Monument Maker, page 45
“In classic storybook style I was given up to the care of a cruel uncle, a bachelor himself, but one who had the means not just on occasion to beat me senseless but to fund my education on the side, and once again I call on any psychologist who might want to uncover another, although this time barely sublimated, association that I have long wrestled with between creating and suffering, between art and punishment, between vision and pain. As soon as I was old enough I left home, and this terrible uncle provided the means with which I was able to formalise my studies in sculpture and, behind the scenes, the black arts, as I attended an art school on the outskirts of Athens that at the time was considered to be at the vanguard of new thought.
“I read about the attempts to make contact with the other side and also the attempts at transmutation, lead into gold, clay into flesh, and I dreamed of ways of empowering my sculptures with some rudimentary form of life. I carved signs on their bodies, made chants over them, prayed to them with little success. I befriended a fellow student from a separate faculty, that of engineering and technology. Previously I had enjoyed little but my own company, preferring to spend weekends at art galleries and museums or recreating strange solitary rites from the books I read. He introduced me to nightlife and to women and to alcohol and to the pleasures of driving in fast cars. He lived his life at an accelerated pace. His name was W____.
“He also introduced me to the Futurists. He mocked my classical leanings, he called me a relic, he said the moving image was the future, not the static painting, not the immobile sculpture. Sculpture must be kinetic, he insisted, the visual arts dynamic, music cacophonous. We began to work together, to make art together, and early on we created a series of mechanical men capable of moving at their own volition.
“At first we had a pair of legs and a pelvis attached to wires that was capable of writhing on the ground as if it had been shocked into existence. But there was something so uncanny and repellent in its movements and in its sickening form that we destroyed it and from then on we made whole bodies or at least semblances of full figures because animated anatomy, divorced from the human figure, is too macabre and unnatural, even for a would-be Futurist.
“The Futurists revelled in noise, in war, in the sound of industry, in speed, in scale, in brutality and lack of sentiment. At first, I confess, I was interested, chiefly because of their name, a name that suggested a process that rendered time itself pliable and that tied in with my own experiments in diabolism and theurgy. My understanding of Futurism was as an art form that made objects or created ideas that would only make sense in time, art that anticipated its place in the future, for instance we imagined an army of mechanical soldiers, of automatons, swarming across the European continent, the sound of their metal limbs like thunder, the smell of oil and industry replacing that of flesh and blood, war as a spectator sport, a savage board game, a mechanised theatre.
“We exhibited our mechanical men in leftfield galleries in Athens, where they attracted much comment; war machines as kinetic sculpture. But really, we were no more in the future than the classicists themselves. We were caught up in the times, more properly, we were of the moment, Futurism, truly, had little facility with time and looking back, I am sure, it will come to seem as quaint and as daft and yes, just as dated, as any other outmoded school of art practice. But the point is this: we took Futurism at its word. We abandoned our steel dream of robotic men, leaving them in a lock-up in an Athenian suburb where I suppose they remain to this day, and began to formulate something a little more ambitious, something that had its roots in a misunderstanding of the Futurist creed and that then took it somewhere else completely.
“Look, W____ said, magic doesn’t work, everyone knows that, magic is dated, it has no power, science and technology point towards the only hope of travelling through time, of escaping backwards and forwards. That’s as may be, I said, but it was then that I had the first of my epiphanies, the first of my revelations that would lead me to you or you to me, however you choose to understand it, I said to W____, okay, well, does art work? You say magic doesn’t work any more, that it worked once, perhaps, but that today we require a new magic that is in line with our deepest-held beliefs, well, what about art, think about it, there are no objective proofs about the facility of art to change anything, to work on the world, to transform and transport, yet ask anyone and they will confess their belief that art works, that art, really, can do anything, and what a reservoir of belief lies behind that, what a potential source of power, there, right there, is the engine for our great experiment in time, we will become artists and we will take art at its word. But every artist needs tools, W____ said, I propose we marry art and technology, the moving image and a commitment to the potential of art to raze and rebuild reality, I say we use the latest technology, the moving picture, the film camera, the projector, as our transport in and out.
“Of course, we were playing with fire, the great artists were naive, there should be protections in place, safeguards, ways out, just as in the practice of magic, there should be banishings, magic circles, purifications, ritual offerings, an understanding of correspondences, of propitious times, of the movement of the stars and planets, but like the great artists before us we were naive ourselves and so exposed ourselves to much peril.
“We were able to secure the use of an unwieldy film camera, a prototype, a Zagrab C20, that shot in black and white and without sound, which for us was perfect as there had to be a distance to the work, it had to reflect a different world, a silent world, a world of simple tones, a stark world, a world of shadows. We had no idea what we were doing, at first. We shot long, stationary portraits of the two of us, one after the other, then we took turns sitting in front of our own image, which we projected on a wall of the flat I had rented in Plaka. We created primitive loops across two spools, we called them time capsules, and we would set ourselves up in the room and immerse ourselves in the contemplation of our own shadow in the dark for hours or days or weekends at a time, the other taking time, according to a schedule, to deliver food and water or cigarettes to whoever was taking the transport.
