Press
Chapter 7 of Gaze, written by Matt Boothman after Yanahn
“If these are the tears,” said Willis Winter, his camera eye swimming bulbous in the vial he held, “I wonder, where are the sweat and the blood?”
This was a foolish thing to wonder aloud.
The exhibition, already only half-realised, ceased to be. In its place squatted the printing press, as black and real as iron. The printing press was no draft. It was no non-committal pencil sketch. It was a realised concept, a complete work, heavy and reeking with the irrevocability of ink.
The printing press was not so much a room in the Tower of Art as a mechanism of it. It was the tower’s core reproductive function. It was rarely seen for the same reason the artist’s brush and palette are rarely seen inside the frame that hangs on the gallery wall. But wherever one found oneself in the tower, one was always in the presence of the press.
So in a sense, Willis Winter’s ankles had always been caught between the rollers. Ever since he had washed up out of the ink floods, his head had been in the letterpress, punctuation biting through his brow to brand bone. In the studio and on the bridge, in the pottery and the lab, his tongue had been stretched into a ink-ribbon, his skin pulled and perforated and stamped and baked dry with hot air. In truth, when he carelessly spoke aloud his notion, all that really changed was that he now perceived the press, and what he was to it.
Still, he would have screamed. But there was no time between his becoming aware of the press and being mercilessly reinterpreted by it.
Willis Winter was in the Tower of Art, which contains nothing that is not art, and art can be adapted. He now experienced his own adaptation from durational autobiography into legal prose. The printing press reimagined him as boilerplate to be redlined, amended, reprinted and signed.
From the press emerged a neat stack of contracts. In the baking haze surrounding the press, the fresh red ink dried quickly to a flaky brown. The papers drily described dreams, services, agreed exchanges and prices. They named performers, crew, editors, producers, distributors.
The pistons and rollers fell silent. There was only the tick, tick, tick of iron cooling.
Greater artists than Willis Winter had lost themselves completely after falling into this pit trap of the tower’s. Arturo was one. He had been a composer. Hailed in the world outside as a genius and a visionary, he had never fully pulled himself back together after his dismantling by the press. It had parcelled out his achievements to his teachers at the conservatory, to his family, to his patron, to his amanuensis, to every conductor and musician ever to perform his work, to the accountant at the firm that printed his scores. The stack of contracts it made of him had blown apart in seeming rage and scattered throughout the tower. When he eventually found his way out, he had left many of them behind.
The air stirred as the press cooled, fluttering the corners of the contracts, the discarded misprints and offcuts, and the pale, paper-thin reproductions of Willis Winter that stood, and lay, and crouched, and rocked, and paced the catwalks.
And as they fluttered they were muttering:
“I have to find the way out of this place before it kills me.”
“I’d be a poor director with nobody to direct, wouldn’t I.”
“We’re like the bin men, we are…”
“I can’t pretend I haven’t an ego, every artist worth their salt needs one.”
“So this place is not only hostile…”
“I can’t leave here until I understand.”
“…it’s also unsafe.”
“Throw me off set the day I start believing myself an auteur.”
“…they couldn’t do without us but they’re not queueing up to shake our hands either.”
“There is malice in this place but not in everything it does, I think?”
“What joy to have found people to share this work with.”
Every contract in the stack was signed and countersigned, except one. It lay on top of the stack, accusing the flimsy copies of Willis Winter that congregated around it. Winter’s own signature perched like a starving vulture on one dotted line. The other line was untouched. The name printed under the line was Gemma Jane.
Every other muttering, fluttering Winter turned silent, surveilling eyes on the one who belonged to that contract, that agreement written out but never made. He hooded his camera eyes and flew to the railing to throw himself back into the unfeeling mercy of the printing press. His counterparts intercepted him. As they collided they stacked, no longer individual sheets but collated leaves.
Willis Winter found Gemma Jane’s unsigned contract in his hand. His fingers tightened, crumpling the page into the pocket that still hung low with the weight the videotape, Gemma Jane’s scene, which he’d been on his way to destroy.
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