishes looked spectacular in terms of colour and presentation. I made a mental note to ask Joanna to reserve the table for us, Ola, and Jarek for a well-earned celebratory moment. Underneath Le Chevalier ’s table I saw a dangling piece of green textile that had passed unnoticed by everyone. It wasn’t a good moment to crouch among the legs of the dinner guests, so I decided to come back another day to check that mysterious object out. Besides, the Concerto Nuovo was about to begin. I followed the crowd into the Music Room. About this space, Alex wrote a monologue that eventually didn’t make it into the booklet, but I found significant nonetheless:

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I don’t remember if in life I was an artist, a musician, or a gardener, but death forced me to be one. About music, I remember only colours. If I paint them, would an orchestra play what I used to hear? If I play my bones as a flute, will they sing the secret of my youth? If I pollinate flowers with my mouth, will the fruits have the scent of words or kisses?

Natan was sitting at the piano, waiting for everyone to take their place around him. He had been working the previous days, going through a huge pile of 500,000 Azaleas, from which he selected 24 paintings, arranging them in the order that ‘sounded’ best to him. Alex was a bit disappointed that he had chosen a relatively small number of drawings, but that’s what made sense for Natan’s synaesthesia to compose the music he heard in his mind, even at the price of leaving some gaps over the three panels, which I suspected was different from the display Alex had imagined, where a number of layers overlapping each other would produce a game of transparencies thanks to the Japanese paper’s quality. The short selection of paintings resulted in a rather short piano piece that Natan played two or three times in a loop, so as to cover ten minutes. He had also transcribed the notes in regular annotation on a music score that was exhibited on the piano, for any visitor able to play it. The Concerto Nuovo began. The music sounded remotely familiar, as if extracted from a Dada film soundtrack. At times haunting, at times melancholic, it had no particular tempo. Alex was transfixed: ‘It’s incredible’, I heard him whisper. ‘When I was painting the azaleas, I was listening to Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédies”, and now Natan’s composition sounds so similar.’ I caught a glimpse of the music score over Natan’s shoulder. It was handwritten on three sheets, corresponding to each panel, with 24 numbered partitions matching the paintings. Natan had designated each colour a different note,

183 The Fantasy of the Novel

Concerto Nuovo in the Music Room.

184 The Sleuth adding a musical transition when needed. In Alex’s paintings, folding, printing, transferring from one paper to another produced a number of visual motifs that recurred throughout the 500,000 Azaleas. Natan’s music annotations mimicked them with similar repetitions in the form of musical phrases. Alex had conceived the opening evening to be a sort of concert, where the various performative events would succeed one another, compelling the crowd to move from one room to the next one. So, whereas Paulina and her friends eating at Le Chevalier had been followed by the Concerto Nuovo, it was time now to get to the Dance Room, where Ramona and her companion were dancing without music. Sometimes they used the handrails, sometimes they moved on the dance floor, stepping onto the river stones, sliding over them, spinning, and marking the copper surface with circles and lines that produced an undecipherable script. I wondered if Ola Maciejewska, who also danced in silence back in the Nuovo Mondo tour, had practised with Pergolesi’s ‘Stabat Mater’ like they did, since both dance performances were dominated by circular and spiralling movements. The dance without music confirmed an idea that had been slowly forming in my mind since the beginning of the opening: that the exhibition was articulated by a series of transformations: you read a poem, but you got food; you saw paintings, but you got music; light through the windows became music, and music became dance. Everything became something else: a wall painting turned into a storytelling device. And the most important transformation of all: you saw an exhibition, but you got a novel. Looking more closely at the copper floor I could see a similarity between the scratches and the traces of The Strange Signature, evoking what Alex once said about the Arabesque handrails being like enlarged handwriting. The indexical marks in the show became objects and images, paintings and sculptures, it was as if all these artworks were the result of looking at handwriting through a magnifying glass, the quintessential detective’s tool. Apparently meaningless, they

185 The Fantasy of the Novel gained a narrative value when performatively interpreted by the detectives who, afterwards, would write reports about their finds and send them to Alex as fodder for his artist’s novel. The crowd had gathered to see Ramona following the shape of one of the Arabesque pieces, sensually replicating its capricious twists with her body, when a security guard stepped in out of the blue and, to everyone’s astonishment, stopped the dance to warn her not to touch the artworks. Małgosia and Jarek, who were among the public, turned to me in horror, but I was busy covering my mouth in an attempt to repress my laughter. If the curator found it a hilarious scene, then everything was alright, so everyone burst out laughing with relief. Once the ice was broken, some spectators stepped onto the dancing floor to emulate the dancers. Those stroking the handrails executed a ballet movement while at the same time reading magnified handwriting with their whole body; those who scratched the copper floor with their dancing motions became in fact writers. Watching them made me think of Robin Thomson, the son of Jessica Thomson, who was a baby at the time of the Somerton man’s death and grew up to become a dancer in the Australian ballet. If, as I suspected, he was the Somerton man’s son, he’d have inherited not only his father’s ears, but his dancing skills too, judging by what the coroner deduced from the Somerton man’s overdeveloped calves. Alex was still standing next to me (we moved along with the crowd) and must have been reading my thoughts, because he said: ‘When they found me in that room’, he gestured towards the Dinner Room, ‘they saw that I had a very good-looking ass, but horrible feet, so they thought I was a dancer, a ballet dancer. You know ballet dancers: beautiful ass, ugly feet.’ Everyone around who could hear him laughed. A girl behind him interrupted her spinning on a river stone to giggle. Though explaining his work wasn’t his strongest suit, that evening Alex was more open than usual:

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Ramona performing in the Dance Room.

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‘Choreography is like writing magnified’, he explained to those who listened. ‘You know, when you write a letter with your hand it’s like this, right?’ He demonstrated the motion with his hand. ‘But, if you magnify the movement of writing, you’re going to have an A, a B, a C’, he carried on describing larger and larger twisting movements with his arms and then with his whole body. ‘Then a D, and an I’, he jumped to mark an imaginary dot. ‘Though there’s no music now’, I said to Alex, ‘this morning, during the rehearsals, I noticed they were dancing to “Stabat Mater”.’ I admit I revealed a bit of my knowledge just to impress him, but I could have never anticipated the mixture of incredulity and surprise I saw in his face. He didn’t expect anyone to identify this clue – especially not me. ‘How did you …?’ ‘I just payed attention, but you always underestimate me.’ I sounded unusually frank with him, probably that’s why he didn’t respond immediately. Before he could articulate an answer, the crowd, which was growing larger by the minute, began to move forwards again, to the next room, sweeping us along with them. Our conversation would have to be continued later. The Death Room was in complete darkness, except for some light coming from the adjacent Dance Room and, opposite, the silhouette of the Music Door outlined by the corridor leading to the Erotic Cabinet. The floor, covered with a dark blue carpet, the same colour as the walls, got quickly populated by lots of people laying down on the big black cushions scattered in the room. The sound installation, Cetaceans, was a hybrid composition of music notation, poems, and patterns of whale songs merged together, conceived to accompany the audience in a one-hour-and-half cycle of sleep, a concert to be experienced in your dreams. A group of singers had been trained to sing like whales, I could also identify the sound of a glass harp.

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I unfolded the booklet in my pocket, went to the paragraph about the Death Room and read the detectives’ dialogue:

– Is this the end? – Don’t worry about breathing; once you die you don’t need to breathe. – Shut up. Let me die in peace. – Think about your mother’s belly. Remember? You were breathing water not air. Once you die you’ll breathe something else. – Do me a favour. – What? – Close your eyes, it’s disturbing to see people die with their eyes open.

So the Death Room meant in fact a return to the mother’s womb, the whales a metaphor for breathing in the amniotic fluid, sleeping a simile for death: all of it consistent with the alignments of birth and death so present throughout the Tamam Shud project. However, that day I didn’t have the patience to lay down and listen to such a long sound composition, so I moved on and pushed through the Music Door. It was a double batwing door that opened in both directions, from the Death Room to the corridor and vice versa. Two pairs of strings ran through the eight-metre-long corridor: one end fixed right above the door, the other connected to a resonance box and a hidden set of speakers used to amplify the sound at the opposite wall. The door’s top had been shaped in a special way to stroke the strings, producing a sound, a sort of jingle, calling it ‘music’ would have been a bit of an overstatement. I heard the doors opening behind me: it was Alex, who had followed me into the corridor.

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‘There is this poem by Coleridge, called “Kubla Khan”, where he says that there’s music when he’s dreaming’, he said. ‘And the music builds up a whole palace, like in Disney’s Fantasia. So the music is singing and the whole palace is building up: fountains, walls, towers, staircases, doors, gardens. So I thought: maybe, if I can just find the door, the staircases, the garden of this palace that he dreamt of, maybe I’ll be able to listen to a little bit of the music that built them up. A little bit.’ He crossed the Music Door again, to let its sound reemphasise his words. The Coleridge story meant a change in the origin of the piece, since he first told it was coming from his own dream. Nevertheless, after giving it a bit of thought, I decided that both stories weren’t mutually exclusive. The door could be read either as an autonomous artwork (originated from different dream mythologies), or as fragment of the Tamam Shud narrative, a materialisation of part of the victim’s emptied house. For me, both options were perfectly compatible, the meaning of the work depended on the viewpoint from which one would read it. Alex didn’t come back from the Death Room, I was on my own to enter the last installation. The north tower had been painted in a sumptuous pinkish colour following Paulina’s design. If the Death Room and its hypnotic whale songs were intended to induce the sensation of floating in amniotic fluid, the Music Door functioned as a metaphor of the mother’s vagina lips that led to the Erotic Cabinet’s fleshy interior. The cabinet itself, an almost exact replica of Gustave Moreau’s, was as impressive as Alex’s determination to get it made. A double door opened to an amalgamation of frames of different sizes, each containing a pair of drawings, one on each side, protected by sheets of glass. All sixty-nine drawings were intentionally (hetero) erotic. The style varied greatly, because Alex had deliberately crafted them as if by the hand of different artists. Although there was some visible effort invested in the execution of some drawings, many others were rough sketches that betrayed a certain quickness. Insinuating couples in amorous

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The Erotic Cabinet.

191 The Fantasy of the Novel positions; a naked girl with a forest beast; a boy with a mermaid; an orgy pierced by arrows: the whole turned out to be more comical than arousing. One of them in particular called my attention: the legs of a woman sitting on a tree branch with a pair of cherries dangling from her toes being eaten by birds reminded me of the story Alex once told me about the wife of an art collector from Milan, who had been found hanging dead from a cherry tree. Apparently, the jealous husband had given her the mafia treatment in reward for her infidelity. There were elements in this anecdote common to the story Charlie Dance told me during Episode 5, about the cherry tree, the pregnant lady, and the jealous old man (‘A child means a father, and a father means a man’). Was it a message sent to jealous men? There were also two drawings depicting Leda and the swan. One of them was accompanied by a text, ‘With what the swan made love to Leda? If not with his entire head, down to his neck? Wait … with his eyes open?’ Once I heard Alex describing this particular picture as ‘not a drawing, but a poem pretending to be a drawing’. And I may add: a poem in the style of Bill Knott’s distinctive bad taste and economy of language, which, if anything, would trigger a smile rather than sexual excitement. In stark contrast with the previous Death Room, where going back to the mother’s womb entailed closed eyes as if asleep or dead, in the Erotic Cabinet, such return – expressed in the oedipal theme of carnal union with the mother, embodied in the literalness of the swan’s story – implied doing it with open eyes. To see what? Perhaps the answer was in the very last frame. At the bottom of all sixty-nine drawings, a tiny picture showed a man’s rear sticking out of a cabinet similar to the real one, as if mirroring the spectator’s position. I resisted the idea that all the Tamam Shud apparatus rested upon such a hackneyed self- referential notion. Dante’s trip after his reencounter with Beatrice culminates in an epiphany at the end of Paradiso. But maybe Alex himself didn’t know what would happen after the much-longed-for reunion with the mother took place; the novel