“The results were extraordinary. There was a form of osmosis between our present and past selves that resulted in what felt like the raising of a third personality. He is risen, we would announce to each other as we left the room after a successful session, a future self, is what it felt like, like the communion between the two somehow attracted the third, all of whom, of course, were surely one. My studies in magic and experimental psychology and of course alchemy suggested that the goal of magical practice, which had become the goal of art practice, was a reuniting of fractured selves across time, an attempt at wholeness, is what it seemed to suggest, and in our early experiments this feeling of union, of union with the past, the present and the future, in a place that was outside of time, well, it was palpable, to say the least. And true to our beliefs, our gamble with art changed everything.
“Contemporary with our experiments in killing time dead using art and technology we were contacted by a group of researchers based in Germany who claimed to be fugitive Futurists themselves. However, their interests lay more in biology and technology, a sideways interest to our own. Specifically, they had been experimenting on animals. They had written to the gallery where we had shown our mechanical men and the gallery had forwarded the letter to us. It explained that they had been disassembling living animals, that was the word they used, disassembling, an ominous word when used in connection with a living thing, and then attempting to reanimate them. Really, what they had been doing was mutilating them. They would literally skin an animal, remove all of its identifiable features until all that was left was pale pulpy flesh and sinew and nerve endings and bone, and then they would attempt to rebuild it using artificial materials. It was terrible and incredible at the same time. They’re practising the art of The Creator, W____ said.
“They wanted our help in mechanising the bodies, in lending them a semblance of new life. Until we find the elixir, they wrote, and it was impossible to tell whether they were joking or not, electricity will have to suffice. We explained in a letter of return that we had moved on, that our interest now lay in film and art and the possibility of a transport through time and a raising of the dead via focused experiments on the two. They replied in kind that it seemed our motivations were held in common. They confessed that they had never experimented with the moving image, however, but they said that if we had access to a film recorder then they would be happy for us to document their experiments and they even used the term ‘art and magic’ in regard to the specifics of our own contribution, so that I exclaimed to W____ that somehow they must have made the same intuitive breakthroughs that we had and that their work, although admittedly more macabre than our own, took a belief in art and the possibilities for ingress, into the future, into the dark of our past, into the work of creation, to a fevered extreme. That was the word I used, fevered, for that is how I felt. We wrote back, and a meeting was arranged, in Düsseldorf, for October, in the first of the dying years of the 1930s.
“Before we left I had an uncanny experience of prophecy. I was listening to the wireless, a habit that I had maintained from the blessed years of my childhood, to a popular general knowledge quiz. I swear this is true and that it really happened and I’m not just misremembering it. It could have been a prankster or an ideologue or a bloody-minded National Socialist but every question that was put to them was answered with two words: Adolf Hitler. Who is the inventor of the telescope? Adolf Hitler. What is the name of the longest river in Africa? Adolf Hitler. How many books are there in the Old Testament? Adolf Hitler. Which of Shakespeare’s plays is referred to by the euphemism ‘the Scottish play?’ Adolf Hitler. Which famous modern composer was born in Leipzig in 1813? Adolf Hitler. Who holds the record for running the fastest mile? Adolf Hitler. What form did Zeus take in order to seduce Leda? Adolf Hitler. Can you name their offspring? Adolf Hitler, Adolf Hitler, Adolf Hitler, Adolf Hitler. The quizmaster made no comment about this and made no attempt to correct him. This remains inexplicable to me to this day.
“True to form, when we touched down in Düsseldorf, we quickly came to realise that our correspondents were themselves under the spell of Hitler, that indeed they were in his employ. The two men, whom I will simply refer to as X____ and Y____, claimed that the Nazis were truer to the esoteric principles of Futurism than even the Italians and that they held in great esteem art’s ability to transform reality and to rewrite history. Of course I quizzed them about decadent art, as we had all heard the rumours that Hitler and his cronies were philistines. Decadent art, X____ explained, and I can still hear his irritatingly nasal Low Countries accent as I recount this, decadent art, my friend, is art that does nothing for humanity beyond simply revelling in its hopelessness.
“Y____ was the odder of the two. Under the name The Unicorn he presented private piano performances in the top floor of the tower block they occupied in the warren of streets behind Düsseldorf train station, where he would ‘rape’ the piano, climbing inside the guts of a grand Bösendorfer with an erection and engaging in violent copulation with it. The piano, he informed me at one of these covert gatherings, should be played as if it has been accosted and assaulted in a back alley. If you closed your eyes and ignored The Unicorn’s increasingly frenzied vocal exhortations, it could almost be Scriabin.
