The Art School Fragments

 

1

Two lecturers are trying to double-take
ceramics as design or sleek aesthetics.
Quick footwork white teeth between them
but every second or third colour-slide
is upside down or down horizontally
as chiropractic. She says it’s quite simple:
a cup is just a cup, establish what
the client wants and make it do that.
The upcast overhead projector is spawning
on her face and onto the ceiling her strut-
like arms and her crayfish hair extensions.
But his laugh insists: ‘cup’ means circles
and volumes, the golden mean still relevant
as the backscreen undoes itself its out-breath
falls down over them. They talk on, muffled,
Magritte’s lovers wrapped in conversation.
Cold wind blows in through the open wall.
Students walk over the lumps of white noise
through to the air outside to blue but chill
porcelain coldness and out to limitless sky,
this one slide panoramic in its frame. 

 

2

She watched as Steven folded on his gloves
the routine moving onto his long fingers
in such slow motion she saw its opposite
and equal, of peeling the gloves back off
then on again (she looked away she saw
them moving up, unfolding off, she …).
And she thought of T the night before
rolling a condom down onto his penis,
‘rolling’ so different from pulling gloves
(she could hear the crinkling of the latex
she had never noticed him peeling 
off, sodden, and dull, and noiseless).
She began to feel the eyes-shut enfolding
of lovemaking, the soft white sheets
against her skin, the sunlight colouring
the northern window, the trees, the garden.
Could she dance among sheets on stage
billowing underfoot (a wind-machine?)
or high-suspended so they’d hang like silken
banners from Heaven,  best of all on skin, so
dancing naked with her body spray-painted
red or blue or … Then lights off. Stepping back.
Dancing it again and its suspension. Lights off.
Back. Strobe dance. Something to begin from …
Are you alright? It was S standing in front of her
as he peeled off his gloves. She nodded at him.
He moved his bare hand to his heart, she saw
something like a smile enter him, the silk banner
swaying as she passed, then it was gone again.

 

3

Where is plastination in the art-trough’s grinning corners?
I'm answering my own questions. I'm dead, I'm all answers.

I am corpsed in Gunther van Hagen’s studio: my flayed body
is hung up mid-step and muscular in red-plastics of kitsch.

There is no heartbeat left to listen to, there is nothing
musical, my tune is gone and all my tempo is solidified.

Art that he is mummy for and I'm the mummy of. He has cut
slide-out sections of my head, like tongues, my face has drawn

its drawers, my eyes are round and starey — and not unlike
his own — this Marquis Narcissist, this fetishist anotomist.

And all his blue lab-coated Chinese students subservient
as scalpels, their little tweezers nibbling me away like ants.

I'm my own ghoul-cut and pointed-at imago. I’m prosciutto.
Circe's son. If I’m a voyeur, I’m a blind one. And you?

 

4

As the Head of the School looks over the balcony
down into the foyer of her cleavage, the student looks up.

No, thinks the technician, seeing a students’s copper plate
drop into the etching tank and seeing the acid rising.

Why when he’s working on something he has to finish
does he sink lower and lower into the body in his body?

The second cigarette follows the first one. Logic? The first
one wasn't enough and the second one tastes terrible.

Concrete soft as porridge is glugging through the pipeline
heavy as a numbed limb one helmeted man sculpts with.

It is wintry and cold on the east side of the building.
It is sunny and warm on the west side of the building.

Perhaps they want to kiss. Perhaps they don’t. Perhaps …
Why is it so hard to imagine other people having sex?

Outide he sees a suited man stethoscoped by iPod 
colliding with a suited man striding with an iPod.

There is enough time in a minute to feel unreal.
But who’s counting? I am. A fool is still a fool.

 

5

 

We just crossed the street then saw it. Not the big semiotic of agreement: smiles out there

in the heart we reach for like goodness as the hand goes into the purse, or cigarettes, how-

to-get-there information. Just as big, but slower to release its signs, we saw refusal. And he

waited, refused. Hey. It's not much. Just give us a dollar or two.

 

Reached up for her elbow but missed her, thinly, onto the edge of the pavement his

wheelchair swivelled like a yacht gybing but he used it, spun back closer as she stared down

the street from the taxi queue You bitch, you just cant bloody ignore me

you've got stacks of money I can see that. Were we being filmed? 

 

We let her handle what he made of her: a hunter aims at one among the pack

to be sure of hitting. His bottom lip bled. Not for a second did she look at him.

When the tall suited man stepped between them, the man in the wheelchair yelled:

 

You piss off you mean looken bastard. Don’t try to defend her, and don't you turn away

as if I’m not worth shit. Don’t think I like not having legs then having to beg all fucken day in the street

with bitches like you, woman, do ya hear? Bloody well give me some money.

 

She was tougher than he’d thought, but not doing the appalling right thing of slapping

his face. He might have heard the sharp click of bags closing near him. Though one woman

was trawling inside hers, some were getting close to giving him their guilt or just wheeling

him off. When a taxi swept in to the kerb he must have known the air had gone, and spun

 

off in deeply trimmed butterfly stokes his head and shoulders pumping up and down over

the main pavement and off into the glitzy downslope of a small arcade. We stared down the

street at our thin approaching traffic, trying to / not to put words underneath it, like the

subtitlers at SBS