February - Giants 2 страница

"Are people already there?" I asked. The parking lot was full. No way this was all for us - already, without us even being present. But Vivian nodded.

"You ready, guys?"

We both shrugged. We didn't have much of a choice if we weren't, so we nodded, and faced it together. Gerard, ever the showman, couldn't enter the building in silence. As he grandly opened the door for all of us, he declared, "How many goodly creatures are there here! / How beauteous mankind is! / O brave new world / That has such people in't!"

Gerard's show was called The Flowers of Hell. Inspired by, of course, a work of Baudelaire, and the entire show seemed to anchor on a picture that Gerard had created fairly late on in his creative process which accentuated this theme. He called it Van Gogh's Sunflower, but instead of doing a reproduction of Van Gogh's work, Gerard's painting was a sunflower painted on a blue background with Van Gogh's head in the middle, acting as the flower's large centre. There were lots of variations on the abject floral theme: another one had a portrait of Van Gogh with a sunflower in place of his ear, another had Van Gogh and Gauguin (who had painted sunflowers to one another), locked in an embrace in a sunflower field. There were several more of Gauguin and Van Gogh, acting like a perfect couple, always locked in embraces with flowers all around them, or as parts of their weak and starved bodies. These paintings took up the side of the exhibit which displayed the title, and it was where most people congregated. I had seen a lot of these paintings, but now that I saw them in conjunction with the tall black letters that formed The Flowers of Hell in front of me, these pieces struck me in a different way.

"I didn't know Gauguin and Van Gogh were lovers," I remarked.

"They may not have been, but I think they were. Purely an artistic interpretation, mind you, but what isn't? Their letters to one another are as passionate as I've seen," Gerard explained. He was taking me around the room with him, his hand on the small of my back. There were a lot of people inside, but in spite of the crowd, we were left alone. Though everyone knew this was a show for Gerard Wyatt, no one had any idea who that was. Gerard had been instructed to produce mystery, and then, after some time of it, grew quite fond of keeping this mysterious nature. In the one corner of the art gallery there was the artist info and a picture, but it was a self-portrait that Gerard had produced. He painted himself as a dove jacket, and the dove jacket alone.

"I was trying to go for a Magritte painting, where the bodies of people in suits seemed to suspend themselves as if nothing and everything supported them. I don't know if it came off right," he confessed to me, noticing my eyes wandering over the painting and information about himself. The information was also fairly sparse. Gerard Wyatt, former Parisian artist, now lives in New Jersey. One single sentence, and it produced the half truth that others could fill in about history. The sentence biography was not what people came to see, though, and now what drew the exasperated sighs when seeking information. Most people seemed disappointed that there was no actual photo of the artist. It was that perverse instinct we all had, to know absolutely everything and to want to see.

"I should know," Gerard stated. "I have that same thing. In their position, I wouldn't only request a photo of the artist, I would want a nude, as if these paintings weren't enough of the vulnerable impulse satisfied."

As Gerard and I began to walk the perimeter and I was seeing all the paintings together at once, I began to understand his small self-portrait a little better. That was a nude for him. This entire art show was a nude for him. Being naked required more than just taking off one's clothing; it involved baring everything that you had tried to keep secret. These paintings, though twisted and surreal a lot of the time, were full of the truth. They were Gerard's unconscious mind, his dreams, and what his eyes perceived to be his reality. The bright colours unified all of them with the intensity of emotions that they were reactions against. The overwhelming colours could sometimes be seen as a way to distract, a way to tidy up truth but not actually dwell in it, but it was the opposite here. Just because Goya used black to convey his deepest darkest emotions, didn't mean that Gerard could use neon colours and be made inauthentic. Colour was colour, so long as you used it to create your reality, then it was what you became.

There were a lot of self-portraits, although only myself or Vivian may have known them to be self-portraits. Several of them involved shadows and skylines that had clouds shaped like a man. It took me until I saw the one that contained a thick black outline of a man filled with every single colour, that I realized it was him. Then, shortly after, I realized how much he was showing here. This was all that was inside of him; if you were to cut him and break the fortress of his skin and clothing, all you would find underneath was colour upon colour upon colour. It was breath-taking and beautiful. I held his hand and squeezed it tight as we walked by those pieces. He was risking so much right then, and I didn't know how he could bear to sell any of it.

"I paint and then I let it go. Once it is out of me, it's like the end of an exorcism. It is pure catharsis, in the pure poetic sense. I take a deep breath and think, well, that's good. It was fun while it lasted, but no more dwelling. Dwelling is what Goya did. He lived his reality too much. It was all on the walls around him and he never left. It is all on the walls around me now, but I will have fun tonight, and then people can take it from me. I don't need to see it again. Oh. Look," Gerard did a small flip of his hand, and we turned a corner in the art space. "I have already forgotten it. That room behind me no longer exists."

