Art on fire, p.10
Art on Fire, page 10
I briefly defied the warnings not to look directly at Robert and peeked at his expression. Robert was watching me. Maybe I was imagining things, but it seemed like he was smiling. I felt possessed. How was this happening? This substantial conversation. After several up and downs on this roller-coaster ride, I had finally reached a marvellous destination.
After dessert, Robert wished me a good night from his end of the table. ‘I enjoyed our meal tonight,’ he said, ‘and hope to have many more.’ We said goodbye at a distance of five metres. I remained seated at the long, desolate table and leaned back. The chandelier above me looked like a spider stretching its black legs.
When I lowered my head, the chair across from me was empty. I was still a little confused. I imagined the real Robert showing up all of a sudden — the real Robert, too shy or too busy to eat with me, or maybe too mischievous, watching a recording of this meal in some far-off place. I was as mystified as the detectives who’d first encountered Robert long ago. But the Robert they had met was different to the Robert I had just had dinner with. At that time, Robert had to prove his uniqueness to strangers, but no longer. Now I had to prove myself.
‘The editing seems to have been successful. That was such a beautiful conversation,’ my interpreter-slash-editor brazenly whispered.
He told me he’d simply changed my words to those Robert particularly liked. ‘You don’t have to thank me,’ he added.
Then, to Danny, he said, ‘I missed the word “phoenix” — how did you know that one?’
Danny replied, ‘Harry Potter.’
I had read about another artist getting an upset stomach after their meal with Robert, so I was worried the same would happen to me, but it didn’t. Maybe I’d talked too much, though, because two hours after the dinner, I started to feel hungry again. I ate a bag of potato chips, but they weren’t enough. I took some instant rice I had stored in my purse in case of emergency and went to the kitchen, where Sam showed me the microwave.
‘Have any other artists eaten instant rice after a full-course dinner with Robert?’ I asked.
‘Don’t worry, Ms An,’ Sam said in reply. ‘Things like this happen. It was your first meal with Robert — you worked hard!’
I looked around for two minutes as the instant rice rotated inside the microwave. It was night, but the cafeteria was bright as day. I noticed that, in the study, Robert and Mr Waldmann had taken design inspiration from artworks they’d seen. Two analogue clocks hung side by side. At first glance, they seemed to indicate the same time, then you realised that one was at three o’clock and the other at nine-thirty. Their hands were at the same angle, though, because one of the clocks was turned upside-down. These were the clocks I’d read about. The clocks that had made Mr Waldmann cry. Sam told me something that hadn’t been in the article: Mr Waldmann had actually removed the batteries from both clocks. Now they would point to the same time forever.
Two minutes passed, and my rice was warm.
Three days after our first meal, Robert suggested another. He could have skipped the formality, since by now we were acquainted, but that morning, he sent another handwritten invitation sealed with red wax. I don’t particularly wish to recall the contents, but I did feel significantly less humiliated by the second letter than I had by the first. It was less that his expressions had softened and more that my expectations had lowered. He had written about how I, as an artist, determined whether or not I struggled to create new work, and if I couldn’t deal with that pain, then why had I come all the way here? It felt crazy to use the phrase, but now that I had some level of ‘Robert literacy’, I understood that the arrogance and reproach in Robert’s letters were simply a literary style. A style with a lot of unnecessary decoration.
I was curious about past Robert Foundation artists; according to Sam, most of them ate with Robert once or twice while they were here. They only received a letter at the beginning or end of their stay, but I received another strange, formulaic missive three days after the first. It might have been because Robert was on the Foundation grounds more often than he used to be, due first to the pandemic and then to the wildfires.
Every morning, Sam placed ‘Today’s Weather’ on a silver platter, which she set either on the table inside my room or a small table outside the door. She drew a mark next to one of five weather icons, like something from a child’s diary. The five icons were sun, clouds with sun, clouds, rain, and snow, with boxes to indicate the high and low for the day, as well as sunrise and sunset. I began to collect these weather reports rather than throw them away. I knew that some hotels diligently informed their guests of the daily weather, but the Robert Foundation wasn’t a hotel. I was the only visitor here — what kind of weather-specific activities would I be undertaking?
‘It’s important for you to know the weather,’ Sam said. ‘You’re a painter!’
Sam informed me that I wouldn’t have to worry about the dress code when dining with Robert this time. Robert had suggested lunch, and we would be eating under a canopy on the outdoor terrace, so I could dress comfortably.
‘You’ll be protected by a cool fan, so don’t worry too much.’
It was a strange thing to say, but Sam seemed to think that I was a preternaturally fearful person. I kept replaying the image of the black umbrella unfurling to protect me, with Sam rushing over one moment too late.
We met at 1.00 pm at an outdoor table under an orange canopy. Robert was wearing more on his body than I was. When he saw me, the first thing he uttered was, ‘You look good in olive.’ The second thing he said was, ‘What’s the most memorable art exhibit you’ve seen recently?’
