Free Affairs of Art by Lise Bissonnette Page B

being drawn, means entering into fear. Fear of losing oneself again, of losing everything, of finding oneself at noon ‘wearing a necktie, crossing the esplanade of Place Ville-Marie, of being wary of pigeons, of going to a place where nothing happens.
    Then the young people close the pen behind them, they plant pickets, defend themselves against newcomers, and attach themselves to the master who is able to alleviate their great fear.
    I played the part, taking as my model Bruno, who had guided me to the clearing. I took my first male lover openly in the village of Les Éboulements, below an inn, the Auberge des Aïeux, where the first Symposium de la jeune sculpture was being held during raspberry season, above the St. Lawrence. I had agreed to chair it during the summer vacation, to re-create a little of Sarzanello. There was the same slope down to the sea and the same cows in the meadow, as well as a steeply inclined street where a blacksmith for tourists stood in for the goose-boy. The inn had not yet been enlarged into motels, the rooms were cells and each two shared a tiny bathroom. Jean-Pierre Daigle entered one naked just as I was getting into the shower, he apologized for not having heard me, he was slim and brown and smiling, with eyes that drill into the groin as they focus there unabashedly. I didn’t move. But late that afternoon I stopped close to him, he was working at the southern edge of the property, just above the thin forest that went down to Saint-Joseph-de-la-Rive. He was starting work on a steel-and-wood latticework whose foundations were enough to imprison you. I dropped my hand onto his shoulder as I questioned him. He was wearing a thin tank-top and my finger ran under the strap, two or perhaps three of his friends noticed, they slowed down their work I think, the sound of files and sanders seemed to me to diminish. We climbed up the entire site standing very close to one another, then we went and played in a bedroom where the sun, still high, did not enter. I opened the window, he leaned out, standing with his back to me, I hoped his panting could be heard down on the terrace where the artists were beginning to gather for the daily discussion. His sculptor’s hands were not yet callused, he tasted of summer and wood and steel, he was the furthest thing from a virgin and he used those hands particularly well. I allowed myself to be venerated, nothing is easier once you’re naked and consenting.
    Jean-Pierre taught me the advantage of loving that is rapid, silent, unembarrassed. He hung out at the baths. Half an hour later we were ensconced in wicker chairs, some twenty of us debating the use of biodegradable materials in permanent installations. Did the work of art unmake or remake itself? I remember a tall Jacinthe who saw a prohibition there because of a question of ethics. “It would be deceiving those who look at the work,” she kept saying. Jean-Pierre shrugged, pointing to the old ladies who were already preparing for the six o’clock dinner sitting in the big room lit up like a boarding-house. “They’ll see your work and they’ll think it’s shit. In our societies it’s the professional objectifier who sees art as biodegradable.” I thought he was predictable and rather pompous, but the others were already listening to him with a hint of reverence. By now they all knew what had gone on in room 13.
    I settled into my character. It seems despicable to you but it’s not. There are certain circles in Montreal where a person can survive only by making himself the author of his own double. Long-haired, bespectacled, and slim, he eats phony croissants, skims a newspaper that takes itself for Le Monde, has lunch in a bistro that has no bar, reads the great public thinkers of Paris and rewrites them for a subsidized publisher, talks in the accents of cinema vérité thereby creating for himself, in the end, an oasis in this city that will