A fast food restaurant sends a small town into paroxysms of cultural outrage when it sponsors a surrealist sculptural installation near its drive thru.
Insurance salesman and authority on neo-surrealist performance art Clarke Marsby was among the first to see it. It was only eight oclock in the morning but, feeling peckish, he swung by the drive-thru in his tan coloured Toyota Festiva and leaned out at the pole to order a McBurger burger and Chunky Shake as usual. It was just as his eyes came back to the road that he noticed the new installation, copper and aluminium glistening at strange angles in the morning sun, propped conspicuously in the vacant bit between the illuminated menu board and the sign pointing to the toilets. He shook his head and did a double take, just like in the movies. No mistaking it. French. Contemporary neo. The influence of Louis Dirshan perhaps.
He drove up to the window - where stood Fastidious Maureen - to collect his meal.
"What's with the monstrosity?" Clarke asked. "It's a bit early surrealist, isn't it? I mean, you can see the allusions to Andre Breton's early theories there, the juxtapositions, the debt to Freud, don't you think?"
"Yeah, that's what everyone's saying," said Maureen, handing over the burger. "Although I can see more of the Brussell's school than anything myself."
Clarke considered this as an interesting possiblity - and one he hadn't entertained - but was more inclined to his own reading, just on the evidence of the pointy bits sticking out the left side. In any case, he, Maureen and most everyone agreed that anything prior to Duchamp's first Paris phase was gauche, and this piece was clearly in the wrong camp.
"Unbelievable," said Clarke, shaking his head. He was truly taken aback.
He paid for the food and drove off at high speed, rushing to catch his friend Blicker before Blicker went to work teaching Art History at the local polytechnic. He caught him just as he was backing down the driveway.
"You should see it Blicker! Ghastly. A poor imitation of Jean Pierre Auvantaleiu's disasterous 2006 catalogue. Nothing more."
Blicker drove down to see for himself.
By this time a small crowd of townspeople had gathered around, most of them aghast. Some were comparing it to the failed poetry of Pierre Reverdy! Blicker had a look and was outraged. He stormed inside and demanded to see the manager. The manager was a nineteen year old named Darren of the Pimples who had started as a bacon tosser when he was sixteen and worked his way to the top. At first he thought Blicker was another customer disgruntled about the soft pastry on the apple fritters, but he soon understood otherwise.
"You can see the influence of Apollonaire there, can't you!?" Blicker demanded to know, making Darren look at the monstrosity out the drive-thru window.
"Well, spacially," Darren retorted, "I think its more early Dali than anything else. Dali-let-loose-at-a-metal-recyclers is what some people are saying."
Blicker was dumbfounded.
"What? You're kidding me! This is way before Dali!"
In response Darren drew attention to certain themes in the early folios of Dali's pen and ink work. The same zeitgeist, he said.
In league with Clarke and now with a few others, Blicker stormed out vowing to go to local government to have the offending eye-sore removed. It was, as Clarke observed, a traffic hazard, if nothing else. He'd almost crashed his Festiva into the railing when he saw it. More patriotically, Blicker wanted to know what people were going to think? "They'll think," he said, "that this town is still stuck in the period of the Manifestos, as if the Dada Revolution never happened!"
Once word got around others shared the same concern. "It makes us look like bogans," complained Les Harrier from the Post Office. "Just looking at it, you'd say to yourself, 'Now there's a town where people don't know a rip-off of Yves Tanguy's 1942 masterpiece Indefinite Divisibility when they see one."
The local celebrity and retired lawn bowl's champion Grisly Miller - usually cautious on controversies pertaining to surrealist art - agreed that it did lend the unfortunate impression that the people of the town didn't know Arshile Gorky from Conroy Maddox and the British revisionists.
Ben from Nelson Irrigation Supplies across the highway, who wandered over during morning tea, was of the opinion that the surrealist preoccupation with the irrational had been at the expense of the more positive outlook of the constructivists - just the sort of thing a hardware man might say - but he did agree that the monstrosity looked like a cheap parody with 3D pretensions to Ernst Fuchs. What a mess! The artist had ventured bravely into the collective unconcious of post-industrial man and recovered nothing more convincing than the innards of a washing machine doing a vacuum cleaner doggy-style. It was anachronistic. It was cliched. It was not what people wanted to see as they salivated over burgers and fries.