It was my own catharsis to go through these rooms with him, and hear him talk about his own work. I had been so busy preparing all of it, cataloguing it, and grappling with the clashing issues of economics and art. Before these pieces had just been my job, just pictures to put up and I needed to come back to that poetic intention that Gerard was so intent with following, at least, now. Gerard had been extremely quiet about his work while he was painting, not wanting to tell me anything because he was not ready to let it go yet. Now that distance had been achieved, it was an incredible experience to go around and hear about his he got his inside to the outside, why he had used the colours he did, and why, most of all, he had called it The Flowers of Hell. We were the audience, each of us a half truth to the other half truth, and together, we formed something complete.

The only flower paintings in the exhibit had been the Van Gogh renditions, so the title of the entire display initially confused me. The hell side of things also didn't quite make sense. Sometimes that same poem by Baudelaire was translated as Flowers of Evil; I didn't see evil in Gerard's work, either. He had wanted to do the anti-thesis of Goya's black paintings, and yet, he had still kept the hell or evil element deeply apart of his work, at least, so far as titles went, and I was not sure why.

"Because we can't avoid it, Frank," he informed me. "As much as we create our own reality, people will up turn any number of rocks until they find evil. People will keep digging in the ground until they find Hell. So I gave them what they wanted to find in the title, and in the mean time, I tried to make it all beautiful. There are flowers, remember, too."

He went on to explain a little bit more about Baudelaire and the symbolist French poets to me, which, to him, were what he wanted to embody with this display. There was no point in painting beauty, even if all he saw was beauty in the world, because not everyone would see that. People liked having evil, they liked knowing the villain, and they liked creating the monster. "Like us," he told me. "We are beautiful and our relationship is wonderful, but people will see things that we don't and they will make us into monsters."

The analogy stuck with me. I got the French poets, and I even began to understand the Gauguin and Van Gogh pictures, too. To us, they were beautiful and their love was amazing, but the homophobia that existed was rampant and ran everywhere, permeated everything. People didn't see a wonderful embrace, they saw faggots. People didn't see Gerard and I as a fantastic couple, they saw pedophilia. People didn't even just see sex nowadays as a beautiful act, they saw it as vile and dirty. The French poets talked a lot about prostitutes and the grime of the city in their work. They tried to make reality into an art form, in order to redeem through representation, but most of them were discounted for being disgusting and sadistic.

"In fact," Gerard commented. "The very word sadist comes from Marquis de Sade, one of the most under studied authors in the history of literature. Granted, he was in prison for the horrible things he had done to women, which I don't take lightly and were most definitely evil, but the work that he produced should have been taken more seriously because of the society that it was produced in. Monsters, like words, are always created. Their meaning is a lie we all choose to believe and accept, and just like art, it means nothing without an audience. By censoring Sade, they actually gave his writing more power. Desire, the desire that he talked about and was censored for, is always produced and made stronger through prohibition."

Some of his discussion made me nervous. He was accessing old wounds, that of pedophilia, that I was not quite ready to deal with again. I found myself looking around the gallery, just in case. There was no use, though. Anyone here, even if they had a problem with us, couldn't do anything to us. There were no restrictions anymore. I wondered about this, too, though. Having no restrictions on desire, did that make us want each other less? Or would we have the backdrop of homophobia to always fuel us forward? What if no one reacted to our presence tonight? What if we were completely encouraged in our actions, and there was no resistance? Would we still be in love? I squeezed his hand tighter, feeling the anxiety mount. But all he had to do was look at me with a small smile, and touch the pocket of my shirt where the wooden dove was kept.

"Prohibition, desire, sadism... It all becomes a mess of words. But I do appreciate the great thinkers of the times, and I believe Sade was one. His character Juliet gave women another role model for their sexuality, someone who could prosper and be in charge of herself. She was a prostitute, yes, but people always discount them. Sade wasn't so fast to do that, and that is why I still marvel at him and many others from that time. These writers and their writing, because they depicted what was gross - but very real - they were in prison and discounted."

