He iearned all that was available, from biology to bio-topology in two
months. How do you measure an IQ like that?
Now —
where did he live while he used another man’s library facilities and
mugged the local fauna to pay the bills with such curious honesty? Or is
honesty not 'curious’ to a genuine intelligence? The publicly disseminated picture was of a hunted creature, friendless and alone, cowering in back rooms, furtively haunting the public terminals in the dead hours of night.
Nonsense. He was not 'friendless and alone’. It has always been obvious to
me where he went, though Dad said it was out of the question. Young Feller
had the acquaintances he was born with, whether they could stand each other
or not.
7 The genius who harboured a super-genius
Call me Mayflower; it’s my professional name and everybody uses it.
Better than Jesus Bloody Christ perhaps. Oh, you poor man, is that
what they did to you? Pushed you from one to the next, denying all
knowledge, making silly suggestions. T hat’s us B Group all over, fine
perceptions and a sophomoric sense of humour. A Group are worse;
we gave up talking to them when we could no longer understand their
language. Who wants trial solutions of Fermat’s Last Theorem at
breakfast? The As think we artists use language to smudge reality and
our art to subvert it; to them our work is meaningless because we don’t
know precisely what we are doing. No artist ever did, but how explain
that to a mathematician?
Lady, how you gush! If I couldn't see your cool eyes or didn’t know that your
mind nudges the top levels of measurable IQ, I might accept you at face value.
Instead, I accept that you are deciding what and how much to say.
How much will I understand? Your pictures certainly mean nothing to me.
184
George Turner
What is the symbolism of a flayed man with a flayed rat in his stomach, and in
its stomach a plucked fowl laying an egg?
N o t symbolism? A clear statement? I shouldn’t have asked. No two of these
pictures seem to be in the same style; there is no theory of art here - that I can
see. Is this why B.Group made such a splash in its first years, then faded out of
sight?
We didn’t fade out of sight; we made our money and withdrew. It
was shameless on our part, but we had done what was asked of us.
That is, we had demonstrated that great artists can be created in the
laboratory, produced our exhibitions of masterpieces on a level slightly
advanced over the contemporary and then got on with our real work.
Which has no acceptance. Much too advanced.
We used hypnotic techniques for quick acceptance. It’s no secret,
though the critics don’t care to labour the point. We used line, form
and colour to lure the brain into looking where we wished, then be led
from point to point of one substantially meaningless area to another,
allowing it to create interpretations. We weren’t fakes; we introduced
new techniques and people did find genuine aesthetic-pleasure in the
works. And we made the money we needed for following our own
bents. Nobody likes what we do now because they can’t see it whole;
they think in terms of historical aesthetics, and appreciations come
only when minds are sufficiently developed to look past their own distractions. Aesthetes aren’t, on the whole, a clever bunch, only a mass of sensitivities.
Group B is superior, but that in itself is nothing to be proud of. The
greatest artists and most of the lesser have created themselves out of
desire and need, but we were created by a computer. Self-expression
is in our genes but we aren’t fools enough to take credit for it.
That? Yes, go and look at it. Tell me if it means anything to you.
It may not, but I must look because — Because for an instant you betrayed
interest in m y interest in that picture. Well, now. . . parallel verticals composed
of jumbled geometric forms —
squares, circles, triangles, rhombs - the space
between the verticals speckled with pastel colours, very pale, so that the
canvas —
no, not canvas, I think it’s glass with a rippled surface —
looks like
bars on a background of tinted snow, very deep, three-dimensional - the hypnotic technique?
I move my head and the thing changes like a kaleidoscope; the bars bend
in a left-handed spiral, the speckles between them fall into patterns linking the
spiralling bars while blotches of colour come forward to impinge on the bars
and to move up and down between them as I look up, look down. I look from
the other side and the spiral becomes right-handed, all the effects reversed.
On the nursery floor
185
S pirals?
I peer more closely and have a sensation of tipping forward into the painted
surface, of being led down a weli of coiour to a particular point where the blazing blotches hover in space, marking off collocations of the tiny geometric figures which form the spiralling bars... in groups of three.
Mayflower shakes my arm, vigorously, while she laughs. Hypnotic, and how!
I have been practically inside the thing. Meaning? Such pure fascination needs
no meaning. But it has one.
I painted that for Young Feller. He told me what would please him
in a picture and I painted it for him. So there was one talent not
programmed into him.
Yes, as you guessed, he sought us out. For practical reasons, not for
friendship. He had no feeling for the A and B Groups. Why should
he? For heaven’s sake, man, we are literally three different species. We
have no thoughts in common, no needs, no perceptions . . .
The A Group physical scientists were to him simply bores, as they
are to me and my sibs —
