Monument Maker, page 46
“Of course, these are early models, Y____ said, practice runs. Nothing has survived the surgery, so far. That is why we moved on to street dogs and to facial grafts. And why we invited you here, X____ added. The organs must remain intact. Our art must have integrity. That is where the Egyptians got it wrong, even with their great cooling towers and funerary palaces. But it’s understandable in a land where the sun is all-devourer and all-begetter and corruption moves fast. In the cold heart of Germany, however, we have, let us say, more options. We propose, in cases that don’t survive the transformation, to replace the skeleton with one of your mechanical structures. To reanimate the dead, to better them, even. What is the point of all this? W____ finally burst. We wouldn’t be the ones to ask, X____ replied, with a smile, and a shake of his head.
“That night, when we returned alone to our quarters—thankfully we were billeted in a separate building far from our colleagues’ experiments—I sat on my bed in the dark with Düsseldorf lit up beneath me and felt completely undone.
“I dreamed of more fantastic creatures still, of terrible transformations, of mocking animals with talking assholes, with horrid lips on their anus, moving and forming mute words, of ghastly distended stomachs lined with sharpened teeth. This is all nonsense, I told myself, this is all a pointless nonsense. But what had I expected of magic and of art? Magic, it had seemed to me, bypassed gristle and blood and bone, or at least merely symbolised it in passing, as results came straight out of the clear air. Sculpture idealised the body, its clean lines, its lack of viscera. Was it all an escape from the body, from its ghastly possibilities? And why had I been called here? It is the body that allows us to travel from the past into the future, I told myself. To modify the body, in that case, modifies our relationship with the past and the future. But what about continuity? Without continuity we are simply mocking life and death and we are simply less than it. How does one man, one living thing, exchange its appearance for another, while remaining that first thing, while to all intents and purposes appearing as another, even believing itself to be another? This was the conundrum that we breakaway Futurists came to wrestle with and which came to be symbolised by Janus, from whom we took our name, the two-headed god—I almost said dog—of beginnings and endings.
“The poor sick dog lolled in its cage, clawed at its new face, bled on its sheets. Food drooled from its mouth, its eyes were obscured by its new sockets. We held a mirror up in front of its cage and it just looked through it. After all, dogs don’t care for their own reflections at the best of times. So, we mutilated a living being, W____ said, so what now? Do we put it on display, do we boast of our achievements? Can this really be the pathway to the future?
“X____ protested. Brueghel’s first painting was a mess, he shrugged. It had to be. Because he couldn’t display it in a gallery should he have given it all up there and then? But how much suffering, how many abortions before we make the perfect hybrid? How much suffering? X____ burst. How much suffering? Is that what you think the great artists sought, an end to suffering? No, X____ continued, no. There is no end to art because there is no end to suffering.
“We continued with the kidnap of dogs, reluctant though we were. We travelled across Düsseldorf in the black of the van, with a single light that would flash on and off at random, why can’t we fix that, I asked X____, it’s driving me mad, and for a second I would catch his silhouette and the outline of the animal in his lap, the poor dog, and then we would plunge into darkness once more. And we continued to document it, to film our midnight runs, for some purpose that continued to evade us and that we thought of as the future. Still, even the dogs that lived, briefly, a week, two weeks, the best part of a month, with a new face, the face of another creature entirely, the face of the dead of the zoo, even those dogs died, eventually, and even when they were alive experienced a death-in-life that was unjustifiably sad. Y____ narrowed his approach. From now on, he said, we will focus on the exchanging of faces between two dogs, dogs of the same breed, even. We will reel in our ambitions, we will start small. We will practise face-swapping. From there, he said, who knows, though I am guessing now, as you read this, possibly, in the circumstances that I imagine you reading it in, that is to say, that you can see where we went, and what the outcome was.