I was a little puzzled and wondered what exhibitions I might have seen between dinner three nights ago and today. I mentioned an exhibit I’d seen in Korea, then one I’d seen in Hollywood, but Robert kept waiting for me to say more. As if I hadn’t given the right answer.
‘Uh … well, I mentioned it already, but the Michael Craig-Martin exhibit was very impressive. The most impressive, actually. It was his first time in Korea.’
Robert finally responded.
‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘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?’
The words he spoke were almost the same as the last time. Almost, I thought — or maybe they were exactly the same. Now I was supposed to answer. I could have said that the dog was replaced by a belt, but I couldn’t bring myself to, and as I equivocated, Robert said the following:
‘A belt. I was so engrossed by it that I had a dream about a belt that night. The belt looked like a snake in my dream. 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. The imagery repeated itself over and over again in my dream.’
I couldn’t decide on how to react, so I nodded slowly. Wasn’t this almost the same as last time, too? Robert seemed to be waiting for me to say something, but I couldn’t remember my lines. It was obvious: I had no lines. I could have said anything, but for some reason, I felt the pressure to give the right answer. I managed to open my mouth and ask, ‘What kind of dream was it?’ then added, ‘You didn’t become tofu, did you?’
Predictably, Robert said that he’d become one of the letters to be written on the tofu.
Was this conversation that interesting? No matter how engrossing, you couldn’t act out the same conversation over and over, could you? Conversations didn’t just disappear after they happened. When we conversed, the words accumulated in our minds, turning into flesh and blood. It was inevitable that we chose subjects of conversation according to our interests, but if we’d already talked about an exhibition, there was some level of implicit abbreviation and omission required when bringing up the same topic three days later. We have to tread lightly on common ground, but Robert did no such thing. Was it true what people said, that time for dogs consisted only of the present? No. As far as I knew, dogs remembered the past. So did Robert enjoy this conversation?
Between Robert and I sat one box and three humans. We were in broad daylight, so I could see the interpreters’ expressions. I grew more confused when I realised that everyone, not just Robert, seemed new to this conversation.
According to our script, it was now Robert’s turn to say 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.’ Which was exactly what he’d said the other day.
I remembered everything I had eaten at our first meal, but I couldn’t deal with such a drawn-out conversation again. When dessert came out, Robert again asked the question, ‘What’s the most memorable art exhibit you’ve seen recently?’
I wanted to cry. I tried to bring up a few other exhibitions, but the conversation was set. When I mentioned Michael Craig-Martin, Robert guided us through a slightly abbreviated version of the same conversation. Was Robert actually curious to know my answers again? How could he have the same conversation three times in a row? He repeated it again before the meal was over. This time, he didn’t even ask me about any memorable exhibits I’d seen, he just repeated his prior statements, condensed to half their original length. When he finished, Robert said the same thing again, condensed further. It took five minutes. Then he cut it in half again, to two minutes. By the end, he’d shortened his speech to a single line: ‘I think that’s what art is.’
After this, Robert ended the conversation. He looked sated. I just nodded, absentmindedly folding my napkin into a paper boat as I listened. One more fold, and the boat would turn into a crane. Paper boats and paper cranes had the same starting point. Four boats wobbled on my lap before some of them fell to the ground like dead leaves.
The same story, folded in half again and again until it was a single line. It was such a bizarre way of speaking that it seemed like a kind of compulsion. I wondered if our conversation had the same function as one of Robert’s chew toys, but Danny said that Robert held this rhetorical technique in high esteem.
Anyway, there was an unexpected effect to this conversation style. It relieved my tension somewhat. As Robert’s lines decreased in number, my hunched shoulders straightened, my neck gained strength, and I found myself wondering if his language skills were nothing more than a few set patterns. ‘What’s the most memorable art exhibit you’ve seen recently?’ was an easy question for Robert to ask anyone he met.
Still, there was no denying that Robert and I had had a ‘conversation’ about Michael Craig-Martin’s work. If Robert’s questions were fixed, how would he have known how to respond to my answers? But maybe he’d seen my posts about the exhibit on social media. Maybe I was predictable.
Four days later, I got another invitation, this time for dinner. I wondered if I had the right to refuse. Did Robert even consider that possibility? Sam brought the letter in the morning. It contained the same biting lines as always.
5.
Compared to what I’d face in the real world after my time at the Robert Foundation, I had assumed that long and frequent meals with the Foundation’s president would be manageable. The problem was that these meals were more boring than I could have imagined. I remembered how the residency guidebook had mentioned that the Foundation provided participants with ‘unlimited meals’. What did they mean by unlimited? Several times, I tried to break out of Robert’s preferred conversational structure. I attempted to change the subject when he finished the second iteration of one of his monologues. It would have been rude to butt in mid-speech, so I needed to speak up as soon as Robert was done with one of his summaries. If I missed that brief interval, I’d have to wait for another chance. Thanks to my hesitation, though, I often missed it. Robert would throw himself headfirst into his next monologue, and I would feel even more exhausted than before.
