All-Over by Brian Howell
A Japanese art critic reminisces about a brief but formative relationship she had with a teacher when she was an art student in London.
Opposite where we live, I can see, behind our net curtains, right into the living room of our neighbours' house. There isn't much more than a metre's distance between our respective façades and theirs, but the two houses are slightly offset from one another, their side wall being slightly more to the left from our position and I also have the sense that our house is slightly higher than theirs, but I haven't exactly gone out and used one of those tools land surveyors use. In other words, we see each other slightly slantwise. They seem like a nice couple, in their sixties, with two grown-up children who visit occasionally.
I sometimes catch an inadvertent glimpse of the man or woman changing their clothes or even walking around naked. Of course, I look away, out of respect, although it's nothing new to me, but you don't want anyone thinking that you are peeping.
As for me, I was a teacher once, as was my husband. In the mid-1970s, I was just setting out on my life's work, as if that implies I have travelled the world as some kind of ambassador ever since, but, apart from a few trips abroad, I have spent most of this life here on the outskirts of Tokyo teaching primary school children. Along the way, there were two sons, now both married, long since flown away, of course, and now my husband Masaru is incapacitated, or hindered, I might say, by those small physical adjustments one has to make after a mild stroke. He shuffles around in his own world, quiet, harmless, not bothering anyone, I guess. He doesn't even paw at my breasts as he used to. I might have been irritated when he did that sometimes, but I saw it as instinctive rather than invasive.
It wasn't destined to be like this, given that I started out wanting to know everything about art. I set out on my journey, a word which I use in two senses. I was abroad, in the UK, and it was after the initial influx of post-war Japanese tourists with their intrusive camera-abetted gawping at historic sites in the 60s, but before the new wave of interest in the 90s and certainly before the digital age, but when people in the West were still more familiar with the sight of astonished-looking tourists than they were with the ground-breaking work of Ono Yoko. But I was not there to pose or be an artist, at least not initially. I just wanted to understand everything, soak it all in. As it happened, it was the time of conservatism and the so-called Transavantgarde.
I went to one of those international English schools in London, where you meet people from every country; the learning was light and fun, and the socialising, even with teachers, was pretty much part of the whole deal. Like an idiot, I fell in love with one of the younger teachers very early on. He was developing an interest in Japan at the time, so you could say our interests dovetailed. And the sex was great.
'You should be a model,' he said once after we'd made love.
'Oh, you paint?'
'I'm just an amateur. But you could help my career, with a body like that,' he said, winking.
I thought: Likely story, but I was young and naïve and these were innocent times, if misguided by the standards of today.
Then, I said, looking at the paintings around his flat, 'These are yours, then?'
'After a fashion,' he admitted.
'After a fashion?'
'I just mean, I don't think they're that good.'
They were quite abstract. I didn't want to say old-fashioned or clichéd. I didn't know a lot. You could make out figures. I had learned enough to make out that some were a little like De Kooning and thought it wouldn't be a great way to advertise myself as a model, or even a human being, if I was going end up like that on a canvas, though I don't remember feeling I was aiming to be a model or an artist at that point.
'Is that how you would show me?' I pursued, chuckling and pointing to one painting made up of seemingly slapdash brushstrokes that looked like a hurricane had passed through his room and somehow separated the woman's eyes and pushed them across the canvas.
'Oh, I wouldn't paint you as you are.'
'What would you do, then?' I laughed.
'I'd obliterate you, in paint, of course.'
'Charming,' I replied, somewhat confused but also tantalised.
His comment back then was disarming, despite his general feyness and otherwise soft, unthreatening demeanour. He certainly wasn't macho in the way that has come to be associated with many of the male Abstract Expressionist painters of the Fifties, or with what he told me about them at the time. You see, there was no internet then, you had to pore over books which didn't always have indexes. You had to do the cross-referencing yourself. Or hang on to the words of someone who knew what they were talking about (or thought they did) or who had had first-hand experience. That person would probably be older and male in those days, but it didn't worry me and I don't resent it even now. The times were what they were, and we have come a long way. No era is perfect.
Early on, we went on a weekend trip to Amsterdam and it was there that I perhaps imbibed that lifelong inclination towards voyeurism. To invoke a word I have already used, it started innocently.