192 The Sleuth was still being written by means of this very exhibition, so perhaps he was still building up the path towards that climatic moment. Right above the Leda drawing there was another one with a hand pinching a nipple. Below, another one with two hands pinching two nipples. They were a literal depiction of the detective’s nipple-key. I turned to my left. On the wall, a rectangle delineated the secret drawer that contained a hidden artwork. As in the chaise longue, there was a little hole to insert the nipple-key, but the detectives weren’t in the room at that moment, so that piece would have to wait for another time. I was missing one work, though. In Alex’s original exhibition plan he described one called Fioretti, ‘Little thoughts in the shape of flowers. Nine little casket boxes, each containing two engravings on golden leaf of a flower and a love scene inspired by the shape of the flower.’ It was supposed to be displayed in the very room I was now in, but I couldn’t see it, which meant that Alex had given up on including one of his pieces. That was really something. After all, the bone flutes had been replaced by the bird callers, but this was an outright removal. The absence of Fioretti, just as that of Fredrick James Shield’s painting William Blake’s Room, introduced a minimal degree of separation between Alex’s fantasy and the reality of the exhibition. But there was another, subtler level of frustrated desire: earlier, I said that the cabinet was an almost exact replica of the original furniture we saw in Paris. It’s this almost which spoils the complete fulfilment of the fantasy, because Alex wanted to frame his drawings with passe-partout, just like Gustave Moreau, but it turned out to be technically not viable since there wasn’t enough space to fit so much paper in the gap between the two sheets of glass. This detail, apparently trivial, is the kind that prevents the artist’s fantasy to be fully actualised. Such minute disagreement between reality and the imagined scenario keeps the ashes of desire alive, ultimately driving the

193 The Fantasy of the Novel artist to try again. A permanent state of dissatisfaction is the secret of creation.

The opening was over and it was time for the private party downstairs, at CCA’s bistro. There, in a small separate room, we were served some food and a lot of wine. Some friends accompanied us: Alex, Paulina, Ola, Małgosia, Jarek, Natan, Ramona, Monika, and a number of unknown people who found their way in. I didn’t see Styrmir or Agata, I hoped they could visit the show later. After a bit of wine, it was the moment for a public toast. I raised my glass in the middle of the circle made by all present and, prey of the euphoric stage that any drunkenness worth that name traverses sooner or later, I said: ‘To Alex, one of the best artists alive.’ ‘Thank you.’ It took one and a half years for Alex to say those two words. ‘It was wonderful working together. I want to mention the absolutely charming skills of Paulina with SketchUp [the computer programme that she used to create 3- D simulations of the exhibition], I couldn’t stop watching her work her magic.’ Paulina, who had drunk a bit more than the rest of us at Le Chevalier, looked totally thrilled. ‘I want to marry Paulina’, Alex rounded off his joke. Spurred by the effect of alcohol, I decided it was time to educate the others on the intricate Tamam Shud universe, so I told them about Simic’s poem ‘Stone’ and how it contained some clues to the mystery: rivers, stones, and writing on the walls. ‘David is the perfect detective’, Alex said, in an unprecedented expression of praise. ‘Gombrowicz said that a detective novel is an attempt at organising chaos. I’m sure David is the kind of guy that keeps everything in place at home.’ He made a gesture with his hands as if lining up some

194 The Sleuth imaginary objects, denoting my strict neurotic behaviour as he pictured it to be. ‘Oh, come on, David is not like this’, Joanna said. I realised how naïve I had been believing, for a second, that my image could have improved in his eyes. It was a lost cause, he saw me as an abhorred father figure, the embodiment of law and order. He had created his particular vision of me and nothing in the world would ever change it. To our surprise, he took an iPhone out of a pocket in his jacket. He searched for a particular photo he’d made of a dead bird hanging from a piece of wire. ‘It’s Cosmos!’ He exclaimed when he found it. ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘You don’t know Gombrowicz’s novel?’ Alex looked at Joanna. She nodded, as she was familiar with the work of the Polish writer. But not me. I just had a copy of Ferdydurke in Rotterdam, which I had never read because it was a present from an ex-girlfriend. ‘You don’t know what you’re missing’, Alex said. ‘You must absolutely read it.’ Afterwards, when I had the chance to read the novel, I understood why Alex was so fond of it. In Cosmos everything is a clue. Gombrowicz said that it’s about a reality that creates itself: random events are treated as evidence that, rather than helping to solve a mystery, fabricates it in the mind of the protagonist. We broke into smaller groups to chat. Alex told me he had been nominated for a literary prize. ‘Congratulations, that’s huge! When will you hear the results?’ I said. ‘6 September.’ ‘That’s my birthday. If you win, you must dedicate it to me.’ ‘How old are you turning?’ ‘Forty-one.’ ‘Forty-one? I thought you were much older.’ ‘Why? I don’t have so many wrinkles’, I said, trying not to sound too offended.

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‘I don’t know, I’d have said you are forty-five’, Alex said. I was tempted to respond that I knew about his fake birthdate, that he was the one who was forty-four and, in fact, I was younger than him. I was tempted to tell him about what Ola thought of him, what Novylon thought of him, why we didn’t let him speak with Kuba. But, once again, my stupid politeness, my determination to keep the working relationship on friendly terms, made me bite my tongue. My only relief was that, after the exhibition, there was only the publication of the artist’s novel and, afterwards, I’d be liberated of my contractual obligation to suffer constant abuse. And yet, such personal considerations didn’t affect my opinion about his artistic talent. When Małgosia came to me exclaiming, as she did after Episode 1, that Alex was a genius, I honestly agreed with her. I didn’t regret selecting him after the open call, although I couldn’t help sensing a feeling of danger, as if working in his proximity was ruining something deeper in me than I wanted to admit. I saw Paulina going out for a smoke and I felt like having one as well. I didn’t have any cigarettes with me, so I followed her. It was pretty dark outside, surrounded by the park as we were; we were the only ones there. I asked her for a cigarette, and she gave me one, which I lit with hers. ‘So, you liked the dinner at Le Chevalier ’, I said, just to say something. ‘Yeah, it was great. Thanks so much for the invitation.’ ‘No problem, you only have to invite me back’, I said in jest. ‘Invite you for dinner? Of course, I can cook for you at home.’ Her direct proposal took me by surprise. I lowered my eyes averting hers. But a voice inside encouraged me to realise the situation, the opportunity. I remembered the many times she had furtively gazed at me; I understood what she was implying in her not-so-cryptic message, so I dropped the cigarette, took a step forward, put my left arm around her waist

196 The Sleuth pulling her gently towards me while my right hand caressed her face, preparing her for a kiss. ‘No!’ She said, slipping my hold. She looked confused, but in her facial expression I could also see she felt pleased, or perhaps it was just a nervous smile to dissipate the awkwardness of the situation. I had been fantasising about seducing Paulina for some time, but I never seriously considered making a move. It was disloyal to Joanna and, even if I could put her aside for a moment in my mind, it was risky and destined to fail. I knew it and yet I did it. And then I realised that the Erotic Cabinet had managed to arouse me more than I initially thought, bewildering me, pushing me to do something that, under normal circumstances, I’d never have done. ‘What’s this?’ Paulina said. She tossed her half-smoked cigarette and went back to the party, leaving me in the twilight alone with my failure and my embarrassment.

197

CHAPTER 13. PRESENCE OF MIND

L e Chevalier was in front of me: its engraved table and four chairs were waiting for Joanna, Ola, Jarek, and me to experience Alex’s designed dinner. I was returning to the exhibition a couple of weeks after the opening. I arrived a bit early because I wanted to spend some time in the show on a normal day without the inaugural crowd. From where I stood I could hear the Music Window humming in the distance, prompted by the afternoon light. I saw the twins passing by and I waved at them, but they just went on as if I was invisible, turning my friendly gesture into an awkward gesticulation. Round me, the wood engravings made with Le Chevalier’s furniture hung from the walls. One of them depicted a peculiar scene: on the upper half, a naked woman crouched right on top of a hole in the ground. Beneath her, in a sort of cave rendered visible thanks to a transversal section, a naked man was tensing a bow, aiming the arrow at her pussy through said hole. The strange thing was that, at a closer inspection, one could see that there was no arrow. Stranger still, the darkness of the cave was

198 Presence of Mind lit up by beams emitted from the woman’s pussy, casting rays of light through the hole, as if indicating the spot that the invisible arrow ought to be aimed at. The scene reminded me of that passage with erotic and incestuous undertones in Episode 1, when Alex told a childhood memory in which his mother urged him to shoot an arrow: ‘“Come on boy, shoot. If you shoot, mommy will give you the thing that you want so much.” I don’t remember what that thing was, but I think I really wanted it, because I shot. Fuck, I shot.’ A visible bow, an invisible arrow. I unfolded the exhibition’s booklet, hoping to get some clues in the detectives’ dialogue when they speak about the wood engravings:

– A knight driven by his horse. – Or a horse going backwards. – She is fishing for oysters. – Or making circles in the water. – Why are they never what they seem? – Because they try really hard to be what they are not. – Come and look at this. – What? – Here, under the table.

I suddenly remembered the green piece of textile dangling under Le Chevalier’s table. There it was, still in place, a mysterious part of the exhibition. I reached for it and recognised immediately: it was the bow tie that Alex had been wearing undone around his neck during Episode 1, as part of his Somerton man’s costume. I wondered if the bow in the tie was supposed to have any relation with the recurrence of bows and arrows in the Tamam Shud mystery (‘With the wood of yew, the first bow was made. Only one arrow from its wood killed Richard the Lionheart’). When Alex and I wrote the booklet’s text in tandem, I couldn’t have guessed what the detectives were referring to. But

199 The Fantasy of the Novel now, in the actual space, their dialogue became a guide to the show, directing the reader to look under the table. Nevertheless, the reason for placing the Somerton man’s green bow tie at that particular spot was still a mystery to me. I put it back as I found it. When I got up from under the table, detective Monika was standing beside me. She was wearing black clothes and a red leather jacket on top, her lips painted in a matching vivid red. She was a funny girl, not very talkative but with very expressive body language, which she had, no doubt, trained throughout her acting career. She shared a thin constitution, dark blonde hair (that day tied back in a messy bun), and a slightly crooked nose with both Alex’s girlfriend and Paulina. The more I looked at her, the more startling the resemblance between those three women appeared to me. ‘How are you? How is the day going?’ I said. ‘Not bad, I had a few visitors and situations worth noting down, but overall it’s been a quiet day.’ She was holding a small notebook where she kept the observations to be reported to Alex. ‘If you have some spare time, would you mind doing the detective’s routine for me?’ ‘Of course! Follow me.’ She walked to The Strange Signature and removed the framed wood engraving that was hanging on top of it, clearing the view of the whole painting. She moved to the right side, pointing to a particular stroke: ‘At the beginning, we thought it was a signature, we thought it was a signature until we saw the penguin.’ Such a simple sentence sufficed to transform what in principle looked like a piece of asemic writing into a drawing, making it impossible, from then on, to see anything but a penguin in that twisted line. ‘Once you see the penguin, you see the octopussy and, if you see the octopussy, you see the jellyfish.’ One after another, the animals, hidden in plain sight, were revealed. ‘And then we knew this is not a signature, it is a story.’

