My Time in Space (5 page)

But even the gilt ceilings of the opera house’s public spaces had been shadowed by the horrible murder of a girlchild somewhere in the backstage labyrinths; the perpetrator was condemned to life imprisonment with the proviso that each year he spend the anniversary of his deed in darkness – a notion that might have
figured
in Musil’s
The
Man
Without
Qualities.
Despite all its brave resurrection of chandeliers from ashes, Vienna was macabre.
Outside
the charmed circle of the Ringstrasse, the most impressive monuments of the Vienna we now began to explore were not baroque churches and museums full of Austro-Hungarian loot, but Karl Marxhof and Friedrich Engelshof, long blocks of
workers
’ flats with gun-slit windows, which had been shelled by the Dollfuss regime, and vast Hitlerite concrete air-raid shelters that
still cast a grey-green gloom of defeat over certain streets. This unhappily historic city, so far from the touristic dream, no doubt had its say in the disturbed images I was producing at that time, which, I was further troubled to find, appealed to Nelly; ‘
torturous
’ was her term for them.

Even after we decided we had to insulate ourselves from Nelly’s underworld, and had moved into an implacably bourgeois apartment in Sankt Elisabeth-Platz, Karl remained a friend and a source of the unexpected. He would drag us to a nightclub where he hoped to be allowed to stage a strip-show he had devised, in which a prostitute behind bars seduces the policeman in charge, to the screech and clang of
musique
concrète
by Varèse (one of the records we had carried off from Mehmet, in fact). Once, he called with a pair of gloves for M which his dog had found in the street, and offered to teach her the ‘Prinzess Striptease’ (distinguished by the performer’s keeping her gloves on to the last). Another time he invited us out with two cancan dancers, La Goulue and Valentin le Désossé, those rubbery icons of Toulouse-Lautrec’s day, reincarnated as a cheery north-of-England couple; on the way home Valentin danced down the deserted street before us twining himself lovingly around lamp-posts. Although Karl never made it as a dancer he did find his rich masochist, and moved into his house for a while. But soon they quarrelled, Karl took off for America, there was a question of theft, and the police came to interview me about him; I suggested that there was no need to take him and his lover too seriously, but they politely informed me that they would decide what was to be taken seriously. We heard only once more from Karl after that; he was in San
Francisco
, where I am sure he has long since gone down into the
furnace
of AIDS.

Respectable as our new apartment was, with its great tiled stoves, the stained-glass in the bathroom door saying
‘Teue
Rechts
und
sheue
Niemands
,’ and its pleasant outlook onto the market stalls and pretty church in the square, it had its sinister notes. There were bullet-scars in the masonry by the front doorsteps, and hidden behind the laurel bushes two inscriptions vividly reminded one of the history that had agonized around this very corner: a scrawl in German saying ‘We will fight until we die’, and a stencilled notice in Russian stating that the house had been searched and found free of arms. In this Cold War city unstably encamped on the ruins of its recent past, in which it was not done to ask anyone where they had been or how they had lived at any period in the previous thirty years, it was no wonder the already dark mood of my paintings took a turn into nightmare: atomic bombers flew in at the window, skeletalized birds fell through a lethal sky, monstrous creatures crawled in the sewers of towering ‘cities in a vacuum’.

These works were very acceptable to the painters of the Wiener Schüle des Phantastischen Realismus, a group of belated surrealists under the enchantment of Bosch’s nightmare-
landscapes
. I had my first exhibition in the gallery owned by the
leading
‘fantastic realist’, Ernst Fuchs, a striking figure who might have been modelled on one of Durer’s self-regarding portraits and whom we had occasionally glimpsed at the Opera accompanied by a Cranach Eve with waist-length golden ringlets. According to current legend he was subject to visitations from angels who
periodically
commanded him to chastity, and his minutely executed paintings revelled in a sex-haunted religiosity. Two of his
emissaries
called to vet my work for the exhibition and after
examining
the contents of my studio left with expressions of regard and admiration; later we found that one of my little sketchbooks of
ink drawings was missing – a series of ‘map-faces’, which in the light of their absence now appear to me as the best of my work from that period. I don’t remember that Galerie Fuchs succeeded in selling any of my paintings, but a review in the
Wiener
Zeitung
praised my ‘sleepwalking surefootedness’, a phrase I have found comforting since.

