The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser

Author:Michelle de Kretser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC019000
ISBN: 9781741767063
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Published: 2008-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

Sunday

IN THE WEEKS THAT followed his lunch with Esther Kade, Tom read everything he could find about Nelly’s work. What began as curiosity ended as need. His book on James lacked only its conclusion, yet he neglected it, led on from catalogue to periodical to website. Obsessive as a gun dog, he tracked the glimmer of her, not caring if it led him astray.

It was easy enough to find reproductions of Nelly’s more recent work; easy to reconstitute the stages of her career. But Tom soon realised that no visual record of the Nightingale suite existed. He had a copy of the exhibition catalogue, but it reproduced none of the controversial works; as if wily Posner had anticipated the furore.

More than one critic lamented the loss of the paintings, reporting that Nelly had destroyed them as soon as the show closed. But surely, Tom thought, surely they couldn’t be gone altogether? He thought enviously of Esther, whose memory held their trace.

Five years after the Nightingale debacle, an exhibition of new work by Nelly Zhang opened at Posner’s gallery. It marked a turning point in her career.

The new show consisted of photographs of original paintings. The catalogue essay was signed by a critic called Frederick Vickery, whose crumpled jowls and rectangular, black-rimmed glasses had since enjoyed mild notoriety on a late-night television arts programme. Zhang confronts us with work that follows Barthes in presenting realism as secondary mimesis, wrote Vickery. That is, not as a copy from nature but as the copy of a copy.

The essay went on to explain that once photographed by a professional photographer, the paintings were destroyed. It struck Tom as a re-enactment of the fate of the Nightingale suite, part protest, part catharsis; the deliberate repetition that controls trauma but refuses appeasement. Or so he reasoned, while flinching at Nelly’s destruction of her paintings, at the calculated violence of the act.

He had heard Nelly and the other artists talk about Vickery. While there was a coolness between him and Posner now, the critic had once been integral to the dealer’s set. His essay had Posner’s spin all over it, decided Tom, noting its concluding sentence: Here is an artistic practice that denies the market’s lust for the original, offering an endless multiplicity of likenesses instead.

Tom examined images of freeways, multi-storey car parks, supermarkets, fast-food outlets. Nelly painted the strange, assertive beauty of constructions essential to the functioning of large cities. She painted hospitals, those non-places where modern lives begin and end. She had a fondness for changing light and liminal hours, for the theatricality of sunset and the frightening blue of certain dusks.

What was curious was the change she worked on her subjects. Inanimate things glistened and appeared to move in her pictures. The ugly musculature of an overpass or a high-rise estate turned dreamily vaporous under her hand. Hung about with the huge blackness of night, concrete and steel grew ectoplasmic. Tom clicked on a link in an online art journal and was confronted with a shining tendon that might once have been a road.

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