And in a pub, of all places. I can't remember the name of the canal now, but we stumbled into a pub one evening that had something attractive about it. What made this particular place stand out was the fact that, every time I wanted to use the toilet, perhaps two or three times that first night, I found myself going up the stairs and having to wait on a landing. This landing looked directly into the kitchen of what appeared to be a normal house or flat, where the people who lived there were just going about the normal things people do in a kitchen, oblivious of anyone looking on. It was the same when we went back the next evening. And that was it. What I saw on those nights wasn't particularly interesting in and of itself, but it opened up a new side to life. And like any aspect of life, once you discover something new to you, you start seeing it everywhere, in places you didn't notice it before - or looking for it everywhere.
But with me, I think it had a lasting effect; it made me curious to look into others' lives and want to be part of those lives, which in reality had nothing to do with me, if I am truthful.
He lived up to his word. You could not see me in his work - unless you knew some of my personal features or regular accessories, the watch or bracelet I wore back then.
Sometimes, he would have me naked, sitting on a stool, move my limbs, into every Modernist contortion he could think of, like a 3D rendition of a Picasso or Bacon, but I hasten to add he wasn't rough. He had a noble soul, even if the parameters of the time are by our standards nowadays sometimes unacceptable.
I see him now take down his underpants and reveal his sixty-year-old, not unattractive buttocks, then stride around the room for a few minutes. Something about his nonchalance, his proprietorial taking in of the space around him - maybe before his disapproving wife comes back and tells him to get dressed and pull down the shutters - earns my admiration. It puts a thought in my mind that I could try to draw him, a few minutes at a time, albeit in near darkness. I'd have to work out his schedule over the weeks ahead and see if I can devise some system whereby I could direct some minimal light on what I'm drawing that doesn't give me away. I had once drawn and painted in near darkness back in England when I first discovered the camera obscura, but these conditions were somewhat different.
In London, I fell in and out of love with John over that first three months of double-instruction. After a while, towards the end of my course, I began to wonder if I couldn't learn to draw and paint, myself. But I wasn't interested in creating abstract art. I wanted to do life painting more than anything else, after generally painting from nature. What I would do with any talent I developed, assuming I reached any level of competence, was of no consequence back then, I thought.
John was not the jealous type, so when I started my life drawing of mostly well-toned young men or women, he seemed able to be objective, which was a nice surprise. The rift came when I asked him to model for me. He would just be too bored, he said. I did manage to persuade him to sit for a few sketches, and these works are still dear to my heart, though I put them aside when I married Masaru. But they are safe. I never wanted to draw Masaru, though he was certainly attractive enough.
'Take everything off,' he said during one of our sessions.
So it was going to be like this.
I was nothing but his muse, after all. Even less, as it turned out. I was his canvas. I was nothing, he said cruelly, holding one of my breasts hard, kneading it, then twisting it till it hurt.
He pushed me back, asserting that from now on I would serve him or not have him at all.
'I intend to flatten you, push you back till you exist only in one dimension.'
He did his best. I felt myself fading as he pushed me down and I saw his erection tower over me like an absurd Oldenburg sculpture.
'But first you're going to be in my exhibition, coated like this in my semen, and you will be on show forever, not allowed to venture out except to relieve yourself. We'll feed you through a little hole in the glass case. One day, we might even add a small loo where everyone can see you do your business and it will just be part of the show!'
While it was happening, and I was asphyxiating, with his slime running down my body, all I could hear was a chant, 'All-over, All-over'. And when I miraculously came to, I confirmed it to his face,
'Yes, it's definitely all over.'
Sometimes, I see him watching porn. I suppose that is just what some men do, even at that age, though not Masaru, I hope. No evidence of that, certainly not nowadays, if there ever was. It's possible I could have found something and forgotten.
One night, I caught the motherlode. He stood by the window in the near darkness, pleasuring himself, showing me his rear, which from my perspective at that moment was outlined by the only illumination, the huge widescreen TV, which doubtless projected nubile girls his way, working like the diamond ring of light from the sun steadily stealing around the moon in an eclipse. Of course, there was no diamond, though I could imagine the tip of his cock on the other side climbing to a point of perfection while he inevitably came to a climax. His almost square buttocks were taking on an abstract form in this configuration and my hand on the sheet of paper was rapidly working to capture what would be a short-lived moment, I was sure. I could not not think of Caillebotte's hunky naked worker towelling himself off after a bath.