“Suffice to say that our early face-swaps were a success, the dogs were uncomfortable, for a while, undoubtedly, but we kept them sedated and well fed until the face had taken and then, a decision we made between ourselves, we set them free, we let them go, on their way, out, into the world. There was something about that, something about having all of these dogs with surreptitious new faces, out in the world, interacting with reality, that really struck me. To me, it was the equivalent of a radical new perspective in art, where the scene is altered, subtly, where the plane is recalibrated, so subtly that at first, or perhaps at all, you do not realise that you are seeing something new, something that is almost impossible, even as it barely registers on your attention. Yes, it was a contagion, as all great art is, yes, we had so uncannily altered reality that it felt like things would never be the same. I began to have ambitions for all of God’s creatures.
“We began the process of mechanisation. W____ and I worked on the birds, the birds with the faces of rats. Y____, as I have explained, was embarrassed about these. When I quizzed him further he claimed that he had plagiarised them, which made no sense to me, where, in the world, are there birds with the faces of rats to copy? We soon came up against our first obstacle. The presence of the organs, perfectly preserved as they were, militated against us installing a full mechanical skeleture. We followed the original skeleture as much as we could, but the presence of the organs meant that we simply didn’t have enough room to build in the kind of strength that would facilitate convincing movement. We came to a compromise. For now, X____ said, for now we can remove the peripheral organs; the lungs, the bowels, the intestines, the offal; but the heart remains, he said, the heart must have its place. To tell you the truth, I thought it was a very poetic compromise. I imagined these birds with their rat faces let loose in the forest of Germany, a single still heart in their breast. I confess it almost brought a tear to my eye.
“Then came the incident that nearly got us shut down. I have explained that Y____ , under the guise of The Unicorn, would present what he described as ‘piano actions’ once a month in the studio of our building. We would invite forward-thinking members of the Nazi elite, radicals, avant-gardists, freethinkers, Futurists and their ilk. We would also invite prostitutes from the building opposite ours, a tower block where the models sat in the windows with numbers and were picked out by customers from the forecourt below. W____ and I had made friends with many of the women due to the proximity of our working environments and our monthly actions provided them with some extra trade and us with future credits that we quickly spent in the building next door. I had a fair appetite for the women of the night, so much so that I pray that I get to indulge it, once again, and forever, in my next life. If you get my point.
“Anyway. On this particular night the crowd were rowdier and more drunken than usual. There were faces I didn’t recognise. There had been drinking at a beer hall beforehand and one of the regulars had invited a group of young SA men. These boors were manhandling the women and generally making a shame of themselves. Y____ made his appearance as The Unicorn, naked and with a startling erection. He had added a yellow cape to his repertoire so that he appeared as an X-rated comic-book hero. The young men began to heckle him. There were shouts of Es ist Übermensch! With the help of a small ladder he climbed into the innards of the piano. Then he began. He bucked, and he wailed, and in his own words ‘fucked the shit out of it.’ It was a tempestuous performance. There were shouts of Es ist Wagner! as he hammered his penis against the bass strings. People gathered around the piano drinking beer and spilling it on The Unicorn. No, he cried, Es ist Unicorn! as he came to a climax and ejaculated all over the strings with a sound like a small frog plopping into a pond. The drunken SA men took it in good spirits and raised their glasses and toasted his performance. They seemed most impressed by the potential ruination of the piano. That piano cost a fortune, no doubt, I heard one philistine say, what a laugh. Then he let out a large belch and slapped one of the prostitutes on her ample rear. Soon the sounds of muffled lovemaking could be heard from the corners of the studio and I heard doors being opened and closed as couples sought out secluded locations for trysts while a gramophone played obscure piano music from Y____’s collection.
“A cry of anger erupted from one of the back rooms and I realised I had forgotten to secure the room that housed our hybrids. A young SA man of high rank came charging through the door with the shout that we were engaged in experimenting on animals. There was general uproar.
