Later that afternoon she and I are sitting in her shining house out in IJburg, the new town built on reclaimed land on the edge of the city. The place is clean and slick and rectilinear, and compared to my rickety old galleon of a place in tourist Amsterdam, which is all character and billowing sails stitched up with twine, Katrina’s house seems to me like one of those hi-teck Sunseeker power boats with a spectral paint-job and a diving deck at the stern. I keep that to myself – it’s another boat analogy – and sip my coffee and concentrate on the subject at hand. Prejudice and discrimination. But in Katrina’s hands, the subject turns to life and art. She ridicules a contemporary artist who said he wanted to get away from that whole proscenium arch thing, and then took hold of the glass of water on the lectern in front of him and held it up, so it glinted in the light like a malevolent charm.
A work of art is an idea, he said. A concept. If I say this is a work of art that’s what it is.
“Do you see what happened?” says Katrina. “The art object has just been reduced to a representation of an idea; but, since the glass of water is itself a piece of the world, a piece of life, it has been reduced to a representation of itself! That’s a double proscenium arch!” Pop! It’s enough to make you jump out of your pan!
You can ask the question what is art? and just about get away with it but ask the question what is life? and everyone thinks you’re making a joke. That doesn’t stop people asking what they should do any more than it stops them asking what they should like. In the days of tradition, everyone knew their place and what they had to do. The great confusion of now, says Katrina, is that the pecking order is not explicit, but it’s still very much intact.
She jumps up and searches the bookshelf for her copy of Morton Feldman’s book Give my Regards to Eighth Street, which is a collection of miscellaneous writings that add together to a memoir of life in the New York art colony of the middle nineteen fifties, in the formative pre-post-modern days. The days of Jackson Pollok’s unpremeditated paintings, and John Cage’s music of Zen silences. Feldman himself was a composer, and has a lot to say about music, and a lot to say about painting. And about being an artist; all with the understanding, it seems, that there is knowledge, and there is what you know; that you need to believe in nothing and to live in the present.
“Listen!” She says. She reads out a bit about Cage gradually talking less and less about the Zen as his work develops. “At most he would give it a sort of warm pat on the shoulder, like some old friend he was leaving in a comfortable bar in Tokyo while he himself began his trek across the Gobi Desert. Great, huh?” She says. “‘His trek across the Gobi desert!’” She goes on. “That’s the struggle of making art. And somewhere here there’s another bit about that, and how it became stranger as they got to the end of this time he’s talking about, what does he say?” She flips the pages, searching, “here we are: what was great about the fifties is that for one brief moment nobody understood art. It lasted maybe six weeks.” She laughs: “Maybe for six weeks!” She says, “imagine! When artists escaped art history, when they weren’t celebrities, when they were anonymous – and that’s actually how they wanted to be! Imagine that feeling, everybody defining art by doing it, no one trying to forecast what their reception was going to be.”
Or what art means, or what it’s for.
“And here’s something for you.” She starts reading again. “Now, almost twenty years later, I ask myself why everybody knows so much about art. Thousands of people – teachers, students, collectors, critics – everybody knows everything.” She flourishes her hand in the air. “Here it is, now listen: To me it seems as though the artist is fighting a heavy sea in a rowboat, while alongside him a pleasure liner takes all these people to the same place.” I guess he’s talking about the criticism industry. She snaps the book shut and holds it up like the torch of knowledge. “I love this book,” she says.
I tell her an art-spat story I once heard about the Farnsworth House in Chicago, USA. It’s a house all made of glass, showcasing the chic austerity of the great modern architect Mies van der Rohe. It was built beside the river Fox on a plot that was then open country but is now swallowed up by the low-rent suburbs of the city. The new owner of the house – an art patron, who else would buy such a place? – commissioned the sculptor Andy Goldsworthy to make a piece for the garden. The artist is famous for his in-wilderness constructions of in-locality materials. He took pieces of stone from the riverbed and arranged them into an art piece; but soon afterwards a gang of South Chicago boys broke into the plot and, finding this pile of stones, hurled them all back into the river they came from! Bump, thump, laugh!