My agony reached its zenith at my fifth meal with Robert, by which point he’d stopped asking me about art exhibits. During our third and fourth conversations, he didn’t even bring up his increasingly abbreviated story about Victorian lemon squeezers. There was no longer any reason to play around with such detail, as everything Robert had to say could be summed up in a single line. Silence followed. I almost missed the origami-like folding, the consecutive reductions, of Robert’s prior utterances. Six people — or rather, five people and a dog — sat around a circular table inside a glamorous greenhouse, clinging to our respective seats as if any divergence would cause the set-up to collapse. No matter what questions I asked, Robert failed to respond, making me wonder if he was in a bad mood. A similar pattern continued during our sixth meal. Forced to sit through multiple long courses, I had to watch as silence flowed around us. It was so quiet that during the meal, a button the size of a bean fell onto the floor, and the staccato tapping sound it made as it bounced off the ground four times in a row put me on edge. My heart skipped a beat; I initially thought that a tooth, rather than a button, had fallen. The button was the size of a tooth and ivory in colour. The group was so unrealistically calm, so lacking in reaction, that I felt sick. What if it had fallen out of my mouth?
I would have felt less on edge if Robert had stopped seeking me out. Our two-hour dinners stole my energy, and sometimes I found myself eating cup noodles or a whole package of cookies alone in my studio afterwards. Even when Robert wasn’t around, reminders of his presence followed me. The cafeteria staff were obsessed with seating. They asked me to let them know in advance if I wanted to eat something specific at the daily buffet-style breakfast; they could cater the menu to my tastes. But I didn’t want different food, I wanted to request a different table set-up. Despite my repeated pleas that the staff stop cleaning up after me, they wouldn’t stop. Things they removed from my table included a salad I’d just brought over from the buffet, an omelette, still warm and uneaten, and a cup of coffee from which I’d drunk a single sip. I had only left my salad bowl on the table while I went to get some yoghurt, but when I returned, the salad had disappeared. Foods were removed ruthlessly, without exception — even if I hadn’t taken a single bite. If I got up from my seat after setting down a cup of coffee, it would be gone upon my return. The fate of paper napkins was the same. It sapped me of my desire to eat.
‘Coffee cups are a bit much,’ one of the interpreters said. ‘They usually don’t go that far.’
I’d been a bit more careless this time — since I knew he could see my table from where he was sitting, I figured my meal was safe. But when I went to get a plate of fruit, my coffee disappeared.
‘I only had one sip,’ I said. ‘Can you ask them not to remove my dishes?’
‘You have to copy the way we do things here. This is all Robert — he’s not going to change.’
Were empty table places a part of Robert’s aesthetic? The interpreter said that Robert didn’t like the sight of unattended dishes.
‘Robert doesn’t even use this cafeteria, does he?’ I asked.
‘Well, air circulates. You have to respect the energy in the air here.’
Later, when I pleaded with the interpreter to translate what I said directly during our meals with Robert, he replied, ‘That’s a very arrogant thought, imposing human language on Robert.’ While humans communicated with one another line by line, he explained, Robert saved the entire space-time of a conversation in his head, like an enormous file transfer system. Talking to Robert required a lot of stamina, so the interpreter had to eat well. Technically, though, he was the interpreter furthest from Robert in our chain of communication, so he didn’t speak to Robert directly. He had been hired specifically for my sake, moving between Korean and English. When I mentioned this, the interpreter became irritated and seemed not to understand.
‘You think Korean–English interpreters are a rare breed? There’s a reason I was chosen over everybody else. I know what words Robert likes. When you two were speaking, I purposefully said “strike” instead of “hit”. I said that because he’s particularly fond of the word “strike”. Do you realise how much this sophistication contributes to a positive atmosphere? It’s specialised knowledge. Know that it requires a lot of energy for me to stand on the front line between you and Robert. That’s why I’m eating these mountainous piles of food.’
Another translator — the one who stood even closer to the front line — walked over. Danny was the first gate through which every word had to pass on its way from Robert to me, and how he turned Robert’s words into human language remained a mystery. He had three tools: the black box; his animal behaviourist background, as a former sheepdog handler; and all the time he spent with Robert. But presumably the latter two were less useful when it came to discussions about art. Everyone wondered how the black box worked. From what I’d heard, the device had been developed by Danny and Mr Waldmann. It was extremely expensive and tailored to Robert. You couldn’t just buy one, even if you had the money. The black box looked like a tissue box, or a speaker, but you couldn’t see what was inside. Its appearance reminded me of a phone conversation I’d overheard on the bus one day.
The woman behind me, on the verge of tears, had yelled into her phone, ‘It’s a black cabinet. Yes, the files are inside, but we don’t have the key.’ During the thirty minutes I was on the bus, which was entirely silent other than her shouting, I had no choice but to listen along as she tried to solve the conundrum she’d found herself in.
