AFTERLIFE

Death can come at the very moment that takes everyone by surprise. For twenty years he had always appeared as if death might visit him at any moment but then over the last five years both his health and success appeared to feed off one another, announcing a form of late flowering in what had been a seemingly difficult life. Previously exhibitions had been scarce but now they had started to be so regular that he had to employ assistants just to keep up with the volume of work. Despite the elation at this late success it might have required a superhuman effort just too keep up with such a demand. Anyway something must have triggered the sudden stroke. Numerous articles marked this passing and his gallery was overwhelmed by requests for retrospective exhibitions because the consensus was that he was the most important artist of his generation. After a period of grief his wife decided to go through his remaining work to determine how this demand might be met. She more than anyone knew of his disappointments that had marked most of his life, but at the same time privately she had an ambivalent relationship to his work because she felt that the space that she had always wanted was occupied by his art. There is a long history to such feelings, indeed it might constitute a hidden minor narrative within art history, or at least a very special suffering in silence that is endured but never quite able to surface. Perhaps it is because it serves as a complex double bind that drains away lived reality into these discrete shards of a life lived within the shadow realm of art. Emotionally her feelings almost appeared to give rise to unpleasant conflicts within her because not only had she lost a life partner but she also felt as if his art had robbed her of a good half of her own life. The ashes had been scattered but the art remained and her instinct was to burn everything that remained. She calculated that there was enough money for her and the two children and she just wanted to live her life freed from the art-world that she resented. After several months one of the artists assistants came to see her with a proposition. He had been in discussion with the gallery and proposed that he could process all the remaining exhibitions because he had the most intimate knowledge of all the work stored in plan chests. The gallery would pay all the costs and provide an income for her over a period of at least five years. She both liked and trusted this assistant so she agreed and all that was demanded was the keys to the studio and a few legal documents to be signed. She told the assistant that he should provide her with a monthly statement relating to the works given over to various galleries along with accounts. This was a perfect solution or at least this is how it appeared at the time. With this a sense of weight and duty was seemingly dispensed and with this a feeling of being able to write a new chapter in her life started to emerge.
Over the next year the assistant processed work for almost a dozen exhibitions. He would attend the openings, talk to the press, and communicate with collectors in ways that turned him into the surrogate artist. The prestige of the work grew beyond recognition but there was a problem with this situation in that all existing work was now sold. The idea of having to let this life go proved to be a difficult for the assistant for it would mean returning to his own anonymous life with a career that had never really established its own independent profile because he had mostly helped produce work for someone’s else’s career. Suddenly an empty feeling appeared to take over his psyche and with this a feeling of resentment as well. He had a fantasy about assuming the role of the deceased artist and as this fantasy took hold he started to produce work in the manner of him and fake his signature. This proved to be easier than he might have imagined because the work was invariably composed out of found images of which there appeared to be an almost infinite amount. Given all his contacts he then started to sell these new bodies of work in ways that did not impact upon his existing price structure. With each new body of work came a new narrative, for instance a discovery of a plan chest in storage, a folio of buried work that had never surfaced at the time. And so it went on. It all seemed remarkably easy for the assistant. The galleries were making money, the museums were satisfied, the wife was delighted with the additional money and if the artist could look down on earth from his new vantage point then he would be witness to the immense ongoing attention to his work. The assistant released that he had to start limiting the amount of work that he had made available because if any astute critic or gallery understood the degree of work that had been made available then there would be terrible consequences. Of course he had always gambled on the idea that even though there might be suspicions about the situation it would be in no ones interest to bring attention to it for it would lead to an instant collapse of the market. Greed was the key to the situation and he had learnt just how greedy the art world was on every level. Above or else everyone had a need to belief and he was in a perfect position because everything was in his hands and he knew the entire story. On a simple level he was leading a rich life, endless travel, openings, contacts, diner parties, interviews and his own ten per cent claim on everything sold. The fact that he couldn’t claim the work he was making was only a minor annoyance for him. On every other level he was now living the life and enjoying it too much too simply walk away so he knew that he had to discover a new narrative in order to keep the market alive.
One day this narrative came to him. He had been reading about the idea of late style and decided to make a whole body of work that would constitute this. It was a risky strategy but also a probable one because many artists make work that they never issue in their lifetime because they are simply afraid that it might be too controversial. Given that he had worked for the artist for several years he could give evidence of all the conversations about this body of work. He also knew that he could produce work that might appear probable and that in dividing opinion it would create a fresh impetus of critical debate. For one year he worked on this body of work in order to launch it as part of a Museum exhibition that would travel from Tokyo, to Los Angeles and finally to London. His calculation was that it would create a ripple firstly and gradually a torrent of new discussion. Publicity was the oxygen of the market and he wanted to push the market level to new heights because that way he could then release far less work for the same amount of financial turnover turn over.
As the exhibition toured across the three continents, this launching of a late style caused a sensational response not only within the art press but also in terms of response from the immediate art community. It quickly became apparent that this work was influencing newly emerging work within exhibitions in all the main art centres. The demand upon the assistant was now to provide as much information as possible about this work, when it was made, the conversations about it, and so on. He started to talk about the idea of the suffering of the artist at the point that they no longer see their own work and with this a form of divided subjectivity that is the cause of an intellectual retreat from their own creative output. He had of course become sensitive to all the issues relating to emotional tone in regard to creating the setting for work because after all he had witnessed first hand all the half truths and outright fictions within the life time he had encountered with his time with the artist. Yet all of this started to prove to be too much because the lie was now too all embracing. Everything had started to appear fake, he trusted nothing and only the oblivion of more lies stood before him. He wanted to write a book documenting the whole thing even though it would destroy him and in turn the now inflated reputation of the artist. He felt that his work in the manner of the artist had far exceeded all the work he had seen in the original but there could be no claim for this. On a simple level he had lost himself because what had started off as a routine operation had now assumed a terrible consequence for those who had become implicated. One day he went into the studio and set fire to it and this for him stood as a form of suicide. It was not like being freed from it all because it had all infiltrated too deeply for freedom to be an issue but at least it was as if he was walking free. All that was left was to remain silent for the rest of his life. He realised that on an unconscious level he had hated his role as assistant because he had lost his own independence but in the end there was nothing to be said about this because it all seemed to work for him at the time. He now had financial security but little by way of self-esteem. He simply resigned himself to the idea that he had both fulfilled his role as assistant. The artist had moved onto a level that might never been possible before his own intervention. History is like that sometimes.