I would’ve been a likelier candidate
as a janitor or football mascot than as a visiting speaker at
Universytet Jagiello
ski, one of the world’s most revered
educational facilities. I’ve learned, however, to accept life’s
injustices with a smattering of grace.
By the way, when I say “football,” I mean “soccer.”
There was no way to turn down Dorota’s invitation to present to her fellow art history students without pissing her off. Besides, the gig paid 100 złotych, rent was due any day, and I didn’t want to get into another tiff with the administracja.
For that price, I came with black nail polish.
“What do you want me to talk about?” I asked Dorota. We had arrived in class ahead of the other students. I knew nothing about art history.
“Don’t worry, they’ll ask lots of questions,” she said with a wink. “They’re an inquisitive bunch. This is a remedial class, so there are clueless students from all disciplines.”
“Literature, too?”
“You’re looking at her.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” I said, embarrassed. “I’ve been meaning to ask you ... are you writing poetry, or just studying it?”
“Is there a difference?”
“I guess not,” I said.
“Radeki, don’t let me be an asshole to you,” she said, laughing. “I’m experimenting right now, and I’m not ready to show you anything yet.”
“I just want you to remember that I’m terrible at judging poetry. I’ll love even what you hate.”
Once the class had filled in and everyone had taken their seats, the professor gave Dorota a piece of chalk, the cue to introduce me.
“I want you to remember this name,”
she said to the class, scrawling S. MOK WAWELSKI on the blackboard.
Whiteboards were not Ivy League enough for Jagielloski. “Please
give him a warm welcome.” She gave me the chalk.
After lukewarm applause, I sat on the corner of the professor’s desk but tried not to give too much of a ball show; my overalls had shrunk in the dryer the night before.
“What do you know about me?” I asked, casting my line into a room I felt knew too much.
“You keep the fire department busy,” a student said, getting a rise from the class. He was a redhead, arms covered with strawberry down. “Can you tell us about your influences?”
“Pink Floyd.”
The professor shot Dorota a warning look worth 100 złotych and maybe more.
“I meant what miniaturists do you admire?”
“Uh, none,” I said, taking advantage of the resulting silence to take a sip from my one-litre carton of chocolate milk.
“So you’ve never heard of the Beckonscot model village, the one with the burning house?” pressed the redhead, wrinkling the freckles on his nose. “I find it weird you don’t acknowledge precedents for your work.”
“The Wall is a great album, and if you listen carefully, it’ll teach you all you need to know about building and tearing down.”
Of course I studied precedents, but he was thinking miniature, and I tend to go oversize. For me, art history is about Christo and Jeanne-Claude unleashing their epic whims on the earth, visible from outer space. It’s about having the gumption to hang a 14,000 m2 orange curtain across the Rifle Gap Valley in the Rocky Mountains, to change the planet’s very topografia at your vernissage. You can’t think small without thinking large, but that wasn’t a very academic thought, so I kept it to myself.
Another student raised her hand.
“What concerns does your practice raise regarding safety and personal space?”
“I don’t know ... I mean, you can prepare for a fire your whole life, but it will always get you, because you can never think of everything. You know? At least once a year, you’ll leave Kleenex near a heater, and you’ll forget to turn off a stove burner. You can never protect your valuables, because you won’t know what’s important to you until you see its edges curling in a house fire.”
I found it surprising that nobody, in this room full of pretentiati in training, asked me about my artist name.
Dorota winked at me.
I suddenly realized that my invitation to this class was an act of sabotage on the school. I winked back. It was time to have a bit of fun.
But first, you need to know more about Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
Husband and wife, environmental artists. They were both born on June 13, 1935, at the same hour. As part of their 1961 honeymoon (which, you might say, lasted decades), they created one of their first Low Art monuments by barricading the docks of Cologne, Germany with an oil-drum simulation of the Berlin Wall, to the bemusement of police and the horror of the art establishment.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude never flew together, so that if one died in a plane crash, the other could carry on with their work.
They remodelled Germany more than once. In 1995, they petitioned the 662 parliamentary delegates who had offices in the Berlin Reichstag, writing personalized letters and making phone calls asking for permission to wrap the building in “fireproof” polypropylene fabric. The delegates acquiesced after a seventy-minute debate on the parliament floor, and then Christo and Jeanne-Claude, with the help of hundreds of workers, threw a giant condom over them.
The German parliamentarians had reason to be nervous. The Reichstag had burned in 1933, and an enraged Hitler, convinced it was an act of arson by the Communist Party, manoeuvred to erase them from government. The Nazis then achieved a majority in the Reichstag, and eventually, single-party rule.
Maybe those 662 delegates knew that a fire could happen again, at any time.
All this. These two artists. But why would I reveal my true heroes to this class? I could just whisper their names into Dorota’s ear some other time.
Dorota raised her hand, drawing a second stern glance from the professor. High Art, it was clear, was under assault.
“Young lady,” I said.
“Is your art sexual?”
“Please explain,” I said, blowing bubbles in my chocolate milk through the extendable straw.
“Czesław Miłosz once said in an interview that in his poems, ‘You will find a very erotic attitude towards reality, towards simple things: amazement, for instance, for the innumerable and boundless substance of the earth—the scent of pine, the hue of fire, the white frost, the dance of cranes.’ I was wondering if you feel the same way about your art.”
“Art does not use the language of department-store perfume,” I said. “But seriously, has it never bothered you that Miłosz put history and politics ahead of literary merit?”
“He had no choice,” Dorota volleyed back. “Do you know what country this is?”
“The artist always has a choice.”
“Not when his best friends are being imprisoned and assassinated.”
“Okay. Good point.”
The professor took the piece of chalk away from me and was about to call off the class, but strawberry boy raised his hand.
“Where did you graduate, Mr Wawelski?” he asked sarcastically.
“Funny you should ask,” I said.
“Jagielloski kicked me out a few years ago for a
conversation almost exactly like this.” I turned to the professor.
“Do you pay cash, or will you be mailing me a cheque?”
Too bad they’ll never hear my real artist statement, a bone that Christo tossed to a journalist over continental breakfast: “I think it takes much greater courage to create things to be gone than to create things that will remain.”
Dorota and I left together. She cut her remaining classes for the day.
“You’re not angry at me, are you?” I asked. “For the Miłosz stuff.”
“No, not really. I’m too preoccupied by what you said about Kleenex and stoves. I’m afraid to ask you about your life and what happened to you. What you know.”
“Don’t worry. It’ll come out one day.”
“In the meantime, I’ll try not to interrogate.” She took my hand. Her wrist was covered in goosebumps.
“Why did you do it?” I asked her. “Why did you want me to fuck with them? Don’t get me wrong, it was amazing, but how did you know I would catch on?”
“I didn’t. But I need somebody in my life who doesn’t have to be told what to do, and I need them to see that none of this matters.” She gestured to the walls I routinely scaled in fits of parkour. I wondered if she had ever seen my sneakers rapping on the glass. “Or maybe I’m the one who needs to see that. But you were more than amazing today. You were ekstra.”
“And if I had failed? What if I had impressed them with shit about the intersection of urban planning, miniature cities, and world art?”
“Then I would have dropped you and found another friend,” she said with no trace of jest. “Anyway, you don’t know about that stuff, so what does it matter?”