He continued to tell me more about the French symbolist poets. He had mentioned Rimbaud and Verlaine before, but now these new names were being thrown at me, and their disgusting work. Before I was too quick to judge, I reminded myself that flowers still grew in hell, or at least, they did according to Baudelaire. There were no value judgements in these works; they were just writing what they saw. There was no strong moral, because it was a lot harder to have morality anymore when you really saw what the government was doing. Gerard talked about Picasso's blue period when he first went to Paris, and how he saw the beggars, the thieves, and the prostitutes that were starving on the street. Beautiful? Not beautiful? Picasso, and Gerard, wasn't quite sure, but they were certainly not disgusting or wrong. They just were. Gerard told me all of this in a flurry of words and examples. I could barely keep up with all the allusions he was telling me. One moment he seemed to be talking about Bastille Prison, the next he was telling me about Lucien Freud's work on the grotesque body, and how this figure had been dealt with by Mikhail Bakhtin. He told me about Rabelais and his world, and the trickster figure that came up in carnivals. Not the kind of carnivals that had cotton candy and Ferris Wheels, but the ones that were used ages ago as a relief from the burden of the everyday world. People would switch roles: you could be King for a day and the King could learn what it was like on the ground floor, with the dirt and grime. The trickster figure was integral to this function. Carnival was sometimes known as The Feast of Fools or The World Upside Down; it was the trickster that embodied this and made it visceral (" Carne means meat, after all," he informed me. "Full body experience, full flesh, the meat of our bodies turned inside out so the surface became the centre."), who would literally turn themselves upside down, perform a gender swap for a day, and then go back to normal.

"They would always go back to normal. We must always go back to normal. It is this stage of normalcy, as much as I hate it, that makes the chaos of carnival that much better," he insisted. His arms and hands were as much of a part of this conversation as his words were, and he was completely engaged. I nodded along happily, not offering much to our exchange. I had no idea who half these people were, and I didn't care right then. I wanted to know more about him and how he interacted with his work. Though his influences were a part of that, they were only a small part. He was still everything.

I looked around at his art, and saw all the beauty in it. It was hard for me to understand what he was getting at in terms of the disgust and grime of the city. I understood the perversity that most people interpreted in homosexuality, but we were in an art environment. Were we safe from that? Wasn't this the carnival, and the switching of roles, he was referring to? I had no idea and I didn't think Gerard was that sure either. He was taking such a huge risk with all of these paintings, and it was probably why he needed to conjure up these images of prison, of Sade, and flowers in hell. He knew he was beautiful and what he was doing mattered, but he was also so nervous. I squeezed his hand when he linked it with mine, and he seemed more grounded. He took a deep breath before we went around the last corner, and I began to comprehend how much he had really exposed of himself.

The last, and the largest, painting in the exhibit was of me. I was shirtless and probably naked, but the painting cut off at my torso. You could see the pelvic bone and the hair that trailed down, but it stopped before I was exposed. My hands were on my hips, but placed behind them so they were not visible. I seemed to be leaning out of the canvas, my eyes stern and looking forward. Not only did I almost appear as a three-dimensional image, but I was also painted in neon colours. I seemed to leap off the page and embrace the Technicolor world - and the painting actually did look like me. A younger me, perhaps, but still me. I was still amazed at how painters could paint someone and actually make it look like them. I didn't know how the actual resemblance could be caught; it seemed like something so solid as a person and their identity was barred from being so easily be reproduced without the use of a camera. But painters - and apparently Gerard was one of them - could do it. It was a hidden talent, though, and the painting only became that much more incredible when the person depicted was standing next to it. Gerard and I walked over to the canvas, and the people who were there looking, looked at me, and they made the connection instantly. And then they started to move away. It was okay once homosexuality was distanced between two long-dead artists and mere speculation anyway, but once it was real, in front of you, it was different. They saw me painted in neon colours and shirtless, and Gerard, who was now identified as the painter, and they began to put the pieces together. They began to plant those flowers in hell.

"When did you do this?" I asked him. I had been so involved with most of the art show that I would have definitely remembered seeing this piece. I remembered making the canvas with Callie and Dean, but the painting? No recollection at all.

"I hope it's okay," Gerard stated seriously. A murmuring of voices had surrounded us and he was doing a good job of ignoring other people's questions. He focused intently on me, and still held my hand.

"Yeah, I guess, it's fine. It's your art... I'm just... amazed," I answered sporadically. I really did have no idea what to say or what to think. I was flattered, but wow, I also felt exposed. I knew what he must have felt like the entire time, only I didn't have as good a focus as he did. I began to hear the murmurings all around us and I began to have doubts. I felt the grime grow under my fingernails and the mask of carnival fall away, unprotected.

"Say the word and it comes down," he told me. He brought himself beside me and put his arm around my waist. He leaned in closer. "If it's too much, we'll get rid of it. I promise."

Hearing how willing he was to let it all go made me more determined to keep it up. The murmurs began to fade into the background and I began to feel my conviction grow stronger. This must have been how those writers survived jail. We were beautiful - Gerard had made me beautiful - and if I knew that, it was the strongest feeling that would keep me there.