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The story was about Noah’s Ark, and how boring it was, only populated by heterosexual animal couples. In the sea, however: ‘I saw whales fucking oysters; oysters fucking crabs; and crabs fucking jellyfish; and jellyfish fucking octopuses; and octopuses fucking penguins and dolphins at the same time.’ Such scene brought to my mind Tim Etchells’ performance at Królikarnia, ‘Train drivers fucking kindergarten teachers. And kindergarten teachers fucking soldiers. And soldiers fucking experimental scientists. And experimental scientists fucking grave diggers. And grave diggers fucking lap dancers.’ Etcetera. While she was telling me about fish orgies under the sea, I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a middle-aged woman asking something to the exhibition guards, who pointed at me by way of an answer. She approached me and, interrupting Monika’s performance, asked: ‘Excuse me, are you the artist?’ ‘He’s the curator’, Monika said. ‘Oh, sorry, the guards told me that you were Alex Cecchetti.’ All those months they had been thinking I was him? I hardly could believe the level of their incompetence. The woman, who turned out to be Italian, just wanted to congratulate her fellow citizen for the show. ‘Thank you’, I answered on behalf of Alex. ‘How old is he?’ she said. ‘Alex? Mid-forties.’ ‘Oh, he’s not so old.’ I wondered why she was interested in knowing his age. She herself appeared to be in her late forties. ‘Since you are the curator, may I ask you what the artist wants to express with his work?’ I hated that sort of generic question. Not knowing what to answer, I just looked at her with a blank stare. Monika understood the opportunity my silence was offering to intervene. She handed the framed wood engraving over to the Italian lady and began reading the wall painting anew. I took a

201 The Fantasy of the Novel step back. For her storytelling performance, Monika basically followed the script written by Alex, deviating from it sometimes, when the interaction with the visitor required it, pretty much fitting the idea of canovaccio, a method halfway between plan and improvisation, structure and freedom, so dear to Alex. The Italian lady listened to the story eyes wide open, the frame tightly clasped between her hands. She didn’t fully understand the situation: was Monika an actress, or a well- informed and keen passer-by? Why was she telling her all that story about Noah’s Ark? When Monika finished, she took the wood engraving from the Italian lady and put it back on its place. Then she invited her to walk to the Reading Room. I followed them at a prudent distance, comfortable in my role as observer, a passenger in the performance, so to speak. Reaching in her pocket, Monika took a nipple-key out and screwed it into the chaise longue’s hole, opening the secret drawer and revealing a blue box and a pair of white cotton gloves. The Italian lady was beginning to grasp that she was being treated to a performance exclusively played for her. Monika sat down on the chaise longue, put the gloves on and, placing the box between her open legs, said: ‘We think he was a botanist. I mean, these things all belong to someone who is a botanist. Maybe a gardener. He was doing some strange experiments with flowers. If you have done a little bit of botany you know that from excrement you can grow potatoes, aubergines, who knows what.’ She opened the box, disclosing a stack of A4 sheets that looked like official documents of some sort. Their text was largely covered by oil paint impastos that both resembled Rorschach test figures and bright-coloured flowers – a visual fusion that resonated with the 500,000 Azaleas. This piece, called Fleurs d’Ennuis, belonged to the cancelled File Room, which Alex had apparently agreed to remove from the exhibition plan, whilst actually smuggling it in other rooms. I would never cease to be amazed by his obstinacy and his sneaky

202 Presence of Mind ways to fulfil his own agenda regardless of everyone else’s judgement. Holding one A4 piece in front of her, Monika said: ‘This is the bank informing me I am in debt for 11 euros and 17 cents. Small shit big flower, maybe an orchid?’ She put the paper aside and picked another one. The Italian lady listened with great attention. ‘Always the bank, this time the debit is at 142 euros and 62 cents. What flower is this? They grow better than mushrooms.’ The performative execution of Fleurs d’Ennuis turned out to be (or at least that’s the impression I got) a reinterpretation of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, whose central motif is the idea that, if treated with the right artistic tools, evil can spawn beauty (flowers) in the form of poems or, in Alex’s case, drawings. He said it during Episode 3, at the introduction to his seminar on poetry, he said that poems and flowers go very well together, ‘because poems, like flowers, are something that bloom’. ‘This is when your girlfriend planned the holiday in India for both of you’, Monika went on. ‘Then you realise that your passport is expired, so you go to the embassy. But, to renew the passport, they want 95 euros and it takes a month. So your girlfriend goes to India and you remain home. Later on, she leaves you, she said she had an illumination.’ I took the page from Monika. It was a photocopy of Alex’s passport, issued in 2010. His birthdate was readable on a corner free of oil paint: it was indeed 1973, so he was 37 years-old when the India incident happened. ‘This is when your dossier isn’t any good to get you an apartment.’ I remembered Alex once said that in Paris it’s necessary to prove a minimum regular income in order to rent a flat. ‘So you Photoshop a fake contract as professor in painting and sculpture in a prestigious art school in Switzerland. 3,000 Swiss francs every month. Only in your dreams. You even succeed in making a perfect director signature, which you saw

203 The Fantasy of the Novel

Detective Monika performing Fleurs d’Ennuis.

204 Presence of Mind in his Facebook profile. Though you didn’t get the apartment, and you got very close to being caught. Purple flower, very rare flower.’ Alex, who never went to art school, pretending to be a professor. Those secret stories gave a measure of his treacherousness. Probably, if I had asked him about this piece, knowing his devotion to Jodorowsky, he’d have explained that it was an exercise in psychomagic, in freeing himself from past traumas. For me, however, the oily flowers smeared over those documents were a representation of his shame, an attempt to hide his ‘excrement’. ‘This is exactly when you are in Villa Borghese in Rome, and you run in the garden with the girlfriend of your best friend, and you kiss and kiss and then you fall, and you fall and you stand up, but now you are bleeding, but you don’t know it, you are bleeding from the mouth because you broke a rib bone, terrible, horrible, painful, but you feel nothing because you are overexcited, and you want to keep kissing her, but she says no, you need to go to the hospital, and you don’t get it, so you smile and your teeth are full of blood, and your face is like the face of an idiot.’ The paper Monika was holding was a hospital record and invoice, 68 euros. I felt uneasy at listening to his exploits about seducing his best friend’s girlfriend. Granted, it was incoherent censuring Alex’s behaviour when I had made an attempt to kiss Paulina just a few days earlier. I see that now, with the benefit of hindsight. At that moment, however, all I knew was my suffering. ‘Don’t take it personally, it’s just the story of this murder’, Monika said. ‘No, it’s impossible that was what killed him.’ The box was empty, she had gone through the stack. She returned the A4s inside the box, the box and the gloves inside the chaise longue. She put the nipple-key back into her pocket and took the Italian lady to the Death Room, where they laid down on the black cushions. I remained standing, always a bit aside. Monika said, ‘Calm down. Think you don’t have to pay the rent

205 The Fantasy of the Novel anymore, taxes anymore, car insurance, the second home, you don’t even have the first one. Now close your eyes. Because it’s disturbing to see people die with their eyes open. Also, another thing that helps is to think of a lake. Think of a lake. Now die …’ We listened to the Cetaceans music in the darkness. The whale songs related to the undersea creatures of The Strange Signature – everything was connected in the show, so well connected, Alex hadn’t left any detail to chance. The exhibition was akin to a concert or, indeed, a mystery novel, where every element is linked to another by a common thread. My job was figuring that thread out. ‘I don’t remember much about dying. How does it feel to die?’ Monika said. ‘The moment of trespassing? Is there a light at the end of the tunnel? What light? What is this story of the light when the problem is the tunnel? Because there’s a tunnel, they say. But if there is a tunnel, where the fuck does it go through? Is then existence a mountain? And if existence is a mountain, who the fuck has dug it?’ I looked at the Music Door ’s silhouette outlined against the corridor light. It was the true image of the light at the end of the tunnel that so many people claim to see during a near-death experience. The idea of the tunnel, of digging and drilling, had some erotic connotations, but it also spoke about the structure of the exhibition: a string of rooms traversed by the spectator’s linear motion, beginning at the Dinner Room and finishing at the Erotic Cabinet, as if describing the trajectory of an arrow that, once shot, cannot turn back, the time’s arrow that carries the spectator straight to the inevitable end. During Episode 3, in the tour of heaven, Alex said that ‘once the arrow leaves the bow, it returns no more’. And also, ‘You cannot change the path of the knife’ – words that were now just a few metres away, in Roberto Bolaño’s book in the Reading Room. For the archer in the wood engraving, the beams of light in the cave were like the light at the end of the tunnel, the spot he had to aim at with his phallic weapon. However, the arrow was missing. This absent arrow, wasn’t it the same arrow-shaped carpet designed by

206 Presence of Mind

Paulina, protruding from the Reading Room at the start of the exhibition, pointing at the itinerary to follow, the very same carpet that Alex had removed? This arrow was invisible to the spectator, who couldn’t see it as an external object because she, the spectator, embodied it, it was her blind spot, too close to herself to see it. Hiding things in plain sight was Alex’s strategy to set up mystery, like the green bow tie, like the animals in The Strange Signature. The key to reveal them was reading them correctly. So, the spectator’s movement through the show led her towards the final destination, her destiny, death, in the Death Room, and then … what then? Was the Erotic Cabinet a representation of the afterlife? There were arrows there too, piercing orgiastic bodies. And wasn’t the swan’s head inside Leda another image for the arrow entering the vagina, penetrating the tunnel? My suppositions were backed by the recurrence of circles in the show, circles that were actually waves produced by a body plunging into a river. One of the wood engravings in the Dinner Room depicted a young woman who, in the detectives’ words, is ‘fishing oysters, or making circles in the water’. An idea that resonated with the Dance Room’s river stones (the scratches on the copper floor did look like ripples in a pond) and, of course, Charles Simic’s poem, ‘A child throws it in a river, the stone sinks’. Thus, I concluded, if the exhibition was conceived to represent the course of a river, the Death Room would be the sea into which it flows, with whales and all. A pretty hackneyed metaphor that, nonetheless, did function in the context of the show. Alex was right after all. During the initial discussions about the exhibition plan, Joanna and Paulina wanted to swap the Death Room for the Music Room, following some practical arguments that, at the time, seemed judicious to me. But Alex rejected their idea for no apparent reason, which made me think that he was just being stubborn. But now I could see that he was being congruent with his own narrative, because the

207 The Fantasy of the Novel exhibition followed a thread that ought to end with death and, beyond that, as a kind of epilogue, the Music Door leading to paradise: the Erotic Cabinet with its images of love and pleasure. Monika took the Italian lady and together crossed the Music Door towards the deepest corner of the exhibition – me a pace behind them. Once there, Monika took the nipple-key again and opened the secret compartment embedded in the pink wall. She extracted a red box, similar to the blue one from the chaise longue, but larger, which contained Mémoires: fifty black ink drawings on paper depicting a heterosexual couple in various amorous positions. It was easy to identify Alex as one of them. Monika said: ‘These are memories, and I’m not sure anymore if they are mine or yours. Since they are memories, you can see them only once in your life, so be focused!’ She wore another pair of cotton gloves stored in the compartment and began leafing through the drawings: ‘When she holds you so tight you don’t know if you’re in prison or you are making love. ‘A moment after and a moment before. ‘When she holds you so tight you don’t know if you’re in prison or you are making love. ‘When she holds you so tight you don’t know if you’re in prison or you are making love. ‘Some like it, some people like it. ‘Some people like it very much. ‘A moment after and a moment before.’ Monika made eye contact with the Italian lady at the turn of each drawing, who, judging by her nervous smile, was feeling aroused. All of a sudden, an exhibition guard burst into the room, ruining the moment just to tell Monika about some stupid practical issue. I wondered how CCA managed to find such tactless workers. We waited until he left, then Monika resumed the performance:

208 Presence of Mind

‘Kinky but shy’, meant that Alex asked his partner to practise kinky sex but felt embarrassed at the same time. In the drawing I could see a girl manipulating his genitalia in an awkward position. I took a closer look. Though sketchy, the girl’s figure was shaped suspiciously like Joanna’s body. Indeed, it was a rendition of her hair, her breasts, and her hips. ‘Kinky but shy. ‘Kinky but shy. ‘Classicism.’ He really had some nerve to show a bunch of drawings portraying his fantasies with my wife. ‘When she’s scary but you have to do something. ‘When she scares you but still you have to do something. ‘Exploration, contemplation. ‘Kinky but shy.’ My paranoia spilled over. I couldn’t take it anymore, even if it was a representation of his fantasies and not real memories. I had never been jealous before. I became jealous by recognising Joanna in the drawings, but I couldn’t recognise myself in my thoughts, in my actions. Estrangement. Long ago Alex spoke about how he wanted to apply estrangement to his project: ‘The performance is then a schizophrenic act in which the artist does not recognise himself.’ No, he didn’t say estrangement, he said ostranenie, a Russian word, ‘One of the first ones to speak about ostranenie in a popular way is of course Freud’, he said. ‘It’s the first time that he saw himself in a mirror, in a train, I think, or in a hotel. And he saw himself in a mirror without knowing that that was a mirror. So he saw another person that looked like him, but he didn’t recognise himself. This is the technique I want to use for my novel, this ostranenie.’ But such ostranenie, such estrangement, reached way beyond the art project, it had become all-pervasive, affecting my presence of mind. The fiction had merged with my life. ‘When she holds you so tight you don’t know if you’re in prison or you are making love. ‘When she cannot hold you anymore.’

