Chapter 23

Psychologically and physically exhausted, we finally came within a furlong of the Suburbs, which stretched ahead of us as we mounted the ridge that hid the Country from the Suburbs and its people. Although Beta was rather less than enthusiastic at leaving behind green fields and forests for the neatly aligned houses on the square grid of Suburban planning, I felt a distinct warming. I was almost home again, at last.

In front of the rows of Suburban streets was the Art Gallery, a building I had never seen before but had often heard about, built at a time when the Suburbs had grandiose pretensions beyond its present status. It towered incongruously high above modest semi-detached roofs, built on a peculiar design that blended elements of many different ages and cultures in a bizarre heterogeneous mix. There were Corinthian pillars, Byzantine domes, Gothic towers, Arabic murals and, in the long approach in front, were statues sprinkled about of its garden lawns. A thoroughly modern Formica display attached to its Norman arch announced unnecessarily The Art Gallery.

Beta gripped my hand tightly. "It's enchanting!" She gasped. "We must have a look. We've got the time, and anyway I need the rest. My feet are aching." She lifted up the sole of one, bent back and brushed off small grass leaves that had attached themselves there.

I nodded. "I wouldn't mind the detour myself." So we crossed the field to the road, mounted a stile and walked along the spotless tarmac towards the gateway to the Art Gallery grounds. A pig was sitting in a chair wearing a dark navy blue uniform and a peaked cap. He raised his bowed head slightly as we approached, judged us to be harmless and dropped his head again. We ambled along the gardens, past antique lamp-posts regularly alternating with waste paper bins, by which were empty benches, each distinguished by a plaque donated by patrons of the Art Gallery. The statues on the lawn were as miscellaneous as the architecture. Some were of great antiquity, portraying nude men possessing incredibly muscular build and remarkably tiny penises, and naked women of graceful curvature and combs in their hair. Some were abstract and suggested forms and shapes, exquisite in themselves but remote from concrete reality. Some were composed of a jumble of materials that might have been found on any rubbish heap, but were put together in a harmony of shape and form.

There were very few people around. Beta remarked on this with a frown. "Surely such a large and splendid Art Gallery this should attract people from all over!"

I smiled. "I don't think very many people from the Suburbs are especially enthralled by Art," I speculated. "If this were the City, I'm sure there'd be very many more visitors." I looked around. "Still, it's not totally deserted, so it can't be closed," I commented indicating two eurypterids eating sandwiches on a bench and a family of pigs playing around a statue of an enormous scorpion whose tail was menacingly poised to strike. "There'll be more people inside, I'm sure."

However, after passing the pig seated by the Art Gallery doors hidden by the shadows of the tall Palladian pillars at the top of a steep rise of steps, there seemed to be a paucity of visitors inside the building's immense interior. Along the balcony ringing the entrance hall, a diprotodon was viewing a set of miniatures and a centaur was stretching his head up to look at a very tall statue of an eminent gentleman in a frock coat at the further end of the hall. The only other people were two very bored women sitting behind the glass of the museum shop amongst a collection of posters, post cards and fine art books.

The hall was not empty, though. Its impressive space was adorned by statues, paintings and murals from all ages, in all styles and often of quite monstrous dimensions. Huge statues representing famous brontosaurs, scorpions, mastodons and psammeads were dotted amongst immense paintings of naked women, wealthy patrons, vases of flowers, triptychs of heaven, hell and purgatory, or Midgard, Asgard and Armageddon. Monstrous chandeliers swung above our heads supported by massively thick chains and the rear view of the outspread wings of an albatross in a dress suit.

Beta gasped. "There's so much here! Have we got time to look at it all?"

"We'll see as much as we can," I remarked, striding past a statue of Heracles cracking open a lion's skull with a rock, and underneath a Pop Art painting of the Mighty Thor to enter the smaller galleries beyond. Beta followed, her eyes darting this way and that, at the tiled murals, the luscious geometric carpets, the erotic statues of couples indulging in bizarre sexual gymnastics, and grandiose canvases marked by single massive brush strokes or an abstract mess of thickly dripping oil paints. The whole building had an aura of reverence and silence highly conducive to Art appreciation, locking out all mundane daily affairs.