Much of the sleepwalking mood of the city derived from the presumed omnipresence of spies. Vienna’s artists were very given  to ‘
Sezessionen
,’ but if any two of them sat down at a café table to found a new group they were soon joined by two more, the spy from the East and the spy from the West; or so we were led to believe. One day we happened to notice a little plaque on the door of a grand building on the Ringstrasse: ‘International
Künstlerklub
’. Enquiring within, we were warmly greeted, and soon found ourselves members, at a very modest fee, of a club that hosted evenings of wine and conversation in its pleasant old rooms; there was even talk of showing my work there. Later we were told by one of the members that the club was funded by the CIA through the Ford Foundation, with the object of seducing visiting Hungarian artists into defecting to the West; also that, having defected, with whatever good publicity for the cause of democracy this brought in its train, these artists soon discovered that there was no state support for them on offer, and quietly went home again. Similarly, the Galerie im Nansen-Haus, where I had my second exhibition, was said (by the same person) to have a connection with Radio Free Europe, proselytes of the Cold War. Were these things so? We would have had to turn spies ourselves to find out.

My best-attended exhibition in Vienna was an impromptu one, and an episode worthy of the city of Freud. The Council had
decided that the attics of the city, stuffed with generations of junk, were a fire hazard, and decreed that on an allotted day each
district
should empty out all this repressed material onto the
pavement
for collection and disposal. When the day came for the first, the most fashionable and expensive, district to disburden itself, scavengers descended. Everything was analyzed meticulously; mounds of goods dwindled as metal spokes were snipped from old umbrellas and well-dressed ladies tottered away with antique
standard
lamps; in the end so much had found new homes that there was little for the authorities to remove. Then it was the turn of our district, and I took the opportunity of throwing out a stack of the worst of my paintings, most of them on hardboard. These attracted great interest. I spent the day leaning out of the window watching passers-by pulling them out of the heap, propping them up in a row, discussing them at length and going off with their selection under their arms. Towards evening a man arrived on a motorbike, gathered together the remainder and roared off, and then, mysteriously, half an hour later returned with them and carefully snapped each one across his knee before replacing it on the heap.

When it became clear that if I was to pursue the career of an artist it should be in a more challenging and future-oriented
environment
than this self-devouring city, we turned our minds to London. First I paid an exploratory visit, and called on some of the Bond Street galleries with a bundle of paintings and a letter from Herr Fuchs introducing me as a ‘phantasmagorical artist’. One gallery owner studied the works for some time before announcing: ‘You paint a world of which I want no part.’ An
official
at the Arts Council counselled me to go away and study the paintings of Mark Vaux (whose abstractionism, as discreet as a
bank-manager’s suit, appealed to me then as little as it does now). Undiscouraged, we removed to London and found ourselves a flat in West Hampstead.

The year was 1964. The ascendancy of Pop Art concerned me as little as the other manifestations of Swinging London, but there was some intelligent painting on show that appealed to me (
Bridget
Riley, for instance, beginning her dazzling career), as my own work was reverting to the formal and abstract. One of
my
ongoing
series ‘The Dreams of Euclid’ was accepted for the John Moores Biennial in Liverpool, a competitive exhibition that had established itself as a rite of passage for up-and-coming artists; the American critic Clement Greenberg was among the adjudicators and evidently set the tone that year. The painting attracted the notice of Guy Brett, art critic for
The
Times,
and of Signals Gallery in Wigmore Street, London, which invited me to participate in a group show to be called ‘Soundings 3’.