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Monika reached the last drawing, the torture was over. She closed the red box and put it back in the secret compartment along with the gloves. After that, she tucked the nipple-key in a pocket of her red leather jacket. The Italian lady was still smiling. In silence, Monika took her back to the Dance Room, and me with them. Beside the doorway that connected the Dance Room with the Death Room hung the drawing of a withered flower. It was the last of the three Amaryllis, a series of ink drawings originally conceived to be included in the File Room and that now, much like the Fleurs d’Ennuis, had been semi-clandestinely reintroduced by Alex into the show: the first one at the entrance of the Music Room (depicting a fresh flower); the second at the entrance of the Dance Room (the same flower halfway dried); and the last one, by which we were standing, at the entrance of the Death Room. So that, when following the linear, arrow-like trajectory through the different rooms, the spectator would watch a narrative sequence, almost like a cartoon. The curious thing was that, as I learned later, there is a subspecies of this flower called Amaryllis Belladonna. Moreover, its common name, ‘naked lady’, comes from the fact that it blossoms when the rest of its foliage has died down. So that the belladonna, the beautiful woman, congruent with the Tamam Shud exhibition theme, comes out after death. ‘It is a flower, is dead’, Monika said. ‘Sad, I know. But there is a way out. Only one way to get out of here. Have you ever walked backwards? If now you turn and walk backwards’, she helped the Italian lady to get in the right position, ‘and always looking at the amaryllis, you will see it blossoming again.’ The Italian lady started to walk backwards. ‘See? See? Bye-bye.’ What she saw was the Amaryllis coming back to life, emerging from the depths of death, and she herself returning to the outer world, far from Tamam Shud ’s stories of murder and incest. During the previous months, I had wondered why Alex didn’t want to open a door at the Death Room so that visitors

210 Presence of Mind could leave at the end of the show. Now I understood that he wanted to force the exit through the entrance, to enable a short version of the Walking Backwards performance. In Amaryllis, as if in a movie played in reverse, beauty and life grew back from death. Death spawns life, just like blue hydrangeas grow over the bones of the dead. Monika and I waved at the Italian lady. She waved at us until she disappeared, always walking backwards. I mumbled Omar Khayyám’s verse, ‘I came like water, and like wind I go’. I turned to Monika, she was writing something down on her notebook. I took it from her hands unceremoniously. It was full of drawings, I could identify the lines of The Strange Signature and some from Songs of Solitude; there was also a sketch of a tunnel that looked like the inner walls of a vagina, at the end of which there was a door; and plenty of scribbles in Polish that I could not read. A few notes were in English: ‘Very short, very intense, like wind on the top of a mountain, but for a second and quiet.’ Below, circled, ‘niepokój’, which, in my limited command of Polish I understood as ‘anxiety’. I gave her back the notebook. ‘Is this what you’re writing for Alex?’ ‘He asked us to annotate anything that happens to us, the detectives, or to the spectators, which is out of context. For example, if anyone behaves strangely with the works. He wants to learn whether there’s someone who comes back to the exhibition, if they stay unusually long in the Reading Room, or if they make recordings. We also collect comments we hear from the spectators in relation to our stories and the artworks. We write about our experience, about the new connections we make between each room and each work. He’s also interested in knowing if we solve the mystery of his death and if we find more than just a murder story.’ Monika’s explanation of her detective job made me think that, over time, Alex had modified his creative strategy. At first, art project and artist’s novel were two communicating vessels within the same system: on the one hand, the artworks’ meaning

211 The Fantasy of the Novel was altered by their inclusion in an overarching narrative; on the other, the artist’s novel was the recipient of that same narrative, which was written through the artworks’ reinterpretation. It was a subtle method to connect both art practice and fiction writing, in a way I had not seen before. The same text could be used as a performance script and appear as a passage in the artist’s novel. Actually, I noticed that the performances were opportunities for Alex to check whether a certain piece of text functioned as he wanted and thus was worth keeping in the artist’s novel. The same text could recur in other places as well, like in the exhibition’s booklet or Monika’s detective script, becoming leitmotifs throughout the entire project (‘I don’t remember much about dying.’ ‘Otherwise, how could you ever know that I lived?’). But the system was different now, Alex had transformed the exhibition into a writing device. Thanks to the detectives’ notes that fed his writing, the exhibition preceded and produced the narrative text. The communicating vessels had been replaced with a machine that made the text.

I heard voices coming from the Dinner Room, so I left Monika and walked in that direction to meet Jarek, Ola, and Joanna. It was time to treat ourselves to a dinner at Le Chevalier. We sat down on the four chairs, on top of the woodcuts. Two waiters came to us: one laid the table while the other brought the menu, which contained poems instead of the usual dish description. I chose a starter:

They were laughing like crazy And all the others were seriously mad

After a few minutes, the waiters came back with two kinds of dishes. I was served a beef tartar with tomato granita traversed by a crusty wedge of gratin Parmesan cheese. Instead

212 Presence of Mind of salt, the chef had sprinkled grated capers previously dried in the oven. The result was a tad intense, though the excess of flavour was attenuated by the refreshing effect of the tomato granita. While my food was predominantly red, Joanna got a greenish dish (focaccia topped with more than twenty different kinds of herbs). Before we started eating, I raised a glass of wine and proposed a toast: ‘While you live, drink! – for once dead you never shall return.’ The three looked a bit puzzled, but they toasted anyway. After sipping at her glass, Ola asked: ‘Was it some kind of quotation?’ ‘From the Rubáiyát ’, I said. ‘Gee, you are obsessed’, Joanna said. ‘So, did you get many responses to the show?’ Jarek asked in his bass voice. ‘Alex did a guided tour late at night’, Joanna said. ‘It was a triumph. We expected around fifty people to show up and we got more than 200. It was incredible, they barely fit in the rooms. The tour was done in total darkness, though people could use their own mobile phone’s torches.’ ‘Regular visitors love the show’, I said. ‘Today I saw the reaction of an Italian lady: she was flabbergasted.’ ‘A lot of people went through the detectives’ routine’, Joanna said. ‘Some even come on purpose at the time when they are in the gallery, to make sure they meet them. By the way’, she turned to me, ‘Styrmir came to see the show the other day.’ ‘I’m glad he didn’t fail, he’s our most faithful Tamam Shud follower.’ ‘That’s very good’, Jarek said. ‘What about published reviews?’ A silence ensued. I tried an honest answer: ‘Here’s the thing: the show is successful among non- specialised audiences, and the art world ignores it. Apart from Styrmir, none of our artist and curator friends have come to see

213 The Fantasy of the Novel it. We got a brief review published in Mousse Magazine, though.’ ‘It’s Italian, quite prestigious’, Joanna said. ‘But only on the online edition, and they didn’t write it, it’s all a copy-paste from our press release. There is also a short article in Szum magazine.’ That magazine was the most important in the Polish art scene. ‘However, …’ I began to say. ‘… it’s rubbish’, Joanna finished the sentence. ‘It says, “An exhibition about books in an art gallery sounds like torture; the exhibition of an unfinished book, like the last circle of hell. Fortunately, this book is full of nice pictures. So much merging disciplines to end up with a simple exhibition. We recommend you stay clear of the text.”’ ‘I don’t understand how they dare publish such an awful review’, I said. ‘It’s not just that it completely misses the point of the project, its coarseness is improper for a piece of art criticism. If I was the editor I wouldn’t allow this sort of language in my magazine.’ ‘Szum’s editor’, Jarek said, ‘applied to be the director of CCA some time ago, in competition with Małgosia. Obviously, he lost. Since then, every single review involving our institution distils resentment. So don’t worry, it’s not about you. He only publishes things of that style about us.’ ‘If this art magazine is really the reference in Poland, it could explain why no art insiders appreciate the exhibition’, I said. ‘This poor standard is pretty much all there is in this country’, Joanna said. ‘If this is the level we’re getting, I hope nobody else writes about the show.’ Some visitors came into the gallery, surprised at the sight of four people eating and drinking in the middle of the exhibition. It was time to order the main dish. I chose this poem:

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When I say you are like the moon in the sky I do not mean you are a fat white round piece of rock Who spins around without knowing why And does not shine of its own light No When I say you are too white and straight to be true I mean it

Those lines sounded terribly familiar. I was sure I had heard them before, yes, during the tour of heaven at Królikarnia, when he explained ‘the power of metaphor’. They rang like Bill Knott’s style, but it was Alex’s writing. Either he composed the poem long ago and then integrated it into the art project, or it was a passage of the Królikarnia tour that later became a poem in its own right. In any case, I got a plate with brownish caramelised pulled veal resting on a bed of green asparagus foam decorated with Romanesco broccoli. How this duotone dish related to the moon, or to an ironic account of the power of metaphor, I don’t know. But it was delicious. Joanna got tortelloni stuffed with ricotta and asparagus, served on translucent slices of red and yellow beetroot, complemented with pepper and thyme biscuits. ‘Is Alex still in Warsaw?’ Jarek asked. ‘No, he’s back in Paris’, Joanna said. ‘He left some artworks behind in his studio at the Laboratorium. He wrote Ola a few days later asking if they could be sent to him, but it was too late, the room had been cleaned up by the cleaning lady.’ We all chuckled at the new intrusion of this real character in Alex’s story. ‘Now that I think about it, we won’t see him anymore’, I said. ‘We’re starting the publication of his artist’s novel soon after the end of this show, but we’re managing the process from a distance.’ ‘Since you mention it’, Ola said, ‘I would like to make an announcement. I won’t be here to help you, I’m quitting at the end of December.’

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Everyone at the table was speechless. Finally, Joanna asked the question that was in everybody’s minds, ‘Why?’ ‘It’s enough. I have too much work and nobody’s helping me.’ ‘But we could find you a new assistant’, Jarek said. ‘It’s not about that. One day, during the installation of the show, Joanna and I visited Alex in his studio in the Laboratorium, where he was making the wood engravings. He wanted to show us some print tests and, right next to him, there was a folder with some samples. He asked me to open it for him, even though he was closer to the folder than I was, like a prince giving orders to a servant. And I don’t know why, but I reached for it and opened it. He was tired and cranky that evening, perhaps for him it was a way to enjoy a small satisfaction that massaged his ego after an exhausting day. It doesn’t matter now. The truth is that building up this show has been a very tense … a very intense time for me.’ The bad blood between Ola and Alex wasn’t of little consequence. For Ola, it led to her resignation. But he didn’t come out unscathed either. At the end of the exhibition, Alex demanded, in the bossy tone he used with her, that the books she bought for the Reading Room be shipped to France, for his next show. Ola argued that it wasn’t written in the contract and CCA had no obligation to give the books away. After some tug of war, she sent a few books, but most of them remained in CCA’s library. I can imagine that, under other circumstances, where the artist and the producer were on good terms, there would have been no problem in acceding his request as an act of good will. I am sure that the money Alex had to spend rebuying all those books for the next iteration of the Reading Room had come at the expense of some other parts of the exhibition. How vital these details about the production process are to understand an art project, yet how invisible they remain to the regular spectator. Such intra-stories (like the real motivations behind Szum ’s editor’s bad press campaign against CCA) are common knowledge that circulates in the art world

216 Presence of Mind in the form of anecdotes and gossip by means of oral transmission, but is rarely committed to writing. The curatorial, critical text offered to the spectator is supposed to explicate the work but it never speaks of its reality, how it came to be, emerging from negotiations and personal relationships that, however informal, crucially allow some outcomes to be actualised while others vanish in the long slog of the creative process. The waiter came to take the dessert order. I chose a poem between the two written in the menu:

Your legs are compassion If they run they would go effortless like clouds to the breeze The round geometry of your breasts is more accurate than The sphere you hold in between your fingers

I got a rhubarb compote crowned with a violet flower sorbet, adorned with beautiful little orange eatable flowers. The sourness of the rhubarb was balanced out by the sweetness of the sorbet, though the combined flavour was a bit overpowering and, after a while, saturating. Joanna got a chocolate soufflé with sesame granola and nettle leaves, the whole dish had been smoked with pine wood. The ambience was strained after Ola’s announcement. And then something crossed my mind, something I didn’t plan on telling anyone, but which I ended up saying anyway, perhaps out of the desire to break the silence and change the subject, or perhaps because my afflicted state of mind needed an escape valve. ‘On my way to CCA today, when I was crossing the park, I saw a child playing under a tree. It wasn’t the first time I saw him, but it was the first time I saw him in the daytime. Now, this child was doing a most remarkable thing, he was playing a flute, not a regular flute, but a bone flute.’ Jarek half smiled. Joanna raised an eyebrow. I continued:

217 The Fantasy of the Novel

Le Chevalier’s dessert.