"I'm okay," I told him, swallowed hard, and then nodded. He smiled and clasped my hand tighter.

"To answer your previous question, I did this while you were sleeping today. Vivian and Cassandra helped with the set up. They like it, but they didn't say too much. It was too much detail to go into about the flowers of hell and all the explanations and feelings I have given you here. They will learn to appreciate it in time, as I'm sure others will."

I nodded. "But do you think it'll sell? I think that was what Vivian was more concerned with."

Gerard considered this. "People love controversy, even if they make it up themselves. Banned books always get followers, and even in jail, Sade had readers."

"Prohibition and desire," I echoed from before.

"Words, words, words." He smiled, and the topic was closed.

I was still not sure how comfortable I was having people look at the painting because they were disgusted by it, and their repulsion produced desire. Did I really want to be bought - in art form - out of shame? But I thought about those in-between people, who weren't sure whether or not they could do art, and I extrapolated that cause. Maybe whoever bought this, if someone did, they bought it because they themselves had felt shamed. Maybe they too also wanted to see the beauty in what they loved, and to finally let themselves do what felt good, even in spite of the commentary. It overwhelmed me how close art and sex were related, how close one could go to pornography in an instant, and how it could all so easily be blacked out and censored. I thought of the photos that I took of Gerard and myself; they were packed safely away in the basement room at Vivian's place. I had looked at them often, but would I ever be brave enough to do something like this? Probably not. Painting was painting - there was that safe distance, even if it was a portrait. If I had my pictures of us on display.... well, then, there it would be. Out for everyone to see. I liked having the blanket around my world, and in spite of myself, I had enjoyed being in the in-between art world, delving into production.

I took awhile there to realize the beauty of pure display. The neon colours that Gerard had been painting with seemed reflected outwards by the small Christmas lights that Vivian and I had decided upon using to accentuate the eggshell white walls. The art space was dimly lit except for those lights where they were strung along. The table that had food was beneath small lanterns made of paper and cast another wash of colour onto the area. Then there was the way the display seemed to ooze around corners and onto walls, creating another wave of vibrancy. Gerard had done the art, but we had made it come to life as a living, breathing, and fucking creature. The display was alive. I had been proud setting it up, and now that I realized the show ended with me, and Gerard and I had created this movement together, I stood in awe.

Someone now approached Gerard. They were tentative, and held a pad of paper at their side. "Mr. Wyatt? The painter?"

"Gerard, please, and yes, I did paint these," he declared. I could tell by the way he clenched his face that this was his least favourite part of the show. But it had gotten to about that time. At the end of the gallery, a small crowd had gathered, and wanted to know more.

The person wrote down a few things on their piece of paper. They asked a few questions that I had already asked about Gauguin, and Gerard gave them abbreviated answers. It was weird hearing him talk so little. The reporter wrote down what they could, and then turned to me. "Are you a model?"

I laughed rather strongly. I was standing there with my shirt un-tucked, my pants rolled up because I was too short, and I looked probably hot and flushed under so much attention. "No, I'm not."

"But is that you in that portrait?"

"Uh... yeah, but I'm not a model. Definitely."

Finding me now boring, the reporter person turned back to Gerard. "Is he your son?"

I shut my eyes, dreading the remark. I was glad that the person had found me boring, because I didn't know what to say to this or if Gerard was comfortable with answering. He chuckled a bit, but then casually corrected them. "No, this is Frank. He is a photographer, usually. We live together."

I felt his hand on the small of my back go up and down in encouraging touches. I loved how he had phrased his answer. We lived together. I didn't live with him or he didn't live with me. We were together, equal. He had even introduced me as a photographer, too. Pure equals, in art, and in personal capacity.

The reporter suddenly found me interesting again. Though he didn't ask me any more questions, he regarded me a lot more and seemed to become more impressed with my presence. I ignored him, and the other people that came and went after him. At one point, someone walked by and took a picture of the two of us standing together. They asked for another one, of just Gerard, and he had refused.

"I don't see why Frank has to go. He is with me. Wouldn't you want your story to reflect that?" he was using his snide tone of voice, and I laughed. It was so rare he was this sardonic, and it amused me to no end. We took picture after picture together, and I felt my face flush with my brief touch of fame.

"What did Warhol say?" he asked me, just to keep me thinking.

"That everyone gets their fifteen minutes of fame," I told him, giving him a playful shrug.

"Well, is it done yet? I have better things to do than to deal with this. Like actually paint pictures."

