Modern Art

Modern Art

  Tal Vinnik

  Copyright 2012

  Cover photo Copyright 2011 Billy Frank Alexander

  The halls leading up to the chapel were lined with various works of art that you would probably expect me to pay attention to, but I was interested in only one piece in the Sistine. No, in the halls what interested me were all of the maps and charts of the world. My parents were always keen to remind me how backwards the Christian world supposedly was, people believing they would fall off the flat world if their ships traveled too far, when the Greeks knew the truth thousands of years beforehand. But here were maps laid on globes, hundreds of years ago. Certainly the church was not at the forefront of modernity, but occasionally, like today, they took steps to make sure they did not fall behind.

  When she saw my badge, she said, “Benvenuto alla cappella Sistina!” and that was all I need to be home. I was fearful that I would be disappointed after the plain and dreary tan exterior of the chapel, but seeing her and that ceiling was a massive relief.

  “Uh, Bon-jour-now...” She knew how beautiful she was and had the good sense to buck the American trend of shoulder pads and permed hair; she didn't need to power dress to make men-no, to make boys-like me putty in her hands. She giggled when she noticed my eyes darting back and forth between her slender face and her un-Vatican-like cleavage; this girlish outburst took something away from her. Love at first sight often lasts only as long as it takes to get a good look at someone. I stopped stammering in something it would be a favor to call Italian and asked, “Speak English?”

  “Of course!” She giggled again. “How may I help you?” Her accent almost made me fall back in love with her again.”

  “Umm... I'm here for the...the restoration. I mean, I'm here to restore...for the restoration. My name's Garner.” I inwardly shook my head at myself and she looked at her clipboard, smiling.

  “Oh, yes, yes, come this way. You're early. This is the best start. My, my, the master himself. Come this way, please, this way.” We rushed through a crowd of people with their heads lifted up. The crowd was smaller than I expected since they were limiting visitors since the restoration started in '84, but it was still, well, a crowd. I had not yet craned my neck; I wanted to savor the moment when I would see it. I could see all of their eyes maneuvering around my colleagues, around the scaffolding that I would soon be climbing. They had sponges in their hands and stood inches from the ceiling. My career-defining moment would be walking in the footsteps of the greatest painter who had ever lived. Maybe it was arrogant, but I saw us in a partnership, unbound from language or time (or fame, or prestige).

  The woman had gone ahead of me, but I could clearly see her head towering above a sea of enamored Japanese tourists. Then she stopped; we didn't go to a ladder or an elevator. We stopped at the “Scenes of the Life of Moses.” This badly maintained fresco of seven episodes was impressive in scope, but was only remembered for the religious value it held. She now looked at me as if it was my turn to lead. She nodded, indicating that we had reached my new home. Botticelli? Fucking Botticelli?

  My voice cracking, I said, “No, no. I don't think this is right. I was told I would be working on the ceiling.” I hadn't. In my excitement, I had completely forgotten that anyone besides Michelangelo worked in the chapel. The word Sistine came over the receiver and I practically yelled out my acceptance.

  “Oh my, signor Garner, I'm very sorry, I think there has been a bad communication. For a work so close to our visitors, we need a professional like you to handle it. If we could afford you for the more minor restoration of the ceiling of course we would do it in a second. I must say, your previous work is flawless. Not to put any pressure on you that is not necessary, but we all expect the same from your stay here.”

  I lowered my hand which had been resting on my chin because of how much it was trembling. Perhaps this was for the best. An artist of Michelangelo’s caliber, he would do fine without a restorer of my particular talents. This five-hundred-year-old piece however... I nodded to the woman. She motioned again toward the frescoes with her clipboard and I started to examine them. The work really was in dire need of resuscitation—the colors were fading, the gaps between the paint growing larger; the whole scene made me physically ill. I could even make out the faintest trace of a small fingerprint engraved in chocolate on the edge of “The Journey into Egypt.” She had to be told.

  “Come here. Do you see this? Look at this, do you see this?” I pointed at the stain. She squinted her eyes and had a dumb expression on her face. I tightened the muscles in my hand and pointed again, thinking it would do the trick. I felt an impending apology.

  “Signor, I'm sorry. I see nothing, but you are the professional. I trust what you say is there, is there. All I can say to you is I loved what you did with the El Greco last year.” I was intrigued. “It was...of course part of it was the painting, but I had never seen a work by him so beautiful. I, and the Church, we put our full faith in you.”