218 Presence of Mind

‘I got a bit closer to him to listen to what he was playing. He didn’t talk to me, just carried on playing, never taking his eyes off me. And you know what he was playing? Leoš Janáček’s “String Quartet No. 1”. Ah, maybe you don’t know him. He was a Czech composer at the turn of the twentieth century, and the string quartet the child was playing is known as “Kreutzer Sonata”. I know, I know, how could a child with a bone flute play a piece composed for two violins, viola, and cello? I can’t really answer that question, but believe me, I could recognise the piece, which I have listened to many times. But there’s more, because Janáček composed it inspired by a novella written by Leo Tolstoy, called The Kreutzer Sonata. The story is about a jealous husband who suspects that his wife is cheating on him with another guy, a musician. He doesn’t have any actual evidence, he’s just driven increasingly mad by hints and details that he believes reveal proof of their treason. And this is when things get interesting, because the novella takes its title from a passage in which the wife and the musician play a duo, she at the piano and he at the violin, they play Beethoven’s “Kreutzer Sonata”. Yes, Beethoven composed a sonata dedicated to a violinist called Rodolphe Kreutzer, whom he barely knew, but only because he had first dedicated it to a friend of his, with whom he fell out after this friend spoke badly of a woman Beethoven liked. So, you see, they quarrelled, and Beethoven re-dedicated the sonata to a violin player. Decades later, Tolstoy found inspiration in Beethoven’s sonata for his novella about a violinist-lover and, decades later, Janáček found inspiration in Tolstoy’s novella for his sonata, a string quartet including two violins.’ The three of them had stopped eating their desserts a while ago. Ola and Jarek’s sorbets had become melted purple pools. They were looking at me with a mixture of shock and wonder. ‘And the child you met out there, he was playing that sonata?’ Jarek said.

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‘Yes. I think he was playing it only for me, as if trying to communicate something. At any rate, that piece had the most shattering effect on me; I had the illusion that I was discovering entirely new emotions, new possibilities I’d known nothing of before. What this new reality I discovered is, I really don’t know, but my awareness of this new state of consciousness fills me with joy.’ ‘I think you’ve had a glass of wine too many’, Joanna said. ‘No, this is just my second.’ ‘You shouldn’t drink more, Dawidku, let’s go home.’ Joanna took me by the arm and said goodbye to Jarek and Ola, who frowned at us with worried expressions as we left the exhibition space. Walking to the subway through the park where I had seen the child, Joanna said: ‘What was all that about?’ ‘Why are you upset?’ ‘Dawidku, I don’t know what’s going on with you.’ ‘Are you angry at me?’ ‘I can’t be angry at you, silly.’ She was still holding my arm. We walked for a hundred metres, then she said: ‘What happens at the end of Tolstoy’s story? Do the wife and the musician run away together?’ ‘The husband leaves for a business trip but comes back home early, consumed by jealousy and suspicion. He finds out that the two of them are together in his house. It’s a bit ambiguous, it’s never clear if they were really doing something or just having a friendly chat. At that point, it doesn’t matter in the husband’s bewildered mind.’ ‘So how does it end?’ ‘He stabs her to death.’ Joanna said nothing. ‘The violin player runs away though’, I added. We walked for five more minutes in silence. When the subway entrance was in sight, Joanna said: ‘Without Ola, this fucking CCA won’t exist.’

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CHAPTER 14. LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL

I met Alex at CCA’s bistro a few days after the opening of the exhibition to discuss the artist’s novel’s publication timeline. When I arrived he was eating the set menu. Although the deadline to deliver the manuscript had been fixed on 1 October, right after the end of the show, he admitted that there would just be one third written by then. After nearly two years I wanted to finish the project as soon as possible, so I wasn’t very happy with the idea of delaying the publication but, on the other hand, the initial plan of having the book out in December 2017 had become an unrealistic prospect over time. I wanted to urge Alex to finish but not at the price of affecting the quality of the work; we hadn’t invested so much time and effort to wind up with a rushed result. I came up with a solution: he would deliver the manuscript to be translated by Johanna Bishop in parts. We still had to keep the word limit to around 60,000 words, because she charged a certain rate per word that made it impossible for us to

221 The Fantasy of the Novel pay more. It was a very practical limitation, the kind that doesn’t permeate to the attention of readers, but crucial to the final form of the artist’s novel. So the first third, 20,000-words long approximately, would be delivered in early October. The second part, by midway through November, and the third part by mid-December, so that the translated manuscript could undergo copy-editing and proofreading in January 2018. If, by then, he still wanted to introduce changes in the text, it would still be possible, but only directly in the English translation. His English could be corrected by the copy editor afterwards. We came to this agreement in order to avoid translating the same passage twice, which was something we just couldn’t afford. This timeline fitted with Alex’s writing process, which wasn’t exactly linear but panoramic. He simultaneously wrote the beginning, the middle, and the end, and now he was adding material in between those parts. In the meantime, Kuba would work on the design. With a bit of luck, the artist’s novel would be ready to be sent to the printer in February, out in March. The plan entailed an extension of my contract with CCA. They grumbled at having to pay me a fee that they didn’t figure in their plans for 2018, but they couldn’t risk losing the artist’s novel’s managing editor. We also had time to discuss his first ideas for the book, not the text, but the-book-as-object. Alex had a weakness for disappearing fore-edge prints, a very old technique in which an image, in his case a reproduction of The Strange Signature, would be printed in such a way that, when the book was in a normal position, it’d remain invisible but, when the pages were fanned on a slant, the image would magically appear. Alex also wanted to print Tamam Shud in a hard cover edition, though I knew intuitively that both wishes weren’t compatible, as Kuba later confirmed, if you want to bend the book in order to see the picture, it needs a certain degree of flexibility that the hard cover doesn’t permit. Alex’s second wish was a cover depicting the image of one of his Tarot-like wood engravings, ‘embossed and the title in

222 Light at the End of the Tunnel blue or gold’. His third wish was publishing three different ends so that, from the total edition, one third would finish in a certain way, another third in another, and the last third would have yet a different end. I asked Kuba if that would increase the printing costs too much, and he said not necessarily, as long as the different pages weren’t too many. Alex said he’d change just the last chapter, which, considering their length, wouldn’t mean more than two or three pages, and that sounded feasible to me. ‘This idea of publishing different versions of the novel reminds me of Nanni Balestrini’s Tristano ’, I told Alex while he was finishing lunch. ‘It’s a novel in chapters, each divided in a number of passages that are shuffled in every copy that is printed. Balestrini came up with the idea in the 1960s, but it was only with digital technology that he could actually produce it. It’s estimated that 109,027,350,432,000 variations can be printed without repetition, each one with its own corresponding number on the cover, so that each reader possesses a unique item. I have number 12,969 at home.’ ‘Yes, I know about him’, Alex said. ‘But I have another author in mind, Milorad Pavić. He published a novel, Unique Item, with a hundred different endings. The reader buys it in two volumes, one with the novel minus the last chapter, and the other one with a hundred different final chapters to choose from.’ He received a phone call, which gave me a few minutes to google ‘unique item pavić’ in my phone. I found an interview with the writer, where he gave answers that could have been uttered by Alex himself. He said, ‘The idea to write the novel Unique Item about a man and a woman selling dreams came to me in my sleep. … Unique Item is a detective story turned upside down. … The chief investigator in my book resembles a cuckolded husband: he is the last to find out.’ I didn’t like that last sentence.

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The end of the exhibition arrived and, with it, the month of October and me cracking the whip, so to speak, pushing Alex to comply with what I saw as a pipeline the text had to go through: from his hands it’d go to the translator’s, from the translator’s to the copy editor’s, then to the graphic designer’s, then to the proofreader’s, then back to the graphic designer’s and, eventually, to the printer and the publisher’s. Up until that moment, I couldn’t find my place in the project because the roles of artist and curator were occupied already by Alex and Joanna. However, in the project’s last phase, I was able to take a responsibility no one else could: I would be the managing editor. Certainly, we were hiring a copy editor who would take care of correcting spelling, grammar, punctuation, and, to some extent, style, but my job was different, I was in charge of overseeing the whole process and make sure all parts came together harmoniously. I had experience in editing other books, I was qualified to guide it to completion until Sternberg Press took over in March. It was my time to shine, which, coupled with the circumstance of Alex being back to Paris, helped my self-confidence recover a little. With an almost two-week delay, Alex sent the first part of the Italian manuscript, called Il Fantasma (The Ghost). I forwarded it to Johanna Bishop who, a few weeks later, sent it back in an English translation that I could actually read: 22,996 words in 29 chapters including, with minor changes and additions, the ten chapters translated by her as a test back in January. Spelling and punctuation were in American English, as we thought suitable for a book with international ambitions. I was aware that it had to be copy-edited and that the final publication may differ to some degree, but still, I was very excited to be able to read Tamam Shud at last. The first thing I noticed was that the cleaning lady had now a proper name: Luz, which is a Spanish female name that means ‘light’. I wondered why Alex hadn’t used an Italian equivalent. Luce (‘light’ in Italian) isn’t actually a name but Lucia is, though perhaps it’d

224 Light at the End of the Tunnel have been a bit too subtle a clue. Would the symbolism of the light at the end of the tunnel be transferred to the artist’s novel by means of the cleaning lady’s character? There’s a moment when the narrator mixes both notions:

A ghost, that’s what I am. If I only had someone … whose house I could clean. Where’s my epiphany in all this? The light flooding over my face? I don’t know yet.

As someone who was raised a Catholic, I knew that Luz is an abbreviation of Nuestra Señora de la Luz, which is one of the Virgin Mary’s many names. Translated in Tamam Shud terms, she is the mother of a dead man (‘Stabat Mater’), whose name means literally ‘light’, both the light at the end of the tunnel seen in the passage to death and the light that floods over the newborn’s face at birth, as established in the exhibition. The logical conclusion was that the cleaning lady was the victim’s mother, which suggested that Luz may have a bigger role in subsequent chapters. It was fascinating reading how all the elements that had been created throughout the art project came to fruition in the artist’s novel. Ideas, images, and entire chunks of text came back reformulated in the narrative. For example, this fragment was obviously indebted to the Episode 1 performance:

They’ve carted everything out of this place, cupboards, chairs, even the bed. Only the sofa is left. It’s all so clean, sparkling, like no one ever lived here. Not that I could complain about the cleanliness before. You should have seen it when Luz was here. When Luz was here you could’ve licked the floor. Poor Luz, it took her two weeks to figure out I was dead. She’d open the windows, then vacuum around me so I wouldn’t have to move. … She’s even got the keys, so she comes and goes when she wants, like the tide. And it’s hard, it’s hard to remember anything when it’s all so clean.

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This sort of rewriting, from When Everything Is So Clean It Is Difficult to Remember Something to ‘it’s hard to remember anything when it’s all so clean’, this rephrasing in a more precise and efficient use of the English language, I attributed to Johanna Bishop’s translation rather than Alex’s writing process. The fact that the reader would never access the original è difficile ricordarsi qualcosa quando qui tutto è così pulito, made me aware of the crucial weight her interpretation would have in the final outcome. I read on. There was a lot more stuff that resonated with things I had already seen or heard. For instance:

This is where I died, although over on the sofa would have been better, because these stairs are anything but comfortable. But it’s not like you can choose where you get killed. Stairs are dangerous, go up and down every day and you could break your neck.