“You will be reported for this, you degenerates, he spat. Throughout, Y____ and X____ remained startlingly calm. The party’s over, X____ announced to the room, this reactionary—that’s the word he used, reactionary—this reactionary has overreached himself in his attempt to appreciate the new vanguard of contemporary art. There is no room for small boys here, he continued, in what I thought was an inspired retort, no room for the pea-brains of yesterday, he said, no room for the Untermensch, he said, piling it on, go back to being foot soldiers, he spat, while behind closed doors the elite of the party, that’s what he called us, the elite of the party, while behind closed doors the elite of the party make the kind of art that greets the new dawn on hind legs and with brave faces, while we, my friend, the elite of the party, he repeated, for effect, the elite of the party continue to push the boundaries of what man and animal, together, are capable of, which is a Reich that will last forever, that is where our experiments point, not to the conscience of animal-lovers, perhaps, of sheep, perchance, but to the establishment not of a thousand-year Reich, he insisted, not of a thousand-year Reich, but of an eternal Reich, in heaven as it is on earth, what a flourish, the crowd were cowed and dazzled, they were beating a retreat, they were walking backwards towards the door, their hats in their hands, some of the girls were marvelling, when the war comes, he continued, like a madman by this point, when the war comes, he boomed, as we know it will, who will be there to gather the broken limbs from the battlefield and put you back together, will it be puppies, will it be cuddly dogs that graft the skin from your arm or the arm of your brother onto your shattered torso, will it be sentiment that will protect us against storm and steel or will it be the elite, once again, the elite, behind closed doors, experimenting, yes, creating, yes, appalling, well, possibly, and in that case don’t go trying closed doors, if you’re not sure what you will find, if your tiny brain won’t let you, because we are after nothing less than the philosopher’s stone of old, the vital elixir, the source of all life, the Holy Grail, what’s more we are under orders to find it, so get out of the way of the future, my friend, and one more thing, before you go, he said, and with a final flourish saluted the air, Heil Hitler, he boomed, Heil Hitler! By this point the SA contingent were out the door and making their way hurriedly down the stairs and into the night. What was left of the inner circle, the close group of avant-garde thinkers and cultural and political radicals that regularly attended our events, burst into spontaneous applause. I looked around at X____ and Y____ who stood there in mock triumph. Still, I knew in my heart that we were in trouble. I knew that we were far from being thought of as the Nazi elite. No more SA, X____ said, scanning the people in the room. No more SA, is that understood? They cannot be trusted. They’re too soft, he said. They’re sentimentalists.
“A week later we were called on by a devious-looking man with a thin lip. He announced himself as belonging to a National Socialist group known as The SIRK. X____ bundled him into his office and I went next door, to the adjoining room, and stood with my ear to the wall. It was impossible to make out the whole conversation, words escaped me, sentences came and went. He said something about being careful. He repeated the word sentimental, the word that X____ had used himself. He warned him; he used the words warning and advice a lot. He spoke of time and art and reality, again and again. He used the German word fadenscheinig. Flimsy art, flimsy reality, flimsy time, I couldn’t tell. Then he left.
“X____ called us together. We are on the verge of war, he said. Poland will fall first. The nature of our tasks, the future of our experiments, will change. New opportunities will assert themselves, therefore we must do what we can in order to bring this phase of the work to a head. We are taking on new staff to help us, he announced, people that we can trust. Also, W____ and I were gifted with German passports assigning us new identities. We were too caught up to turn back, caught up in the sweep of the future, the gravity of the past.
“An Italian woman by the name of Mariella came to work for us. We fell in love, our courtship was a whirlwind, we were married soon after. Who knew what the coming war would do to any of us? Bring this phase of the work to a head, X____ had advised us. Prepare for new possibilities. Mariella I will say no more about, in order that you—or I—or the two of us, might rediscover her all over again.
“We worked on the animals together, the mechanised hybrids. The future of painting meant that we were to release them across the country, these mechanised monstrosities, these grotesque works of the imagination that would turn the whole country into some fantastic fable, into some kind of dreamland: the Reich as the mind of the artist.
