This is Life (2 page)

She looked confused. ‘Er . . . yes?’

He shuddered as if waking from a trance, which, he supposed, was just what was happening. He knew he had to turn this situation around. ‘Hello, Aurélie Renard!’ he cried. He
realised too late that this was over-friendly. He had even raised his hand in a cheery wave, as if she had been a small child and he a dental surgeon about to perform an appalling procedure upon
her. He cleared his throat, and for a moment he allowed himself to just look at her. She was quite short, three or four centimetres below average height he guessed, and slim, with breasts that were
palpable, yet unobtrusive. She was very pretty, in a no-make-up kind of way. She was what his colleague Professor Boucher would have called a
compact blonde
.

Professor Boucher took pride in putting all the female students into chauvinistic categories, and whenever a
compact blonde
was in the vicinity he took the opportunity to pull faces, wink
and bug his eyes out, implying that she would be Professor Papavoine’s
type
. Sometimes his grey chain smoker’s tongue would even dart out of his mouth and moisten the lips that
lurked below his unruly beard. Professor Papavoine was always exasperated by these displays, and what exasperated him more than anything was that Professor Boucher was right; he supposed the
compact blonde
was
his type, insofar as he had one.

‘So,’ he said, taking care now to sound at least a little bit professorial, ‘you have an idea for your project?’

‘Yes.’ Aurélie swallowed hard, and began. Until a few minutes earlier she had been determined to stick to her original plan of spending the coming weeks producing a series of
line drawings. Drawing had been her first love; it was what had led to her being singled out by her art teacher as an exceptional student, and it had won her prizes at school. It was her love of
drawing that had driven her to apply to art college, to leave the industrial town she had grown up in and come to Paris to learn about materials and technique, and to become as accomplished as she
possibly could at the only thing she had ever been really good at, apart from making mashed potato.

Her idea for the project had been to wander around her neighbourhood and draw people, animals and objects: anything she saw that she thought would make a good subject. She’d had a feeling,
though, that telling the professor she wanted to draw a series of pictures would not be enough, that he was going to be looking for an
angle
. She had one ready. It was bold, perhaps even
audacious: she was going to look him in the eye and tell him that she planned to make these line drawings really, really good. She would leave it at that.

As she had waited for her name to be called, she had joined her fellow students outside the professor’s office, and her confidence began to drain away. Sitting in a circle of much
criticised plastic chairs, she had listened quietly as they talked at length about their own proposals. They seemed to come from a different planet from hers. Their talk was of
recontextualising
found objects
, of
blurring the boundary between art and the everyday
, and of
provoking extreme reactions
. One of the students, Sébastien, was saying something about
subverting the zeitgeist
.

She watched him as he took his turn to hold court. On the last day of college before the summer break everyone had gone out for drinks, and she had ended up inviting him back to her apartment,
and they had spent the night together. He had left first thing in the morning, and hadn’t called her once over the summer. He was tall, and had good bones, and she had liked him from the
moment she had set eyes on him. She had spent more time than she should have done wondering whether he had lost her number, or whether she had written it down incorrectly as he hurried to gather
his things and go.

When she saw him again at the start of the current term, as scores of students milled around waiting to be allowed into a lecture hall, she had sought him out, gone up to him and said hello. He
had given her only a cursory greeting before returning to the intense conversation he had been having with a fellow student about something she didn’t understand, and had no particular
interest in understanding. He was acting as if nothing had ever happened between them, as if she was just another slight acquaintance from his course, as if she had never slept in his arms, and as
if he had not lightly pinched her chin as he told her that her eyes were just the right shade of blue. He hadn’t even asked her how her summer had been.

She had stood there for a minute or two, and when she realised he wasn’t going to acknowledge her further she had gone away and leaned against a wall by herself. He hadn’t been her first, but he had been her third, and
she had hoped it would be a case of third time lucky. He was with another girl now, a sculptor with waist-length black hair, who never smiled. She had seen them around together.

On visits home, Aurélie had endured several identical conversations with various aunts, uncles and neighbours about the apparent horrors of a monstrous thing called
modern art
.

—So you’re at art college?

‘Yes.’

—
What kind of work do you do? It’s not modern art, is it?

‘I mainly do line drawings, but I’m starting to work with oil paint too.’

—
So, it’s not modern?

‘Er . . . not particularly.’

—
Thank God for that
.

Every time this happened she felt like grabbing the aunt, uncle or neighbour and shaking them. She didn’t like the idea that what she did was automatically considered to be better than
everything that they lumped together under the banner of
modern art
. She was also frustrated by the implication that because she chose to work in a conventional way, then what she produced
must be old-fashioned and unoriginal. By their standards, being old-fashioned and unoriginal were virtues, and they didn’t even feel the need to see any of her work before declaring her
superiority, purely because of her perceived refusal to embrace anything that might be considered to be in some way progressive.

She was very impressed with a lot of the work her fellow students were producing, and some of this work would doubtless be considered
modern art
by these aunts, uncles and neighbours. She
knew how much care and thought went into it, and though some of it ended up plain, ugly or nowhere near as original as the artist thought it was, a lot of it worked incredibly well, and it dismayed
her to see it all dismissed by people who would never be open-minded enough to give it a chance. She was always looking for different ways to approach her work, and she had ideas for new
perspectives and techniques, and had plans to seek out unusual subjects, all of which would amount to something that would be seen as undeniably
modern
to her supporters.

She also had plenty of aunts, uncles and neighbours who were more open-minded about art, but listening to Sébastien, who was still going on, she knew he would stretch even their patience.
He was saying something about
mapping territory beyond the beyond
. He wasn’t doing himself, or anyone else, any favours at all.