  For the rest of the day, I stared at the fresco. I examined the flaws, wrote out an inventory of possible chemicals to test and brushes that I would need. Jetlagged and frustrated, I left the Vatican after a few short hours. Because my work would stretch into weeks rather than days, the Church rented out an apartment for me in Rome. The place was clean, but small, and unfurnished save for a bed. It was suitable only for sleep, and it was terrible even for that; the springs dug into my back and I would have to buy more comfortable pillows. Where was the lavish spending of the Church now? Almost as soon as I jacked in the phone line, it started ringing. I knew it must be the last museum that I worked for; I hung up before they got a chance to speak and sped out of the room.

  At least the people on the street were joyous enough to distract me from the filth on the street. No, friendly isn't the right word for it. Many of them were shouting at each other and there was a near constant stream of honking from Vespas nearly mowing me down. But the energy; these people were alive.

  Wandering from street to street, I couldn't find a single prostitute who looked anything like the Sistine woman; few of them actually looked like women. Half had the problem of being in the midst of pubescence and quite a few more had the problem of possessing penises. Perhaps the majority weren't out yet because the sun had just set, but I had been sitting around all day and my patience was waning. A liquor store owner happily passed me a Vodka called “Mezzaluna.” That night, it was obviously going to be my only means of arousal. I dramatically smashed the bottle on the street after it was half gone and I continued prowling, at this point for almost any woman. Every time I thought I would find a suitable one, I would get up close to her and decide otherwise.

  For a large part of my adult life, I've found solace in whores because of the simplicity they brought to relationships, which a real woman could never bring me. And it was so difficult to find a real woman to stay with me with all the traveling anyhow. Because they were used to requests so exceedingly depraved, something as simple as asking a whore to wipe off a little make-up would result initially in confusion and then would be seen as a compliment (a whore not having enough make-up on had never been a problem). I had tried being honest with a girl I dated briefly in my college years who was a carry over of the last decade's feminist movement and insisted on living her life “naturally,” sans bra, sans razor anywhere on her body. When I told her what I thought about her underarm, she cited some passage from the bible about trusting God's decisions and then some other quote from Gloria Steinem. She broke up with me immediately; when I saw her the following week, her upper lip was waxed clean and she was obviously wearing a bra that God didn't intend for her to wear.

  After walking around for two hours, pausing a few times to take in the famous fountains, I wen
t somewhere with a blurry figure who offered to give me a hand job for five American and I reluctantly agreed. She seemed bored with the proceedings and at some point poured a line of cocaine on me which I only noticed when she started snorting in my chest hair and then sneezed. I didn't want to be with someone more intoxicated than I was, so I stormed out. When I got home, I used a pair of tweezers to pull out the mixture left on my chest. The powder reminded me of the eraser residue that had nearly gotten me arrested in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  I was in a room that housed thousands of black hats stacked in a fairly well constructed headwear-pyramid. There was an open book, which I thought was a guest-book, on a tattered wooden table next to the “piece.” I walked over to the table and cleared off the bits of eraser on the page to get a better look at the writing on the page. An alarm suddenly went off. A young man, musty, rushed at me and grabbed me by the collar.

  “I knew something like this would happen!” he shouted. “Puritans trying to impede modernity!”

  “What? I'm so sorry, I'm not sure what I did.” I was only seventeen back then, on a sort of field trip for uni. I genuinely felt perplexed and ashamed for ruining something. I was so young.

  Two grumpy men arrived in the room, seemingly going through the motions. One of them interrogated me on the details while the other got to work on the book with a set of tweezers and a small tube of eraser shavings. He opened up a binder of photographs on the table that he used to set the scrapings in their original (and seemingly arbitrary) positions. When I was done with my interrogation by the arranger of the hats (“artist” seems a bit much) and the curator, the curator convinced the man not to call the police because his comrade was so good at putting the shavings back having done it three times earlier that very week. I approached the book to at least see what the fuss was about. The only thing on the page was the word “work” written over and over again, in various sizes, differing capitalization and all kinds of punctuation! This brought a thought to mind: if I had set the hats and the book on fire and took a photo of it, would that also be “art”? That was probably the beginning.

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