THE
WEDDING PARTY
From The Forked River Anthology, a bouquet of feuilletons about Bras de Venus, a small Mediterranean port on the border between France
and Spain
Evening on the
quayside. A crouched figure in a long overcoat sweeps the pavement with a hand
brush and pan, watched by a patient dog. The wind is up and the folds of the
coat flap like a bellows, while the corsetry of the sailboats in the leisure
port rattles. It’s not the street cleaning service moonlighting. Since the new
mayor introduced breathalysers after lunch for council workers, they sleep by
night.
Eberhard, the
abstract artist, is trying to collect dust for an installation. It runs before
him with a curious puffing, a passing sea breeze. His muse, Geraldine, sulks at
his side. She likes to retrieve objects of interest, such as dead birds, and
lay them at her master’s feet. But the alcove of a boarded-up shop offers
nothing worthy to carry in the mouth of an Irish setter. She lopes off to the
sandpit reserved for toutous and crouches down to express her
disgust.
The centrepiece
of Eber’s work of art is overlapping circles of blackish dust chalked on the
hardboard. Red and green paint runs through them. Vertical footprints traverse
the boarding diagonally. They look recent. I wonder if Eber can walk up walls,
like M. Hulot on holiday. The blue side panels are dabbed with white. Doves.
Fag-butts, sweet papers and a condom are stuck on the bottom and, where you
might expect a signature, ‘Babou et Fils’ is boldly printed, upside-down.
If you chanced on
it cold you would think, another graffiti artist with latent gifts as a
colourist and a makeshift sense of form gained from spraying aerosols on
passing trains, and you’d wonder who the kid is, and what will happen to him.
Maybe the town should club together to send him to Art College. But they would
need to catch him first.
‘I see something
of Jacques Tati in it’, I say to Eber.
‘And Picasso’, he
says. ‘They really saw things nobody notices.’ He performs the art of their
sighting technique, hand peaked, jigging around like a sailor who has lost his
monkey.
‘I see’, I say,
and ask him what’s the subject.
‘Two lovers lying
side by side.’
I touch the sole
of a footprint and the dust comes away. ‘Real life intruding on art.’ Eber is delighted.
I hold my finger to the wind (a sandblasting sirocco. The pipsqueak
breeze has been blown away) and smell it. The pastel of dust is mixed
with Geraldine’s influence, I think.
‘How are you
going to exhibit it before it’s wiped by a storm?’ I ask.
‘It’s all up
here’, he says, and points to where he thinks his brain is.
‘Ah! Conceptual
Art? The body goes down, the idea stands up.’
‘No. Art
Ephemera. I see it in my mind’s eye and that’s enough. Though if anybody else
notices, it’s a bonus. I sit on the bench over there watching people pass.
Nobody has stopped yet, except a man from the council who pasted up a ‘pas
de pub(licité)’ notice.’ (Welsh, the
Scottish-Catalan artist, would like that, I think. Publicity was Eber’s métier
before too much time in the pub lost him his pas.)
I don’t believe
Eber when he intimates he’s making art merely for his own and Geraldine’s sake.
PR in Paris has sharpened his self-promotion skills. Now he works for himself,
dropping the part of his surname that makes it harder to remember. Le
Journal regularly reports his latest project. Last time it was ‘Art for the
Dying’. Welsh points out that he’d sell his mother for a by-line, abusing her
in interviews for never having understood him. ‘I was an unloved child and that
is why I drank too much.’
This goes down
well with art therapy groups, less so with Welsh whose work is about itself.
Value-added features are Eber’s selling point on the lecture circuit where he
presents himself as a singe en hiver, a monkey in winter, who found art
when he gave up drinking. He has the simian features to go with it, and the
dog.
There is not much
doing tonight in Bras, other than Eber’s installation, and the sirocco which is now peppering sand from Africa on to it. I’m feeling strangely hot.
Then I realise the wind has suddenly dropped. I wonder if it could have been
the phantom migjorn pretending to be a sirocco.
Eber takes a
sprig of jasmine from a council flowerbed and sticks it above the lovers with a
smudge of what I think is Geraldine’s best mixed with grass. ‘Yes’, he says.
‘Love is being made all over this town, but who cares?’
We are joined by
the Unquiet Soul, poet and local journalist, who seems to know all about Eber’s
doomed masterpiece. ‘It may be all in Eberlue’s head’, he says, with
characteristic poetic licence when it comes to names (eberlué is French
for a dumbo), ‘but dust is dust, and life is death.’ His yappie toutou is peeing on the ‘Babou et Fils’ signature on the bottom right.
Even though a
boarded up shop window touched up by a conceptual artist may not be considered
good pub for Bras, the Unquiet Soul’s piece on Eber’s latest appears in Le
Journal entitled ‘Monument to Ephemeral Amours by the Artist Gerald and his
Dog Loulou’. Eber and Geraldine pose against the backdrop of the lovers and
street rubbish as though they were being married by the mayor, who stands in
front of what could reasonably be mistaken for the work of vandals using
materials the newly-sober street cleaners are on contract to remove. He was
elected on a ‘Keep Your Town Hygienic’ ticket, and would, I think, look even
uneasier if he noticed the street sign in the foreground. ‘Pour garder notre ville
propre, toutous, ce coin vous est reservé’. To keep our town clean, doggies, this spot is
reserved for you.
Eber and
Geraldine are now man and bitch.