‘With her usual acerbic wit…’ The Eminent Critic is already drafting his review in his mind as he moves from one artwork to the next. ‘…Finchley subverts our received assumptions about originality, about seriousness. And yet…’
Through the door of the next room an Admiring Group, champagne flutes in hand, can be seen standing in front of a large exhibit, which itself remains hidden from our sight.
‘Absolutely breath-taking!’ mutters a Man with a Beard.
‘Quite extraordinary!’ exclaims a Very Thin Woman.
Well, so it should be! Because – look! – it’s nothing less than the cherry tree itself, its roots contained in an enormous hemisphere of earth, its branches laden with thick clouds of pure white blossom.
‘Julian Smart,’ reads the label on the stand in front of it. ‘Creation.’
Julian and the Elegant Woman stand nearby. He wears a fetching but slightly rumpled suit and a very satisfied expression.
‘Talk about upstaged,’ the Elegant Woman remarks, with a small acidic smile. ‘Susan must be livid.’
He laughs. ‘I hope so. You wouldn’t believe how much effort went into this. And the idiots I’ve had to deal with!’
Standing to Julian’s left and two or three paces behind him, is Wendy, looking very attractive and a little nervous. She is talking to the Academic in John Lennon glasses.
‘Oh I can believe it,’ says the Elegant Woman, ‘I assure you of that. You don’t work in arts administration without learning what it’s like to deal with idiots. But tell me more about it. I’m fascinated by the process.’
Julian glances back at Wendy, sees she’s busy talking.
‘Well, if you’re really interested, why don’t you come over sometime and I’ll tell you the whole story.’
Over against the wall is a small group of other teachers from the school, clustered for protection around the diminutive figure of Mr Veronwy Roberts. They look dowdy and uncomfortable in this place, clutching their glasses of champagne.
But here comes the Eminent Critic.
He sees the tree, looks across at Julian, and smiles, getting the joke at once.
Julian strides across to meet him. Laughing as they arrive at the same idea together, they shake hands in front of the tree like Livingstone and Stanley.
Later, back at home, the Eminent Critic sits working on his laptop at his kitchen table.
‘Creation,’ he types, ‘is easily this year’s most arresting new work. Ostensibly – and indeed ostentatiously – silent, it does in fact speak eloquently to us, sharply interrogating (with Smart’s characteristic astringency) the idea of “nature” as something prior to and outside of social discourse. Smart has deliberately chosen the most tritely conventional of subjects – cherry blossom – and has transformed it into a complex, maddeningly ambiguous statement precisely by not transforming it at all!’
As he continues to tap at his keyboard you can see on the screen the following text, under a standard Microsoft toolbar:
‘by insisting on his own complete absence, Smart, almost teasingly, invites us to question what precisely it is that makes this work so unmistakably and triumphantly a work of art. The caption? The gallery setting? The funding – both from public and private sources – that made the work possible? The fact that Julian Smart is a recognised artist? The’
He takes a break in mid-sentence, wandering across his large and well-stocked kitchen to pour himself a glass of red wine. As he stands sipping at it, he flips idly through the TV guide from Saturday’s paper. He is still thinking in prose.
‘But that only opens up another whole line of questioning, of course. What makes Julian Smart an artist? Who gave him this licence?… Mmm, must watch that. Last episode too… Ultimately it is critics who are the arbiters. Indeed it is perfectly possible to argue that we are the actual creators of art.’
Stark shadows give his face a certain mythic quality, like the famous poster of Che Guevara, though nothing like as handsome.
Two weeks after the show, on a frosted door marked ‘Headmaster’ the pot-bellied silhouette of Mr Roberts holds the receiver of a phone in one hand, the rest of the phone in the other, while the coiled flex dangles in between.
‘Is this Mr Julian Smart? Yes? Well, we’re not happy, Mr Smart. We are not happy about this at all. The agreement was that the tree would be returned unharmed!’
Inside the room he is pacing about with beads of sweat on his forehead. Behind him are shelves lined with lever arch files with labels like ‘Literacy Strategy’, ‘Sex Education Guidelines’ and ‘Promoting Creativity’.
You can see the tree in the playground through the window.
‘Our parents are very distressed. Many of them grew up with that tree themselves…’
From the far side of the metal railings you can just see Mr Roberts’ upper half as he paces his office.
In front of him is the tree, completely bare, apart from a few shrivelled leaves.
‘…would never have agreed in the first place…’ he’s saying.
A jet passes overhead.
‘Well, I’m sorry, mate, but there’s absolutely nothing I can do.’
Julian Smart is sitting at a table outside a café. He looks defiantly across at Wendy as he slips his phone back into his jacket pocket.
‘What does he think I am? Some kind of plant resurrectionist?’
Smartly Dressed Professionals chat at the tables around them. Cars and pedestrians hurry by.
‘And what a ridiculous fuss anyway! Anyone would think I’d murdered one of the kids.’
Wendy’s face looks troubled. ‘Yes but…’
‘Oh for Christ’s sake, don’t you start! It was only a bloody tree. There are trees everywhere. But just for a moment there that particular tree got to be a unique and famous work of art.’
We see Julian’s lean and handsome face reflected in the window of the café. A single thought hovers in the bubble above him.
‘And there are pretty women everywhere too.’
Mr Roberts sits down wearily at his desk, passing his hand over his face.
I stand with my back to my window watching my story churn out of the printer.
Your doorbell rings.
6
Transients
There was a delicious, agonising goodbye in Ellie’s car, with gentle hands, and moonhoney, and lips still warm from the night, but at last reluctantly they had to heed the honking taxis and the shouting man.
The car door closed. Space and time opened up between them. Thomas watched Ellie rejoin the stream, waved and blew kisses, then turned to hurry into the station, feeling for his ticket in his jacket pocket.
‘I really must catch this train,’ he’d told her. ‘I wish I could stay longer with you, I truly do, but I need to be there for this meeting.’
And yet, when it turned out he’d got the time wrong and that his train was already pulling away, he found he didn’t care that much about the meeting, or mind that the hour and a half he now had to wait would be on his own when it could have been with Ellie. He phoned his work to apologise – really it was no big deal at all – then bought some coffee and sat on a kind of gallery above the platforms, under Victorian arches of iron and glass, with four or five big intercity trains beneath him, lying side by side beneath their power lines like metal whales.