This contact with art, though it might seem superficial from what I just said, gradually shaped my interests, my tastes, and even my vision of the world. In fact, a deep connection developed between my practical “job” of going to feed the two men and my amateur interest in the most extreme forms of so-called “contemporary art.” I should make it clear that the magazines I’m talking about were not for antiquarians or historians; they focused on art in its current state, which since the 1970s has been a perpetual search for difference and originality, an endless escalation. From outside, it might have seemed like a meaningless eccentricity contest. But when one entered into the game, the meaning became apparent, and dominated everything else. It was, in fact, a game of meaning, and without meaning, it was nothing. The artists could exhibit whatever they chose: a glass of water with a few dead flies floating in it, old newspapers, a machine, a hairstyle, a diamond; or they could choose not to exhibit anything at all and go running after a car instead, or kill a chicken, or leave a room empty. Freedom was taken to its limits, and beyond. It was easy to criticize, or mock, these new developments in art, so easy that criticism and mockery lost their force and hardly seemed worthwhile. The perplexity and disapproval expressed by the enemies of contemporary art resulted from their way of viewing the work in isolation, taking no account of the history behind it. I sometimes felt rather weary myself, leafing through a new issue of one of the magazines, seeing nothing but photos of rubble, wheelchairs, blurry television screens, messy rooms, expressionless faces, or embalmed animals. But a reading of the texts that accompanied the photos, even a fragmentary and interrupted reading, showed that there was always a justification; sometimes it was disappointing, but sometimes, often (or was I fooling myself?), it struck me as acceptable, intelligent, even dazzling. I had my collection of favorite artists, to which I was always adding. Human creativity, on this set of premises at least, was inexhaustible.
One of the things that appealed to me about this new system, and prevented me from rejecting it out of hand, was that its multiform proliferation did away with the need for traditional talents and their cultivation, which had been seen as the substance of art. It was no longer necessary to be a born artist, or to undergo special training; the days of masters and apprentices, virtuosos and botchers, were over. Anyone could do it; there was only one condition: it had to be something that had never occurred to anyone before. Year after year I was amazed by the ideas that kept occurring to the new artists appearing on the scene. And often, almost always, those ideas were perfectly simple; their only merit was originality. The reaction they elicited was invariably the question: Why didn’t I think of that?
It was this line of reasoning that led me to see the two men, with their strange deformities, as an artistic idea. An idea that might have prompted me to wonder, somewhat ruefully: Why didn’t I think of that? And indeed, never in a thousand years would I have come up with it on my own. But there it was: given to me, to me and nobody else. In practical terms, I might as well have thought of it. In a sense, in every sense, it was typical of the “artworks” that I kept seeing in the magazines, the kind that got noticed at biennales and documentas, the kind that won prizes and were discoursed upon in articles. In a sense, too, I had a right, after all I’d done for that “idea,” to say that “it had occurred to me.” Admittedly, if that had really been the case, if I’d been choosing an idea for an artwork, I would have chosen something else. Morbid and monstrous subjects didn’t appeal to me, although they were fashionable in the art world. But I had to make the best of it, because, left to my own devices, nothing at all would have occurred to me.
At least, nothing that good. Because although the subject wasn’t to my taste, I had to admit that the “idea” was excellent. Two men, one with enormous hands, the other with enormous feet, symmetrical, asymmetrical, inexplicable: they had everything it takes to work as art. No one would believe they really existed; they were too much like the inventions of a mind intoxicated by contemporary art magazines. As to keeping the secret and not betraying the trust that had been placed in me, I could set my mind at rest because labeling something as art dispels all suspicion of reality forever.
But how was I to proceed? The medium didn’t matter, I knew that much. All the medium had to do was record the idea. In these new forms of art, recording and documentation are everything. My initial plan of photographing the men might seem to be at odds with my artistic project. But although they might have thought I was intending to reveal their reality, no one else would have seen it that way. These days, in the art world, thanks to digital editing tools, which are widely accessible, photography is just another medium for documenting fiction. And apart from the fact that it’s used extensively by avant-garde experimenters (though not as much as video), photography would have been ideal for me, mainly because I wouldn’t have had to manipulate the images (I couldn’t have, anyhow, given my technological ignorance), but everyone would think I had, and very well at that.
However, as I said, I had to give up on the idea of taking photos. Which left the perfectly adequate alternative of drawing. A series of drawings, a folio, and maybe a book eventually, with texts to explain or justify the idea — but not too much because the value of the idea depended on its mystery, its inexplicability, its openness to any kind of suggestion. It would be an open series, but not too extensive, twenty drawings at most, enough to show the men in all their positions and from every angle, at rest and in movement. I set only one constraint for myself: both men had to figure in every drawing; there would be no drawing that showed only one of them. That would unify the project, and supply its enigmatic meaning.
But the problem was that I didn’t know how to draw. I’d never learned. Or, granting that everyone knows how to draw (badly, at least), I should say that I’d never actually sat down and done it: I’d never practiced. This wasn’t an insuperable obstacle, because the quality of the draftsmanship wasn’t crucial; the drawing was just a means of documentation, so all I had to do was make sure the viewer understood that it was a picture of two naked men, of normal size and shape, except that one had the feet of a giant sixty feet tall, and the other’s hands were correspondingly huge. It can’t have been that hard. The scene might have been made to be drawn.
It’s easy to say, “All I had to do. .,” but in order to achieve that effect, some effort and a certain degree of skill were required. Especially to make sure that the viewer understood exactly. Because if the drawing was clumsy, as mine would have been, the disproportionately large hands and feet might have come across as just another clumsiness, or a bad imitation of Picasso. And even if the drawing were adequate, there were still dangers: for example, the hugeness of the extremities might have seemed to be an effect of perspective.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. There was a prior difficulty, which I noticed when I started thinking about it in practical terms. I realized that substituting drawing for photography didn’t get me very far. One way or another, you have to draw from life, and just as I couldn’t take photos, I couldn’t pull out pencil and paper and proceed to draw the two men. Or I might have been able to, but I wasn’t planning to try.
Drawing in the absence of the model means working from memory, which would have required me to retain visual detail, and that was a capacity I didn’t possess. Or maybe I did, but unwittingly, because it wasn’t something I’d ever tried to do. So I began to try, without taking any precautions, not suspecting that the trial, even if it never went beyond the planning stage, could alter my relationship with the men. I tried to imprint them on my retinas: their lines, their shapes, their volumes. It was a new way of looking at them: in all those years, those decades, which made up the greater part of my life, I’d never looked at them like that. The difference was that now I was bringing memory into play, anticipating its operation, trying to turn time to my advantage. I’d never done this before. Why would I have bothered, when the one thing I knew for sure was that I’d be seeing them again the next day? Now my presence in the room, and theirs, was charged with memory in the form of an intensely physical, palpable, almost sensual attention. “I’d never looked at them like that.” I wanted to take them away with me, and that intention, though I never came close to realizing it, disturbed me, stirred dark impulses, and left me feeling guilty. It didn’t produce the desired effect. My visual memory, which had never been exercised, wasn’t about to spring into action just because I told it to.