Then he turned, suddenly, looking up in my direction, his penis couched in a generous light sheath of cum. I prayed he had not seen me. I had turned out the little illumination I had been using, perhaps just in time.
The next and last time I saw John was at an exhibition in London. It was two or three years since the break, and he was exhibiting in a show alongside other artists. I was initially really happy for him. He had done well but was hardly a 'sensation'. By then, I had become a budding art critic and I felt I had fulfilled a small dream, writing for a listings magazine. It was hardly the big time, but I got to interview some big guns and go to almost any show I wanted. But I never fell in love again with an artist. Once was enough.
Instead, I carried on with my own painting, more as a hobby than anything else, specialising in male nudes. I didn't exactly gain a reputation as such but perhaps those male models or subjects liked something about my coolness, the distance I kept, and perhaps also because I was Asian and gave away little through my facial expressions.
Our last conversation went something like this.
'Hi.'
'Hi.'
'So nice to see you. You're a critic now, right?'
'Yes, it's nice you're aware.'
'Probably harder to find than me.'
'Oh, I don't know. If you look...'
I didn't want to be on the defensive, but it felt as if I had been cornered a little.
'Oh, well. I'll keep an eye out,' he said with a wink, trying to sign off already, but I couldn't resist adding, 'And you're developing? I mean your direction...'
'Oh, the AbEx infatuation, you mean. That is really old. I fancy I might get taken up by Saatchi. He's become a bit of a friend, you know. The Trans... the Trans...'
'Avant-Garde?'
He wore a pained expression.
'Yes! That's what I was searching for. I could be one of his stars, I think.'
I almost wondered who he thought Saatchi was. Warhol?
'Really?' I said, astonished at such a bold claim. 'I suppose anything is possible.'
An even more pained expression now crossed his face, but I hadn't meant it to sound like it came out.
'Oh, I didn't...'
'Well, I sort of expected something like that from you. Thwarted ambition and all.'
'No, John, that's not what...'
He swanned off before I could disabuse him, joining what looked like an élite gathering of would-be supermodels who seemed genuinely delighted to be with him.
But there was something déclassé about them, I thought. Something tacky about their dresses and make-up.
OK, I thought as I left. We'll see about all this.
A year or two later, it was true that John was gaining recognition. I had no problem with his talent as such, but the position he put his models in, and their fetishisation, irked me. His art was closer to Allen Jones than the celebrated Transavantgardists to which he said he aspired.
I could hold myself back no longer and wrote an excoriating review of one of his shows that somehow made it into Vogue, and his career was over, truly all over. Not suddenly, but drip by drip. I almost expected him to come after me, but he never did. I heard at some point that he had left England for places further afield. Much further afield.
He thinks I'm a batty old woman with nothing in her life other than to look after her doddery old husband. But I wear a mask every day as was the norm in Japan even before it was legitimated by the pandemic, which makes it almost impossible that he would recognise me. And yet if he had glimpsed me painting the unassuming English teacher he now is with his adoring family, he probably wouldn't be able to compute the bizarrest of coincidences that we are now neighbours. I will not reveal myself voluntarily, but I will continue to limn his image. Who knows what will come of it all? Maybe it's not quite all over, after all.
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| Image generated with OpenAI |
I sometimes catch an inadvertent glimpse of the man or woman changing their clothes or even walking around naked. Of course, I look away, out of respect, although it's nothing new to me, but you don't want anyone thinking that you are peeping.
As for me, I was a teacher once, as was my husband. In the mid-1970s, I was just setting out on my life's work, as if that implies I have travelled the world as some kind of ambassador ever since, but, apart from a few trips abroad, I have spent most of this life here on the outskirts of Tokyo teaching primary school children. Along the way, there were two sons, now both married, long since flown away, of course, and now my husband Masaru is incapacitated, or hindered, I might say, by those small physical adjustments one has to make after a mild stroke. He shuffles around in his own world, quiet, harmless, not bothering anyone, I guess. He doesn't even paw at my breasts as he used to. I might have been irritated when he did that sometimes, but I saw it as instinctive rather than invasive.
