Des Heaux Arts
Tags: Museums, Love, History, Fiction

I meet Guy in the Crypt.

I am more interested in the Crypt itself than the artworks displayed in it. The artists are all third-years at Central Saint Martins, and they are self-consciously artistic in that way exclusive to art students; all on-trend graphics, video art, and installations inspired by insipid, imaginary traumas. But the Crypt — the Crypt! We sip mimosas from plastic cups as if standing in an eighteenth-century church crypt is an everyday occurrence. Because, for everyone else, it is.

Instead of checking my phone in the corner, I can pretend that the whispered conversations about aesthetics and the occasional scream of one video piece on loop are the voices of the restless dead. They can be vengeful dead, perhaps; angered Anglicans whose ashy remains quake at the thought of the self-centered sacrilege being enacted on their graves. But in reality, there is no deeper meaning or tortured soul haunting the students’ art. There is, however, a stone slab at the back of the crypt with a Latin inscription on it, and this, more than anything else, attracts me. I flick open the flashlight on my phone and hold it up to the letters. TEMPLUM SANCTUM CONSTITUTUM MDCCIX

A boy’s voice behind me, closer than the general murmur of the Crypt. “Are you…”

“Reading Latin,” I say.

“Because…”

“I can.” I glance towards him but see only a lanky outline in the glare of my phone. It’s a good outline, though — oversized jacket, well-cuffed pants, hair that undoubtedly strings into his eyes. “I like to know what it means. The history of it all. Like,” I kneel and run my fingers in the grit of the letters, “here’s the MINISTER of the parish…but MINISTER is just like English, so I guess it’s not as impressive…”

“It is.” The boy crouches and his face is close to mine in the electric rectangle of phone light. I see eyelids heavy under thick brows and a pearl earring in his left ear. I catch my reflection, soft, spiraling, in the pearl. I like how I look in him.

“Thanks.” Gravel digs into the knees of my jeans as we stand. I’d ask if he’s an artist, but I know the answer already. He wears his hair in that bowl-cut style that would look stupid on anyone but an art student. He leads me back to his corner of the Crypt.

According to his epitaph, Guy Bonhomme specializes in video. He favors 3-D rendered digital shapes imposed over cell phone footage of London parks. The shapes shift in space and color as the playback rolls over three staticky TVs propped against the crypt walls. I feel hypnotized as I watch the slow parade of shapes, jarred at random by flashes of rainbow feedback. The work reminds me of a desktop computer screensaver, if the screensaver only covered part of the screen. I ask him what it means.

Guy pushes his bowled bangs out of his eyes. “I don’t want it to mean anything. I’d rather let the viewer decide. I think it’s Fascist to prescribe meaning in art, you know?”

He sees the glaze of my gaze as I watch the shapes on the screens instead of his face. Move, morph, glob.

“So where in America are you from?”

The shapes are burned to the backs of my eyelids. “Ohio. Do you know it?”

His face is as blank as the shapes in his art. I take a pen from my pocket.

“Hold out your hand,” I say. He has a stalk of asparagus tattooed on his forearm. I draw around New York, Texas, California, squiggle the river of “Ohio, the heart of it all. I’m Alice.”

“Charming,” says Guy, and he closes my map in his fist.

—

After two weeks of Instagram mutual-following and sending each other our favorite art historical articles, Guy Bonhomme greets me outside of the art history building at University College London. He leans against the black fence of a Georgian townhouse, perfectly anachronistic in a thrifted neon jacket and a paper cup of coffee from Prêt à Manger. We are going to the National Gallery.

I unfold my annotated copy of his article on contemporary tactile aesthetics as we walk. Guy holds out the hand with the coffee.

“There’s no marks for oral presentation,” he says.

“I know,” I insist, “but I want to tell you what I think. Don’t you want to know what I think?”

“Of course.” He tosses his coffee in the trash. “I didn’t print yours out, though.”

I stop at the crossing. “I’ll have to take marks for that.”

“I know.”

“You force my hand,” I say.

Guy takes the printout in one hand and my hand in the other.

“So,” he says, and steps into the crossing as if he hasn’t done something absolutely wonderful. “What did you think of this section? Doesn’t it remind you of Walter Benjamin?”

The sun sets purple on the rounded slates of the National Gallery’s central dome. It is open late on Fridays. Though the entrance is deceptively contemporary (this concerns me at first), Guy and I climb two and a half staircases to stand in an atrium paved entirely in green and orange marble. Orange isn’t the right color for it — the marble is the color of a sketch in raw Siena chalk, dashed off in a minute by Michelangelo, and now polished perfect and hung in isolation at the back of the High Renaissance wing. I hold my breath. I can hear the click of my loafers on the mosaicked floor above the shuffle of tourists and a guided tour in Spanish. White tiles spiral from the orange not-orange pillars above me, leading the eye to mosaic portraits in the corners of the room. Rubens, Velasquez, Reynolds. I break my gaze to find Guy already in the first gallery. He looks up from his phone as I enter the room.

