The moon men, p.9
Art on Fire, page 9
‘What happens if I keep looking at him?’ I asked.
‘It’ll be uncomfortable.’
‘For Robert?’
‘For you, too.’
Apparently, Robert had refused to meet a guest who showed up to a banquet dinner in jeans. I was wearing an orange dress and teal sandals. I had read somewhere that Robert liked complementary colours, which was why I’d brought this outfit, but now that I was in the US, one day out from the welcome dinner, I wasn’t sure I still wanted to impress Robert. When the rehearsal was over, I wondered if Robert would even be able to tell the difference between the teal and orange. I’d always heard that dogs weren’t as sensitive to colour as humans. Of course, the Robert Foundation’s response to that would be that Robert was different from the average dog.
Since meeting Robert, Mr Waldmann had come to favour olive-coloured clothing, because whenever he wore that colour, Robert would jump into his arms. He had wondered if the colour reminded Robert of the Grand Canyon. Not everyone agreed with him. What was the colour olive supposed to mean to dogs when they saw the greenery of a garden as yellow? Grass, snow, marble — they all looked the same to dogs. Dogs could only distinguish between two or three colours, people said. Yet supposedly Robert could pick out the colour olive. When someone pointed this out during an interview, Mr Waldmann stopped talking — only momentarily, but it long enough for the interviewer to feel a gulf widening between them. As time went on, the people around Mr Waldmann took it for granted that Robert was different. They had a certain level of faith. ‘Dogs are colourblind,’ they said to themselves, ‘but Robert isn’t a normal dog. We don’t know exactly what Robert sees. We can only guess.’
According to those who’d met him, Robert was aristocratic, elegant, and graceful. I hadn’t heard anyone say he was considerate or kind. If I changed my perspective a little, maybe I’d see him as charming. I didn’t expect him to have a good personality — he was a dog, anyway. Why was I expecting something from him that was rare to encounter even in humans? I repeated this sentiment, trying to convince myself that it was true.
Danny had parked his car in front of the banquet hall. It wasn’t even a twenty-minute walk from my accommodations, but we drove. He seemed to be trying to figure out whether there was anything dangerous about me, but there was nothing to find. The problem was with them, not me. Danny said I might encounter some issues at the dinner. There was an issue with the interpreter. They’d put in great efforts to find a Korean interpreter for me, Danny said, but since I had arrived so suddenly, the Foundation hadn’t been able to book the interpreter they’d intended to hire.
‘But I didn’t arrive suddenly,’ I said. ‘I got here late.’
‘Not everyone can pass through a forest fire like you did. The interpreter we chose was supposed to come from Los Angeles, too, but he wasn’t able to make it because of the fires. We wanted to invite you here after we’d set everything up. Once everything was perfect — Robert-style. That’s why I asked you to wait at your hotel longer, but then you arrived yesterday. I hired another Korean interpreter, but he’s not a professional in the field of art. I hope you’ll be understanding, even if the interpretation is a bit rough.’
‘I’m talking to you in English, though,’ I said.
Until then, I had been wondering how I’d be able to talk with Robert. Presumably there was a limit to human–dog communication. But we would have a Korean interpreter, right?
The dining room seemed to be ablaze. It wasn’t that bright inside, but somehow it still felt that way. The candlesticks on the tabletop were designed to look as though they were melting just like the candles they held, and scarlet lights dangled from the ends of the table. With the lights swaying, a dimness in the air, and an utter lack of sound — much less music — I felt like I would get drunk just sitting in my seat drinking water. Robert and I faced one another at opposite ends of a table that could fit ten. I already knew that he was a dog, and I’d spent the past few days dwelling on the fact that I’d come here as his guest. Even though nothing about this situation was a surprise, sitting here with Robert felt stranger than I had imagined.
Robert sat as motionless as a doll, dressed as if he were human; only the sound of his breathing signalled that he was alive. Because the room was so silent, I could hear the tension in his nostrils. He was busy figuring me out. It was a tenacious endeavour that made me feel as if he were chasing me. I was trying to look straight ahead, but not directly at Robert. He must have understood this. It looked as if he were resisting the urge to come down from his chair and sniff me.