We walked through a series of corridors, admiring different species of Art, through a room painted black and containing only a single used and collapsed washing-up bottle, past a pile of loosely arranged bricks guarded by a panoply of security devices, and around a vista of videos featuring different views of the same uninspiring terraced house on different times of the day. Our eyes were dazzled by the sights, but our feet were aching more than before we'd arrived. So much for coming into the Art Gallery to rest.

We entered a smaller room than most, featuring modernist paintings and sculptures from the surrealist to the abstract expressionist, from op art to found art, from the photographic to the neoraphaelite. In the middle of this room stood a large canvass on an easel, behind was a man in his mid-thirties wearing a black beret, a purple smock, and very baggy black trousers. In one hand he held a long paint brush from which globules of paint were threatening to drop while his arm supported a palette kept in place by a thumb through a hole.

The Artist's long nose peeped out from behind the easel, and he scrutinised us coming in with one eye squeezed close and the other along the length of his arm and measured by his upright paint brush. "Good afternoon and welcome, fellow æsthetes," he greeted us. "You come to admire and appreciate the illustrious panoply of Art the Gallery is proud to display, I deem?"

"It's very impressive," I admitted. "There's so much of it, and so varied."

"Not varied enough, I believe," the Artist mused, lowering his brush. "Many fine and illustrious schools are mysteriously unrepresented. Great hiatuses in the grand diffuse tradition of representational art are hidden from sight. Where, for instance, are the metaconcretists, the neomodernists and the protoromantics? Why such paucity of quasisurrealists, aural art and brochure montagists? It is a disgrace they are not represented here. Schools of art which have emerged over the centuries - such as the Marxist school, the Feline expressionists and the heterodoxians - not displaying their great deserved worth."

"That's a lot of different schools of art!" exclaimed Beta. "Which do you practise?"

"All and every one," the Artist announced proudly. "I am willing to employ any style appropriate to the effect I visualise and which best encapsulates its ultimate Truth." He raised his paint brush again and scrutinised Beta. "You are a vision rarely encountered in these environs. A woman so unlike those from the Suburbs who most often venture into these galleries. I presume that the Country is your abode. Your bearing and dress is so typical and so worthy of pulchritudinous immortality. It would be an inestimable privilege and a precious opportunity were you to sit for me. Your composure inspires me. I crave to render you in oil: capture your essence, your inmost coherence and your déshabillé. Grant me my wish, I beg."

Beta smiled, clearly flattered. "Do you want to paint a portrait of me?"

"Most assuredly so. Future ages and cultures must not be denied your beauty." He gestured towards a chair on which sat a bowl of chrysanthemums and daffodils. "Pose for me here and now. I feel the imperative to capture your soul on my canvass. Remove the vase and flowers. My still life can be completed another day."

"I'm not sure we have the time," Beta remarked uncertainly. She looked at me for guidance, but I nodded. The opportunity to rest my feet seemed desirable in itself. "Well, maybe we can. How long will it take?"

"Not long at all, I assure you," the Artist said, strolling towards the chair, picking up the vase and setting it carefully on the floor. "Sit here. Relax. You must agree. My muse must not be denied!"

Beta lowered herself into the chair, crossed her legs and rested her arms on the chair rests. I sat on the padded seats provided by the Art Gallery. The Artist walked back to his easel, removed the painting he'd been working on and carefully placed it against the wall. It was probably intended to be a portrait of the flowers that had earlier been on the chair, but except for a splash of yellow that might have represented the daffodils there was little in the viscous broad strokes and amorphous puddles of paint which at all resembled flowers or vases. It seemed nothing more than a random mess of oily paint.

"That's fine!" the Artist said approvingly, studying Beta with the aid of his paintbrush. "Now put on a more solemn expression. Remove the idle humour of your smile. Suggest more pathos and regret. Uncross and slightly open your legs. Lay one hand on the upper thigh. Place your other hand behind your exceptional bouquet of hair. Slightly tilt the ankle. Raise the wrist ever so slightly."

Beta obediently followed each of the Artist's instructions, adopting an increasingly uncomfortable and extremely unnatural pose. She ached with each more elaborate demand. At last, the Artist was satisfied, while Beta was on the verge of toppling off the chair and knocking over the vase.