“What do you want to see, Alice?” he says.

I look. I see velvet cushioned chaises down the center of the salmon-walled room, over a parquetted hardwood floor perfect for the slow, sideways, heel-toe head-tilted walk particular to art museums. I feel breathless, overwhelmed, like running through the galleries with eyes wide open to see

“Everything,” I say to Guy. “But I’ll settle for Artemisia Gentileschi.”

She was this incredible Italian Baroque painter, I say, who, regardless of her exceptional status as a 17th century female artist, was a master of the Caravaggio school in her own right. Most people know her for her rape case and her proto-feminist biblical paintings, like Judith Slaying Holofernes, and Susanna and the Elders. And those paintings are great, of course, but have you seen her self-portraits?

Like, look at this, I say, stumbling over a velvet chaise to cross the gallery, to the painting that’s caught my eye. I squint closer to read the label (I haven’t worn my contacts), though the iconography of the painting should be enough. Self-portrait as Saint Catherine, oh my god, Guy, do you see this? Like look at her expression. Her confidence! She’s like, yeah, I have the balls to paint myself as a saint, and to do it well. I dare you to come after me, to serve better chiaroscuro than this — do you see the shadow on her cheek? And how it gives her eyes that look? That ferocity? That beauty?

Guy has picked up a museum map from a velvet chaise, and turns over its folds with his bony fingers. The edge of the second floor runs against his tattoo. I am torn between him and Artemisia; the gallery light cuts across his face as in a Caravaggio. He catches my gaze and smiles.

“There’s a contemporary exhibition on the ground floor,” he says. “Video installation. No old Italians. Let’s go, yeah?”

—

A week later we go to the Tate Modern. Unlike the National Gallery, which sits in the heart of historic, touristic Trafalgar Square, the Tate Modern occupies an old factory in Southbank on the Thames. It is Guy’s favorite museum. I have never been.

The Tate atrium is stark and steel-beamed, like an airplane hangar, or a hollowed-out Ikea. I feel the vast space between myself and the ceiling, but unlike the transcendent upward feeling I get in cathedrals, this space feels smothering. I press my hand into Guy’s to steady myself. He pulls his fingers from my grasp to zoom on the museum map on his phone.

“The work I want to show you should be right…” he bites his lip. “Here. Follow me.”

Guy leads me to a big white room. A ratty grey rug covers a corner of the floor, and on the center of the rug is a boxy old television. Blue letters run across the screen like the banner at the bottom of the news channel. I read:

SPIN SPAN SPEAK SPOCK SPOOK… AND SHE SAYS TO ME WHAT IS LIFE AND I SAY IT IS NOTHING…

The words sprout fuzzy neon borders which make them hard to read. I squint: BEDROOMS AND GRAVEYARDS SERVE THE SAME PURPOSES…CONSUME OR BE CONSUMED…

I look at Guy. He mouths along to …YOU ARE THE MACHINE IS YOU…

“What does it mean?” I ask.

“It’s nonsense,” says Guy. The blue light reflects in his eyes as he stares at the television. “It’s neo-Dada performance art — the television is the performer, see? Isn’t it brilliant?”

I watch the scroll.

“I love how obviously political their work is. Like, old art is missing this; your Renaissance boys would never do something like this, Alice.”

“They would,” I say. It’s hard to keep my voice at a gallery whisper. “They did. Michelangelo painted his least favorite cardinal as a demon in his Sistine Chapel frescoes, and Artemisia, I told you — ”

“Yeah,” says Guy, his eyes still on the TV. “But nothing on this scale, with so many parts — ”

“The Sistine Chapel is massive.”

Guy finally looks at me. “You can’t deny that Renaissance Italy, the entire concept of the art historical canon, really, is racist and classist — ”

“That’s not the point, Guy.”

“But it is, Alice.”

“Guy.” I stop. I unclench my hands. I watch the screen with him.

YOU ARE I IS WE IS…GIRL DEAD IN FREAK ACCIDENT…THE ACCIDENT… IS CARING TOO MUCH…WHAT THE MAN THINKS…

“This gallery is hot,” I say. “I would like to go outside.”

Guy does not seem to hear me.

I speak in a voice too loud for a gallery. “I’m going to wait in the hall.”

“K.” Guy keeps his eyes on the screen.

I turn to leave but a crush of people blocks the doorway, noses in museum maps. One lifts her cell phone to the work Guy stares at; his silhouette haloes blue on her screen. How picturesque.