We laughed and made jokes between us as we dealt with more photographs and then a few more asinine questions from reporters before they all left, after getting what they needed. Gerard had given them one word responses and he was sure that they were going to spin sensationalist drivel come morning. They were always going to do that, so there was no point in putting any effort into it whatsoever. After the reporters were gone, we thought we'd have a chance to rest, but now it was customers and people who were curious coming up to us and talking. We had tried to move the discussion over to the snack and coffee area so we could at least eat while all of this was going on, but it was still difficult. It's hard to fill your mouth with finger sized sandwiches and baked goods when someone is constantly asking about Paris or your influences, or worse, your feelings. They wanted to know everything about us. Gerard, while patient at first, began to grow despondent.

"Look at the walls. Look at the pictures. My answers are all there," he told them, growing wearier by the minute.

"Why do I have to be a real artist? Can't I just hide in the woods and have people love me from afar? I want to go back to being a mystery," he kidded with me. He joked a lot about being overwhelmed and annoyed by these people, but each time someone came up to him, he took the time to talk. As much as he apparently hated it, he dealt with it. As much as it made him feel awkward, he knew it was something good. He may not be able to get world famous, and maybe his fifteen minutes was dwindling, but he could at least establish connections. Vivian had told me earlier on when I freaked out that the money he had just gained was gone again, that there was likelihood that he wouldn’t make very much money at all from this. If anything, Gerard would get notoriety, maybe a commission from someone, but the ultimate goal was teaching. If he could make a name for himself locally and prove dedicated years of study, he would probably get an honorary degree and then have a stable job again. I wasn't too sure if Gerard had heard of this plan, or if he was okay with it. It seemed to me that he didn't think too much about the future, about making a living. He was at a place in his life where he could paint and people finally wanted to talk to him about his painting. Money was awesome, but discussions about it seemed to go in one ear and out the other. I admired his ability to be so present and to not worry as much as I had been the past little while. I wondered what would happen if he did get a teaching position from all of this. It was hard to imagine him as anything other than my teacher, my mentor, and a huge part of my life. I didn't think he could teach art in a classroom setting. It was too impersonal, too far removed. He knew the art history, but I wasn't sure if he could convey it in conventional means, or if the school would demand that of him.

I took a seat in one of the chairs next to the table, and waited as Gerard kept talking to people. I looked at the painting he had done of me, and how caring he was being to each new person that came up to him. He would occasionally look over at me and smile and nod. He mouthed "just a minute more" a few times, and I was learning to just smile and nod back at him. It was odd, sharing him with this many people. I felt jealousy and annoyance at first. He had not been able to keep his hands off of me when we first got here. Now he seemed so fragmented and everywhere, but I looked at the painting of myself, and I felt better. Even if he did get a teaching position, it would be okay. He would be a good teacher - I saw that in just the way he was dealing with each and every person that was coming by. And I had shifted in his mind. He was no longer my teacher, I was no longer his student, and I was no longer living with him. We lived together. We made art and were artists on an equal playing field. And... he loved me. He made me into something beautiful. No prohibition required.

I felt the box in my shirt pocket and took it out so I could hold it in my hands again. Everything was changing around me, but this I held close to myself like an anchor and weighted the time down. Everything was changing, but he had promised me something. He would never forget me. I closed my eyes and held the box in my hand and waited for him, because I knew he was coming.

"Hey," he called down to me. He kissed my forehead and I opened up my eyes to see him standing over me. There were still people around, and now it was Vivian who seemed to be heeding all of the questions and conversations. This was a good sign; it meant art was being sold, and it meant that Gerard was now free. He moved himself between my legs on the chair and put his arms on my shoulders. He leaned down and we kissed on the mouth. We lingered, and our amorous nature from the car began to come back full force. He grabbed my empty hand and started to pull me up off the chair.

"Come with me," he told me, and I quickly began to follow. I put the box back in my shirt pocket and began to feel all fluttery with excitement. He looked around quickly before finally pulling me into the men's bathroom with him. It was empty, luckily enough for us, and he pushed me up against the door and pressed our bodies together. He reached beside my shoulder and locked up, and then buried his face into my neck. He kissed, licked, and then bit me and my breathing became sudden and out of control. I un-tucked his shirt from his pants, and he slide his hands underneath mine. His fingers went up and down my chest, and our hips pressed so tightly into one another that I could have not stood on the ground and still been supported by our weight together. I clawed my fingers down his back and then took off his jacket. Gerard unleashed us from against the door and then led us more into the bathroom. He put his coat down on the sink ledge and began to unbutton my shirt. Just the first few buttons, and I did the same for him. He leaned me against the bathroom wall, next to a stall, and then began to grip me through my pants. We made constant eye contact, but barely spoke.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14