Studio

With a flick of his long thin stroke of a leg, a movement not unlike the hurried turning of a page, Willis Winter transitioned from the auditorium into a different volume of the Tower of Art.

The room was still between drafts. Old ink, weathered from black to grey – and gone fuzzy, each faded line sending tendrils like a caterpillar’s fine hairs out between the fibres – described a chaise longue opposite an easel. Hurried new lines – blacker, thicker, slapdash in a way that struck Winter as more honest – edited the chaise into a firm, imposing, wipe-clean couch, and the easel on its tripod into a camera. The studio had never been described as not containing a couch, a camera, bright lights with umbrella-shaped reflectors, en-suite bathrooms stocked with make-up, prophylactics, and lubricants – so it presented no contradiction for the room to be depicted that way now. The tower was not changing for Willis Winter.

But hold that thought – igniting in the white space between inked lines – pain. Chaos. Light that was also noise. Flickering, strobing static snow. Visual information without intention, the antithesis of art, of the art which the Tower of Art is, projected from somewhere unknown to irradiate its delicate substance.

Might Winter know how to make it stop?

“The colour of television,” he was muttering to himself, contemplating the scene with one elbow on the camera and all his weight on one foot. His waistcoat, now devoid of the ink flood’s stain, but still nearly as black, hung artlessly from the bony hanger of his shoulders; cheaply manufactured, an unsuitable cut for his unusual height, the drape distorted by … by the thick black video cassette in the pocket. Winter became aware of the cassette in the same moment. With finger and thumb, he extracted it from the pocket and held it at arm’s length, rattling and leaking wide black streamers. They tethered the cassette to Winter’s waist, stretched, bowed into low swags, snapped and dangled and pooled at his feet.

The static in the white spaces strobed and resolved into an image, fuzzy but with enough recognisable form to soothe the tower. A woman, a girl really, made of light, perused by scan lines, now sat on the couch. Mixed media: full colour projection on ink sketch. There was no sound other than the plastic clicks of the tape spools turning. The girl’s eyes were on Winter where he stood by the camera, and the innocent smile she wore distorted them, nearly disguising the plea behind them.

Willis Winter spun on his heel, unbalanced by the cassette he still held straight-armed, turning his back to the girl and scribbling backwards, away from the wall and into the room. Between the camera and the soundless girl, he flung his arms wide, splashing black ribbons, and redrew himself into a tense and painful arc, pelvis forward, head back, and said, “This? Is this why I’m here? Out of everything I’ve made, this is what I’ve been brought here to account for? I was on my way to destroy this when I found myself here. What is there left on this tape for me to confront? What else could it teach me? Well?”

So said Willis Winter, as out of sight behind him, the girl’s lips moved, the girl’s head bobbed.

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