WANDERING AROUND THE tiny, empty house while Milton was out, and knowing that she would not be stuck there forever—that she would never live there again, in all probability—let Maude appreciate its jewel-like quality, with the squares of color glowing out of the blackness. It was not unlike the afghan that lay over the arm of the black couch, squares of concentric color within bright color, each outlined in and joined by crocheted black. She had never had trouble loving that.
She was thinking about what she’d do for the final Concepts class. It was a self-imposed task. Bruno wouldn’t care and the class wouldn’t care if she did nothing, which was what most of the class would do. Why not, if an empty gallery, presented as a show, could still make a splash, even though it had been done. For her, though, showing the empty gallery again was like telling the same joke over and over. It lost its punch.
Outside the wall of glass, redwinged blackbirds rose from the field in a group, the heartlifting vermilion on their wings flashing as they swerved up and disappeared. From the cracked patio behind the living room to the row of houses visible on the far side, the field was soft with wildflowers—buttercups, clover, the first pinks, tiny at the end of the stiff blades that were their stalks, and the dandelions that so angered the other homeowners. The field was slated to be shaved and tamed that summer into an official park, with playing fields and metal swings.
She’d been thinking about an ethnography of the artworld but couldn’t come up with a way to present it elegantly—the affine group of the men who could sit in the bar night after night, who knew the right things to say, the right people to know. The glossary—visual verbal linear dialectic Wittgenstein Gertrude Stein Duchamp. A glossary of forbidden, uncool, embarrassing words: feeling expression beauty universal transcendence. The forbidden qualities of prettiness, decorativeness, lack of sophistication, traditional craftsmanship.
Though the atmosphere of the artworld might be a perpetual sixties, in art, it turned out, not all that much was allowed. At first conceptual art had seemed to bear out the atmosphere of freedom. Visual art at that point forbade all narrative elements—anything except color, form, composition, mass, any representation at all, even of emotion. Visual art was to be scientific, to make progress, in the exploration of its pure components. Maude put Milton as a dot on that timeline. But conceptualism, in its way, wasn’t much different. It was just that its mandate was to reduce art to its intangible elements—the framing that turned whatever was framed into an object of commentary or contem-plation, whether it was a urinal, a soup can, or the knowledge that the artist was listening to your footsteps and masturbating under the gallery floor. It was still about what made art art.
But the artist covertly under the gallery floor, under your feet—it did give you a feeling. And something else they talked about at the bar, in class: blurring the line between art and life so that art wouldn’t be something framed, on a pedestal, apart, but something lived; and, likewise, your life could be redeemed by becoming, itself, art. How exciting that was. How—romantic. Hence the boxes of nail parings and pubic hair, the exhibited electrocardiograms and medical charts, the videotapes in which an artist comes and goes, doing dishes and forgetting his keys but not talking of Michelangelo. As process, okay. As product—maybe pretty boring.
She could imagine acceptable things she could make. Wearable sculptures of coiled twine or strips of rag or feathers, in non-body shapes; cubes covered in real growing grass; rooms with a grass floor, or filled with artificially made fog—if possible, a cloud floating in the middle of a room. A joke about containing the uncontainable, nature; about the puniness of artifice. Ungrandiose, antigrandiose art. It would appeal to the senses; it would be beautiful, in fact. And, therefore, probably uncool.
For, above all—so it seemed as she stared abstractedly out at the soon-to-be-paved and replanted field—art had to be exclusionary to succeed. It had to make an in-group and an out-group. She had even seen a gallery piece about that, this year, done with masking tape on the floor. The way art could do this was by special knowledge, the kind of initiation where you betrayed nothing (no goofy handshakes or pins and insignia). It was straightfaced but never earnest—you just wore shades. The work couldn’t be too accessible or easy in its appeal. It must not be for everyone. You had to be one of the initiates. The knowledge required had to change frequently, be an ever-moving target. And that was what was wrong with traditional art—with representation. It was a magic no one really understood, and it was powerful magic, with deep effects; but anyone could learn to read it in two seconds. Everyone could like it.
You would think, she thought, that people could stop worrying about being cool once they got out of high school.
This ramble of thought was interrupted by the clank and clatter of the front door, and Milt was there with her, unavoidable, throwing his raincoat onto one of the red kitchen chairs. “Well,” he said, as if she had asked a question. He’d been in the city, she knew. “They’re dropping me.”
This was not going to be good. “Who?” she said. If only she’d been in her own room when he came in. She couldn’t help it: she wanted to hide.
“The gallery,” he said bitterly, as if it were her fault, and as if she ought to know.
“Your gallery? Your gallery is dropping you?”
“I’m not selling well enough.” His hands and shoulders made a wide W of a shrug. “They have better uses for their space.” He looked at her face. “Don’t worry. I can still pay your tuition.”
“I wasn’t even thinking about that.” A stronger feeling over-came her fear.“Daddy—I’m so sorry.”
“Aagh”—he made his classic tossing-away gesture—“it’s just fashion. That’s all it is. It’s just fashion.”
“You’re right. You’re absolutely right,” she said as he loped past, on his way upstairs to his studio or bedroom. “Oh, Daddy. You’re a real artist.”
He paused at the bottom step. He didn’t look at her, and she saw he couldn’t. “Thanks, honey. Thank you, Maudie.” He looked at her quickly. “I never thought you liked my work.” He took one step, disappearing into the walled stairwell, so that just his voice was in the room: “You’re good to me, kid.”