Exhibition
Chapter 6 of Gaze, written by Matt Boothman after Yanahn
The Tower of Art contains all that is art, but that does not make it an artist. The tower is at most a curator. What it lacks in creativity, in artistry, it makes up in taste.
Beyond the laboratory awaited an exhibition. A peace offering, curated for Willis Winter.
Winter stepped from the claustrophobic linework of the woodcut laboratory into a room styled to accommodate him; the first such room he had entered since washing up on the shores of the ink floods. The sketchiness of the room most closely resembled the studio, but these were the first marks on a new page, not a careless tracing-over of an earlier work.
The room was cosy enough to fit in a frame, and sparse in a way that hinted at details yet to be decided. Just enough of the edges of floor, walls and ceiling were suggested to allow Winter to feel that he was occupying space, not hovering in void. And there was motion: glass teardrops hung by threads from the (mostly implied) ceiling, leaving in their wake lines of action that were by far more confident and real than those barely suggested edges delimiting the room. They faded in gentle stop-motion sequence from top to bottom to top of their swings. But for the rather arthouse subject matter, Winter could have been walking into one of his own storyboards.
The meaning of the exhibition could not have been clearer: Willis Winter was someone worth taking seriously after all. His presence in the tower was no mistake.
“Oh,” he said, remarking the motion lines and the space left for imagination to fill, and confirming that the alchemical book had come with him from the laboratory (yes, it was still implied to be in his possession, no incident having removed it in the interim, though for his convenience, as a person to be taken seriously, the awkward tome would remain momentarily out of frame, the better for him to experience and understand the exhibition), “I see. So this part of the craft, this is okay? This is not objectionable?”
The rough draft before the finished masterpiece; the plan: this is part of the process of many an art form. So no, this did not induce the same eye-bursting, razor-to-canvas pain as the intrusion in the studio.
Winter stalked among the dangling vials. His elbows rose and fell like nodding donkeys as he brought first one teardrop, then another, to his camera eye. It was not the done thing, to handle the exhibits, to march around the piece like a shopper in a busy IKEA instead of in a solemn stroll, but he was engaging; he was reading the labels; that was the main thing.
“‘Ruinous Vainglory’,” he read from the luggage label attached to one glass teardrop. The title of a graphic novel Winter had dreamed of as a teenager the in Hebrides. He had filled notebooks with concepts and character studies while imagining five volumes, then had learned about all the steps that came between, and lost heart.
“‘My City of Villages’,” he read. A photo book. He had assembled all the material, dozens of shots of the Glaswegian neighbourhoods he’d burrowed into looking for love, but lost confidence in the project while writing the commentary.
“‘Glory Hole’,” he read from the fattest teardrop, the centrepiece. In close-up, he surely could not help but understand that the teardrop was hollow, a stoppered vial, and that what the hollow held was tears. Tears for the film that had come so close to fruition. Tears for the year of sacrifices, of stasis, of travelling, pitching, hustling, begging, mental and financial resources dwindling. Tears unshed, back in the world, in the absence even of a “no”. Tears held back, at rock bottom in Los Angeles, so the wall of indifference would not win.
“And these tears,” mused Willis Winter – he understood! he understood! – “are they meant to be mine? I mourned once, yes, that these works would never be. I raged as well. But I sorrow no more. These were all necessary failures.
“Without these sorrows, without this rage, I might never have made any of the work I am proud of. I would never have given adult work a chance. I would not be the artist I am.”
He released the vial gently, so it hung straight down and did not swing. From above the fog of a ceiling merely suggested, a fresh teardrop fell, crystallising into a new thread, a new vial. Winter cradled it. “So who is it that sorrows now? Who mourns my failures still? Who have I given cause to weep?”
His questions met with silence, but not with indifference. The one he enquired of had already replied the only way it knew how.
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