He took me through the huge galleries on the fifth floor of the former thermal plant. Slowed by digesting food and thought-provoking art, we browsed the hangings somnolently, with much nodding and contemplation through half-closed eyes.
Finally we stood in the amplified silence of a huge, empty hall that could have garaged a couple of articulated trucks: empty, that is, but for seven large movie screens affixed to the walls. Footage from seven grainy CCTV cameras featuring the same deserted studio at night was running simultaneously on all the screens. The exhibit was Mapping the Studio, by Mike Norman. Mike’s studio was not a very psychedelic one. It seemed stacked with odds and ends, like someone’s garage; it was a place where things were made, not a place designed for show. The only thing that moved in the videos were rats. When we arrived, there were only three other visitors in that room, the largest gallery by far on the floor, and they looked on with some embarrassment as Malcolm began to pace the room ostentatiously. Starting from one end of the room, he took large, measured steps in a straight line across the room. He did the same thing on the other side. Then he walked across to where I was waiting at the entrance to the room, trying to hide my mortification behind a Metro newspaper.
By this time, several more visitors had entered the hall and stood in a loose gaggle beside me, watching Malcolm appreciatively. A uniformed security guard procured by the surveillance cameras also drifted in through the opposite entrance. He watched us through narrowed, less appreciative eyes.
Malcolm was panting by the time he reached me. As he caught his breath, a middle-aged woman flustering her way through a handful of brochures removed the audio guide from her ear to ask, in an artsy American accent, ‘I missed most of that. Sorry, what’s the name?’
‘Malcolm Frisbee,’ said that worthy. His voice had the resignation of a B-list celebrity destined to a lifetime of halfway recognitions that had to be supplemented with the occasional introduction.
‘I don’t mean your name. I mean your piece, your performance art. It’s not in the brochure . . .’
Her meaning dawned on Malcolm. ‘I’m not a performance artist!’ he snapped. He took my arm and turned away. We left the gallery at an angry three or four miles per hour and stormed up the stairs. Malcolm used the exercise to work off his anger at the indignity and to work up an appetite for desert. Back on the seventh floor, Ruby was waiting at the café with a prescience that verged on smugness as she nursed a sixth or seventh espresso.
Our earlier table was taken, but a waiter found us a better, if smaller, one for two, right against the glass window. We resumed our meal where we left off, he ordering a white and dark chocolate mousse and I, an ice cream. My order arrived almost immediately, but despite all his tips, we had to wait for his mousse. In the meantime, Phone-in-the-Ear-Ruby replaced the folder with the offending story in front of her boss. This time, there was also a white envelope under the transparent cover of the folder. Clearly, boss and PA had run this tag-game before. The coffee junkie did not meet my eye, nor did she return to her fix at the café. She disappeared into the ladies, like a butcher stepping back from the slab to avoid the spatter of blood.
The moment had come. The envelope was addressed to me. I did not need a BBC Panorama investigation to figure out its contents. I steeled myself to walk out before the final indignity. I was not going to become another IMX luncheon-termination statistic. I took a final spoon of ice cream.
Nobody did significant gazes like Malcolm Frisbee. He fixed me with one such and asked, fingers drumming a suspiciously calypsonian tattoo, ‘What do you think?’
‘About the ice cream?’
‘About Mapping the Studio! Answer me from here,’ he said, digging fingers into his guts. ‘Tell me what you felt, standing there, watching those giant screens.’
I took another final spoon of ice cream. It was a good thing that the mind was no TV screen and that my blankness as I stood watching the CCTV footage of a deserted studio could be transmogrified into an intellectual opinion. I shook my head. ‘Awesome,’ I said quietly. ‘At first I was like, “Nothing is happening here . . .” Then, as I looked, I realised that . . . well, something existential was happening before my eyes. It was like, you know, a Waiting-for-Godot-kind-of-happening . . .’
I trailed off.
Malcolm’s chocolate mousse had arrived while I was dissembling, but he had not dived in with his usual enthusiasm. Instead, he stared. ‘Are you taking the piss?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Come on! We were watching seven videos of an empty studio, for crying out loud!’ He seized my hand. ‘If I gave you a ten-hour film of an empty studio to take home, would you watch it?’
‘Err . . .’ I suspected it was a trick question. After all, this was Tate Modern.
‘Picture this: you come home from a hard day’s slog at the old nine-to-five, and there’s a ten-hour DVD of an empty studio waiting for you to watch. Will you watch it?’
The ice cream spoon was cutting into my fingers. ‘Well, if you put it that way . . .’
‘Fine,’ he said, unhanding me. ‘Now, what if I put the same DVD up on seven cinema screens, in an auditorium measuring, what? Twenty-four paces by sixteen—say a thirteen-hundred-square-foot warehouse—what if I did that, and amplified the sound of Nothing Happening till the static was singing in your ears. What would you think then, eh?’
I said nothing.
‘“Awesome,” isn’t that what you said?’
I stared at my ice cream.
‘And that is the second lesson,’ he concluded.
He then attacked his mousse with gusto. The nice waiter paused by me to ask whether the ice cream was at all palatable, so I took a final, final spoon of it. If I left at that point, the question would haunt me for the rest of my life, so I asked it. ‘What was the first lesson?’
‘Lesson one: Do something different, but do it first. That’s the Lucio Fontana lesson!’ He shovelled a mouthful of mousse into his mouth.
It was a beautiful day outside. Black barges floated past on a muddy Thames, towards the Millennium Bridge. Malcolm did not notice. He was sweating in the cool room. I suppose he had a conscience after all.
‘Lesson two: Do it on a grand scale! That’s the Mike Norman lesson!’ He wiped chocolate off his chin with a napkin.
I realised he was working up the anger to deliver my termination notice. I had to rise; I was cutting this too fine.
He was thundering, ‘So what is this nonsense about a short story? Come on, Humphrey Chow! I wait for you, I wait patiently for you, for years and years; and you come to me with a short story? So where’s the market for that? What’s my commission in that?’
The gloves were coming off. I wanted to tell him I hadn’t exactly been with his agency for ‘years and years,’ but I didn’t. It was time to go. I took a deep breath.
‘I didn’t actually give it to you . . . I gave it to . . . what I mean is, Lynn and I are working on a collection of . . .’
‘Give that poor girl a break,’ pleaded Malcolm Frisbee, clasping his fingers dramatically.
I forced myself not to look sideways, the first lesson of drama being to affect a total lack of awareness of your audience.
‘She could have walked off with her team’s bonus last Christmas if your account hadn’t dragged down her averages! Last quarter, every other writer on her slate grossed fifty K, annualised. You? Zilch! And now you tell me you’re working on a collection? Humphrey Chow, are you on this planet?’
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