“War broke out. Poland fell. The project was to be closed. We were reassigned by the man from The SIRK to an internment camp in Poland. You can better work in secret there, we were told, plus the facilities were cutting-edge, the opportunities unsurpassed. We began to deposit our creations in the wilds around Düsseldorf.
“In the hills around Wuppertal we left a flock of bird-rats hidden amongst the trees, to be found, to decay, to confuse and to amaze. The last of our dogs we loosed in Düsseldorf itself, in Essen and in Dortmund. We left a particular monstrosity in Münster just for the poetry of it and for the future of cryptozoology. Turtles with moving limbs and mechanical snake heads we left by a secret lagoon north of Cologne. Larger animals, big cats, extravagant horses, mythical creatures, fabled beasts, we secreted in caves, transported to the bottom of rocky gorges, once, even, just as a teaser, left at a bus stop in Solingen.
“Then we were done; we locked the building and drove across a newly risen Germany more fantastic than any painting. Poland was more incredible still. In a matter of months they had transformed this dull little country into a setting better suited to the playing out of history, as fantastic as art itself. Flames rose up from villages in the snow. The tracks of articulated combat vehicles lay thick in the mud and across the roofs of collapsed houses. Dead horses laid out like letters across a field. Convoys of uniformed foot soldiers walked this way and that. Off in the distance we could hear the symphonic sounds of heavy artillery redrawing the map. We were euphoric. The Futurists were right: what a sound, what a scene lay in the guiltless embracing of the full possibilities of tomorrow.
“We were stationed at an internment camp in the north-east of the country. We marvelled at the great alliance between war, art and technology that the Nazi party had mobilised across the space of a few short years. Our quarters were basic—bare rooms with a desk and some chairs and a screened-off bed behind a curtain—but our facilities were advanced. There will be much raw material for your experiments, The Kommandant told us, as doctors there will be much to marvel at. He called us doctors; is that what he thought we were, is that what he had been told? None of us made to protest. We had immediately acquiesced to the undercover nature of our work, perfect secret agents. Something else was driving us along. Besides, there was a whole medical team in the wing next to ours, we wouldn’t be treating cold or typhoid or whatever it was that mass gatherings of criminals and the war wounded and the most wretched sections of humanity brought down upon themselves. But who were we working for? The SIRK? We called it the future and thought no more of it.
“Artists seeking the elixir of life in a death camp, I’m sorry, it sounds ridiculous now. I can’t explain how it felt. We were caught in the teeth of it. The bodies began piling up. We worked in shifts. What are we to do with all this flesh? W____ asked. We proposed tests, idiot tests. Stress tests on dead bodies, strategic removal of body parts, and soon, of course, the grafting began. The grafting of human tissue is a complicated business. Imagine a fleet of mechanised corpses turned against the enemy! X____ marvelled. Imagine the legions of the walking dead! It wasn’t hard to imagine. A walk round the camp revealed the legions of the walking dead in ever-swelling numbers. Our art, what was left of it, seemed even more of a cruel mockery. But X____ argued that if we could perfect the process of facial transference we could use it for good, we could rebuild damaged faces, replace limbs with new mechanised constructions, whereas I began to feel we had lost the plot; what about our dream of immortality, our dream of waking the dead, our dream of travelling through time using art? Here we were, elbow-deep in viscera, rearranging the corpses of poor children like jigsaw puzzles.
“W____ and I began to film the day-to-day working of the camps. Our credentials as artist-doctors gave us complete access. Why film suffering? For history, for one, but even then we continued to nurse an idea that by using the moving image we could perform some kind of alchemy, that some kind of escape could still be facilitated through the manipulation of signs and symbols. While X____ and Y____ continued to expand their experiments, Mariella, W____ and myself focused on capturing the scene forever. We shot hours of film, hours of terrible footage. Guards casually and brutally beat men and women and children in front of us. They held up emaciated bodies and forced them to perform, we closed in on the faces of the dead and of the dying. There is a way out through art, I continued to believe it, continued to believe it, continued to believe it, even as the empty eyes of hopelessly lost prisoners stared back at us in disbelief.
