A Conversation at the Gallery
Behold the Gallery. Boundless. Enormous. Very, very large. Standing outside the material Universe, it is just as well that it is where it is, for the Gallery is the repository of all Art in Time and Space (and a few other dimensions highly deserving of a capital letter).
Right in its center, in the air, among a throng of others, a picture hung. In front of it two men floated.
"Will it stand up to time?" asked the first. He was small, bright-eyed and ageless. His eyebrows shone like oiled sunlight. He turned his head to his companion.
In the mist-shot darkness under his long violet robe, its color and shape tapering thornlike to black towards the hood, the second one seemed to have accommodated all the ages the first one lacked.
"TIME SHALL TELL."
Driven by a cosmic resonance, the TELLTELLTELLTELL carried in a wide powerful tremolo across the vast expanses of the book-steppes, fluttering pages like windblown grass. The word disturbed two scavenging Huginn-ravens, which took to the air amid panic-shed feathers and the flicker of ink upon paper.
Almost immediately they calmed – having been by now used to the sound of reverberating, if somewhat dubious omniscience – and perched back atop a Holy Book, bound in the red and goldsilver hide of some obscure starbeast and written by the Race of Concrete Shoe-Horns, encapsulating the wisdom of two billion years of sentience and culture. Back in the Universe, the complete Book wasn't due for another two billion and one years. One of the Huginn-ravens took a bite out of it, thereby decreasing the chances of the Concrete Shoe-Horns' ever achieving sentience by one page.
While eating books might seem like a barbarous thing to do, even by a bird, the Hugginn-ravens are more than simple-minded scavengers. Some have written books themselves (if only by using their droppings to paste pages from other books together), and the appellation "scavenger" is technically incorrect, applied to a creature that eats things which, for the most part, haven't even been created yet, whenever "yet" might be in a place like the Gallery. What Hugginn-ravens actually do is to pare down the sum of all Art in the Gallery to control the amount of clutter and cliches in Life in the Universe, thus instinctively enforcing a fundamentally Universal Law – "Art is pretty big thing." In the case of a book as central and powerful to the existence of a race as the Shoe-horn Holy Book was, its destruction in precreation could obviate the development of the entire species. Which, in the case of a species called "The Race of Concrete Shoe-horns", was probably for the better.
"Tell! Tell! Tell! Tell!" squawked the other raven, and received a critical look from his cousin, who had a single eye like blue glass.
"Shut up and eat your binding."
"Tell?"
The blue-eyed Huginn-raven ignored the question with a sigh. It had of course been rhetorical, as would be every question from a creature so daft.
Meanwhile the echo had traveled the Gallery's whole circumference.
As mentioned, the Gallery is technically boundless, but the echo was produced by a voice equally boundless (technically). It seems the laws of simple mathematics hold even outside the boundaries of Space and Time, which is probably a mystery even greater than the existence of the Gallery itself, but the Gallery is generally more fun to look into, so the laws of mathematics and their effect shall, contrary to what the length of that paragraph suggests, not receive any more attention than the two Huginn-ravens have accorded them. Suffice to say the echo, having completed its rounds, returned back into the black hood from whence it came and there it sank but did not cease, proving without the shadow of a doubt something murky yet profound about the nature of probably Everything.
The small bright man screwed up the side of his mouth and flashed a sceptical eyebrow.
"Time will tell. Right... No, actually, you are. Now, what is it? Looks like Earth-art to me."
"YOUR..."
"Don't you go all endless on me."
From the bottomless depths of the robe came a soft sound, like a galaxy clearing its throat.
"Your skills are growing greater – Earth-civilization has seven billion billion and three twin-cultures in the entirety of existence. Yes, it is from Earth. Or it will be. Or it has been. Or..."
"French?"
"Why, yes."
"Twentieth century?"
"Yes..."
"1961, from the look of it. Jean Dubuffet's work? Looks a bit like Paris, Montparnasee, what he's painted."
The hood turned toward the small man. He turned from the painting, drawn from his analytical contemplation by an invisible gaze and something he perceived as a singularly strange combinations of smells. Although the tall, robed one did not speak, he radiated a rank endlessness, along with a confusion just as endless, which was a much more satisfying aroma.
"What?"
"...," the hooded man failed to say.
"I googled it. It's a thing you use to find things out. Powerful. Not as much as you, but it's getting there."
"Maybe I should stop it then. Shall it prove a mighty adversary?"
"Most mighty. But you may find something in common. Lack of substance, for one. Now, is that going to stand up to time?"
"Unlikely. It's power is too great."
"How does that make it unlikely? Is going to be destroyed at some point in time? Or it never gets painted?
"I have traveled far and wide..."
"No, you haven't. You don't go out in the Universe".