“Still, the pair’s main artistic focus lay in the flaying and the restoring of the recently deceased. I will never forget the scene that greeted us when W____ and I first entered their studio on the second floor. There in front of us, held upright by chains strung from the ceiling, was the body of a horse whose skin had been removed and whose blood had been drained. Look at the technology, X____ marvelled as he ran his fingers along the striated muscle and sinew, what madman dreamed this up? The studio stank of ammonia and of preserving fluids and of the insides of things. W____ made the mistake of making a flip comment about taxidermy and X____ exploded. The flesh remembers, he burst, the flesh remembers! Taxidermy is hollow, he said, empty shells. The Jews have a word for it, he said, Qliphoth, the impure husks, the shells. The life of an animal transforms the viscera, remodels the muscle, and so deepens the eye, he said. The eye, he said again, pointedly, with a manic expression on his face. The organs, the muscles, the blood veins, he said, these all become imbued with time. That was the phrase he used, ‘imbued with time.’ The flesh remembers, he repeated, the flesh remembers, and he stared at me with his eyes like egg whites, his pupils like birdseed.
“But their experiment—their art—was more terrible and incredible than we had been led to believe. They were creating hybrids. They had started on dogs, stray dogs that they captured roaming the streets by night, dogs whose faces had been changed. Y____, with great surgical skill, had perfected the process of removing the face of a dog, preserving it perfectly, and transplanting it onto another. I have to tell you that some of these dogs were alive during the process. W____ and I were implicated.
“We filmed the work. We would begin just after midnight. We placed the camera in the back of a van on which we had painted a red cross in order to dissuade suspicion, and we drove through the outer reaches of Düsseldorf. We travelled with poisoned meat, enough to knock the dog out for a few hours at least. We would spot our prey, a thin waif, a haggard black dog whose eyes lit up in the darkness, and we would open the doors of the van and switch the camera on, placing the meat on the floor.
“Come on, boy, we would say, you can see X____ mouth it on the camera, he pats his thigh and waves the dog into the back of the van. The dog turns around, looks up, it is so dark, it is black and white, the dog’s eyes are like tadpoles on the surface of a pond, it thinks for a second, it is motionless, then it leaps, it leaps into the back of the van and it starts to eat. The effect is almost instantaneous. X____ holds the dog, it slumps into his arms, it knows something is wrong and it looks into the camera in fright. It wants to hold on to life. It was unaware of what life felt like, living its life in happy ignorance of the life force until the moment when it felt it draining away, a moment that it seemed to me X____ took a peculiar pleasure in, as he held the dog in his arms and as he whispered to it, who knows what, you can see it in the films, it looks like a religious painting, W____ said, a religious painting in the dark, The Passion of the Dog Saint, The Annunciation of the Street Bitch, and as we drove back in the dark I let the camera run and it was obvious that X____ had been affected, he was upset, or no, he was filled with emotion, yes, and at that moment he was almost tender.
“Back home Y____ would immediately begin work. The dog was laid out on a trolley, X____ had carried it in his arms, and Y____ would begin the removal of the face. He made it appear no more difficult than the skinning of a rabbit by a teenager. As he made the final cut he held the face in his hand and displayed it for the camera. It hung down over his fingers like thin dough. Then he turned to the dog whose face he had removed and he greeted what was underneath, and you can see it clearly on camera, you can see him mouth the word hello, that was what he said to the bloody mess on the table, to the revelation of muscle and blood and vein and bone showing through, hello, he said, and of course you might say it could be any word, the film is silent, after all, it could be any exclamation of two syllables, ‘my God’ might have been more appropriate, but I was there and I heard it with my own ears. He clearly said hello.
“X____ walked to one of the pressurised containers that lined the wall and that looked like silver tombs. There was a low hiss and a puff of dry ice as the door opened out and X____ appeared with what looked like a goldfish bowl or a space helmet in his hand. He placed it on a surface next to the faceless dog. Y____ put on a huge pair of gloves and put his hand into the bowl, removing what looked like some kind of thin animal-print material. He looked between W____ and me with an expression of manic glee. Then he held up the material for us to see. I got it from a young giraffe with a broken neck, he boasted. I froze behind the camera. We have an arrangement with the Zoological Gardens, he explained. He began to smooth the lineaments of the face over the dog’s head. He held the head towards the camera. This is the future of painting, he said.
“There had been many previous experiments. Afterwards, as the dog lay sedated in a cage, X____ showed us around a back room of macabre exhibits, of hybrid animals in grotesque transformations. In a series of glass cases there was a collection of birds with the faces of rats. Y____ seemed embarrassed about those ones. Indulge me, he shrugged. There were horses with camel humps and small, rudimentary wings. Pegasus, X____ laughed. There was a cat with the tail of an overgrown monkey and the snarling face of a ferret, snake heads on turtles, a small rhino with the head of a donkey (we just grafted that straight on, Y____ explained), a donkey with the head of a rhino (likewise, Y explained). Until now the artists have only interpreted the world, X said as we walked along in the gloom. The point is to change it.