I don’t even know if this story is true, but it starts me thinking of the survival of artworks and whether their only real value is what the philistines call standing the test of time. If it’s been here a while, if no one’s had the guts to recycle it yet, like Chartres Cathedral, say, or the Mona Lisa, then it must be good: but what about that Head Made of Frozen Blood, living its precarious life like a stone Buddha in Taleban country, festooned with post-it notes to the cleaners not to unplug the refrigeration? What if it’s not a work of art at all, but a piece of criticism? I’m suggesting that because the story is bigger than the work itself. What about that Pile of Bricks in store in the basement stacked up, so help us, like a pile of bricks? Is it art? And what about the Unmade Bed! Is that art, too? Or is it a set of iconic linens like the shirt worn by Horatio Nelson at the battle of Trafalgar, the one in the Maritime Museum, the one with the bullet hole in it from the bullet that killed him? Iconic linens doomed to a future of high value, pored across by conservators with tweezers removing specks of dust from the weave of threads one by one. I can feel the horror of the chambermaids. Do not disturb? Why the hell not! They could wash the sheets. They could make the bed – they could solve the problem of art just like that. They could solve art, with life!
I can feel myself becoming wolf. I tip my own head back and point my own grey snout at the sky to howl my own howl – but at this moment, Katrina’s little boy Jacob skids into the room clutching a doll made of modelling clay. It looks grotesque, a hunchbacked voodoo mannequin ready for torture. “Papa!” he says. “Look at Papa!” He pirouettes towards a chest in the corner and pulls the drawers open one by one until he finds what he’s looking for and pulls out another doll, this time an elaborate construction made of cardboard and sticky tape. “Mama!” he yells. He mashes them together. Then he points straight at me and says “I’ll make one of you!” and runs out of the room.
“Hey Mister Freud, let it go!” says Katrina to my startled face. “He’s a kid! He’s playing!”
I HAVE A BOOK IN MY STUDIO called The Aesthetic Theories of French Artists, by Charles Edward Gauss. It is about the influence of science on painting. Charles Edward Gauss is not like Katrina’s choice Morton Feldman, the up-from-the-streets expressionist. He is an East Coast academic, writing just after the Second World War and just before the beat generation of pre-postmodernists got going. He could be one of those guys on the pleasure liner that Feldman was writing about. In the stuffy language of his time he says things in his introduction like this: In rendering the French quotations in English I have made my own translations, though often better ones are available, in order that any responsibility for misunderstanding may be laid only to me. Thus neatly playing the academic’s trick of being humble – a poor thing but mine own – and showing off – I can translate French – at the same time. I’m sure Gauss was a decent man, but I was once attacked by one such closet egoist who was not: in a book launch seminar, my words traduced, my published views labelled racist, militarist and sexist, even as I was sitting there next to him – and as I blurted out my defences, blood gushing from every wound, he said, “I’m sorry. Didn’t know you’d take it so hard. Still – as Nietzsche said, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” This said with a smile. Hand stretched out for a shake. Which I refused. The difference between you and Nietzsche, I managed to get out, between gasps of rage, is that when Nietzsche said that, he was using his own words. And I’ve thought since that maybe it’s guys like him who are the wolves in the Little Red Cape story.
Aesthetic Theories of the French Artists is an account of the coming into being of modern painting from Courbet’s realism via impressionism and post-impressionism and cubism to surrealism. It traces in straightforward terms the impact on art of the arc of scientific revelations about the hidden nature of the material world. For example particle theory: photons streaming from the sun and bouncing off things and striking the retina is what the impressions of Impressionism are. And ‘Mr. Freud’s’ theories of the unconscious are what surrealism is. After the high-density tomes spewing out of today’s academies, it is refreshing: Impressionism is a depiction of the photons striking the retina. Surrealism is a depiction of the psyche. Modern art is all about science. So could we add that conceptual art is an imitation of quantum physics and its conundrums about the role of the observer? It all sounds plausible - but then, if it’s life and art it could all be just kids’ stuff. Maybe all art angst is kid’s stuff. Phenomenology, for example: if I shut my eyes does the world cease to exist?
“Hey, Fronk!” Katrina says. Fronk staggers into the room fully laden with a projector slung over his shoulder, projector stand in one hand, computer in the other, plugs and leads trailing behind him with a clatter and a sheaf of papers perilously tucked under his arm. “Did you forget the chairs or something, Fronk? We’ve got thirty people coming tomorrow.”