Prélude à l'après-midi d'un artiste

(a short story)

The Lady and the Unicorn: À mon seul désir (Musée national du Moyen Âge, Paris)

As I look out my hotel window and see the quiet evening  snow coming down into this Parisian courtyard, I consider how at first I did not pay attention to the email that started it all.

“I run a major gallery in Paris and I am interested in your work,” it read.  It was signed “Emilie Garnier”. We all receive suspicious emails that turn out to be scams as in: “ I would like to purchase one of your artworks for my wife, can you send me a price list?” Was this inquiry one of those?

The email sat in my inbox for several months— I didn’t know what to make of it and was very consumed by other projects at the time. But the sender insisted, with further emails every other week.  

Then one day I ran into an artist friend at an opening, someone who has many links with Europe. “Emilie Garnier told me she wants to talk to you”, he said to me. “Beware— you are in for a wild ride. But she knows how to sell.”

I finally looked at her gallery’s website, which appeared to have been designed (and then abandoned) in the 1990s with a splash page that literally was a splash: a stereotypical view of the open sea with a dolphin jumping out of the water (which made me think of Bruno Bischofberger’s ads in the back cover of Artforum, featuring random alpine scenes).

I thought about what my friend said.  She represented Erwin Schiller, a major conceptual artist from the 1970s, and had worked with many other important artists of that generation since she opened her gallery in 1977. She was an institution in Europe.

I decided to reply to her email. We skyped (Zoom didn’t exist yet during those years). She proposed a solo exhibition right away. I was going through a difficult time in my career at that moment, feeling that everything was stagnant, and that I was going nowhere. This was an appealing opportunity for me. I accepted.

When I told my friend that I was having a solo show with Garnier, he said: “congratulations, but get ready. I suggest you do like Schiller— he only sends the work, and never sets foot in the gallery. He only shows up at the bar in the corner on the opening night so his friends can come see the show and then meet him there.” The idea seemed absurd to me at the time, but later I would understand what my friend meant.

I told Garnier that I only wanted to travel for a few days. She was surprised that I would not want to stay for at least one week in Paris. I explained I had to work, and that I also did not like traveling alone (when I travel by myself I don’t do tourism- it’s only work for me).  She asked me to text her right after I arrived so we could meet.

My flight landed at 8am in Paris and texted Garnier right away: “I am here”. It took me about an hour and a half to get to my hotel. When I arrived she was there, sitting in the lobby, furious.

“I have been waiting here for two hours!”

I was surprised. I did not expect her to meet me in the hotel. “In my text I meant that I had landed, not that I was at the hotel. I didn’t expect you to wait for me here.”

“You said you don’t like being alone!” she replied.

Right away she criticized my outfit. “Your pants are ridiculous”— she said. “You look like Charlie Chaplin.” I was taken aback, unsure how to react. Who says that to someone they have just met in person a few seconds before? I chose to laugh it off, thinking (hoping) it was a joke.

We then went to the gallery to start installing. As we arrived we encountered a contractor fixing the doorway of the building next door, making a lot of noise. Garnier started yelling at him in French, trying to send him away. I did not understand a word of their back and forth. A typical Parisian scene, I thought, not unlike bickering New Yorkers.

She smoked like a chimney. I don’t smoke but I am not bothered by others smoking. Yet her smoking was truly at an industrial scale. She always spoke as she smoked, with no filters.

I learned that she had fired her only assistant. “They are useless”, she said to me. “I  always do everything anyway. It’s a waste of money.”

The next few days were awkward. Garnier did bring someone to help us for a few hours, but  as it turned out, I did most of the installation myself. She kept micromanaging me every step of the way, as if I were an inexperienced intern.

I should clarify that I am an introvert, and I detest conflict. I am also a Gen-X individual, a generation that is not known for its extreme assertiveness. For that reason, when I am pushed to an extreme I can explode like the Hulk. I started to feel that Garnier was pushing me to that point. With Garnier, I had a hard time knowing how to manage a professional relationship with someone I knew was important and influential in the field but who behaved in ways that felt so unpredictable, at times  flagrantly offensive.

At some point, the night before the opening when we were close to finished with the installation, she handed me a broom. “Sweep the floor— we can’t open with the floor like that”.

I felt insulted by the humiliating tone of the directive, as if I were Cinderella. I did start sweeping, but then asked her:

“Do you also ask Schiller to sweep the floor before his openings too?”

