D'Art of Harkness
by Philip Hartigan
A FORK IN THE ROADa new series from Philip HartiganExhibition
Marseille
What is this compulsion to
expose myself. Demons of demonstration. Sometimes I feel as much
as a motherless child as a stand up comedian displaying a banana
wanting everyone to belief that it is an erection. A painter
tries to capture his audience hold them for a span of eternity
in the secret harbor of his imagination, a lovers grip, a power
hold, a forced embrace of restraint. Some painters spend all
their lives painting versions of the same painting that other
generations have also persevered with. The essential equipment,
is an acquaintance with evil and a profound desire to do good.
Make friends and change the world. I’ve just moved to an apartment over the Ferrari showrooms in uptown Marseille, France. It has a painters view of the barren hills that encircle the city. Moving in at four in the morning like a thief in the night. I have planned two shows in two sites of rare conceptual beauty. Non ritualized by the art world. I am looking for new dimensions not for easy money. The first is a charity shop on the Rue Adolphe Thiers. Let me first of all describe the neighborhood. The road goes up from the great church of the Reformed. Which is at the head of the human tide of the Canabiere. The rue Adolphe Thiers identifies itself by the narrowness of its passage to the Plaine. The double parking of a sclerosis laden life. Ideally placed, the Charity shop lies next to the two streets where the ladies of easy virtue are seen day and night outside their seamy hotels. The Rue Curiol and the Rue Senac are high neoclassical bourgeois buildings of six storeys. Crammed with all kinds all forms of humanity. The dream of novelists who will do some research and never return. I arrive in my Ferrari directly from the showrooms and the guy in the Charity Shop has decided that the show will not go on. “What show? What exhibition?” he brays. “What the fuck is going on?” as I smile my non violent killer smile. My agent, Yves, who has arranged the locations starts to scream. He’s a big guy, like me, he loves art. Yves a Marine who, like me, needs to do things differently. The narrow street cracks with anger. My Ferrari loaded with the work of this neglected genius has recently had a rough ride. Last night round about two in the morning I went to Bonnieux to the dark middle ages where I store and glue and manipulate the raw material of my life. The clutch pedal broke so a crunching of gears and a squandering of thousands of synchromeshed atoms of technology. Load up and turn round Back down to Marseille, four in the morning. The pioneer... The hooligan of the history of art determined to see it through using the r.p.m. to ascertain the right time to change gear. AND
THE GEARBOX IS GLOWING RED LIKE MY FERRARI. WILL THE SHOW GO
ON? WHAT KIND OF QUESTION IS THAT ?
The guy in the charity shop
phones his wife and she says that she forgot to tell him about
the art show. So I finally get it up. So there Juan Fangio I
made it.I HAVE MY LEATHER COAT ON WHICH GIVES ME THE RIGHT TO LOOK LIKE AN EXTRA IN DONNIE BRASCO. VISITORS TO THE SHOW Mother and child man dog grey Man green bag Track suit shorts woman in red white bag. Black man fur collar pimp shades woman purple track suit small man pony tail earphones walkman black man construction worker man head down cigarette denim jacket man bald white beard longhaired black woman high heals very sexy shiny boots laughs a lot. Gives me her card. Longhair thinface glasses with a man with a dog white pony tail. Must be dog walking time. Young girl black poodle. Poodle lady in Black anorak. Motor cyclist holding security chains. Dainty blonde girl with boy looking worried. Grey leather suited man in shades woman with him carrying shopping bags. Fat guy with multicolored trainers. Black mother with white hair and child in pram. And so the day rolls along in the charity shop. It was a good idea to do a show here because the people are looking for something they don’t really know what but its unusual and with a bit of history. The lady from the town Hall comes to see She is worried about the pessimistic message in my work. “So surprise me.” I say to her. She begins to talk about my favorite sport football and she is not at all illiterate. Whereas in economic terms she is sans alphabet. I begin to talk about my theory of nuclear war in the zones of petroleum production thus preventing the blackmail of those dependant on the petrol and putting a stop to Saddam and his like. Those already corrupted don’t count for much. The new radical muslim incorruptible will have to be rubbed out so. The project of nuclear war in these zones once unthinkable is now very likely. People never read Andre Gunder Frank his work Crisis analyzed and predicted. Twenty years ago I was sitting at his feet and going for the coffee in his seminars. Political economy doesn’t turn round like the seasons it turns on acts of violence and expropriation. The charity shop has a sordid seamy charm that needs a constant procession of customers to protect it from the ravage of reality. Yesterday I leafletted the streets of easy virtue and lo and behold the ladies are coming in to take a look. They are accompanied for their stroll by the mac, the pimp. I am intrigued by the closeness to sin and spectacular lives. They too find me extremely pessimistic and offering not enough color. Stop reading philosophy and read poetry one tells me. Art is a physical affair you are too cerebral, the lady who tells me this is from Eastern Europe. White hair and white furs and white boots she weighs in at about 200 lbs. I am chastened. And white lipstick. She liked me, a definitive opposites in attraction. The cocksure Duchamp is about to be eaten alive by the White trinity in her white furs and enormous flesh. Appetite, I have no longer. Critical factors have dissolved in the weight of those karmic eyes. |