Maybe he wasn’t. I wondered what Robert was thinking. He hadn’t said anything since we first greeted one another. Everything was so calm that I could hear the candle wicks burning, and the low hum of the light bulbs. I wondered if things looked the same from Robert’s end. Dogs could see much better in the dark than humans, after all, so perhaps Robert could see more in the intricate layers of twilight surrounding us. Was I being arrogant, calling the silence of the room silence?
I was fortunate to have many points to stare at — metaphorical trees bordering the path of my anxious gaze. Vases, silver candlesticks, the right and left side of the chair opposite me. They were my natural refuges. They weren’t just props, but beautiful pieces of art in and of themselves. Still, I couldn’t help but look at Robert. The lights on the table were arranged such that it was impossible to avoid the figure opposite me. A mix of brown and black fur, a white torso. I was particularly fascinated by the way Robert’s dark-brown ears moved. I had heard that papillons had ears that fluttered like the wings of a butterfly, but Robert’s ears weren’t butterfly-like. They were more like … a phoenix? Like a phoenix’s wings.
I remembered reading that the first step of Robert’s communication with humans involved a device attached to his body that displayed his thoughts externally. Some people said the device looked like a headband, others said it was in the shape of a necklace, and still others said it was like a crown. Was that it? I could see that there was an odd hornlike object hanging from Robert’s ears. As I couldn’t see it directly, I tried to use its shadow to guess its shape.
As the light in the banquet hall grew dimmer and dimmer, everything about Robert unexpectedly increased in size, even his shadow. Robert was sitting motionless. I realised that what I had thought was his leg was actually the frame of his chair, and what I’d thought to be the frame of the chair was the unfamiliar object connected to his ear. It was impossible to tell whether it was decorative or had a use. On second thought, the black cube in front of Robert looked suspicious, too. Was that the black box? Could this cube read Robert’s consciousness? The person sitting closest to the box was Danny.
Our conversation was made possible by four separate stages of translation: Robert à black box à Danny à English–English interpreter à English–Korean interpreter à me. Even if I spoke English completely fluently, Sam later told me, they would have hired an interpreter. Interpreters considered more than just the flow of language; they provided a certain security. For safety reasons, Robert’s words passed through several checkpoints before reaching me. If I were a native English speaker, that would have removed only one of the checkpoints. Multiple stops existed between artist and patron.
‘What was your first impression of me?’ Robert began. At least, that’s what I was told he said. He didn’t utter the words in an audible language, but they reached me in a comprehensible form after passing through the many interpreters.
‘You reminded me of a phoenix,’ I said in Korean.
The Korean interpreter uttered the Korean word for phoenix — bonghwang — to the English interpreter, who asked, quietly, ‘What does that mean?’
The Korean interpreter said, ‘It’s a type of bird. It symbolises many things,’ to which the English interpreter replied, ‘A pigeon?’
The Korean interpreter stressed the symbolic nature of phoenixes so heavily that he forgot other pertinent details, and as a result, Robert was told that he reminded me of ‘a mythical Korean pigeon’. That was it.
A Korean pigeon? Considering that I could understand English, how could I not intervene? I said in Korean that a phoenix was not a pigeon, then I repeated the sentiment in English. I added — again in both Korean and English — that phoenixes symbolise royalty. When I heard my words transformed into ‘It’s the king of Korean pigeons’, I wanted to explode, but there was a rule against mobile phone use during dinners with Robert, so I couldn’t look up the right word in English. I asked the Korean interpreter what the English word for bonghwang was, but he couldn’t think of it. Then we heard a voice in the darkness say ‘phoenix’. I assumed it was Danny, but I couldn’t be sure.
Other than the surface of the dining table, everything was so dark; it was hard to see. The tabletop was a stage. Did that mean our foods were actors? No, it was our conversation leading the performance. Our words. I had to check to make sure everything that departed from my mouth was transported correctly.
