“Paul, try not to get ridiculously worked up over this.”
“You mean there are degrees of offense that it’s unhip to take? I thought I could get as goddamn offended as I liked.” I appealed to Blau. “All I’m asking is, What’s the goddamn point of taking pictures that are meant to offend?”
“Really,” he replied, “it would be out of bounds for me to speak for Ms. Kander. Worse, you’d probably take it as some sort of definitive statement or explanation of her intent, which wouldn’t be fair to either the artist or you.”
“Criminy!” I said. “Who is this gal? Her name sounds German. Is she a Nazi?”
RuthClaire, who had an ostensibly calming hand on my arm, said, “I don’t know her ethnic background. She’s from Tennessee.”
“She doesn’t live in Atlanta,” I hazarded. “She’d be an idiot to show such crap here—in this neighborhood, in a city with a black mayor—and try to live here, too.”
“She’s based in New York City,” Blau said, “but she could live in Atlanta if she wished. Atlantans are more knowing about contemporary art than you might think.”
“Unlike your average hick from Beulah Fork?”
“Paul,” RuthClaire said, “let’s go see Adam’s work.” She put a gentle pressure on my arm. “Before the crowd comes in.”
“Wait a minute. I want to know David’s interpretation of Ms. Kander’s intent.”
“But that would be to preempt—”
“RuthClaire, for God’s sake, let me talk to the man.” I rounded on Blau. “Look, I’ve got a mind of my own. You won’t unduly influence my own final stance. I’m trying to understand—to appreciate—these photographs. Isn’t that what an exhibit is for, to prompt greater understanding and appreciation of an artist’s work?”
Blau surrendered to my tirade. “Okay, you’re passionate about this. You deserve an answer.”
I waited.
“I think Kander’s attempts to offend are motivated by a desire to heighten our outrage at the stereotypes she presents. It’s satire, Mr. Loyd, not a call to embrace what you see as, God forbid, accurate depictions of the people involved. Her technique forces you to reassess your basic attitude about each image. The art’s not only in her skills as a photographer, but in the outrageous scenes she stages for the camera. I get off on that. The young lady’s droll.”
“That’s one word for it,” I said. “But is that how everybody who walks in here will finally interpret her work?”
“Oh, no. Some will take one look, turn around, and walk out. Others won’t see anything but naked flesh. For them, it’s pornographic, and they’ll either enjoy it or scorn it as such.”
I waved at the walls. “Is this stuff for sale?”
“Well, prints are. That’s how Ms. Kander makes her living. By today’s standards, they’re dirt cheap—but Kander’s popular and sells in volume.”
“Who’s she popular with? Voyeurs? The artsy-fartsy crowd?”
“Both, I guess. There’s no form to fill out to buy one. So far as I know, you don’t even have to be twenty-one.”
“Where would you hang these things? The bathroom?”
“That’s up to you. Are you thinking of ordering one?”
“Hell, no!” I virtually shouted.
Adam arrived in the company of a staff member named Bonnie Carlin, but I was still hot about the rub-your-nose-in-your-own-smug-prejudices strategy of Kander’s “art.” Everything Blau had said about it made a kind of backasswards sense, but I kept thinking that, for all her cleverness and technical skill, she was really accomplishing the Unnecessary, often for the Uncomprehending, and almost always with a (pardon me) Drollery that bespoke a superior smugness all her own.
Phooey, as Lester Maddox used to like to say.
Bonnie Carlin delivered a message—it was time to let the clamoring crowd in—and departed. We, too, abandoned the M.-K. Kander Room, crossing the corridor into the third and final gallery room, where Adam’s paintings hung. This room was like the first, but not so large. A single darkened studio loft brooded above us. Below it, all four walls seemed to resonate with the vitality and prehistoric wildness that Adam—who had even begun to wear deodorant—would no longer permit himself to reveal in his day-to-day relationships with others.
I saw the huge barbed baobab that he had painted at Paradise Farm. I saw rolling silver-brown mounds that could have been either the Lolitabu foothills or a herd of headless mammoths on a dusty African plain. I saw grass fires, volcanic eruptions, jags of icy lightning, and a crowd of silhouetted human (or semihuman) forms either fighting or feasting or copulating. I also saw a series of ambiguous mother-and-child portraits that could have been of RuthClaire and Tiny Paul, or of a baboon female and her capering infant, or even of a genderless adult attacking a smaller figure of the same unidentifiable, but monkeylike, species. There was also a painting of a hominid creature with the head of a dog or a jackal or a hyena, and around its head there glowed a brilliant orange-red light. The exhibit as a whole communicated energy and excitement.
By my standards, very good stuff.
Demurely, Adam hung back, his hands behind him. His eyes shifted from side to side, as if he was fearful that I would ridicule this painting or take umbrage at something and walk out. At Paradise Farm, he’d had no such qualms. Here, though, as the only artist on the premises, he appeared to be suffering a terrific bout of the butterflies.
“They’re good,” I told him. “I like ’em all.”
Adam smiled. His lips drew back to reveal teeth and gums. Then, flustered, he pursed them shut again.
By the terms of his contract with Abraxas, Adam had to stick around long enough to meet some of the general public at the opening. Members of the board of directors who had not been able to attend the reception would want to greet him, as would some of the wealthier patrons who always arrived late. Moreover, Blau encouraged his artists to talk to students, impulse visitors, reporters from the Atlanta papers, and other media people. Temperamental aloofness could hurt fund-raising efforts.
The reception officially ended, and the crowd swarmed in. Adam and RuthClaire withdrew to Gallery Three to receive congratulations and autograph Abraxas flyers. I retreated to Blau’s office and poured myself the last half-glass of Asti Spumante from the only decanter not already empty. Then I drank it up and wandered into Gallery One.
Haitian art was scoring heavily tonight. I had to reposition my shoulders every few steps to slide through the pockets of people discussing it. Gallery Two, featuring Kander’s work, was also packed. Flushed with admiration or chagrin, two women squeezed out of that gallery into the hall.
“It’s a wonder the place hasn’t been raided,” one of them said.
“Goodness, Doreen, the woman’s making a statement.”
I followed Doreen and her scandalized friend into Gallery Three. The Montarazes, huddled together for mutual protection, stood at the front of a ladder-like contraption giving access to the loft overhead. The sight of one particular hanger-on surrounding them brought me up short.
There before me—in checked shirt, green knit tie, dun pants, and fake suede jacket—slouched Brian Nollinger, the anthropologist from Emory, the Judas who had tried to turn Adam over to an agent of the INS. He had shaved his Fu Manchu, but his granny glasses and his air of unflappable belonging—“Why would anyone be unhappy to see me here?”—identified him more surely to me than a fingerprint check. And it was no comfort remembering that, but for my own jealous meddling, Nollinger might not have come into any of our lives. In a sense, I had created him… as an ongoing annoyance, if not as a human being.