Maxine looked over at Jane, who was avidly awaiting Paula’s answer about those damned dioramas. When had Jane become so enamored of Paula, and, more important, why? Paula was exactly the sort of person Jane and Maxine might have made fun of privately together back in the old days. Either Jane had lost her sense or Maxine was completely out of touch; Maxine was unwilling to investigate the likelihood of the former.
“I’m doing a new series. Michael knows,” Paula added, nudging him.
“It’s brilliant,” said Michael briefly, not looking at Paula, with his manner suggesting a fleeting but marked self-consciousness Maxine had never observed in him before.
Were they sleeping together? Were they? Maxine thought of herself as impossible to shock, but for some reason, this truly surprised her. It seemed unlike Paula somehow to sleep with her dealer, no matter how appealing and successful he was, and Maxine would have bet that although Michael’s appetites would eventually lead him to adultery and excess, he was still on the right side of things; his conscience and ego seemed approachably cloudless. No, of course they weren’t sleeping together. But their relationship seemed sticky and intertwined nonetheless.
“What’s the new series?” Maxine asked Paula, wishing she could shoot a privately amused, colluding look over at Jane and have Jane return it, as she would have a long time ago. Instead, Jane turned her gaze toward Paula to await her answer.
“I’m building replicas of certain, quote/unquote, clichés of African American family life,” said Paula. Michael didn’t look at her as she spoke; he looked thoughtfully into his wineglass. “Life-size. The miniaturizations of the boxes were greatly effective but have run their course. I’m fabricating a couch in an apartment in the projects, family watching TV, no father; a Kentucky Fried Chicken booth with a family eating dinner, no father; a car of the A train heading up to Harlem, whole family coming home from shopping, no father. Like that. My visitors today were from MOMA, of all places. It would be a real statement to get a replica of a KFC booth into the Museum of Modern Art.”
“Was that what they were interested in?” Michael asked.
“Well, they liked the A train, too….” She held up her fingers, which were theatrically crossed.
“How would you characterize what you’re doing?” Maxine asked. Her voice resounded with a certain hollowness, but no one seemed to notice.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I suppose, aesthetically.”
“Aesthetically,” Paula repeated in a teasing voice. “I don’t know about aesthetically, but essentially it’s just one statement, part of an ongoing dialogue. Conceptually, it’s about shifting the paradigms while engaging in the act of replicating something real and making it as lifelike as possible, to scale, in an artistic context. And thematically, it’s about the African American matriarchy. I’m dialoguing in mainstream, accessible terms about an underrepresented sector, giving a voice to the voiceless and, in the process, playing with the traditional power structures of representation. To put it colloquially, in black culture, women are the ones who step up. Sure, black teenage girls are having babies, but the family raises them together, grandmothers, aunts, cousins. Black men are off in prison or on the streets and the women are holding everything together with faith and discipline and courage.”
“Yes, I see that,” said Maxine. “What I don’t see is how life-size subway benches or fast-food booths can be considered art in the same way as a Kandinsky painting or a Rodin sculpture.”
“That’s partly the point,” said Paula. She sounded as if she were congratulating Maxine. “The African American family structure is, of necessity, self-invented and free-form in the same way African American art has to be. We have to make it up. We have to invent. We have to use what we’ve got, which is nothing. Our own lineage was broken by slavery. Our heritage was lost. Our families were divided and separated again and again — out of existence. African American art is pure American energy, tapped into something positive instead of the negativity of gangland killings and crime and unwed motherhood and drugs. It’s the flip side, the bright side of ghetto darkness. You could say that we have to write our own song, and we are singing it any way we can.”
“Beautifully put,” said John softly.
“And, all due respect,” Paula added with a glint of fight in her eye, “but you haven’t seen these replicas. Radically different subject matter aside, they are solidly part of tradition, if you want to get into that. I’m dialoguing with Ed Keinholz, of course, and Red Grooms…Duane Hanson and H. C. Westerman…. And just because they were white men and I’m a black woman doesn’t mean it’s any less valid as art, Maxine. You, as a woman artist, ought to know that as well as anyone.”
“Bravo,” Jane said, tapping her fingers together in miniature applause.
Maxine opened her mouth to ask Paula how she could possibly consider herself an African American descended from slavery when her mother was of French descent and her father was from Algeria and she’d grown up in the suburbs and gone to Bennington.
Instead, she said, “I have done my best to avoid becoming familiar with conceptual art. It seems like a lot of clever, cold hoo-ha to me. As for so-called dialoguing — if that is really a verb — I have no idea what that means. I paint out of direct experience, and I’m not talking to anyone when I work, least of all to myself. I have to get everyone out of my head, including my own voice, in order to be able to paint. Please excuse me if the answer is obvious and the question is retarded, but what the hell ever happened to truth and beauty?”
The whole table erupted into conversation all at once.
“So is it really art?” said Saul Unger softly in Maxine’s ear. “That’s the question. It should be called something else, because it is something else.”
Maxine looked over at him, surprised to have an ally at the table after all.
“Really,” Saul said stubbornly. “The same way Scientology is not a religion, this is not art. Yom Kippur is not easy. Kandinsky is not easy.”
Suddenly, another plate appeared in front of Maxine, this one containing two grilled lamb chops, boiled new red potatoes, chickpea-mint salad, and steamed baby squash. The chickpeas looked like round infant heads with cowlicks. So whoever was masterminding this dinner was attempting nothing less than the re-creation of the history of evolution, from primordial soup to water babies to land babies. She supposed there would be meringue chicks in baklava nests for dessert. She could imagine the cook back there, his breast simultaneously puffed with pride and racked with despair: No one would understand his brilliant work, no one would apprehend its true meaning, and then it would be gone.
“Speaking of aesthetics,” she said jovially across the table to Michael, indicating her plate. “This is like the upscale version of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.”
Michael responded with an impatient, tight look Maxine felt was meant to function as a slap. She surmised in a flash that she had committed a double faux pas. Apparently, you weren’t supposed to question Paula’s artistic merit; rather, you were supposed to say, “This dinner is amazing. Who is your chef?” instead of comparing it to a Buñuel film. But why the fuck not? It made no sense, any of it. In the old days, the painters at such a party could well have been pissing in corners, drunk as bums, arguing so hard that they spat at one another. She missed her brother with a sharp pain in her chest; she thought for a moment that she was having a heart attack until she realized that it was just nostalgia.