After all my words had made it to Robert, he responded with the following: ‘The symbol of Arizona is the phoenix. Since you’re finally here, you should take advantage of the opportunity to visit nearby states as well.’
I found the word ‘finally’ jarring. I wasn’t sure if this was another floral addition to Robert’s speech, or an awkward translation. It was definitely preferable for me to believe that his phrasing had just got tangled up during the multi-stage translation process.
The dinner lasted for two hours. It unfolded like scenes from a dream, starting with gazpacho and ending with grapefruit pudding. Before each course, we were told about the ingredients that had gone into our food. The ‘golden grapefruit pudding’ was topped with a sprinkling of Arizona cactus powder — a specialty from Q City, the place that was supposed to be inspiring my art. I remembered receiving a business card. The pudding was surprisingly hard to eat; it was firm, as if alive, and my spoon had no points with which to poke at it. The pudding kept running away, so even once I’d got it onto the spoon, I had to be careful not to spill it on the way to my mouth. It felt like completing a stunt. When I looked up, I found that Robert had already polished off his dessert. Apparently, he had the same dessert as me, just in a different shape. This meant that, unlike me, he could gracefully swallow the small, round bites with just a flick of his tongue. Robert stared at me as I watched his long, prosciutto-like tongue emerge from his mouth before going back in. I quickly moved my gaze to the upper-left corner of his chair, before looking straight ahead again.
‘That colour suits you. I like orange very much,’ Robert said. Or, his interpreters did. I said that his clothes looked good on him as well.
‘It goes well with your teal shoes,’ Robert added. When had he seen my shoes? I’d been sitting when he arrived.
‘The colour combination also looks good against your irises,’ he said. ‘They’re golden, like an ale beer.’
I knew that dogs could see better than humans at night, but when he described the colour of my irises accurately, despite the distance and the dark, I became extremely nervous. Come to think of it, Robert’s eyes were located more to the sides of his head than was typical for dogs. Perhaps this gave him a wider range of vision. Or maybe it was the additional pairs of eyes around him. Robert’s crew of interpreters, there to reduce his misunderstandings and blind spots, might have heightened his already above-average vision. Robert’s language existed in the number of times he scratched at his fur, the angle at which he did so, and of course in his sneezes, hiccups, coughs, and the movements of his paws. After looking at Robert’s actions from all angles, Danny used the black box and two interpreters to convey his thoughts to me. They expressed Robert’s feelings so carefully that if they weren’t perfect translators, they were perfect actors, or perfect lunatics. Even though it seemed as though Robert and I were sitting alone at this dark, grand dining table, that wasn’t the case.
Compared to the Robert Foundation employees, I was alone. When I arrived at the Foundation, I’d planned to tell them jokingly about my weird hahahaha dream, but I didn’t feel like doing that anymore. They seemed to think, no matter what I said, that I was blaming them. They were defensive. When I told Robert that the food I’d eaten the night before — on my brief sojourn to Mexico — was delicious, the Korean–English interpreter didn’t seem to convey the sentiment properly, so I asked him to interpret the sentence again. The mood soured after that.
‘You mean when we mistook someone else for you,’ Robert said in response. ‘I think I’ve already explained myself enough.’
When Robert’s words finally reached me, moving from dog to box to human to human to human to human, they were not what I had expected. He seemed to have already forgotten about my supposed doppelganger. He wasn’t being sarcastic about their incompetent pick-up service. I added that it was just a dumb joke and said a few more things to change the energy in the room, but no one laughed. Perhaps the problem was that Robert and I were using interpreters rather than communicating directly. Speed was important when telling a joke, so by the time mine got to Robert, it had lost its punch.
If communication between Korean and English was like traversing the Pacific Ocean, then I would have assumed communication between a human and a dog was like leaving the Earth’s atmosphere.
There was a border collie named Rico that supposedly knew over two hundred words, and another dog, Chaser, that knew more than a thousand. Before meeting him, I thought that Robert might be around that level. Maybe this reflected my own hubris, since I knew a lot about the subject, but I didn’t think you needed that large a vocabulary to discuss art. Now that I was sitting before Robert, though, he didn’t seem to be communicating at the level of words or grammar. Robert was simply scanning me.
