Free Affairs of Art by Lise Bissonnette

tolerate my unusual loves in her elegant way. She would prefer by far handsome, talkative boys to a girl from Mentana Street who would resemble her. I wasn’t there yet.
    Bruno arrived two days before the symposium, Marianne put him up in a big room she had transformed into a black-and-white suite following my instructions. They went around together beginning on the first evening, she drove him to the mountain, he gave her his arm, in Montreal he was a copy of himself, he walked and lulled himself inside a huge dark brown pullover that was too hot and that had probably been knitted for Armani.
    Once again I fell under the spell of his words when we visited artists’ studios. I believed I was doing the right thing by taking him first to see Jérémie Wells, who had been one of the first to grasp the importance of photography in the return to representative art, which was just now taking off in the United States. Not very gifted as a painter, Jérémie had transformed his atelier into a darkroom and photography studio. To it he brought female beggars whom he’d warm up for a few hours and he’d pay them a few dollars: they posed for him nude in surrealistic settings that he built himself. The folds of their bellies were extended into the gathers of the velvet, their cracked sexes gave birth to orchids, the breasts hung more flaccid still beneath rivers of pearls. They had eyes closed in dreams, and the smiles of schizophrenics. Sometimes he would photograph only his setting, overprinting in the margins bits of their flesh, slabs of a back, of buttocks that resembled beaches.
    Bruno questioned him with fierce intensity. First about his techniques, then about his relations with his models and about the meaning of his work. Jérémie replied at length, he thought he was taking human contradictions to their logical conclusion, by making of old age and poverty a form of pornography and by trying to sell to the rich his mockery of their wealth. “As a designer excellent, as a thinker worthless,” decreed Bruno as soon as the door was shut. There was enough for a book in what he told me about the relationship between art and poverty. Up to the nineteenth century it had been painted in the smiling colours of genre scenes or sacred art, then it moved on to the pure illustration of the tragic. But we were now at the frontier of the direct exploitation of the misery of others, of its production for the purposes of provocation, basically mercantile. “From the poor one steals even their grime,” he said. I was discovering his moral side and it made me admire him all the more.
    In the industrial building that had become a congregation of artists, he had a few minutes for each of them, but to my delight he lingered over Charlene Lemire, a tiny woman with huge eyes who was striving to create on her smooth canvas those ghostly effects that raise you up inexplicably from a fear more physical than anguish. Today she would give no further explanations, not even for the famous Farinacci-Lepore. She told him all kinds of nonsense, said she’d found the texture of the ghost in cheesecloth and her fringes in the fur of an afghan hound that had, she thought, the eyes of Lucifer. She enjoyed herself, she thought she was outside the master’s game. She asked about Italy, prided herself on being a better cook than any Italian woman, thanks to the teaching of her Sicilian neighbour and her own research.
    And that was how the greatest international art critic came to Cartier Street, climbed a curving outdoor staircase, bringing several bottles of a great wine that bore the label of Quebec’s Liquor Board, and entered the Quebecitude of art. All evening Charlene made him laugh, telling him how she paid her rent by teaching gouache to charitable ladies, and about her recent fierce battles with her closest friends to obtain a thousand-dollar grant and a two-week stay in France, in a shared studio outside