"My substance has traveled..."
"You don't have one. Or is that where it went?"
Again that unpleasant smell. Like roses expelled from the bowels of a dead fish, if incontinence was a viable issue for a dead fish.
"I HAVE TRAVELED far and wide upon the viewless wings of Art, and have seen its capacity for creation in the minds of countless species, in the mesh of the elements themselves, ordering Chaos, bringing beginnings and ends, reordering the laws of the Universe itself..."
"So?"
"Are you familiar with the Race of The Yellow-Bellied Worms of Gnuu'lt'bz'tz.Tz??"
"I'm happy that I'm not."
"So your Google can't travel among the stars?" asked the Endless (But Not Now) One with a smirk.
"It's getting there. What about the worms?"
"Among the Yellow-Bellied Worms of Gnuu'lt'bz'tz. Tz? there lived a great artist, who shall remain unnamed – so great was his power, so nonsensical his name. He could use his art to alter reality, to conjure up the past and the future."
"And what did he do with it?" The small man was impressed.
"Once he realized his power, he painted himself tons upon tons of dirt and for a short time became the richest worm on the planet."
"For a short time?"
"He was crushed to death in a landslide during an inspection of his coffers. His spirit and his power, however, remained and roamed the Universe. They found a home on Earth."
"No!"
"Yes."
"Jean Dubuffet is a worm?"
"He has the creative power of one, yes."
"And what does that mean for the Earth?"
"It could mean it's DESTRUCTION."
The hooded man paused until the word returned to his hood. His companion weathered the smell. For a sublime critic of art, The Endless One had little enough creative flair, so even that piece of slightly worn-out dramatic flourish was appreciated. He went on:
"The power of the worm has manifested fully in this picture. It represents a consummate if unwitting imitation of a style that by the twentieth century has been extinct for more than three hundred centuries – the artistic style of humanity's ancestors, their real history and their great battles against humanity's greatest foe obscured by time."
"They had a greatest foe that wasn't themselves? Who?"
"The Bunrabids."
"Never heard of them."
"A mighty race, also indigenous to Earth. Much was lost by both races in the course of the war, but at the end humans prevailed and completely obliterated the Bunrabids, effacing them even from their art and left only scarce and ambiguous traces of their enemy's existence.
What Jean Dubuffet has done is to reach back in time by the sublimity of his imitation, and begin a cycle of reversion for Earth's reality. First the dodo bird will appear again. Then the Arabian gazelle and the bulldog rat; the stuttering lion and the woolly slug; the saber-tooth tiger and the mammoth; and then the Bunrabid. And there will be carnage.
"But the twentieth-century human has devastating weapons."
"None shall avail him against the Bunrabid."
"Allright then, how about the prehistoric human. Won't he appear too?"
"It is possible, but not likely. The biological niche is full. Either way, there shall be a bitter struggle."
The small man glowed with a hungry fire.
"When does it start?"
"The cycle's speed is unpredictable. It might begin and end in a day, or in a thousand years. But it must be observed. Such a large-scale effect of art is well-nigh a cosmic impossibility. The consequences of this event may extend far beyond the reaches of the Earth's cosmos."
The Endless One said a number of other things, but were all greatly diminished in importance by the fact that the small man had eagerly vanished and so didn't hear them, and so there would be little point in repeating them to the reader. All of them save the last, probably.
"CAN'T BELIEVE HE BOUGHT IT," The Endless One said and chuckled quietly, the sound like that of a company of galaxies sharing a joke.
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Review on Emo’s “A Conversation at the Gallery”
ReplyDeleteBy Tsvetelina
Emo, really, thanks for the fun read! I honestly expected disaster when I first laid my modern-art-blind eyes on Mr. Jean Dubuffet’s take on the craft. But, of course, the task was not to like the painting, but to put it in the center of a story. And Emo definitely nailed it when he chose to dwell in the domain of a lighthearted parody. We have a cute storyline, inventive concepts, intriguing characters, fascinating language – all drawn from a fathomless well of imagination – what more could an open-minded reader want?
Now, I am pretty sure that Emo, when writing his story, was perfectly aware that us, the devoted Terry Pratchett fans, will not fail to immediately detect the many parallels between his story and Terry Pratchett’s works. Characters like “The Endless One” with his capitalized words (Pratchett’s Death with the black robe and all), the two goofy and extremely lovable ravens, The Endless One’s companion (we’ve had Death’s apprentices); the peculiar to Pratchett’s Discworld perception of Space and Time; the hilarious names of the mentioned races (“Race of Concrete Shoe-Horns”, “Race of The Yellow-Bellied Worms of Gnuu'lt'bz'tz.Tz?”); inventive phrases and sentences like “a few other dimensions highly deserving of a capital letter”, “like a galaxy clearing its throat”, “for another two billion and one years”, etc.; witty remarks like "Don't you go all endless on me."; and notably the whole tone of Emo’s story simply prompt us to make the connection. Nevertheless, I would certainly not go as far as to call this plagiarism. Rather, it’s a tribute, an homage, and a pretty successful one, if you ask me.
