The Thieves of Manhattan - By Adam Langer Page 0,31
usual boots, blue jeans, and concert jersey. No baseball cap tonight—that was the sole indication that opening night was a special occasion. Weren’t people supposed to dress up for gallery openings, I asked as I kissed her hello. Nah, she said, if people were looking at her instead of her art, that was a problem. Then she thrust the wine bottle into my hand and told me she had to leave to take a piss. She warned me not to drink all her wine, since she had only one bottle left.
“Sell what you can, Sailor,” she said with a wink. “You couldn’t do any worse than me.”
I stood alone in the gallery doorway, holding Faye’s wine bottle, and watched her red hair bounce as she stomped down the hallway. Up ahead, I could see a line for the bathroom, so I wandered into the gallery. I’ve never known much about visual art, can never figure out how long I’m supposed to look at a painting, and frequently count to sixty in my head when I’m in front of one, so it will look as if I’m actually getting something out of it. I planned to do the same with Faye’s work.
The dozen framed pieces each measured about two feet square. They seemed to be copies of famous works with which I probably should have been familiar: a smoky portrait of some sullen, Dutch tradesman—maybe a Rembrandt?; overlapping disks of bright colors—Kandinsky?; a woman with a cloudy sky where there should have been a face—probably Magritte. The prettiest one looked like a Wyeth—a pastoral landscape, a little family graveyard behind an old country house, a long white car on a distant road. But each painting had been violated, its frame broken or smashed and held together with wire, pipe cleaners, and Scotch tape; sections of paintings had been chipped or torn away. Visible underneath were crude sketches or cartoons, the sorts of drawings Faye tossed off while supposedly working at Morningside Coffee. In a corner of the landscape, there was a cartoon of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz with a thought bubble over her head (“There’s no place like home”).
Forged in Ink was the title I’d given Faye’s exhibit, but now that I was seeing her work up close, I understood that it was a bad and pompous one; it totally missed her sense of playfulness. The works here encompassed her personality perfectly—irreverent, self-deprecating, honest in their own way.
“Konbanwa,” said Faye by way of a greeting when she returned, then glanced at the bottle I was still holding.
“You drink all of it?” she asked, and when I shook my head no, she raised an eyebrow, then grabbed the bottle and gulped down a third of it before handing it back. I took a swig, then gazed at her paintings, searching for something insightful to say.
“So,” I began. My eyes had settled on a pointillist landscape, ducks and paddleboats operated by top-hatted men on a rippling pond, and a big hole in the center revealing polka-dot ducks drawn in crayon. “So, you take the copy of the old painting, tear it, and slap it over one of your drawings?”
Faye shook her head. “Nah,” she said, “I do both. The old and the new.”
It took some time for it to dawn on me that everything I was looking at was her original work—each exquisite brushstroke in each old master painting and each squiggle in each napkin doodle. Now I felt like a moron for having underestimated her work every bit as much as I had underestimated her—the more I looked, the more I wanted to keep looking. Her works were fakes, but at the same time, they were real. She seemed to be trying to fuse the two to create art that was more than either one or the other.
“Yeah,” she said, “some of it sucks, some of it doesn’t; what else can you say? There’s nothing more boring than listening to people try to talk about art. It just is what it is; good or bad, it almost always fails.”
“Fails at what?” I asked.
“At becoming something real,” she said. “That’s what artists try to do—you copy and copy and copy, and someday maybe you finish faking it and you learn how to make something real.”
The crowds in the hallway were thinning out; no one was in line for the bathroom anymore. “This party’s pretty much cashed,” Faye said as she finished the wine. “Wanna grab some grub?”