"Perfect!" he said at last. "Uncompromising. Suggestive of idyllic rural grace. Beautiful. You shan't regret this."

He laid his palette on the floor and picked up a large thick pencil which he used to draw on the canvass. From where I sat, it was impossible to see exactly what he was doing, but it appeared fairly random and uncoordinated. The pencil slashed backwards and forwards in large broad gestures, pausing occasionally for particular minutiæ that seemed worthy of more attention. On occasion he raised his pencil, with the same gesture as with the paintbrush, to measure Beta's relative height and sometimes that of objects nowhere near Beta, including the doorway behind him and the neon lights above our heads.

"The paintings and sculptures here are very impressive," I remarked idly.

"You think so?" The Artist remarked. "True, they apprehend some of the rich tradition of Art but there is such a meagre representation of living Art. Art should be seen as it is, not preserved like fossils and antiques. Art is of the moment: vibrant and urgent. It should evoke the time in which we live in all its plurality, eliciting both poverty and opulence." He gestured towards a large canvass on the wall which consisted of a collapsed and rather worn bicycle tyre glued on to a mass of paint and random cuttings from women's magazines. "Like this masterpiece, which flaunts the very essence of our time."

"It does?" wondered Beta. "It doesn't look quite as impressive as some of the other paintings. Like that one of the pigs dancing in a field in the main hall."

"Pigs dancing in a field? Could that be Cannelloni, or is it Bratwurst? Such naïve art of the Vermicelli school is the very antithesis of this Art. Whereas Puddle's classic mirrors to us the ineluctable chaos and complexity of our age, urging one to reassess ones very raison d'être and revealing, satirically and subtly, our relationship with travel and the media, - the two main aspects of our age - both deflated in a swirl and posture of free thinking expression; the other is just an illusory image of a time that never existed and probably never will."

"But we saw pigs just like that playing around a statue of a scorpion as we came in," Beta objected, wearily holding herself in position. "I've never seen bicycle tyres splattered amongst paint and scraps of paper before."

"That is because you are a Country girl," explained the Artist. "In your idyllic romantic world, all is play and nature: so to you it seems unaffected. But to most people, deprived of tactile sensual pleasure, the deflated bicycle tyre is more real and more poignant. Particularly so in those City districts so poor that the motor car rarely encroaches. The most consequential and potent images of our time are urban and Suburban." He lowered his pencil and leaned back to admire the lines he had sketched on the canvass. He bent down, picked up his palette and brush, and stood back while contemplating where to place the first brush stroke. "Art is not intended to comfort. It should challenge, discomfort, undermine, re-evaluate and disassemble. Art should be a kick in the face, a punch in the groin, or a garrotting in the dungeon. It must hurt, disillusion, deconstruct and destroy. The beholder must reel in shock, cough in rage and splutter in incoherence."

"That's not the Art I like most," Beta argued. "I prefer Art to be beautiful, illuminating and enhancing."

"And what is more beautiful than that?" insisted the Artist, diagonally tracing a broad stroke of red paint across the canvass. "What enhances more than that which confronts rather than comforts? What is more beautiful than chaos, disorder and anarchy? No doubt you still subscribe to passé notions of beauty, expressed by elegance of shape and form, harmonised by balance between foreground and background, evoking geometric structures of simplicity and symmetry. Surely it is better to subvert such idealistic romantic notions, and capture the nonlinear, nonharmonious whole of our world."

"Shouldn't Art achieve more than that?" Beta objected. "Isn't it Science that should explore such things?"

"Au contraire," the Artist reacted. "The Scientist's rôle, and that of the Artist, is to see and describe. The two are identical. The difference is in the nature of that observation and description. The Scientist is analytical and rigorous. The Artist is impressionistic, abandoned and sensuous. The Artist and Scientist represent two aspects of the same Truth. The Scientist reduces the world to axioms, theories, hypotheses and definitions. The Artist exposes its greater, irreducible whole. While the Scientist's tools are those of matriculation and exegesis, those of the Artist's are imagination and technique. The Truth exists in abstract expressionism, cubism and deconstruction. Remove the surface and turbulent disorder reveals its own resplendence and purpose."

"But not all Art is like that," I remarked. "Many of the contemporary pieces here are much more real and representational than you suggest."