Signals was the standard-bearer for avant-garde work at that period. Paul Keeler (or his father, of the chain of opticians)
supplied
the money and David Medalla the inspiration. Medalla was a young Filipino ‘elemental artist’ whose career was already the subject of myth. His bubble-machines oozed mounds of foam, his bread-making machines excreted yards of dough, and his talk was so overwhelming that when he described his ‘Homage to Kurt Schwitters’, a collection of flying robots that had foraged over Japan and brought back their finds to his windowsill – a bus ticket, an article off a washing-line, etc. – which he then made into a collage, he convinced us momentarily that such a work existed. Among the artists hanging their work for the Soundings show I noted a man of sombre and reserved mien who seemed to hold himself at the same angle to the excited chatter as I did myself. His
work, a thirty-two-foot-long painting constructed of ten or so panels in different colours, was by far the most distinguished
contribution
; ‘a precise spectrum of cool summer’, was how I described it later on. Peter Joseph became my closest friend and associate in the art world. Otherwise Signals was more loss than profit for me. Half an hour before the opening of that exhibition the artist Li Yuan-Chia decided to polish up a metal relief by Mary Martin that hung next to my paintings; he gave the can a good shake and it exploded; I came into the gallery at that moment to hear him screaming ‘It’s all right, Tim!’ But the
paintings
were spotted all over, and I had to dash home and fetch replacements. After the show Medalla told me that a film
company
wanted to borrow my works to furnish a set; his
mesmerizing
babble left me with the flattering impression that the film was to be Antonioni’s
Blow-up
,
but in the event it turned out to be a romp with Max Wall, and the paintings were returned the worse for wear. Compensation – of a couple of hundred pounds – was agreed, but then Signals Gallery closed its doors unexpectedly in the way such galleries could be expected to do, Medalla and Paul Keeler vanished, and it took weeks of phonecalls to Mr Keeler Sr to explain the situation and exact my money. In all, Signals cost me a year’s work.

Sometime later the Lisson Gallery was founded by Nicholas Logsdale and his partner Fiona, took on board several ex-Signals artists, and soon proved to be Signals’ successor as shock-absorber of the new. Dashing around with cans of white paint, readying it for the opening exhibition, we almost persuaded ourselves it was an artists’ co-operative venture. An idea in vogue at the time was that of the ‘multiple’, an artwork produced in large numbers of identical instances, forgoing both the Benjaminesque aura of the
unique original blessed by the touch of the artist’s hand, and the preciosity (and frequent fraudulence) of the ‘numbered, limited, edition’. The concept was seen as a blow against the capitalist art world; economies of scale and industrial production processes would place these works in the financial reach of anyone who could afford a beer. My multiples were to be two prints in
strip-cartoon
format called ‘The Theory and Practice of Dreams’, in which little constellations of abstract shapes pursued an evolution of ‘sleepwalking surefootedness’ from frame to frame. They owed much to the technical diagrams I was drawing in the
freelance-illustrator
hours of my life that helped to keep us solvent at that period; in particular they were concocted out of the little symbols used in electrical and electronic circuit-design, available in sheets from Letraset.

Since money was need to print this ‘unlimited edition’, I wrote to Letraset Ltd explaining the ethics of the multiple and Letraset’s role in this project, and asking for sponsorship. To my surprise the Chairman replied: he had never heard of multiples but would be happy to talk to me. I went down to their offices in Seven Dials, and found the Chairman to be in low spirits; he had been kicked upstairs, he explained, and missed the days when he was a young inventor taking on the world (like me, was the
implication
). He told me of the birth of Letraset: he was playing around with a sheet of transfers belonging to his children, and idly cut out the letters ILL in the backing film, exposing the ink layer within; then he pressed it onto a sheet of paper, rubbed the front, and behold, the lettering was imprinted on the paper. After that
glorious
moment, of course, years of research into inks were
necessary
and many financial disappointments had had to be endured before rub-down lettering became the world-wide industry it is
today. So, he was sympathetic to my predicament, and called in his chief accountant to see what they could do for me.

The accountant studied the drawings for my ‘Theory and Practice of Dreams’ consideringly. Was it some sort of a puzzle game? On being told that it was art, he began a long sentence to the effect that while the company did acknowledge a certain
limited
obligation to fund artistic endeavours in the local community, my work was perhaps outside their remit … whereupon the Chairman dismissed him rather shortly, and as soon as he had returned to his office phoned him and told him to make out a cheque for a hundred pounds to Timothy Drever. Thanks to this generous expression of fellow-feeling, I was able to have hundreds of copies of my abstract comic strips printed on good card. But then the fallacy of multiples, or at least of marketing them through the gallery system, became apparent: since they were to be so cheap, it was not worth anyone’s while trying to sell them. Mine lay in the Lisson’s print cabinets for some years until I was asked to remove them, and I have heaps of them in the attic to this day.