Part exercise in ekphrasis, part meditation on creative inspiration, “Man of the People” dwells in the uncanny sides of aesthetic encounters. Amir Adam sets out to imagine art history as a solid black canvas—not as a lineage of creators and admirers but as a “palinoptic” story of would-be geniuses and their anti-patrons. The result is a vertiginous genealogy of negative capabilities and counterfactuals, struck through with desire and anxiety.—The Editors and the Fiction Staff
Man of the People
Sad: the scores of succubae, the dead, forgotten anti-muses that have passed through history unrecognized. A shame that their accomplishments aren’t recorded in the annals, that we don’t know the names of those who terminally stymied the art of fatuous men. A shame, I think, that we don’t celebrate them—the faceless, nameless legions that saved us from so much fucking art.
My father’s favorite is Aivazovsky, a prolific Romanticist who painted, almost exclusively, seascapes. In Russia, borrowing a phrase from Chekhov, the people still refer to all things lovely as “worthy of Aivazovsky’s brush.” The man created approximately three thousand seascapes over his lifetime. My father told me that, in person, they’re real enough to make your stomach roll and pitch, to make you sick at sea, wobble when you walk away: mal de débarquement.
He has an Aivazovsky print. It’s unsigned, unnumbered, probably worthless. One of several thousand. It’s a print of a painting of the artist painting a seascape. In his later years, Aivazovsky held a banquet for himself. A man of the people, he gifted each guest one of these small, self-conscious paintings. Many were copied and sold in the form of prints. In my father’s, Aivazovsky sits in front of a nearly completed seascape. Everything is in brunaille except for the sea and a small red boat lifted high on that sea, a dinghy riding the buck of giant swells. Aivazovsky sits, earth-toned, with a paintbrush in hand. He’s old and fat and white-bearded and smiling as he adds finishing touches to the waves. His body is turned toward the spectator, open in broad welcome.
My lover, my beloved—a painter himself—has a favorite too. He said that when he saw Malevich’s Black Square for the first time in Moscow, the shape burned its image onto him—the blunt force of it, its darkness, its starkness, its angular relief against the white, the textured cracks in the paint, small fissures ferning, fractaling across the block. He said that he stared at the square until it was more than black, until it was a color more numinous, stranger, more variegated, the combined tones of a toe blackened and purpled by frostbite. And then he swears that it changed into not a color at all, but the absence thereof, a fiery, waving emptiness. He says he can see it sometimes, the quadrilateral—floating, a foreboding palinoptic on his empty canvas.
My lover, recycling a stale anxiety, believes that we are in the evening of time, that we are in the ever after. He believes what Malevich did won’t and can’t be done again, that he and his friends might feel they’re moving forward but really they’re looping back.
What I want to tell him: I’ll be your kryptonitic baby, the drain for your genius, the hole in the ocean floor. Lapping, I’ll lop your sea legs. Lighten your load.