back the curtain, and they enter the studio proper. He’s decided, it seems, for reasons Peter can’t begin to decipher, to give the loft an absurdly large entrance—a lobby, if you will. Maybe it’s a Wizard of Oz trick, meant primarily for visitors like Peter—a wait-till-you-see-what’s-behind-the-curtain strategy.
Behind the curtain is the studio, a jerry-rigged roomlike room maybe fifteen feet square. Groff is more orderly than some. He’s put up a pegboard wall from which various tools hang, some of them quite lovely, assorted wire scrapers and long wooden paddles and wood-handled awl-like implements, all meant for the shaping of wax and clay. The studio is filled with the smell of warm wax, which is not only lovely but strangely soothing, as if it linked up with a childhood memory, though Peter can’t imagine what infantile ministrations could conceivably have involved hot wax. The first oracle at Delphi was a hut made of beeswax and birds’ wings—maybe it’s racial sense memory.
And here, on a heavy-legged industrial steel table: the object itself. A four-foot-tall bronze urn, beautifully burnished to that green-ochre particular to bronze, with a foot and handles, classical at heart but given pomo proportions, the base smaller and the great looping handles bigger than any artisan in the fifth century B.C. would have considered; that hint of cartoonishness, of animal jauntiness, that rescues it not only from imitation but from any hint of the tomb.
Okay. At first glance, it passes the context test. It has gravity and charisma. Although gallery people don’t like to talk about it, even among themselves, this is one of the problems that can arise—the simple fact that in a hushed white room with polished concrete floors, almost anything looks like art. There can’t be a dealer in New York, or anywhere, who hasn’t gotten variations on that phone call: loved it in the gallery, but now it seems all wrong in our living room. There’s a standard response: art is sensitive to its environment, let me come over and if we can’t make it work I will of course take it back… But really, more often than not, what happens to the piece when it arrives in a living room is, it lacks the potency to stand up to an actual room, even if the room itself is awful (as these rooms so often are—the rich tend to love their gilt and granite, their garish upholstery fabric that cost three forty a yard). Most of Peter’s cohorts blame the rooms, and Peter understands—the rooms are often not only gaudy and overdone, they have that sense of the conqueror about them, and the painting or sculpture in question usually enters such rooms as the latest capture. Peter, however, has other feelings. He believes that a real work of art can be owned but should not be subject to capture; that it should radiate such authority, such bizarre but confident beauty (or unbeauty) that it can’t be undone by even the most ludicrous sofas or side tables. A real work of art should rule the room, and the clients should call up not to complain about the art but to say that the art has helped them understand how the room is all a horrible mistake, can Peter suggest a designer to help them start over again?
The Groff urn, it must be said, feels like an object that could hold its own. It has that most vital and least describable of the fundamental qualities—authority. You know it when you see it. Certain pieces occupy space with an assertiveness that’s related to but not exactly contingent upon their observable, listable merits. It’s part of the mystery; it’s part of why we love it so (those of us who do). The Sistine Chapel isn’t just brilliantly painted, it’s like an orchestra. It fills the chapel in ways a flat painted surface cannot, in terms of the ordinary laws of physics.
Peter gets up close. Here on the urn’s side are the inscribed rants and atrocities, orderly as hieroglyphics, done in a controlled, slightly feminine, cursive hand. On the side facing Peter: at least forty repulsive slang terms for the female sex organ; the lyrics to a truly vile, misogynist and homophobic hip-hop song (Peter doesn’t recognize it, he’s nowhere near that hip); a section from Valerie Solanas’s Society for Cutting Up Men Manifesto (he does recognize that); something reprehensible from a website about some guy’s search for lactating women who’ll squirt into his mouth.
It’s good. It’s fucked up, but it’s good. It not only has presence as an object, it has actual content, which is rare these days—content, that is, beyond a fragment of a fragment of a simple idea. It refers simultaneously to all the glossed-over history we’ve grown up with, all those artistic tributes to Great Monuments and Hard-Won Victories that fail to note the grunty human suffering involved, and at the same time presents itself as a thing that could in theory at least survive into the distant future, one in which (sez Groff) different home truths will be told.
Maybe Peter’s been too hard on himself. And on Groff.
And yes, Peter is already preparing his spiel for Carole. In fact, in truth, it’s more than good enough. It’s an embodied idea, a single idea, that may lead nowhere in particular but is not, on the surface, a naive or jejune idea. Plus, rare these days, it’s a pretty thing. These are assets.
“This is a great one,” Peter says.
“Thanks.”
Carole will (probably) be tickled by the feminism implied by all this vicious misogyny. She’s no fan of shock for shock’s sake (what was he thinking of, trying to sell her the Krim?), but this serene and poisonous object will give her something to talk about, something to explain to the Chens and the Rinxes and the whomevers.
“I’d love to show it to Carole. Does that still seem like a good idea to you?”
“Yeah. It does.”
“And I told you about how she’d like to see it at her place, like,
“Miz Potter is used to getting what she wants, huh?”
“Well, yeah. But she’s really and truly not an asshole. And if we can get it installed in her garden by tomorrow, the next day Zhi and Hong Chen will see it. As you probably know, the Chens are huge buyers.”
“Let’s do it.”
“Let’s.”
They stand together for a moment, looking at the urn.
“My guys are going up there tomorrow to take down the Krim,” Peter says. “They could take the urn with them when they go.”
“What does Krim put
“Tar. Resin. Horsehair.”
“And…”
“Frankly he’s a little private about some of his materials. I respect that.”
“I heard one of them dripped all over the floor at MoMA.”
“That’s why the floors are concrete. So. What if I got here with my team at noon tomorrow?”
“You work fast, Peter Harris.”
“I do. And I can promise you Carole won’t haggle about the price. Not when we’re doing her a favor like this.”
“Good. And noon is fine,” Groff says.
“I’ll bring papers and things with me tomorrow, I don’t expect you to just loan me the piece.”
“Of course you don’t.”
“Okay, then,” Peter says. “Pleasure to meet you.”
“Likewise.”
They shake hands, head back to the elevator. Groff must live in a relatively tiny place behind the studio—the loft can’t possibly be
Groff rings for the elevator. And now, a brief awkwardness. They’ve said what they have to say, and this elevator is
Peter: “If Carole decides to commit to the piece, I’m sure she’d love for you to come up and see it in situ.”
“I always insist on that, actually. This is on trial for both of us, right?”
“Absolutely.”
“Garden, right?”
“Yeah, an English garden, a little wild and overgrown. As opposed to, you know, a French garden.”
“Sounds nice.”
“It’s really nice. You can’t see the water from the garden, but you can hear it.”
Groff nods. What is it about this transaction, why does it feel… why does it feel like