She had never been able to work out what this kind of talk had to do with anything. It seemed designed only for the artists to elevate themselves into positions of intellectual unassailability
before they had even taken the time to put brush to canvas, or smash the bricks, or saw the hooves off the freeze-dried donkey. She couldn’t see what it could ever do but alienate people, and
turn them away from all art, good and bad, and it was this that had driven her to keep her proposal as straightforward as possible, as uncluttered with explanations and justifications.

She supposed the simplicity of her proposal had, at least partly, been a kind of protest against the sort of thing she had been listening to, as well as the excruciating artists’
statements she often read on exhibition programmes, words that turned her against the work before she had even seen it. But whatever her intentions, her plan to announce that she was going to
simply draw some pictures no longer seemed bold and combative; it just seemed very small, as if she hadn’t given it any thought at all. She worried that she would be laughed out of the
professor’s office, or castigated for having a lack of ambition or for being unable to articulate her ideas. Her courage evaporating, she did what she always did at times like this: she asked
herself what her friend Sylvie would do.

Sylvie was always breezing into difficult situations, and she had a knack for escaping them. Aurélie began to consider feigning a fainting fit to get out of the appointment, but she
decided that Sylvie would have come up with something more creative and far less transparently fraudulent than this. Then, as if from nowhere, a plan came into her mind. She knew at once that she
had found a way to present the professor with the kind of proposal he would be looking for. She had no idea whether or not it was any good, but at least it was something other than saying she was
going to draw some pictures.

Sébastien’s soliloquy was still going on. By now he was furiously bemoaning the blindness of the public, how unable they are to even
see
brilliance, let alone comprehend it.
By this, she knew he meant that they were unable to see or comprehend
his
brilliance. She had seen his latest piece, and it had looked like something torn from a children’s colouring
book; if it had any worth she was blind to it as well. She was annoyed with herself for having let him make her so unhappy, and even more annoyed that she still found him so attractive, that she
still wished he had called, and that it had been her, and not the unsmiling sculptor, by his side. She made a mental note to have a word with herself about him, to write a list of everything that
was wrong with him and stick it to her fridge door with a magnet.

She left him to his monologue and continued to pull her plan into shape. She even started to feel quite pleased with it. It had still been forming in her mind when the professor’s
secretary called her through to his office.

Every year Professor Papavoine began this day with the intention of listening hard to what his students were saying, but it had never happened. In the opening seconds of his
first appointment it would strike him that there was really no point, and unable to get away from this truth his concentration lost focus and only odds and ends of the students’ ideas ever
registered with him. These sessions barely counted as tutorials; being only symbolic, they were a way of acknowledging that the students had made it through to the second year of study and were now
ready to have their projects approved by an authentic professor. The faculty’s primary aim in this was for news of these encounters to reach the parents, who would, they hoped, be satisfied
that their offspring were receiving an acceptable standard of education. Whatever the students’ proposals for their personal projects, Professor Papavoine waved them through, wished them all
the best and sent them on their way. He didn’t see what else he could do.

The only time he had ever come close to vetoing a suggestion was when a student had proposed a project in which he would publicly collect, categorise and display everything that came out of his
body over a twelve-week period. A big glass vat would contain his urine, another would house his excrement, and smaller demijohns and specimen jars would hold snot, earwax, semen and sweat. He had
planned on presenting this as an exhibition called, simply,
Life,
during which he would be on display himself twenty-four hours a day, naked and publicly topping up the exhibits as the weeks
went by, while microphones picked up the sound of his bodily functions and a series of speakers amplified them around the room in near-deafening surround sound.

Professor Papavoine had pulled a slightly quizzical face and said he wasn’t quite sure about this idea, at which the student had turned white with rage and stormed out, vowing to leave the
college, turn his back on Paris and make his name in London, which he had promptly done with this very concept. In interviews he had derided the conservatism of his forsaken home city, and
announced that he had embraced the English way of art, which he confirmed by selling the completed work to an oligarch for three quarters of a million pounds and gaining membership of a number of
private drinking clubs.

He had gone on to present
Life
in San Francisco, Tokyo and São Paolo, and with each new staging its popularity had increased. It had become acknowledged as a sensation of the
international art world, and it was due to open in Paris any day now: the return of the Prodigal Son. Everybody was talking about it. Since his meeting with Professor Papavoine he had shaved off
all his hair, even his eyebrows, and changed his name to
Le Machine
. There were posters all over the city of the artist naked among the empty receptacles, his genitalia only just obscured by
a carefully positioned specimen jar. Bold letters across the top said, simply:
Le Machine: Life
. Were it not for the booking information at the foot of these posters, they could almost be
mistaken for advertisements for a gentlemen’s fragrance. Professor Papavoine spoke to nobody about his encounter with the star of the event.

In every case other than Le Machine’s, though, Professor Papavoine had expressed neither doubt nor discomfort, and he made a point of offering no praise. He would think no more of the
ideas he heard until weeks later, when the time came time for him to sit on the assessment panel.

Aurélie carried on. Professor Papavoine really wanted to hear what she had to say, and he worked hard at concentrating. She told him her plans to blindly throw a dart
into a map, and how the nearest suitable public space to where it landed would become the starting point of the project. Then she started saying something about small stones, and strangers, and
random selection, but he lost the thread. As he looked at her, he was only just able to stop himself from sighing. She was so pretty. Her shortish hair was tied back, and he noticed that one of her
ears stuck out a bit more than the other, and her teeth were a little uneven. He guessed she would have been offered braces when she was a teenager, but refused to have them fitted.
Oh, petulant
child
, thought Professor Papavoine.