Soon the townspeople as one were referring to the sculpture - officially titled Analytics/Distrust:Homage to a Lemon - as the "Drive-Thru Monstrosity." It transpired that the McBurger management had bought the piece for $45,000 at an auction in Sydney, funded dollar for dollar by the National Modern Towns Civic Enhancement Program. There were no tenders. The Council was in on it and there were rumours of kick-backs. The artist, a Master's graduate from the University of New South Wales who claimed to be related (conjugally at least) to Brett Whitely, had composed his thesis on the turtle motif in Man Ray and was now enjoying a plush residency in southern Spain. In his absence he was berated in the local press as a frenzy of writers appealed to Letters to the Editor. Bill Thompson from Golden Square wrote pointing out that the term 'Drive-thru Monstrosity' seemed to imply that the monostrosity could be driven through. Someone replied the next day, "For Godssakes Bill, don't give 'em ideas!" while another wit wrote and said he'd like to drive thru it indeed - right through it! The media joined the chorus. The headline ran, 'WHAT NEXT? CUBISM?' The Mayor's Office intervened and offered the limpidistic assurance that the installation would grow on people. (After all, the botched refurbishment of the pedestrian mall did.) Another wit said that the term "monstrosity" was, in any case, unnecessary, since this "Homeage to a Lemon" was a lemon sure enough, and he sensed post-modern self-referencing smart-arsery. He complained that these days you can't trust even bad art not to be a stunt sending up bad art.
Things started to get nasty when, one morning, the risen sun revealed the sculpture adorned with fish and cigars, a gesture poking fun at its provenance. Then, another morning, it was emblazened with a cross-section of the most tiresome of surrealist slogans, all of them implying - somewhat in a pop art style - that "this flavor's lost its taste." Every Saturday night the town's teenage revellers used the piece as a bottle opener and then, later the same night, as a venue for clumsy copulations. The real mystery was when someone threw a few tins of old paint at it more or less in the style of Jackson Pollock. A crack-down on welfare fraud a few years earlier had inadvertantly purged the town of abstract expressionists, but now it seemed at least one was still hiding somewhere in the suburbs and this controversy drew him from his lair.
In all of this Blicker was the most passionate objector. He had devoted 25 years of his life as an educator and class-room innovator to ensuring that the people of the region had a good overview of surrealist movements up to and including the contemporary revivals in New York and Madrid. He wasn't going to sit idly by and watch some monstrosity in a drive-thru make a mockery of his life's work. He gathered petitions and wrote to polititians. He organised a rally but called it off because of rain. He and Clarke and local art activist Brian Lannigan were nevertheless photographed giving V for Victory signs with soggy banners reading 'Surrealism Deserves Better' in the shelter of what would have been a cake stand and fundraiser had the day been clear.
Finally, though, it was the brute reality of economics that triumphed. The price of copper went up and a ute load of youths from a car yard in Bixley Downs drove over in the middle of the night, lifted the monstrosity with a winch, took it away, melted it down and sold it for $241.50 US an ounce as a means of funding their amazing cannabis addiction. In the ensuing investigation, the Closed Circuit TV evidence was inconclusive and charges were never laid.
That morning Clarke Marsby swung his Festiva in off the main street and started down the drive-thru in his usual way, but this morning no eye-sore to put him off his food.
He mentioned it to Fastidious Maureen.
"I see the monstrosity's gone," he said.
"Yeah," she said, "Someone took it in the middle of the night." She paused as she fitted the milkshake into the cardboard holder. "Not surprised, given the price of copper," she added. Then she opined, "I'd like to see something from the later Berlin School, or even the Vienna circle, in that spot. Wouldn't you?"
"Yes," Clarke said. "Something appropriate."
Personally, he felt the town needed a healthy dose of late Magritte. Something to teach the Lacanian realists a lesson.
No comments:
Post a Comment