When one day Howard lectures an audience of young artists,
he is confronted with the question what is dear to him. It deeply dissatisfies
him that he can think of no valid answer. At the same time, a deep-rooted
cynicism impedes the progress of his latest series of horrible paintings,
Infant Rapes.
This short story describes Howard's struggle for an
alternate motivating force behind his creative process. Following is
a fragment taken from the second chapter. The entire text will be published
in the beginning of 2007.
Howard’s studio was unlike other painters’ studios. Its walls
and floor were not smeared with paint, there was no dirty sink full of old brushes
looking the worse for wear from constant contact with water, and there was no
chaotic collection of useless objects scattered around the room waiting for the
artist to harvest inspiration from them. Howard’s studio was spotless
although it did contain a wealth of things, but organised so scrupulously and
in such a way that only he could fathom their ordering and, as a logical consequence,
only he had the patience to maintain it.
When anyone asked him why he kept it so tidy he would persist in maintaining
that a true painter not only looked after his canvases, but also his studio
if need be. Behind this euphemism lurked a far more banal cause, namely, he
could not tolerate chaos and he found it absolutely impossible to work if something
in his periphery was not according to his taste. Few people knew that he
spent at least two thirds of his time in the studio rearranging things, removing
paint stains, and whittling down the rows of paintings.
As regards the latter, this meant visiting the landfill site regularly -
he worked on large canvases and hated reusing material. The waste that he actually
generated always cost him a great deal of time. He endeavoured to reduce his
aborted canvases into ingenious, small fragments so that the people who worked
at the landfill would be unable to recognise the scenes depicted - they would
certainly label him as perverted. Mutilated limbs and, for some time now, monsters
from a series of child rapes posed a real problem. But he could not paint anything
else. He had once surprised friend and foe alike with a simple painting of
an African child soldier: nothing worse than a skinny youngster brandishing
a machine gun in the air. That was not what the public expected of him.
His completed works stood in the four-metre-high rack in the corner, arranged
by exhibition. Nothing more needed arranging today; he had done that yesterday.
He forced himself to arrange the canvases from his last series, Infant Rapes,
I through to IX, against the long white walls of his studio in order to take
stock of the work to date, a moment he had long postponed.
Translation by Sarah-Jane Jaeggi-Woodhouse