The days twilight descends as the return from the days activities becomes tangible. I have sold a few books mostly crime and “polaire”. I bought two volumes of Primitive North African Indian Art Navaho sand paintings and East side chewing gum Sculpture. The books were a good deal but the surprise was the pages were glued together unopenable. The surrealism of damp will always be with us. I was about to succumb to temptation and look up the white triple goddess for unfathomable session of teatime cunny when a blind man came in to the shop. He was a slight figure. North african with a little goatee beard and a white stick. He folded the stick and sat down to look at the work. My sister lives next door and we’ve just had a dispute. This is you? As slippery as a sack of eels. He introduced himself as a healer. To heal in this world you have to be sicker than the ones you are healing. We are here at the 3rd level watching the world and the influences of the will of allah on the story of humanity. .At the 5th level we look at the works of God and feel our humility. The 7th level is pure spirit and we want to experience this it is such a wonderful experience that it can make us sick. I am not blind but I use this cane to prevent the blind from trampling me underfoot. The healer was the usual mixture of trickster and prophet that pop up in the Bible and the Satanic Verses. Marseille is a manuscript from those two sources. He drove off in his Mercedes very dented early model handpainted green. My black leather jacket was becoming stiff with damp as the evening fell. Time for a coffee. I AM VERY TEMPTED TO GO TO SEE THE EASTERN EUROPEAN WHITE TIGRESS. So I leave the charity Shop and go down to the Canabiere via The Rue Curiol. It seems that everyone is on their doorstep. Miles Davis would have adored it here, his nervous system would begin to heal. Delicious french pastries ironising with their clients. Going head on into the train of the coming century. Divine and stomping. Shy and demure I watch from the vantage point of a coffee shop. I catch her eye on my way back up the hill and she strides over .“What do you want here?” She is so intimidating, “You must go away and don’t come back.” I give her one of the cards that I had made for the exhibition with my phone number. I give her a kiss on the cheek as I pass. “Va ton, va ton. Bad boy,” and she laughs at herself. I turn to wave and she has gone. I wonder if she will be my friend. I need a friend like her. Someone who knows about all the arts in Life. I close the show, pull down the steel blinds for the night and get into the Ferrari. Thoughtful stuff these expositions and I glide into the Marseille night. Over the plaine where the Bohemian Parisians and the like have made camp. It’s a thirty year journey back to watch the show. Bitches Brew. Milestones these sounds, devotional born from the windows, hazy with steam from coffee machines. By the rocade and the lights of the port where we come into the Bombay morning of redemption. I park the sports car in front of the line of derelicts that have been standing there since this morning, afraid to not have a place to sleep tonight and I know that they are all greater human beings than I. They look at me as if they are dreaming, shocked by my affluence. I give them the money that is in my pockets. They are so many I could just never stop giving them change. I could, like St Francis, give them everything and finish up like them, and talking to the birds for breakfast. It’s time to honor the friend who lent me the car and take it back to the garage. I wonder if the siberian alley cat will call me. I continue to glide. In this car that’s the only action possible, glide. The electronic gates open. Programmed by the on board computer then down into the security zone of the garage. Up ten floors in the shiny reflective lift to the apartment and the smells of exotic cooking. The coming conflict is on the menu with Irakian and Kurdish refugees they are doing the cooking so I am pleased as I will be not doing the washing up. Will all be called off when Saddam comes to exile here in Marseille. Who knows in the future we are all in for exile. The faces of battle hardened, humans from the streets of Marseille haunt me and hurt me as much as I hurt myself. Second expo. A few days later I’m at the Bellevue center manned by Islamic revolutionaries. I loved Mohammed Ali. Those fights with Smokin’ Joe Frazier put modern politics into perspective. So the islamic revolutionaries talk to me about the underground culture in New York and the white trash that is just out to destroy itself because the life for white middle class kids has no sense at all. They talk about the Jewish world, conspiracy Zionism and the establishment of the greater Israel in the Middle east. Nuclear desert theory doesn’t impress them cause they are fascists from nowhere. They don’t believe in technological waste destiny. They eat all my pistachios, They are hungry locusts. The don’t like paintings of women breast feeding their children and super glued street waste. Sex is not a subject for them. I think that they are totally anal and just put it up the arse whenever they can find someone stupid enough to take it from them. I drink Jim Bean just to intimidate them. They talk to everyone on portable telephones and the Ferrari drives them out of their little boxes. The cleaning ladies love the expo it tickles their sense of fun and disrespect. When you spend your life cleaning up after people the accepted values become reversed. Cleaning Ladies are the true artists of our society. Belle vue here in Marseille is the International end of the line. Six twenty story blocks from the brutal sixties The population of these blocks is a great amorphous immigrant grouping. The places are cheap. 400 dollars a month for a big four roomed apartment But the life is end of the line. African Asian Arab North African Yugo Tchetchine Kosovar. Each has its gang of kids who rule and deal. Grim ghastly and gruesome. All the rubbish chutes are blocked and the crap gets thrown over the side of the ship it rains rubbish all the time here. The trees hang fruited with rubbish. Rats as big as household pets jump up to eat the rubbish hanging from the trees. Rats running down the street with sanitary towels in their mouths past babies in prams. My ferrari is surrounded by kids and I must be a new dealer in the neighborhood. Can I get a witness? To this knot of distress have a block of clay and model my way. The little black children play gently at my feet. Tomorrow I will come here on the bus and on foot. They will eat me like a week old sanitary towel, steal my boots. like St Francis I will be stripped bare by the bachelors and broken on my spare Wheel. Africa will be recolonized. China will be conquered by Football and I am the wrath of the lamb wearing Nike and Adidas. The dealers like my art work and they come round at the end of the first day and pay cash for two drawings of Jim Morrison’s poetry. “Break on through to the other side” & “Strange Days” I have to take the pictures round to their place tomorrow night. Bit scary I think. New dimensions was what I wanted. Easy money is never as easy as it seems... |