It wasn't destined to be like this, given that I started out wanting to know everything about art. I set out on my journey, a word which I use in two senses. I was abroad, in the UK, and it was after the initial influx of post-war Japanese tourists with their intrusive camera-abetted gawping at historic sites in the 60s, but before the new wave of interest in the 90s and certainly before the digital age, but when people in the West were still more familiar with the sight of astonished-looking tourists than they were with the ground-breaking work of Ono Yoko. But I was not there to pose or be an artist, at least not initially. I just wanted to understand everything, soak it all in. As it happened, it was the time of conservatism and the so-called Transavantgarde.
I went to one of those international English schools in London, where you meet people from every country; the learning was light and fun, and the socialising, even with teachers, was pretty much part of the whole deal. Like an idiot, I fell in love with one of the younger teachers very early on. He was developing an interest in Japan at the time, so you could say our interests dovetailed. And the sex was great.
'You should be a model,' he said once after we'd made love.
'Oh, you paint?'
'I'm just an amateur. But you could help my career, with a body like that,' he said, winking.
I thought: Likely story, but I was young and naïve and these were innocent times, if misguided by the standards of today.
Then, I said, looking at the paintings around his flat, 'These are yours, then?'
'After a fashion,' he admitted.
'After a fashion?'
'I just mean, I don't think they're that good.'
They were quite abstract. I didn't want to say old-fashioned or clichéd. I didn't know a lot. You could make out figures. I had learned enough to make out that some were a little like De Kooning and thought it wouldn't be a great way to advertise myself as a model, or even a human being, if I was going end up like that on a canvas, though I don't remember feeling I was aiming to be a model or an artist at that point.
'Is that how you would show me?' I pursued, chuckling and pointing to one painting made up of seemingly slapdash brushstrokes that looked like a hurricane had passed through his room and somehow separated the woman's eyes and pushed them across the canvas.
'Oh, I wouldn't paint you as you are.'
'What would you do, then?' I laughed.
'I'd obliterate you, in paint, of course.'
'Charming,' I replied, somewhat confused but also tantalised.
His comment back then was disarming, despite his general feyness and otherwise soft, unthreatening demeanour. He certainly wasn't macho in the way that has come to be associated with many of the male Abstract Expressionist painters of the Fifties, or with what he told me about them at the time. You see, there was no internet then, you had to pore over books which didn't always have indexes. You had to do the cross-referencing yourself. Or hang on to the words of someone who knew what they were talking about (or thought they did) or who had had first-hand experience. That person would probably be older and male in those days, but it didn't worry me and I don't resent it even now. The times were what they were, and we have come a long way. No era is perfect.
Early on, we went on a weekend trip to Amsterdam and it was there that I perhaps imbibed that lifelong inclination towards voyeurism. To invoke a word I have already used, it started innocently.
And in a pub, of all places. I can't remember the name of the canal now, but we stumbled into a pub one evening that had something attractive about it. What made this particular place stand out was the fact that, every time I wanted to use the toilet, perhaps two or three times that first night, I found myself going up the stairs and having to wait on a landing. This landing looked directly into the kitchen of what appeared to be a normal house or flat, where the people who lived there were just going about the normal things people do in a kitchen, oblivious of anyone looking on. It was the same when we went back the next evening. And that was it. What I saw on those nights wasn't particularly interesting in and of itself, but it opened up a new side to life. And like any aspect of life, once you discover something new to you, you start seeing it everywhere, in places you didn't notice it before - or looking for it everywhere.
But with me, I think it had a lasting effect; it made me curious to look into others' lives and want to be part of those lives, which in reality had nothing to do with me, if I am truthful.
He lived up to his word. You could not see me in his work - unless you knew some of my personal features or regular accessories, the watch or bracelet I wore back then.
Sometimes, he would have me naked, sitting on a stool, move my limbs, into every Modernist contortion he could think of, like a 3D rendition of a Picasso or Bacon, but I hasten to add he wasn't rough. He had a noble soul, even if the parameters of the time are by our standards nowadays sometimes unacceptable.