It evoked the staircase that I first saw in the photo accompanying Alex’s application to the open call, which depicted him playing dead on the steps. I also found the scene of the narrator with his mother, and the distress he felt at shooting the arrow for fear of losing a moment that would never come back:

If I had to die twice in one lifetime the way you wake up twice in one day, then I’d want one final memory, twice. Me in my mother’s arms on a normal sunny day. Holding my little wooden bow, looking out across the fields at a distant haystack. Shoot it, mama says. No, I say. Come on, shoot it. No no no. Come on, shoot it, my big darling boy, shoot and you’ll hit it. It was never a question of hitting the target. I wasn’t afraid of missing the target. That wasn’t the point and never had been. Everybody knows that once the arrow leaves the bow it will never return. Come on,

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shoot, mama tells me. No, I say. Come on, shoot, mama wants to see. Shoot it, if you shoot it mama will give you that thing you want so much. And I’ve forgotten what it was I wanted so much, but I must have really wanted it, because I shot.

The arrow was, as I learned in the exhibition, a representation of the passing of time, also expressed in the image of digging a tunnel. Such metaphor was employed in the artist’s novel as well:

Oh, the questions you could ask a dead person. Some even want to know if there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. What light? People always get stuck on the wrong questions. Who cares about the light. The problem is the tunnel, since they say there’s a tunnel. But if there’s a tunnel, what the fuck does it go through? What’s existence then, a mountain? And if existence is a mountain, who dug into it? If there was a tunnel I’d remember.

Each page was full of allusions inevitably tinged by my experience during the two-year-long art project: ‘What’s hell for many can be heaven for some.’ ‘The best thing for thinking is walking. Because thought, like walking, is a thing that goes somewhere.’ ‘When I say you’re like the moon I don’t mean you’re a big, round, white chunk of solitary rock that shines only with borrowed light and revolves around us without even knowing why.’ There was a chaise longue with books on it; there was a seminar on metaphors; there were mentions to ‘the river of time’, and to rain that ‘makes circles out of water’. The entire interpretation of The Strange Signature recited by Monika in the exhibition appeared as a description of Noah’s Ark, fish orgy included. I became curious to know how a casual reader would interpret the Tamam Shud imagery and events without those artistic references. I was pretty sure that they’d miss a lot. For example, in the chapter called Crossings there is

227 The Fantasy of the Novel a scene in which the narrator hears a sound at the end of a hallway:

Further down I can hear music, something like a tune but it only lasts a second, like a jingle, and then footsteps. … Then that music again, the jingle, and this time, all of a sudden, it’s kimono man.

For a casual reader this passage could be a throwaway, but I was sure it was a veiled inclusion of the Music Door, a description of how it functioned in the exhibition space, producing a tune, a jingle, rather than music proper, when one crossed it. I remembered something I always had wanted to check: did Alex really use the outcome of Episode 4’s Tarot readings in his artist’s novel? The answer was yes: the chapter called Superpowers read as a faithful transliteration of the narrative produced with the aid of that young woman on stage: the protagonist possesses someone at the library in order to search for a copy of the Rubáiyát. There were some minor changes, such as possessing a female instead of a male, but it was essentially the same passage as it had been written with the Tarot cards. At another point in the story, the detectives’ pizza-greasy fingers touching the screen of their mobile phones are described as ‘plump ballerinas, figure skaters, making endless little pirouettes, … they slide their thumbs in little circles’. It was inevitable to recall the scratches inflicted by the dancers’ movements onto the copper floor. The pizza is compared to ‘an image of the cosmic wheel that spins and spins without getting anywhere’, that is, the very image of the wheel of fortune that, apart from being a Tarot card, is also the central motif described in my artist’s novel The Wheel of Fortune. Obviously, I didn’t have the exclusive right to use that traditional imagery, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t a coincidence, especially when reading the scene in which, attempting to

228 Light at the End of the Tunnel contact the ghost, the two detectives visit a Tarot reader described as a ‘big woman in heels’. Twiggy picks three cards: The Judgement, The Wheel of Fortune, and The Devil, in which she reads the past, the present, and the future. ‘On judgment day, the dead will rise up’, she says, ‘the angels draw the souls out with the suction of their instruments’, a direct adaptation of the joke Alex told during Episode 4. I remembered how Agata didn’t believe that Francis McKee was the curator and writer he claimed to be, but a character who brought a book with The Judgement card on the cover. In Even the Dead Rise Up there is an abundance of mediums and séances, just like in Tamam Shud, too much of a coincidence? I laughed at thinking how Agata, if she ever read the scene in the artist’s novel, would find it a confirmation of her suspicions about Francis playing a part in the fiction. The big woman in heels reads the present in the second card, The Wheel of Fortune. One of the characters observes an interesting detail about the creatures depicted in it, ‘There are three of them so they can’t be us, detectives are always in pairs, always. So the third one’s the dead man.’ Which reaffirmed my idea of the detectives being a representation of Joanna and me, and my theory of the pair being unbalanced by the presence of the third wheel, the third policeman, the dead man, that is, Alex himself. The big woman in heels proceeds to read the future in the third Tarot card, The Devil, who, according to her interpretation, is flanked by two slaves that ‘look like two morons’. ‘The demon controls them, they do what he wants without even realizing. And who might these two morons be?’ Yes, who could they be? Who else but the detectives, Joanna and me? Describing the Devil, Alex gave the image he had of himself away, ‘He’s a rebel, the only one who dared defy God. In the end he’s a hero … People should thank him instead of fearing him. But … the devil is a great manipulator.’ Alex didn’t identify himself with the Devil exactly, but with God’s enemy. In the chapter Honey in Words, God is defined as ‘a father who knows all’, which resonated with the Morse

229 The Fantasy of the Novel message delivered by the crows in an earlier chapter, ‘He knows about it all’, in turn quoting a Rubáiyát verse where Omar Khayyám speaks of God, ‘He knows about it all—He knows— HE knows!’ So God is one of the Names of the Father; Christ, his son, dies in the arms of his mother, as told in ‘Stabat Mater’. The same chapter narrates how he wakes up three days later at ‘cockcrow’, happy not to be beside his father, who ‘sees all and is in on everybody’s secrets’. Alex couldn’t conceive a more horrible torture than being under his father’s surveillance! And where I say ‘father’, I mean any figure that represents authority, a male managing editor, for instance. Rebelling against him, defying the order he represents, is what makes a true hero. Reading Tamam Shud confirmed, down to the tiniest detail, that which I had already figured out by accompanying Alex in his protracted artistic process. Even the bone flute, the untraceable toxikon, the gardener, and the botanist, it was all there:

Why dig him up, asks gold lips. Because of the gardener, says ginger. The gardener, she repeats. A botanist, says twiggy. An expert who seems to have found something that wasn’t there before, says ginger. A toxin, says twiggy. A poison, ginger says, a thing you only get when a toad pisses on a plant. It’s not a toad, exactly, says twiggy, staring at the picture of the skeleton [the Tarot card Death]. And what’s that, asks twiggy, pointing at something on the card, a flute? A bone flute, says the woman in heels.

But I also realised that, although I had learned a lot about Tamam Shud, the art project, and the ramifications of its fiction in reality, there was still a mystery to be solved, a mystery of a different kind, the mystery posed by the artist’s novel’s plot: who killed the protagonist and why? In a way, Alex had spoiled his own mystery in the very first text that I read from him, that is, the application to the open call, where he said, ‘I came to the

230 Light at the End of the Tunnel conclusion that [the one] who deleted all the traces of my past life must have been me’. Alright, but even if he wasn’t deliberately misleading here, even if I accepted that the victim was the author of his own assassination and subsequent obliteration, I still didn’t know the motive, nor the reason why he had forgotten everything about his own life, including the moment and cause of his death. I had my own speculation about the solution to the actual Somerton man’s mystery (an unrequited love story between two secret agents, with a baby in between), but that didn’t apply to Alex’s story. If I had to rely on Episode 1’s final dialogue, it was all the result of the protagonist’s three wishes, and the Algerian LA taxi driver an analogy of the genie in the lamp. But I was still missing too much information, I had only read one third of the artist’s novel, the mystery could not be solved until I read the remaining chapters. ‘The second part of Tamam Shud is full of surprises!’ Alex promised in one of his emails. But the second part turned out to be hard to get. The deadline for Alex to deliver it was 20 November. On 1 December, he wrote, ‘I am finalising the text, some edits to do and a couple of chapters to link part one with part three. As soon as possible.’ And he vanished after that. We tried to reach him by email, text messages, phone calls, to no avail. On 12 December I called him once again. He didn’t pick up, but replied with a text message saying not to worry, he was still working on it, and he’d be sending it by the end of the week. On 28 December, more than a month late, he sent Part II, called Piramidi (Pyramids), with apologies. When I forwarded it to Johanna Bishop, she said: ‘Oh, thank goodness! I have to confess, I was starting to think the rest of the project would be cancelled.’ My thoughts exactly. In the meantime, Kuba sent a proposal for the layout, which Alex liked a lot. It was what one would expect when opening the pages of a novel, nothing too experimental, just a simple design that didn’t distract from the narrative. Each

231 The Fantasy of the Novel chapter began atop of a new page. According to Kuba, this system increased the volume of the book in 10–15%, which, after consideration, wasn’t a bad thing, for it added more surface for the fore-edge print. About that, I had to ask Alex to prepare an alternative image, because his first preference, a reproduction of The Strange Signature, had to be discarded due to its thin lines, which weren’t noticeable when Kuba scaled it down to fit the thickness of the book. One day, Alex wrote an email announcing that he’d be sending the last part of the manuscript earlier than anticipated: ‘The end happened just as a surprise, not expected. Hope you all like it.’ Around the same time, Johanna Bishop returned Part II translated: 29 chapters and 20,797 words. Although these figures could change slightly after copy-editing, it was comforting seeing that we were on track to meet the agreed total of around 60,000 words. Contrary to what Alex had anticipated, I didn’t find any surprising twist, it was more or less a continuation of what I read before. I was on the living room’s couch reading a line that reminded me of our conversation about Gombrowicz’s Cosmos (‘Everything can become a code if you’re looking for a code’), when Joanna came and asked: ‘So what’s new with the novel?’ ‘The detectives didn’t make much progress in their investigations. The whole thing is structured as a series of visits they pay to knowledgeable characters: the kimono man, the big woman in heels, the woman with a moustache, weasel face … who lecture them on their respective area of expertise: archaeology, botany, etc.’ ‘It sounds a bit like Bouvard and Pécuchet.’ ‘Yeah, that’s true. Sometimes there’s a change in tone, some passages are less humorous, more dramatic, and also a bit off the main plot, which makes me think that these are chapters Alex has been adding lately after the main storyline was completed through the art project.’

232 Light at the End of the Tunnel

These unexpected tonal alterations kept me thinking for the next hours, until I felt the urge to consult Johanna Bishop’s opinion. She wrote back:

Hmm, hard for me to say until I’ve had the chance to put it all together and read through. There are shifts in tone throughout, and the constant fluctuation between slapstick, lyricism, and surrealism bordering on creepiness may be what I like best about it. Kind of like a [Jacques] Rivette movie. But yes, the pace of that fluctuation may be different in Part II (I found the scenes with the aging girl to be very moving). There’s also maybe more violence creeping in, even just in the sense of harshness in character interactions. The end of the aging-girl section works for me, since if we’re coming closer to the heart of the mystery (not that I expect it to be solved in a traditional way), it helps remind us that this is a murder mystery and presumably began with an act of violence. I did find the moralising by the girl to be jarring, though, it’s a little heavy-handed.

She was referring to the cheesy moment when the ghost woman says about her killers, ‘Forgive them, they lost everything there was in their lives starting with grace, they can’t speak what they feel and with that kind of violence they’ll never know love and their death won’t be mourned’. Johanna Bishop concluded:

I don’t know, I have no clue where he’s going with it and everything depends on that – I think for now the shifts not just in tone but in the rhythm of the tone is a good thing, because otherwise the scenes with the detectives getting sozzled and high while various characters give them lectures would become too repetitive. But then I’m a translator, not an editor, and Stockholm syndrome in relation to the text is part of my job.

