Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss(36)
By this point my mother had married Lloyd Marentette, whom she’d known for forty years. The previous spring, they’d been part of a tour group cruising the Seychelles. When Lloyd had grown seriously ill with a respiratory infection, my mother nursed him back to health, sitting in his stateroom through the night and monitoring his breathing. They fell in love. Now my father could no longer drop his laundry off at my mother’s house or take her out to dinner. He must have felt abandoned, all their ancient rituals finally settling into history.
Soon my MA program began, and the noise from the States receded into the background. My flat was located just around the corner from my graduate studio at Chelsea College of Arts. I worked every day, except Sundays, when the studios were closed, and bonded with the other graduate students who haunted the studios on Saturdays.
In October I audited a theory class in the undergraduate program, located just off the King’s Road. I didn’t recognize the instructor’s name but my well-read, cynically witty studio mate, Mike, didn’t miss a trick. “He’s a rock star, Frances,” Mike said, tossing his head up in approval. “Most important critic in London.”
Students spilled into the hallway when I arrived to class on the first day. I slipped through the crowd and found that all the chairs in the seminar room were taken. Some students sat on top of a broad table pushed against the wall, and I seized the last spot, sitting Indian style with my notebook on my lap.
Standing before us was a fit man in his early forties: the famed art critic Trevor Atkins. He had cropped salt-and-pepper hair, glasses, and an ordinary face made exceptional only by the rather pained expression he wore, as if his very popularity were a source of embarrassment to him. His hands rested tentatively on the back of a chair as the masses settled themselves.
When he finally spoke, I was transfixed. He had a gift for the oblique, the ungraspable, managing to synthesize everything I had ever read or thought about art over the years, while somehow creating his own art form with the parallels he so astutely drew between art and theory.
The seminar left me feeling only more motivated; I wanted to participate meaningfully in this dialogue between art and theory. I wanted, too, to know this Trevor Atkins, to absorb his influence, and sought out conversations with him whenever possible, even arranging studio visits with him for all the MAs. Then Trevor and I arranged a theory seminar for the MA program, inviting all the top theorists in London. Suddenly I had access to people I’d only read about in the States. These luminaries came out to the pub with us after class and, later, to my dinner parties. I had finally landed exactly where I needed to be, it seemed.
The change of longitude acted as a kick-starter for my art. I worked feverishly day and night to keep up with the intense flow of ideas, making small installations in my studio as sketches for larger pieces. I spent hours each day slicing up Dennis Cooper’s Frisk, line by line, just as Cooper’s protagonist sliced up his victims’ bodies. I relabeled beer bottles with the dismembered text and sold them as art objects at a pub on the King’s Road. Only much later did the piece’s seemingly disparate links between the devaluation of the artist, human carnage, and my family’s brewing history become clear to me.
I hardly slept. I’d wake in the middle of the night and scribble ideas inside a journal. Everything I’d ever thought or read was taking on visual shape, and I had to catch it all, as if I could outrun my terror of something essential slipping away. Come morning, I’d discard almost everything or morph certain aspects of ideas into new ones that might bear fruit.
One sleepless night the sky cracked with thunder, and rain pelted against my bedroom windows. I dropped my journal onto the floor and walked through my conservatory out onto the tiny terrace, the rain coming down hard on my head. I raised my arms up toward the pink glowing dome of London sky. I caught the rain in my hands, shallow pools forming in my palms, and splashed it over my face and neck like holy water. I stood there a long time, feeling the warm rain soak straight through my T-shirt to my skin. The muffled sound of traffic horns traveled over the buildings to merge with the rumble of thunder splitting open the clouds. I could stand there as long as I wanted, I realized; my life felt utterly my own.
Trevor Atkins and I had been in a darkened seminar room for hours. I projected slide after slide of my work from 1990 to 1995 while he hit me with searching questions. Certain slides we’d linger on for fifteen minutes or more, discussing my ideas, my intentions. A bold rectangle of light hit the wall when the last slide had finished.
“I find it refreshing,” Trevor said, “that your work is not exactly . . . ‘female.’”
I wasn’t sure how to take this. My breath quickened, erratic, imprecise. I hadn’t been able to sleep the night before, and in anticipation of our meeting, I’d stayed up reading Trevor’s exhibition catalogue essays. Compared to his brilliant lectures his writing style seemed stiff; and yet attaining his respect felt critical.
Trevor shifted in his chair. “Then again, certain pieces are clearly about how you perceive others in relation to yourself. Right? There’s a self-consciousness to them, really, and this, I suppose, could be seen as ‘female.’”
He was referring to my family piece, I knew, among others. “My work does tend to deal with the relativity of perception,” I offered. “You know. And with point of view.”
I hated the idea of my work being identified as “female”; I wanted Trevor to see me only as brilliant, apart from my sex. I yearned for this with every synapse in my brain and every cell in my body, as if my self-realization as an artist were entirely dependent on his favorable opinion of my work.