I see him now take down his underpants and reveal his sixty-year-old, not unattractive buttocks, then stride around the room for a few minutes. Something about his nonchalance, his proprietorial taking in of the space around him - maybe before his disapproving wife comes back and tells him to get dressed and pull down the shutters - earns my admiration. It puts a thought in my mind that I could try to draw him, a few minutes at a time, albeit in near darkness. I'd have to work out his schedule over the weeks ahead and see if I can devise some system whereby I could direct some minimal light on what I'm drawing that doesn't give me away. I had once drawn and painted in near darkness back in England when I first discovered the camera obscura, but these conditions were somewhat different.
In London, I fell in and out of love with John over that first three months of double-instruction. After a while, towards the end of my course, I began to wonder if I couldn't learn to draw and paint, myself. But I wasn't interested in creating abstract art. I wanted to do life painting more than anything else, after generally painting from nature. What I would do with any talent I developed, assuming I reached any level of competence, was of no consequence back then, I thought.
John was not the jealous type, so when I started my life drawing of mostly well-toned young men or women, he seemed able to be objective, which was a nice surprise. The rift came when I asked him to model for me. He would just be too bored, he said. I did manage to persuade him to sit for a few sketches, and these works are still dear to my heart, though I put them aside when I married Masaru. But they are safe. I never wanted to draw Masaru, though he was certainly attractive enough.
'Take everything off,' he said during one of our sessions.
So it was going to be like this.
I was nothing but his muse, after all. Even less, as it turned out. I was his canvas. I was nothing, he said cruelly, holding one of my breasts hard, kneading it, then twisting it till it hurt.
He pushed me back, asserting that from now on I would serve him or not have him at all.
'I intend to flatten you, push you back till you exist only in one dimension.'
He did his best. I felt myself fading as he pushed me down and I saw his erection tower over me like an absurd Oldenburg sculpture.
'But first you're going to be in my exhibition, coated like this in my semen, and you will be on show forever, not allowed to venture out except to relieve yourself. We'll feed you through a little hole in the glass case. One day, we might even add a small loo where everyone can see you do your business and it will just be part of the show!'
While it was happening, and I was asphyxiating, with his slime running down my body, all I could hear was a chant, 'All-over, All-over'. And when I miraculously came to, I confirmed it to his face,
'Yes, it's definitely all over.'
Sometimes, I see him watching porn. I suppose that is just what some men do, even at that age, though not Masaru, I hope. No evidence of that, certainly not nowadays, if there ever was. It's possible I could have found something and forgotten.
One night, I caught the motherlode. He stood by the window in the near darkness, pleasuring himself, showing me his rear, which from my perspective at that moment was outlined by the only illumination, the huge widescreen TV, which doubtless projected nubile girls his way, working like the diamond ring of light from the sun steadily stealing around the moon in an eclipse. Of course, there was no diamond, though I could imagine the tip of his cock on the other side climbing to a point of perfection while he inevitably came to a climax. His almost square buttocks were taking on an abstract form in this configuration and my hand on the sheet of paper was rapidly working to capture what would be a short-lived moment, I was sure. I could not not think of Caillebotte's hunky naked worker towelling himself off after a bath.
Then he turned, suddenly, looking up in my direction, his penis couched in a generous light sheath of cum. I prayed he had not seen me. I had turned out the little illumination I had been using, perhaps just in time.
The next and last time I saw John was at an exhibition in London. It was two or three years since the break, and he was exhibiting in a show alongside other artists. I was initially really happy for him. He had done well but was hardly a 'sensation'. By then, I had become a budding art critic and I felt I had fulfilled a small dream, writing for a listings magazine. It was hardly the big time, but I got to interview some big guns and go to almost any show I wanted. But I never fell in love again with an artist. Once was enough.
Instead, I carried on with my own painting, more as a hobby than anything else, specialising in male nudes. I didn't exactly gain a reputation as such but perhaps those male models or subjects liked something about my coolness, the distance I kept, and perhaps also because I was Asian and gave away little through my facial expressions.
Our last conversation went something like this.
'Hi.'
'Hi.'
'So nice to see you. You're a critic now, right?'
'Yes, it's nice you're aware.'
'Probably harder to find than me.'
'Oh, I don't know. If you look...'
I didn't want to be on the defensive, but it felt as if I had been cornered a little.
'Oh, well. I'll keep an eye out,' he said with a wink, trying to sign off already, but I couldn't resist adding, 'And you're developing? I mean your direction...'
'Oh, the AbEx infatuation, you mean. That is really old. I fancy I might get taken up by Saatchi. He's become a bit of a friend, you know. The Trans... the Trans...'
