Free Affairs of Art by Lise Bissonnette Page A

Paris where she slept on a sofa and only barely had running water, which made her unkempt and hence desirable to her neighbour, a superior Frenchman who believed he was granting the grace of his body to a poor little thing from the colonies. Her paintings had ended up for a month in the cultural centre of Rueil-Malmaison, which attracted neither Le Monde nor Artpress. But she finally had a European line in her CV. It fills the horizon, it is the vanishing point for Quebec art, which was born at the wrong lat­itude. Charlene made fun of my own European line, remembered she’d known me as a stammering junior lecturer before I became a master and professor who now spoke about my own European line. She added up my sacrifices: I wore pure cotton shirts instead of T-shirts, I slept under uncomfortably hot down, I drank bitter coffee without sugar, I forced myself to read Lacan and to stay thin like a French intellectual. Only too happy to add it to the list, I talked about the sole publication devoted to art, which was going downhill, and about the despicable acts its editor would agree to in order to have Bruno write something for it, which he promised to do by making Charlene a star.
    At coffee time, he became gloomy. Even with his blessing, he said, Charlene would go nowhere. She should have gone to live elsewhere, though in any case elsewheres welcome only the Jérémie Wellses, because there is a destiny in art that irrevocably crosses borders and is the only thing that counts. “This is the era of the cold, the calculated, the universal, there is no reason to shy away from it.” And that was why, if he were to add a zest of Montreal to his papers once he was back in Bracciano, he would say something fairly elliptical so as to sound positive about Jérémie Wells. “You’ll frame the article and use it as a dart board or a conceptual piece.” His job was to predict the direction art would take in future, he was a meteorologist, it earned him a superb living and enabled him to travel. He would sometimes encounter a jewel among the frauds and celebrate that, but he never went against the current.
    We drank more wine, in silence, on the candlelit balcony. Across the street, a fat woman sat rocking in her chair. Bruno did not touch me, I could hear his slow breathing, a cat stretching, domesticated. “Quebec is a balcony on Cartier Street, Charlene, and we won’t leave it.” I did not think I’d said it out loud. But she heard.
    I slept with Bruno for the rest of the night, under my mother’s roof. She had set three places for breakfast.
    From that day I became François Dubeau, master of the balcony. I left the sole publication devoted to art and started Parallèle. The correspondence with Farinacci-Lepore brought both grants and the friendship of the young art historians who were beginning to take over the museums, and also the international influence that sells two or three copies to Quebeckers passing through the bookstore in the Musée d’art moderne in Paris. We never had as many as five hundred readers but we claimed two thousand, counting unsold copies and those sent free to government bureaucrats, journalists, and our counterparts around the world. I edited it for five years, then turned it over to a submissive assistant who was better at public relations.
    It gave me pleasure, Vitalie. What I told you about that world was too often only the ridiculous, the petty, the pathetic. But that can be enjoyable when one has come up from insignificance. In art there is a clearing, a picnic ground between the birches, where young people lunch sur l’herbe, stripping themselves bare, while their parents go back to work again on Mondays, and all around them the city rumbles, consuming the last of their childhood friends who populate the suburbs. Gaining entry to that clearing, drinking there the sour wine of vernissages and sharing the tables at which freedom is