The Terry Pratchett thing left aside (on the good side), how can I even start to enumerate all the drolly tiny chunks which find their perfect place in the grippingly comic fabric of the whole patchwork of Emo’s story. He provided me with numerous laughs. A definite asset of the story is the way Emo plays with the reader’s mind elating a given concept by attributing it with a (seemingly) great importance and then causing it to collapse clumsily which inevitably leads to a humorous effect (“…thus instinctively enforcing a fundamentally Universal Law – "Art is pretty big thing."”; “…there lived a great artist, who shall remain unnamed – so great was his power, so nonsensical his name.”). And the real gem of the story – the way The Endless One’s (and Emo’s) attitude towards the observed painting is revealed: "Jean Dubuffet is a worm?" "He has the creative power of one, yes."; plus the grand finale “"CAN'T BELIEVE HE BOUGHT IT," The Endless One said and chuckled quietly, the sound like that of a company of galaxies sharing a joke.” Mr. Ulrich, seriously, can’t you think of anything better to do with your money?
Here I’ll add just a grain of salt: Emo, come on, your head must be buzzing with imaginativeness, you sure could have picked a better title. A memorable story like this one deserves a memorable heading – grant it one!
Review on Emo's "A Conversation in the gallery"
ReplyDeleteBy Alexander
Conversation in the gallery is a sci-fi story which in colourful language manages both to amuse us and to justly make fun of Jean Dubuffet and all the pretentious modern art that for some ungodly reason sells for millions of dollars apiece.
The story kicks off shrewdly with an imperative, followed by three verbless adjective phrases in decreasing order of magnificence which immediately hint at the humorous nature of the work. The next sentence, ending this first paragraph, serves to tell us everything else we need to know – the setting is a fictional one, and the author likes to listen to himself and is going to make us suffer (or rejoice) with his endless meanderings and digressions.
Then follows the introduction of our three main characters – the painting and the two figures regarding it, with a lovely parallel construction (“a picture hung”/”two men floated”) which for some reason works very well for me and gives that tone of pomp that runs through the story and is the source of much of the humour.
The description of the two characters is brief and yet it kind of startled me, so that I had to read it again and again till I found what was bothering me. It is here that the author starts off another trend – that of peculiar original well-thought-out similes and metaphors (“eye-brows like oiled sunlight” is the first of many, “soft sound like a galaxy clearing its throat”, “smell like roses expelled from the bowels of a dead fish”, etc.)
Those robed eternal figures instantly related in my head with the figures of Terry Pratchett’s mystical Auditors, and “Conversation in the gallery” is certainly reminiscent of that author’s Disk World series in its use of language and its knack for characters who speak in ALL CAPS and making up absurd races with funny names and occupations like the Huggin-ravens and the Concrete Shoe-horn guys. I suppose, however, that those qualities are even more easily relatable not to Pratchett but to works like D. Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide…”
While I find the digression into the ravens and the shoehorns hilarious and informative about the universe we’re dealing with and all in all well worth the read, I feel this is the place where the author could have easily cut at least half of the 600 words he missed the set word limit by.
It serves another purpose altogether, though, and it is here we can find an indication of just how great his writing skills are – after having made a long detour into pretty unrelated to either the story or the painting detail about the ravens, the author turns us back to the Gallery with “Meanwhile, the echo had traveled the Gallery's whole circumference.” Fantastic, relating the long tedious time passed in the story’s universe while sound circles an endless space with the long-ish but rather more entertaining time passed in real life while we were reading about something else.
What follows is a pretty witty dialogue which brilliantly conveys what I think of J. Dubuffet and his sorry excuse of a painting (“he has the creative power of a worm”) and at large about the Picassos and dead-cows-in-an-aquarium-s of the world that have turned art into a very profitable ruse for the culture-starved masses.
The voices of the two characters are distinct and characteristic, as is the voice of the narrator, once more underscoring the author’s skill.
The ending, however, didn’t satisfy me. While it is a nice little plot-twist, it looks like the author just wanted to get over with the story, because he had already way beyond passed the point of acceptability in length.
Those great metaphors I fawned over in the beginning? The last one (“sound like that of a company of galaxies sharing a joke”) isn’t one of them – instead of letting us in on the joke, it kind of patronizingly lets us know there is a joke, as if we couldn’t guess it ourselves, and the voice-like-a-galaxy image we had already seen a page or so earlier.