'Avant-Garde?'
He wore a pained expression.
'Yes! That's what I was searching for. I could be one of his stars, I think.'
I almost wondered who he thought Saatchi was. Warhol?
'Really?' I said, astonished at such a bold claim. 'I suppose anything is possible.'
An even more pained expression now crossed his face, but I hadn't meant it to sound like it came out.
'Oh, I didn't...'
'Well, I sort of expected something like that from you. Thwarted ambition and all.'
'No, John, that's not what...'
He swanned off before I could disabuse him, joining what looked like an élite gathering of would-be supermodels who seemed genuinely delighted to be with him.
But there was something déclassé about them, I thought. Something tacky about their dresses and make-up.
OK, I thought as I left. We'll see about all this.
A year or two later, it was true that John was gaining recognition. I had no problem with his talent as such, but the position he put his models in, and their fetishisation, irked me. His art was closer to Allen Jones than the celebrated Transavantgardists to which he said he aspired.
I could hold myself back no longer and wrote an excoriating review of one of his shows that somehow made it into Vogue, and his career was over, truly all over. Not suddenly, but drip by drip. I almost expected him to come after me, but he never did. I heard at some point that he had left England for places further afield. Much further afield.
He thinks I'm a batty old woman with nothing in her life other than to look after her doddery old husband. But I wear a mask every day as was the norm in Japan even before it was legitimated by the pandemic, which makes it almost impossible that he would recognise me. And yet if he had glimpsed me painting the unassuming English teacher he now is with his adoring family, he probably wouldn't be able to compute the bizarrest of coincidences that we are now neighbours. I will not reveal myself voluntarily, but I will continue to limn his image. Who knows what will come of it all? Maybe it's not quite all over, after all.
There is an atmosphere in the whole piece that ties it all together. Some of the narrator’s stories are gripping. There is no intersection between sexual and artistic interest, and respect. That’s provocative. The bizarre coincidence that they are neighbors strikes me as surreal. Really memorable!
ReplyDeleteThanks, June! I like that take.
DeleteI agree with June's comments above. The writer also truly captured the voice of an Asian woman. There are many great artists who are not decent human beings. I get the impression that when the MC wrote her savage review, she was exposing an Emperor with no clothes. Sure, he had his fame for ten minutes, but when she cried foul, his fickle admirers disappeared. Aren't we all tired of artists glamorizing violence and degradation? Very well done, Brian.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Rozanne. I can't disagree with your characterisations. I would like to have made the narrator more likeable, tbh, but I'm glad it worked for you, especially the female Asian angle.
DeleteThis story had an unusual, somewhat discomfiting vibe, tending toward interpersonal sexploitation and self indulgence and onanism. I felt that the MC's exchanges with John, some years after their break, were revealing of a sadistic mindset but, as a veteran of 4 years work as a so-called "life model" during my university years, it did not seem either unfamiliar or unlikely to me. Artists are, well, artists. As sometimes happen, I found no one in this story that I wanted to root for. Like when the MC took credit for singlehandedly scuttling John's career with a scathing review in "Vogue," she seemed moved more by scorn and retribution than anything else. I fell in love with the AI illustration and wanted to fall for her as well.
ReplyDeleteThat's another fascinating angle, Bill, especially as regards your own modelling experience. Again, I wouldn't deny there's a lot of nastiness going on. It's probably more a comment on the excesses of the art industry than real-life artists per se but anything goes, in certain circles and psyches.
DeleteNot directly related to the story, but it reinforces my opinion that artists or their supporters are frequently (Warhol) grifters who have no clothes.
ReplyDeleteI found the narrator's voice compelling in an eerie way. And because the coincidence of her now living so close to her former lover is set up from the very beginning, it didn't create plausibility problems for me. A thought-provoking story,
ReplyDeleteThanks, Gilbert. That's a crucial aspect of the story so it's good to know it works.
DeleteI really enjoyed this! The narrators voice felt very personable and because it's such an intimate story, I felt engaged right from the start. I particularly related to that aspect of looking into other people's lives. I think we all do this to some extent, artists are perhaps more aware of it or just pay more attention.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Daniel, for a really positive and generous view of my somewhat eccentric character!
Delete