He and Nikki met at the Art Institute, though it wasn’t quite as cute as it sounded, since Jonas was there on a field trip. Actually, it was more like an anti-field trip, for a course on Art Brut taught by Lawrence Agnew, a famously charismatic lunatic at UChicago whose intensity Jonas at that point still considered mostly laughable, but with whom he’d since taken three other courses, every undergraduate course Agnew offered. Nikki was a TA in that Art Brut course; he’d seen her before, in the darkened lecture hall where Agnew worked himself into a frenzy over slide projections (the informal record between slide changes was thirty-two minutes), but he’d never spoken to her until that day. She was the subject of a lot of male speculation in that class, with a face made up of perfectly harmonized eccentricities: freckles, an overbite, a mannish brow, long black hair that was never held back in any way, so that whenever she leaned forward to take a note, her face disappeared from view. That day at the Institute was freezing, and her strategy in response was to wear two sweaters and three shirts and a gigantic scarf and no coat. Jonas knew it was fashion at work rather than modesty but still liked to imagine the magnificence of the body that had to be buried under so many layers in order for her to be taken seriously and not incite a museum or lecture hall full of undergraduate boys. Agnew, who was only about five feet six, was lecturing invisibly from the center of a circle of about forty students, in front of a roomful of Monets.
“Was this shit ever good?” Agnew said. Not for him the reverent whisper one usually slipped into in museum galleries; where he went, the dynamics of the lecture hall went with him. “Well, it had to have something going on, because believe it or not, Monet offended people mightily in his day, at least for five minutes or so, but believe me, offending people even for five minutes is pretty damn hard to do. Harder today than it was then, but still. They literally wouldn’t let his work into the museum. And now if you go over to the gift shop which is the raison d’être of ridiculous graveyards like this one, his work is on every desk calendar and coffee mug and golf-club-head cover you see. So what is the lesson there? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not a lesson about Monet. It’s a lesson about what happens to the new in this world.”
Jonas saw Nikki standing by herself on the edge of the circle, holding a notebook but not writing in it; from where she was positioned, she could see through the doorway to the next gallery, and something in there had caught her eye. Without giving it enough thought to lose his nerve, he walked quietly over to where she stood and looked straight over her shoulder, his face quite close to her hair, to see what she saw. It was a little girl, maybe three or four, who had somehow slipped under the rope and was reaching out with her fingertips toward one of the Seurats. She didn’t touch it, though she was close enough. Some part of her was sensing the trouble she would get into. She was torturing herself. Her hand was held out in front of her in a position almost as if she were painting the picture. Jonas could feel Nikki holding her breath. Finally the girl’s mother, or teacher, or nanny, grabbed her by the collar of her coat and yanked her back outside the ropes. Far from being upset, the little girl looked almost relieved. Jonas, who’d had a fair amount of success with women in his young life even though he never really knew what to say, felt the touch of inspiration.
“I bet that was you,” he said. Startled, Nikki turned around, and then fought unsuccessfully to keep the smile off her face before finally turning back toward the invisible Agnew and pretending she had been listening to him all along.
“The Impressionists were outsiders,” Agnew said, “but they wanted in. They wanted in more than anything. This is what drove Dubuffet crazy, that kind of aspiration. He didn’t want the self-conscious new, the ambitious new. He wanted the untouched, the uninfluenced. He wanted to go back. He wanted the outsider who didn’t care-who didn’t even know-that he was an outsider. Was this a vain hope? In his own case, probably. But art history is in a lot of ways the history of failure. It takes a genius to find something truly worth failing at.”
She appeared to be paying attention, but she did not move away from Jonas, not even when the group shuffled into the next gallery and Agnew began laying into Picasso. There were probably fifteen fewer students in the group than they’d started out with; nobody cared about that, though-this wasn’t high school, you could cut whatever you felt like cutting, it was presumed to be your loss. Other than the Art Brut class, it was mostly old people in the Institute on a Tuesday morning. They glared menacingly at the point from which Agnew’s heedlessly loud opinions seemed to emanate, but they couldn’t make eye contact with him, because he was too short.
The Institute had a few Dubuffets, and they went and stared dutifully at them. Jonas didn’t find them all that convincing, but that was the really electric thing about this class: the professor was so rough on the defenseless dead artists that you wound up feeling a little sorry for them and would look more actively for some aspect of their work to like. “You can feel the effort in his effortlessness,” Agnew said, “the technique in the absence of technique. And though he’s trying to chasten or alienate or ignore his audience, he still has an audience, which is to say an anticipated reaction, and that makes all the difference. You cannot, as the expression goes, get the toothpaste back into the tube. That state of pristine ignorance Dubuffet wants to go back to? Forget it, you can never go back to it. But does that mean it doesn’t exist?”
They spent ten minutes max in the room full of Dubuffets, and then came the moment that turned Jonas from a student into an acolyte. “Now follow me,” Agnew said, and he walked back through the museum the way they had come, into the entrance gallery, and, incredibly, out the front door onto the sidewalk. The group of students and TAs, now down to about twenty in total, followed him wide-eyed into the freezing sunshine and instead of turning left toward their chartered bus, followed Agnew to the right, in the direction of a group of artists who sold their work to tourists from card tables on the sidewalk. Mostly it was cheaply framed photos or pen-and-ink sketches of Chicago landmarks, including the Institute itself. There were some Seurat knockoffs that were pretty good too. Agnew stopped in front of one particular table where a young man sat drawing on a sketch pad held down on his crossed knees. A group of pages evidently ripped from that pad was held face down on the table by a rock; their frayed edges rustled in the breeze off the lake. Agnew leaned over and rapped with his knuckles on the table; the artist looked up at him, nodded just slightly in recognition, and went back to his drawing.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Agnew said, “this is Martin Strauss. Martin lives on the South Side with his parents, and he comes here every day unless it’s raining.”
Strauss stopped drawing, but not at the mention of his name. He looked at the pad in front of him for no more than a second or two, tore the page off from the spiral binding, lifted the rock, put the page face down on top of the pile, and placed the rock on top again.
“Though Martin has no particular notion of privacy,” Agnew said, “I will honor his privacy by not discussing the specific ways in which he has been diagnosed by society as outside its norms. As a human being, we have marginalized him, but as an artist, he has no sense of himself as an outsider, or an insider for that matter, because he has no sense of what these categories mean. He has no sense of an audience at all, critical or otherwise. He simply needs to express something. Compulsion without ambition. Not only can this not be faked, it cannot be willed either. He could not stop what he is doing, or change it, or tailor it to someone else’s expectations, if he wanted to. If you are enticed by the Art Brut ideal, you have to be willing to follow it where it takes you. This is not as simple as it may sound.”