I do not wait in the hallway. There is somehow too much air and not enough in this building. I stumble down five flights of stairs and out into the street — boardwalk’s more like it, since it runs along the Thames, except instead of boards it’s concrete and short trees in careful planters overlooking the space between Blackfriars and Millennium Bridge. A French school group swallows me, disaffected teenagers with shirts in ironic English; they pretend not to understand when I ask them to move, please. I break through their languidness and my momentum crosses me to the metal railing at the edge of the Thames.

From above, the river Thames is grey and fast. I can see the current that raises the tide every twelve hours or so. The tide is out this afternoon; the rocky foreshore exposed to the absent winter sun in a white-grey sky. To my left, the surface swells into a slope under Blackfriars Bridge, then pebbles out into sand. On the right the rocks grow bigger and slick with algae; pigeons and seagulls peck at the decaying posts of old docks embedded in the shore.

Guy says that the best art is about nothing, and sure, art can be about nothing. Like a still life that’s nothing but a few oranges and tulips. But even those aren’t about nothing. They’re about vanity, and the brevity of beauty, and even an artwork that’s just beautiful is about beauty, and aesthetics, and contrast and composition, and to be about nothing is to be about something all the same.

A boy’s voice, behind me: “Yo, I texted you!”

I turn from the tide. Guy is a step away, then a step too close. “The Tate’s too much for you, yeah?” His breath is hot in my face. I dodge and press my hips into the railing, but I still feel Guy over my shoulder. “I used to go down there with the boys during A-levels. We’d smoke but the fish rot would hide the smell on our clothes. And we could chuck the butts in the river, no problem.”

Guys’ hands are on either side of me on the railing. I look at the ring on his finger (a mood ring; it’s ironic). I see the stalk of the asparagus tattoo underneath his flannel.

“You chucked your cigarette butts into the river?” I say, quietly.

“What about it?” He shrugs against my back. “People’ve been chucking their shit in the river for thousands of years — since the Romans.”

“Hm?”

“They taught us in primary school. The river’s basically been a dump for all of Londoners’ rubbish ever since the Roman settlement here. Like, there’s all these animal bones in it from slaughterhouses along the river. And pottery shards and anything that could fall overboard on a ship, ya know?”

I grip the railing and rotate my hips to face Guy. “And all that’s just in the river?”

“I guess.”

“So you just threw your cigarette butts in an archaeological site.”

Guy lifts his shoulders and leans in. “So what?”

“You don’t do that, Guy.” I push my hands into his on the railing, forcing him off-balance. He steps a circle back from me and runs his fingers through his hair.

He demands. “What are you on about?”

I demur. “What do you mean?”

“You don’t like the Tate Modern, do you?”

I look at him. His bangs puff pitifully in his face.

“No,” I say. “I don’t.”

“I knew it,” Guy steps back again. “You think the Tate is rubbish.”

“No.”

“You think it’s garbage, then, is that American enough?”

“No, Guy.” I want to reach out, reassure him, make him like me. But I don’t want to move from my spot on the railing. “It’s just — ”

“Not enough?”

“Not for me,” I say.

Guy circles farther away from me and trips on the toe of his just-scuffed-enough leather boots. He catches my eyes, and he knows I know he never read the article I sent him. He tilts his head back, sighs, “Right, great.”

“Guy.” I lift a hand, but he’s looking up at the Tate. I turn my head to the railing. A few feet away, the rail breaks into a gate. I didn’t notice before.

I imagine opening it. Enter to a plane of concrete, and stone steps slick with river mud down into the rocks. I step on the concrete landing. Low waves ripple out from the paths of tour boats and ferries. A green rim of algae on the stone walls marks the tide’s highest point. It’s rising now; the slope under the bridge is shallow.

Below the tidal wall the sounds of the city disappear. No French tour groups, no murmur, ghostly, traffic-horned, otherwise. I keep my eyes on my shoes to avoid pools of mud. I feel the unsteady surface of the shore in my ankles; pieces of brick, slate, ceramic shards rock under my feet. I kick my toe into a piece of blue-patterned pottery — Delftware, 16th century, I imagine, I recognize its flash as if in the corner of my eye in a museum. But it’s not a museum, it’s the riverbank where Guy and his friends threw their cigarette butts and didn’t see the history under their feet. I pick up the pottery, scrub the blue-green grain of riverbed clay across the surface. It smells like fish and decaying garbage; I’ll have to wash my hands at least three times in the Tate Modern’s sinks… but four hundred years ago this dish dashed to pieces, dropped from a distracted dockworker’s hand and turned and tumbled, buried in clay and brushed by the tide until one day, today, the blue-painted edge touched the toe of my shoe, and I reached down, and I picked it up, this piece of history, shard of the past, chipped and beautiful; I hold four hundred years in my hand.

I look up. Guy doesn’t notice.

—

Written in autumn 2020. A character study for novel in progress of the same name.