‘That weeping was strange, though, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, it was. I’m glad we got that dummy out of there before the hysteria really took hold.’
‘But you must have been a little bit spooked — I know I was.’
‘Sure I was. For a moment I thought it was weeping because it didn’t want to die for my sins. That’s how weird I am.’
I started to say something but then I thought it better to leave him to his thoughts. And me to mine.
He went down to the kitchen and came back with two flutes and the champagne in a plastic cooling bucket. He pulled the cork and filled our glasses with the bright foaming Moët & Chandon. ‘Here’s to you, Sarah,’ he said as we clinked. ‘You really have improved me.’
‘Here’s looking at you, Roswell, you’ve improved both of us.’ So we didn’t need to say anything more for quite a long time as we drank and leaned against each other and looked at the fire, while outside the winter evening breathed its cold breath on the windows and passersby in the darkness looked up at our golden oblongs of cosiness. It’s always surprising how things that are very complex and improbable become by degrees quite simple and as if they’re the only possible outcome of everything that has gone before. It was good not having to lean forward any more to help Roswell push his stone uphill.
The next day on a sudden impulse I bought a Standard and turned, as if with prescience, to the page with the cartoon and the various snippets. There it was: a photograph of Roswell and the hyperthyroid woman in front of The One for the Many. The story followed:
JESUS WEPT?
Ms Ernestine Casey and Mr Roswell Clark discuss The One for the Many, Mr Clark’s rejected entry in the R. Albert Streeter competition. Ms Casey and several others claim to have seen tears rolling down the face of the crucified crash-test dummy. The museum staff say that this was caused by condensation from the skylight. Mr Clark had nothing to add to this when interviewed at his home, and said that the figure was not available for inspection.
‘Aha!’ I said to myself. ‘I bet Roswell gets one or two phone calls before the day is over.’
When he came to my place that evening we both showed our Standards and said, ‘Have you seen this?’ Then we both laughed and said yes, we had. ‘I had a phone call as well,’ he said. ‘Guess who from?’
‘George Rubcek?’
‘How’d you know?’
‘First name that came into my head. What’d he say?’
‘He said he was sorry my piece hadn’t been accepted for the exhibition but he’d been outvoted. Then he offered me seventy-five thousand pounds for it. When I told him I’d burnt it he laughed and said that was one way of making a creative experience complete and he hoped I’d stay in touch.’
‘Seventy-five thousand pounds! It takes me six years to make that much! Are you sorry you burnt it?’
‘No. It’s not as if the burning of it cost me that amount of money — I did what I needed to do to get from one thing to the next; I wasn’t manufacturing something for sale, and the value put on it by a would-be purchaser is irrelevant.’
‘My hero,’ I said.
There were no other journalistic enquiries about the weeping Jesus and nothing further in the press that we heard of. In due course the R. Albert Streeter prize was announced. It was won by one of the dustbin entries, not Weedy’s orange-peel effort but one that featured eggshells and coffee grounds. A young woman called Prismatica Froude was the proprietor of this dustbin. Folsom Bray, as director of the museum and chairman of the judges, issued this statement:
We live in a time of constant change and constantly changing perceptions. Governments are having to recognise that their world-views are not always shared by those they govern, and cultural establishments find themselves in the same situation. In art as in world affairs there are groundswells that compel us to reassess what we have always taken for granted and to redefine art itself.
In the primeval caves of France and Spain, among the astonishing drawings of animals, there can be seen negative handprints made by placing the hand with outspread fingers against the cave wall and blowing powdered red ochre or blue-black manganese around it and between the fingers. Startling in its immediacy, this ancient image says, ‘Look! With this hand I take hold of the world.’
Through the centuries the world has seen what the hands of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and other masters have achieved. Can the hand and the mind be separated? Or is the mind really the primal and the primary hand? Henri Focillon, in his classic meditation, The Life of Forms in Art, cites Hokusai’s demonstration in which he placed a scroll of blank paper on the floor, poured a pot of blue paint over it, then dipped the claws of a rooster in a pot of red paint and let the bird run across the paper. Those viewing the result found in it the image of a familiar stream carrying the red maple leaves of autumn. The mind of Hokusai used for its hand the feet of a rooster; and the minds of the viewers became the hand that drew a recognisable image.
There were fourteen hundred and twenty-three entries in this competition and they separated themselves into various categories of works that could be grouped together. Dustbins, tampons, and underwear were three of these categories, dustbins being the most numerous: there were ninety-seven of them, empty or full in their different ways but unanimous in their perception of the human condition in the world of today. There are no two dustbins the same but they speak with one voice, the voice of the mind that is the supreme hand. In the eggshells and coffee grounds of the winning entry, in these entrails of our nights and mornings each of us may descry a different future but whatever comes, we must work through it together, no two of us the same.
‘There you have it,’ I said. ‘Nobody can bray like Folsom.’
‘He’s the man, all right,’ said Roswell. ‘I need you to take your clothes off again.’
‘Are you going to take advantage of me, squire?’
‘First a few longer poses,’ he said, and followed me up to the studio. When I was au naturel he had no chair for me, only the blanket on the floor. ‘What I want,’ he said, ‘is you in various attitudes of listening: standing, sitting, lying down — as many different ones as you can think of.’
‘Listening?’
‘Listening.’
‘For what?’
‘That we don’t know yet,’ he said. ‘It could take years.’
So there I was, wearing nothing but my bat tattoo. Which seemed to have a lot of lift in it. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I believe it could.’
32 R. Albert Streeter
To be a patron of the arts of painting and sculpture has been my delight. But now do I question whether I had not done better to buy a soccer team or found a leper colony. The competition to which I gave my name at the museum of the same name has produced a catalogue of fifty entries. I ask myself for what have these been chosen, what attributes? There is of course a place for dustbins and their contents, for used tampons and dirty underwear, but I weep to think that my museum is that place. Is this all there is?
‘Be tranquil,’ I say to myself. ‘It does not import, no.’ The money comes in faster than I can spend it. In my pocket it lights a fire and I extinguish this fire in one way or another. Sometimes with a Peng, sometimes with a whimper.