Over the course of dinner, I was growing smaller. Danny had talked about the importance of posture, but no matter how confidently or upright I tried to sit, my posture still began to flag. Robert and I needed to have a deeper conversation, yet I couldn’t help but wonder if my impatience — showing up at the Foundation so hurriedly (‘hurriedly’ being a relative term), participating in this dinner without any real preparation — had ruined this opportunity.
More challenging than communication between dog and human was overcoming the barriers between our native languages. That is, if you could call English Robert’s native language. I had expected the interpreters to narrow the distance. However, the Korean–English interpreter didn’t seem to like me very much and kept filtering out my words. At least, that was what I had been able to pick up on. There might have been even more omissions than I’d realised. It was as if I had ordered jjajangmyeon, jjamppong, and sweet-and-sour pork, but the jjamppong wasn’t delivered. Had the jjajangmyeon and pork arrived? There was no way to confirm. Eventually, I asked the interpreter to deliver my sentences as is, rather than cutting things out, and he replied, ‘We need to edit them.’
He said this with a kind expression and gentle tone of voice I hadn’t yet observed.
‘That’s how we’ve been able to keep the meal going,’ he added. ‘Otherwise things get awkward — like when you made the comment about Mexican food.’
My request wasn’t completely in vain. The interpreter started to add helpful supplementary explanations after translating Robert’s words. He noted that Robert used the word ‘plantation’ instead of ‘farm’ when referring, for example, to orange farms, date farms, and even wind farms. There were a few words that Robert really liked, one of them being ‘plantation’. He referred to the wind farm I’d seen on my way here as a ‘windmill plantation’.
This was part of the conversation that made it through the four tollgates separating me and Robert:
‘What’s the most memorable art exhibit you’ve seen recently?’
‘I saw the Michael Craig-Martin exhibit before I came to America.’
‘What struck you about it?’
‘The whole space felt like a Costco. There were all these things you’d see in a supermarket: a pepper grinder, an electric toothbrush, a mobile phone. In the context of an art exhibit, these commonplace objects were like exotic creatures. It was like seeing a deep-sea creature in a museum. I was watching wine openers and tape measures move like living creatures, with tongues and tentacles and skeletons. That kind of hit me over the head.’
I’d felt the same way when I saw Robert. I was sitting right across from a creature I had no reason to encounter. Or, five metres across from him.
‘Interesting,’ Robert replied. ‘I saw that exhibit, too. A few years ago, with Mr Waldmann. We especially liked the homage to Velázquez’s Las Meninas. Remember that? Michael Craig-Martin replaced the human figures in Las Meninas with household items. Sunglasses for the princess, a fire extinguisher for the artist. There’s also a dog in Las Meninas. Do you remember what Michael Craig-Martin put in the dog’s place?’
‘I don’t.’
‘A belt. He replaced the dog with a belt. I was so engrossed by it that I had a dream about a belt that night. It was a teal belt, slithering down a road. The belt looked like a snake, yes. I dream a lot. Recently, I saw a piece by Charwei Tsai. It was a video of a Buddhist mantra being written repeatedly in tiny letters on a piece of tofu until the tofu shrivelled up and caved in. The imagery repeated itself over and over again in my dream.’
‘Did you become the tofu in your dream?’
‘I was one of the letters in the mantra, about to be written on the piece of tofu. I desperately wanted to exist, but my dream ended before the artist could inscribe me. In short, it was a dream of indefinite waiting, of worrying that my turn would not come. Whenever I go to an exhibit, it takes a long time to leave. It feels like I’ve reached the end, but then there’s more to see. Have you ever experienced this? I think that’s what art is like. It’s a spirit that, in reality, is a dead end, but it crosses over into our dreams and tells us to keep talking. That’s the light that the artist instils in us. I will be living inside your work even after your exhibition ends, Ms An Yiji. I look forward to your cooperation.’