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I found that last sentence very illuminating. Whereas the copy editor scrutinises the text from a critical distance searching for faults, the translator’s job demands the exact opposite, an identification with the writer as complete as possible, because she needs to see and say things the way the writer sees and says them. Eventually, when the translator has ‘the chance to put it all together and read through’, she may be able to take a step back and see the work from a more removed perspective, but not while she’s subsumed in its narrative. Johanna Bishop also raised a flag about Alex’s idiosyncratic style and punctuation. She tried not to change the non-standard elements (the way dialogue was handled; no diacritics; no colons; no question marks if it was followed by an ‘asked x’) except when uniformity problems came up or when she really felt it was necessary in the English sentence, because they had a stylistic impact. The problem for her was that it wasn’t always easy to tell what was a considered choice. I asked her to make a style sheet to brief the copy editor afterwards, so that he wouldn’t take Alex’s stylistic choices to be mistakes, saving an unnecessary cycle of corrections and counter- corrections.

I made sure everyone would stay busy for the few next weeks: Alex was in Paris finishing the third and final part of the novel, Johanna Bishop was in Italy ready to translate it, and Kuba was in Warsaw researching the most suitable printer. With everyone on track, I could leave town without stress. I had to teach again in the Netherlands, the idea being that Joanna would meet me in Rotterdam afterwards and from there we’d fly together to Lanzarote. I relished the prospect of spending the thick of the winter in our swimming suits but, mostly, I saw it as an opportunity to repair our damaged relationship. Though we

234 Light at the End of the Tunnel had long stopped any physical contact (I couldn’t recall the last time we showed some affection to each other) and the distance between us had grown large in the last months, I still hoped it wasn’t beyond recovery. The morning when I was packing for the airport Joanna left for CCA like any other day. There was no goodbye kiss. One hour later I was taking the bus to the airport, thinking how strange was going to be not seeing Alex anymore. I am just like Pozdnyshev, leaving home for a business trip. It surprised me to conceive such a bitter idea: Pozdnyshev is the jealous husband in Leo Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata who goes on a trip only to return home earlier than expected and find his wife with the violinist. ‘Kreutzer Sonata’, that was the piece the child was playing in the bone flute. What did the vision of the child mean? ‘It reminds me of certain folk stories about unearthing dead people’s bones, making them into flutes, and playing a song with them that tells the story of the dead person’s life.’ That’s what Paulina told me. So perhaps the child was playing the story of a dead man. The first time I saw him was under a yew tree. What did Alex say? ‘With the wood of yew, the first bow was made. One arrow from its wood killed Richard the Lionheart.’ The child appearing under a yew tree couldn’t be inconsequential, it announced somebody’s death. Through my investigations I had come to understand the meaning of the imagery employed by Alex in his project: the arrow as a metaphor for the passing of time that carries the narrator away from the happiness of his childhood beside his mother; death as the only chance of reunion with that missing moment, hence its ambiguous status as both end and beginning of life, though such encounter must of necessity happen in the realm of fiction, just like Dante met Beatrice. That much I knew. But the question now was, what did all that mean for me? I had to concentrate, think harder. The bus was approaching Warsaw Chopin airport. ‘If the hairs of a victim are played on a guitar or a violin, the singer will sing the name of the murderer’, Alex once said. Bow and arrow pointed to

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Richard the Lionheart’s death; a bow tie was a marker for the Somerton man’s death; bow and violin sang a certain death – whose? ‘The Two Sisters’ ballad tells the story of a murder driven by jealousy. The bones and hair of the victim are later made into a harp that sings the name of the murderer. So there was a bone flute, a violin, and a harp, but where was the harp in all this? It was, as everything else in the Tamam Shud mystery, hidden in plain view, it was the Music Door, no less. Did its jingle play the solution to the Tamam Shud mystery? I ought to read the rest of the artist’s novel to find out. Now, the mystery I was treading into was of a different order, the announced victim wasn’t fictional. Think harder David. The hairs of the victim are not used in the violin, but in the bow that produces the notes. ‘With the wood of yew, the first bow was made, with the wood of this tree the first lute was crafted’, one of the Tamam Shud characters says. What if that sentence didn’t refer to a bow that shoots arrows but to a violin bow? The violinist is the murderer! Who’s the violinist? Trukhachevsky, that’s the name of Pozdnyshev’s rival and the wife’s lover who plays Beethoven’s ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ with her. The child was playing a warning. It had been about me all the time. And the warning said, You are being killed right now. The bus arrived at the airport. I got off and stood by the departures entrance for five minutes before making up my mind and taking the bus in the opposite direction back home. I had a bad premonition. No, not a premonition, a certainty that I couldn’t shake off. It was midday when I got off the bus again. I pulled my suitcase through the hundred metres that separated the bus stop from my block of flats. I gave a quick glance to the yew tree in passing, but I didn’t stop. I dialled the code to open the building’s door and pushed my way in. I left the suitcase in the lobby by the mail boxes and climbed four flights of stairs. It was still and full of light on the top floor, thanks to the many windows that surrounded the perimeter of the tower. I slowly put the key in the lock, trying not to make any noise. I entered

236 Light at the End of the Tunnel the flat and quietly closed the door behind me. I advanced five steps towards the bedroom’s door, inhaled sharply, and opened it. In the middle of the bedroom, with their clothes on, I saw Joanna and Alex. They were holding each other so tightly that it took them a few seconds to notice my presence. A few seconds that felt eternal and I haven’t been able to erase from my mind since. Alex, who was facing the door, was the first one to see me. He slightly lifted his eyelids, then opened them fully in horror, still holding her. Joanna, feeling his sudden shock, turned her head and saw me too. I don’t know what my facial expression was but, judging by what I saw reflected on their faces, it must have been terrifying. I had seen so many similar scenes in movies, read so many times about the same moment in novels, a cliché, really, yet nothing prepared me for how to react. Pozdnyshev killed his wife, letting the violin player escape but, in my opinion, if someone deserved to die, it was undoubtedly the lover. I could deal with Joanna later. Besides, Pozdnyshev couldn’t serve as a model, because he committed the crime in his socks, what a ludicrous image. Those thoughts crossed my mind in rapid succession but didn’t materialise with any resolution, I was frozen. And, as long as I didn’t move, those two wouldn’t dare to do so either, like a pair of lambs meekly awaiting their execution. But I have never been a violent person. Even if for an instant I entertained the idea, deep inside I knew I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t find the energy to move my body, let alone the determination to raise my fist and land it in his face. How long did we stay like this? Probably not more than six or seven seconds. When I began to perceive the absurdity of the situation, I turned on my heel and walked away. As I was going downstairs, I think I heard Joanna calling me, but I can’t really tell if I heard anything at all, because the sound of my heartbeat was deafening, blood buzzing in my ears. Once on the ground floor, I grabbed my suitcase, still standing where I left

237 The Fantasy of the Novel it, and headed back to the airport, to Rotterdam, to never set foot in Warsaw again.

238

CHAPTER 15. MY LAST LONGINGS DEPART

V ocational detective skills, what a joke. I couldn’t see it coming and only found out too late and in the most traumatic way possible. Like the Tarot Fool, who ‘looks at the stars while walking on the ground’, I was so subsumed trying to read the abstract signs of the Tamam Shud universe that I didn’t pay attention to what was happening under my very nose. During the first weeks of my return to Rotterdam I could feel nothing but pain, haunted by the image of those two holding each other. At first, Joanna tried to reach me, but eventually she gave up. I stayed away from anything related to Tamam Shud, from anything that could remind me of that period in my life. As a result, I abandoned the project before it was finished. I never learned how it went, I never read Tamam Shud beyond the two unedited thirds, nor saw the book published. Occasionally, though, I’d run into some piece of text, an article or an interview, like the entry of a curator’s blog where she gave an account of her studio visit with Alex:

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After a tea and some chats on common friends and life anecdotes, the meeting changes gear and I realise the artist has (metaphorically) put on a performer’s mask. He opens drawers, shows pieces, tells stories and the objects in the house become new shapes, faces and skins. In a precise moment of that Parisian studio visit I acknowledged his advantage over me, his control of the situation and his making me uncomfortable with a show and tell of an erotica portfolio, following a script, I imagine, already tested with other female curators.

The curator nailed down Alex’s ability to relate to women through seduction and his masterful display of charm and pretension that echoed that first encounter with Jarek in CCA’s restaurant. Earlier, such a confirmation of the main personality traits that I had observed in Alex would have filled me with the satisfaction of knowing that I was right, that my personal impressions were shared by others. Now, all I could feel was a revolting pressure in my stomach. My Rotterdam house was an inexpensive rental that I could pay by doing sporadic small jobs. I didn’t need to meet anyone, certainly not from my former social circle, informed exclusively by art world people. I could spend weeks in a row without any social interaction. When there was no other option but to speak, for example to a store clerk, my voice would come out hoarse and rusty. I was dead to the world, leading an afterlife not unlike the one that Rimbaud describes in A Season in Hell:

For I can say that I have gained a victory; the gnashing of teeth, the hissing of hellfire, the stinking sighs subside. All my monstrous memories are fading. My last longings depart.

Looking back, Rimbaud saw the time shared with his fellow poet and lover Paul Verlaine as a living hell, a

240 My Last Longings Depart tempestuous relationship that reached its dramatic climax when the latter shot him with a gun. Verlaine was arrested and imprisoned, Rimbaud went back to his mother’s, where he had time to reflect on those years, both a source of torment and an extremely creative period. His decision to quit a life of madness and poetry is expressed in A Season in Hell, more concretely in its last poem, ‘Adieu’, in which the young poet says farewell to his former lifestyle and announces the abandonment of art. Eventually, renouncing art and life would become a victory for me as well. The initial pain slowly receded and, after a few years, all that was left was emptiness. At the beginning of my self-exile, Tamam Shud was still an aching memory to try to forget. I had traversed my own fantasy of reaching artistic relevance vicariously through another artist or, rather, the fantasy had been so brutally shattered that I became incapable of entertaining any more desires. A consequence of quitting the project before the end was that I would never learn the solution to the Tamam Shud mystery – and I couldn’t care less. I lost interest in knowing but, for the curious reader, I guess it’s a question that can be answered by reading the actual Tamam Shud artist’s novel. The price to pay for recovering the presence of mind that had been progressively impaired throughout the art project was settling down in a state of numbness. In time, I became perfectly insensitive: done with life, done with desires, done with art, I was set to become an elderly bachelor, like Kafka’s Blumfeld. If art is something that happens (and I learned that the hard way), an eventless life was the best I could aspire to.

What did I say about a friendly hand? One good advantage is that I can laugh at old false loves, and blast those lying couples with shame.

But now I can say something about death: death is meaningless. All those stories about ghosts, mediums, and an afterlife in which a dead man carries out the investigation of his

241 The Fantasy of the Novel own assassination, it’s all nonsense, literature for the living. Death isn’t even a thing, it’s just how the living experience the death of others. When I am dead there will be no more stories, no more mysteries, no more desires. The only thing a person can do while still alive is to prepare the conditions for her memory to survive her, creating something so remarkable that it becomes memorable, saying something now that will remain significant in the future, that will speak to generations to come. Posterity is a fantasy where artists deposit their desire. In fact, it is the ultimate fantasy, the imaginary scenario in which the artist satisfies her deepest desire, namely, leaving a mark that will outlive her. Most people try to live on through their descendants, but that’s the easy way, there’s no glory in having children who will transfer your name and your DNA, anyone can do that. Ancient Greeks called it génesis. They also had a name for fame: kléos, which is how others, the minority, try to realise their desire for immortality by means of a long-lasting fame that will preserve their name in future memory. The same Greeks already saw génesis, biological permanence, as mediocre in comparison with kléos, earned renown. But who can guarantee immortality by renown? Posterity is the quintessential fantasy because it is impossible to realise, in the sense that the artist will be dead by the time it happens, if it happens, and, even if it does, it will happen in unexpected ways, so posterity can only exist as an imaginary future. It’s powerful enough, though, to catalyse all the creative energy towards one single goal, whether the artist admits it’s what she works for or not. But my desire is dead and there’s no possibility of creation. This has been my life for the last six years and I have no intention of changing.

I must bury my imagination and my memories! An artist’s and storyteller’s precious fame flung away!