The following day, on the morning before the opening, we only had minor adjustments to make. I found Garnier at her desk, smoking, fighting over the phone with her bank. I sat down across her desk and waited until she hung up the phone.

“I did not like what you said to me last night”, she said.

We talked it through. I told her that I did not mind doing whatever it took to get a show up but the way she had been treating me was really disrespectful.

Shortly after our conversation she took another phone call,  which perked her up. After that, she offered to take me out to lunch.

One thing about Garnier, which is not uncommon in some people, is that they might seem furious at one moment but the next they appear to have forgotten all about it—something that I can’t ever do myself.  

We went to a Vietnamese restaurant around the corner.

“Can I tell you something racist?” she said.

“No. Please don’t”, I replied.

She wanted to say something about immigrants.

We went back to the gallery. There she started to take out some things from her archives to show me, I wasn’t sure why. The first thing she pulled out was a soft-porn black and white magazine spread from the early 1970s featuring an attractive young woman.

“Why are you showing me this?” I asked, totally confused.

“That’s me”— she said. “I used to be a model.”

Then she pulled out a framed piece and put in on my hands. It was an On Kawara  1969 telegram from the legendary “I Am Still Alive” series. I was fascinated.

“Do you want it?” she asked me.

“What?” I said, shocked. “Of course I want it! Are you giving it to me?”

“Of course not”— and she took it away. “That is one work that I won’t give to anyone.”

I do not know almost anyone in Paris; I only invited an artist friend and another ex-high school friend who lives there and teaches Yoga. They both came, very happy and excited to see me, as was I to see them. But Garnier was icy to them, bordering on plain rude, as if she did not want anyone who was not a collector at the opening. I was really embarrassed, but my friends thankfully found her rudeness entertaining.

Despite that, the opening went well. Garnier sold a number of works to her collectors, all of whom adored her.  She was buoyant later that evening. I was fascinated by her transformation during the opening, asking myself if there was a cultural thing  going on about her that I had missed and was incapable of understanding.

A couple years later, Garnier contacted me to do another exhibition. I felt uneasy at the idea, but the previous show had gone so well sales-wise that I felt it would be a mistake not to try again— plus, Paris.

We scheduled the show right during the corridor between Thanksgiving and Miami Basel— the last chance during the year to capture some attention; after Basel the holidays take over and the art world goes dormant until January.

Garnier told me that after my opening a collector friend of hers would host a dinner party and we would invite the top curators in Paris as well as an important museum director. I was delighted. I wanted to invite my artist friend and another curator I knew, but Garnier said no. “This is a very exclusive, high-level dinner party”. I accepted it.

The party after the opening was indeed very elegant. Thankfully at the last minute Garnier allowed me to invite a German curator friend who was lingering at the end of the opening; he was my salvation that evening as I had no one else to talk to, practically everyone else wanted to talk in French, and no one seemed to be too interested in talking with me. It is not that I wanted to be the center of attention; I was just an outsider wanting to meet and talk to others.

Then the museum director asked to say a few words (in French, of course). “We are here to celebrate Emilie”, he started.  He went on to discuss her long and storied career and how everyone was so grateful for the important contributions she had made to art in France. It was a long speech, outlining practically her entire biography. Garnier stood there, in that typical attitude of those who roll their eyes when being praised but at the same time clearly love the attention. Everyone clapped. I found myself again confused and embarrassed at myself for half- expecting, hoping, that the museum director would mention my name at some point (he did not).

At the end of the evening, everyone started saying goodbye and I readied to get back to the hotel. Garnier asked me if I wanted her to go with me the next day to the airport. “I know you don’t like being alone”,  she said.

“I am ok— seriously”, I said.

--

And here I am, with my packed bags in the small hotel room shortly before heading to the airport, looking at the snow fall quietly, trying to understand what all of this meant, thinking of how, sometimes, we as artists have to accept to exist in opaque circumstances like this one.

I then say good bye to Paris in its full melancholy splendor of late autumn; the city that I have loved since I was a backpacking art student visiting its opera, tearing up in front of some of its paintings at the Louvre, buying used books in Montmartre, daydreaming in front of the lady and the unicorn at the Musée de Cluny, and humming the immortal Edith Piaf:

Paris, l'odeur de ton pavé d'oies,

De tes marronniers, du bois.

Je pense à toi sans cesse.

Paris, je m'ennuie de toi, mon vieux.

On se retrouvera tous les deux,

Mon grand Paris.