242 My Last Longings Depart

Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud in London.

243

EPILOGUE

E stranged from Joanna for six years, her text message comes as a shock. I have to read it twice. She says that she’s been invited by an art institution to spend a few days in Rotterdam (a ‘research trip’, she calls it) and she wants to meet me for a coffee. And she has something for me, something related to the Tamam Shud project. An obvious bait to lure me, although she must know full well that it has a slim chance of working. Yet, her message manages to disturb the numbness I have long comfortably settled into, stirring memories of our unfortunate adventure. I let them come, partly to prove to myself that I can revive that period of my life without getting sick. Bad news, the memory still hurts. But hiding in my Rotterdam refuge won’t help; perhaps a direct encounter with Joanna will erase the last vestiges of sentiment, a final push to get completely over it. I decide to respond her message. The next day we meet in a café downtown. I don’t remember the last time I was surrounded by so many people. The noise of chattering, clinking cups, the espresso machine is deafening. We sit in the furthest corner, face to face across the table. I look at her while she orders a cappuccino, an old habit

244 Epilogue of hers. She hasn’t changed a bit, she still retains the gift of looking ten years younger than she actually is. As she turns to me, I can read in her face that she doesn’t share the same opinion about me. She smiles awkwardly, does she regret contacting me? Now I’m not so sure that coming to see her was a good idea. ‘You said you’re in Rotterdam for a research trip. You still curate?’ I say. ‘Yes. Well, not exactly. I became director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow.’ ‘Congratulations’, I say, but it sounds unemotional. ‘The position suits you.’ ‘Yeah, it’s a step up, professionally, but I don’t curate exhibitions so much anymore. I write, though, just this morning I submitted a horoscope for artists.’ ‘That’s funny. Who’s publishing?’ ‘Szum magazine’, she smiles. Sensing that it’s her turn to ask me what I’ve been doing lately, I switch the subject abruptly: ‘You said you have something for me?’ ‘Yeah, I thought you’d like to have this.’ She produces a book from her bag and drops it on the table. I can read the title on the cover: Tamam Shud: An Artist’s Novel, by Alex Cecchetti. It’s a beautiful edition, 284 pages neatly packed between dark blue covers. The title and the blurb are in white letters, it’s a nice effect. The front cover has been embossed with a drawing in black ink, which I recognise as one of the Tarot-like wood engravings from the Dinner Room, the woman fishing oysters. The sides are overlaid with dark blue foil, which gives the book the air of a solid, compact object. ‘Printing the book took forever’, Joanna says. ‘The printer was in Warsaw, but the blue foil had to be done in Gdansk, so there was a lot of back and forth. And the fact that we didn’t really have a deadline put our project at the end of the printer’s priorities. Plus, the very day it was going to be printed, CCA’s

245 The Fantasy of the Novel new chief of publications literally stopped the press in order to insert the Ujazdowski’s logo more visibly. All in all, the book spent more than two months at the printer.’ ‘That’s really long.’ ‘It was an agony, I thought we’d never get it out.’ The waitress brings my black coffee and her cappuccino. I hold the book in my hands. ‘Are you searching for the fore-edge print?’ Joanna says. I nod, and she takes the book from me. She bends its pages on a slant, from the front to the back cover and, as if by magic, the blue foil fades away, not entirely, but recedes enough to give way to the white of the interior pages, which acts as the background against which the image of a withered rose emerges. Alex’s drawing, unmistakeably. ‘Kuba said that, with more pages, it’d have gained more vertical resolution, so to speak, but looking slightly jagged is part of its beauty, I think.’ Then she turns her hands to fan the pages in the opposite direction, from back cover to front. A new image appears: it’s the same rose but fresh. ‘You see, when the book is at rest, the double fore-edge print is concealed by the overlaying blue foil. In the interior, each page carries on it a fragment of the drawing’s lines, just a few millimetres from the edge, so that the sum of them all, when seen as a whole in the right angle, composes the image of a withered rose, or a fresh rose, depending on how you bend it.’ I take the book back from Joanna and examine its contents: there are 83 chapters instead of the 100 I estimated. ‘Hmm, I see there’s only one end’, I say. ‘How many do you want it to have?’ ‘Maybe you don’t remember, but Alex played with the idea of having three different endings. I guess he gave it up at some point when writing the last part.’ In a way, I am pleased he discarded the multiple ending idea, I’ve grown to dislike this sort of postmodern literary device. I thumb through the book, stopping at the last page. ‘My name is in the colophon’, I say.

246 Epilogue

Fore-edge print.

247 The Fantasy of the Novel

‘Of course, you’re still the managing editor, even though …’ Even though I left you in the lurch, I complete her sentence mentally. Out loud I say something different, ‘So how’s the book doing?’ ‘People like it, generally speaking, though I observe a difference in appreciation between those who attended the art project and those who didn’t.’ ‘Is that so.’ It’ strange that I’m asking so much about Tamam Shud. I thought I no longer cared, but here I am, enquiring about its fate in the real world. ‘Do you remember Styrmir?’ Joanna says. ‘Yes, he attended most of the Tamam Shud episodes.’ ‘Exactly, well, I gave him a copy of the book, as a token of appreciation for his loyalty, and also because it was his birthday. Anyway, I met him one more time afterwards, when he was preparing to move back to Iceland, we had a drink and chatted a bit. He said that the art project helped him understand the artist’s novel, so much so that, Part III, which is less linked to the contents of the performances and the exhibition, was nearly incomprehensible to him.’ This last bit arouses my curiosity. Joanna notices it. ‘He said that attending the art project aided his imagination. For example, Episode 4, when Alex wrote new chapters by means of Tarot cards, Styrmir said that he could hear Alex’s voice when reading those chapters, that reading the artist’s novel was like listening to Alex. He felt disappointed when he didn’t read about some visual elements that made an impression on him during the art project, specifically the green bow tie and the Erotic Cabinet. And vice versa, he regretted having missed Episode 5, in the botanical garden, because he thought he left out clues about whether the victim had been poisoned or not.’ She can’t repress a smile when revealing Styrmir’s candour. ‘So, on the one hand’, Joanna goes on, ‘he said that the situations, dialogues, and characters he had first encountered

248 Epilogue during the performances and the installations were easier to understand, to imagine, to situate them into a greater order but, at the same time, he also complained that such rich imagery limited his imagination.’ ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’ Did I just say ‘interesting’? ‘He spoke of how the Music Room, the Concerto Nuovo, made a strong sensory impression on him, and how it was later transferred to the artist’s novel. Stronger than the artist’s novel’s capacity to elicit images in his mind, in fact, so that everything he had previously experienced in a way aborted any possibility of picturing them freely.’ ‘So he said he didn’t understand Part III?’ ‘Yeah, I think he felt alienated by it. He said that he could still identify Tamam Shud as a murder mystery during Parts I and II. But Part III, or at least its final chapters, includes settings, scenes, and characters that weren’t introduced during the art project, and that’s when he didn’t find it worth calling it a murder mystery anymore.’ ‘I wonder if that has to do with the way Alex wrote. The first two parts were closer in time to the art project. But, as months passed by, his writing became more detached from the source.’ ‘Be it as it may, Styrmir’s conclusion was that Tamam Shud is really written for art insiders. He didn’t discard the possibility of the general public reading it and enjoying it, but he was sure that they wouldn’t get the work fully, not without the artistic references he had been exposed to for two years. What were his exact words? Oh yes, he said, “For people who didn’t see the performances, who don’t know Alex and his craziness, this book may look like a crazy piece of work”.’ ‘Wow. Alright. Did you have a similar conversation with a casual reader?’ ‘A gallerist friend of mine, he didn’t attend any of the events, but he did read it, and said that it stands as a work of narrative fiction in its own right, that has its own integrity and, though he admitted that an awareness of “some additional

249 The Fantasy of the Novel action”, as he put it, may have transformed it into a more complex experience, he didn’t think it needed an art project to stand on its own. But then, he didn’t believe it was written for a consumer of mainstream literature, he said that it isn’t a “novel- novel”, but something else, that it was made by someone with the will to express himself using the medium of literature, but who doesn’t really care about the readers.’ ‘So did he enjoy it or not?’ ‘It started quite well, he said, he felt involved while there was still a certain promise that something would develop and touch the mystery. But then he began to lose his way, as if in a maze, and he wasn’t sure he got it, eventually. He even came up with a metaphor, “It was like getting slowly into a forest: at first it is like a young forest and you can understand its structure, and then it’s getting weirder, denser. And then, at the very end, you say ‘Okay, I’m lost’.” Honestly, I was alarmed by the idea of a promise that the artist’s novel doesn’t fulfil. Though, on the other hand, my friend is intelligent enough to realise that it’s not a regular novel, that language isn’t really used to develop a plot but rather an experience.’ ‘I wonder if people who read it recommend it to others.’ ‘My friend did. He recommended it to one of the artists of his gallery. But the bottom line is that he valued the artist’s novel for what it is. He said it’s quite long and substantial, and the whole idea is quite involving, but it’d be nice to have some drugs to use while reading it.’ I appreciate her efforts to ease the situation with her final quip, but I can’t react. With nothing else to say, she sips her cappuccino. Preventing the conversation from dying prematurely, she takes the book, thumbs through its pages, and marks a passage with her finger: ‘Here, read this and tell me what you think.’

This young guy has a strange head, with a receding chin, high cheekbones, and eyes sunk deep in big dark sockets, like a skull. A bona fide skull that’s talking and drinking

250 Epilogue

beer, sitting there between the two detectives in the warm sunshine. Inside that skull-head, something seems tirelessly at work. Come to think of it, this kid has the cool eyes of a chess player. What do you want from me, asks young skull. From what we can gather, says ginger, this is the music in the book. The Rubáiyát, twiggy explains. … Because of that color disease, says ginger. The words, colors, music, that whole mix-up in your head, it could be useful, that’s why we’re here. Synesthesia, says twiggy, and it’s not a disease.

‘It’s Natan’, I say. ‘I just wanted to know if you’d recognise him too.’ I close the book. Joanna’s staring at me. It’s been an effective MacGuffin for us to chat a bit, but it’s run its course. Without Tamam Shud, silence reigns. Six years apart and we don’t know what to say to each other. Finishing off my cup of coffee, I ask her: ‘Do you still see him?’ ‘See whom?’ ‘Alex, of course!’ ‘Oh, Dawidku …’ ‘Look, I’m not angry at you anymore. I just want to know … I’m curious, that’s all. But you don’t have to answer.’ ‘You’re not angry at me’, she snorts. ‘I was so worried about you. I knew something was wrong, I wanted to protect you, but I never guessed you’d react that way, it caught me off guard, running away and cutting off communication.’ ‘It caught you off guard? I’d say I caught you in flagrante.’ ‘Still with that story?’ ‘I know what I saw!’ Joanna looks at me with infinite sadness. ‘That … scene you say you saw, Dawidku, I know about it only from your account.’ ‘You didn’t answer my question.’

251 The Fantasy of the Novel

‘For God’s sake, no! The last time I saw him was after the exhibition, we were together, remember? After that we finished the artist’s novel from a distance. There was no book launch whatsoever, no occasion to meet him again. The last thing I heard is that he’s got a new girlfriend. Another curator.’ I grumble. I call the waitress and pay for the coffees. I stand up, taking the copy of Tamam Shud with me. ‘Are you going to read it?’ Joanna says. ‘I don’t know.’ She looks at me with a mixture of concern, desolation, and frustration. ‘Take care, króliko’, I say. As I walk back home with the book under my arm, the curiosity to learn the end of the artist’s novel, the solution to the Tamam Shud mystery, starts to itch inside me. I recognise this curiosity as a proof of how much my current state echoes Alex’s art project: what it means to be dead, what it means to be obliterated. Is it possible to write after death? The thought brings a smile to my face. I notice that I’ve been looking at women in the street since I left the café. I feel hungry. My desire is awakening. And then I see it, not before my eyes, but in my mind’s eye: I picture myself writing. I make a resolution, an unexpected one that implies the return to art, to life, to the fantasy of posterity. And, with it, the return of conflict and disillusion. And so what? It’s decided: I am going to write a novel.

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