THE ARTISTS’ COLONY
RON GALLIPOLI
Before the Artists’ Colony, there was the Artists’ Kindergarten. I remember a collection of classrooms which floated like cosy run-down tugboats in a sea of long green grass. Indifferent cows browsed between the buildings. The perimeter of the kindergarten was fenced by tall trees, shielding wee precious children from the shops and houses of the town.
The classrooms were all flooded with sunlight from their many windows, and the windows were left open year-round so we could benefit from fresh air. We all wore heavy grey woollen shorts and skirts, for the same reason: excess warmth would dull our youthful vitality. On the coldest days of the year we were allowed to gather fallen branches from the trees around the kindergarten and light small fires to keep warm. (This was considered preferable to mechanical heating of the classrooms.) The teachers seemed to consider fires educational in themselves and didn’t bother with any explicit instruction on fire days, so we loved them.
The educational curriculum was progressive. The teachers shared reverence for Nature and for Equality. Every few weeks we were taken out to collect leaves, for closer examination back in the classroom. We were given soft art pencils and instructed to sketch the leaves, to instill a love and understanding of Nature and also somewhat of Science. Those children whose pictures were accurate to life were praised for their Science; those whose pictures were not recognisably botanical were praised even more for their Artistic Imagination, the highest value of all. When I realised this, I began to fictionalise my drawings, choosing unreal colours and ridiculous lines instead of the calm accuracy of which I was capable.
After seven years of drawing leaves and lighting fires, we were ready for the Artists’ School. The Artists’ School was next door to the Artists’ Kindergarten. The move was a shock for the more sensitive children, because they were rarely asked to use pencils anymore. Instead we learnt to type on computers. The children who were frustrated by computers were moved, after a year or two, to Lifestyle classes. Lifestyle students were not expected to read or write; they received most of their instruction via board games and supervised surfing expeditions. We were jealous of them – but still, most of us avoided being moved to Lifestyle classes, knowing that removal from the Artist stream would be irrevocable and leave us somehow locked out of the future.
We rarely drew sketches of leaves anymore. Now we studied Language Art. At the start of each term we were assigned a series of videos to watch, and given a list of Themes. For example, one video we watched was Gallipoli, a film about two friends who go to war. The themes of Gallipoli were Conflict, Sadness, Red, and Electronic Music. Our assignment was always to recall which Theme matched which video, like a long-winded game of Go Fish. This was Language Art. We also studied the Scientific Method, which went: Observation Hypothesis Results Conclusion. Each week we would heat the same chemicals in the same flasks and refine our Observation Hypothesis Results Conclusion until every word was correct. There was also Mathematics – which I, like most students, found profoundly confusing. When it became clear that a student enjoyed Mathematics they were sent to the Principal’s Office for a talk, after which they were never seen again.
We were fed in an outdoor canteen. The residents outside the School, who were rarely seen, were obliged to feed the students, and their resentment of this obligation could be seen in the whimsical selection of food we received. The canteen’s overworked and untrained cooks had to wrangle loads of soft vegetables, stale pastries, uneaten wedding food, et cetera, into lunches, and the usual consequence was that we were served a Filled Roll of unpredictable contents.
After five years of Artists’ School, we had to decide whether to continue to the University. The University was located on a mountaintop, accessible only via cable-car.The University’s main source of income was selling tickets for the cable-car; each return ticket cost several hundred dollars. Of course, very few students could afford that, so a University Bank loaned money for tickets. The Bank didn’t ask for any collateral and repayment was on easy terms, so we students weren’t too inconvenienced, and we happily rode the cable-car up and down the mountain each day. There was a bottle shop near the ticket booth, and I spent most of my weekly allowance (also borrowed from the University Bank) on a daily bottle of wine, which I would dispense into a water bottle and begin drinking on the ride uphill. It was possible to walk to the University and avoid the cable-car, but this demanded hours of stiff hiking every day, so very few of us did. Watching these lonely refuseniks struggle uphill from the dignified comfort of the cable-car, I judged them as strange and pitiful. Why don’t they just borrow money for a ticket from the Bank?, I wondered as I sipped my cheap wine, satisfied with my excellent choices in life.
At the University, Artists like myself were segregated from the students of other subjects such as Money and Law. They were restricted to other buildings. Students of Medicine and Finance were even further away, in different suburbs, working on unspeakable things. The classes we Artists took followed a repetitive structure, I noticed: we would read again the Texts we had studied at the Artists’ School, but we were no longer asked to recall Themes; our task was to uncover the hidden immorality of these Texts. We would underline passages where a narrator revealed their offensive thoughts and share them with each other. We competed to prove the depravity of these books, and by extension their authors; those gifted at the Language Arts, such as myself, would finish the semester with an entire Text (including the prefaces) underlined and stuffed with marginalia elaborating on the ethical inadequacy of each sentence. For those of us talented at this vital art, known as Problematics, it was a fun exercise, and one which truly illuminated the idiocy of the past. We laughed at how foolish we had been to study Themes when Problematics was so much more revealing. How little our School teachers had known of Art!
After three years getting very good at Problematics, the University discarded us like a toddler discards an unloved toy, i.e. immediately and completely. We were now qualified Degree-Holders, but alone in the world. We discussed our plans for Work. We trusted that someone would pay us, because we were Qualified. It was unclear what the work would entail, but we knew that it would require our skills in Problematics and Language Arts.
Unfortunately, we live in a nation that despises intellectuals. Employers revealed their ignorance by refusing to hire me, or even grant an interview. I survived on a Stipend, barely enough to cover the rent for a mouldy room, and I ate mostly boiled Gluten Pellets. Of course I worked on my Art, and spent hours in conversation with other Young Artists, and we watched each others’ plays and read each others' Texts and discussed the Past and Future of Art. I charmed one of these young artists, Anna P; she took a shine to me; and we were, in our Bohemian sphere, a Power Couple, the Light of the Party, I dazzled with Sarcasm and she with Irony. I told everyone I met about my Project, a grand sprawling Novel, but no it was not just a Novel but a Film, an Opera, an Art Installation, an experimental Website, a Travelogue of the Psychological Interior, et cetera. In other words, it was a tremendous effort to write a page here and there, at night when I was drinking, pages of Genius which shrivelled and turned to ash when exposed to the cynical light of day, pages which revealed me as a fraud, a talentless nobody trapped in the soul of an Artist. Nonetheless I talked about my Project at every opportunity, and the conversation always refreshed my own confidence in the inevitable completion and success of the Project, whatever form it was going to take.
Between my talent for conversation and the actual literary production of my girlfriend Anna (who wrote every day, dozens of pages, with monkish discipline) we earned our invitation to the Artists’ Colony.
The Artists’ Colony was occupied primarily by other graduates of the University, the Artists’ School, and the Artists’ Kindergarten. We accepted each other on sight as siblings of a sort, and as rivals. The Colony was up the mountain, like the University, and like the University required the cable-car for access. Each year two Artists were accepted as Lodgers, which meant they were provided with free accommodation in the Colony grounds; there was fierce competition for these places, because the rest of us had to continue borrowing money from the University Bank to attend unless we were willing to walk uphill for several hours a day.
Naturally, the Instructors were the centre of our attention. The Instructors were Artists like us, but successful. They had proven themselves. My Instructor was a great Film writer called Alex. I hadn’t seen any of his Films, because they hadn’t been made, but nonetheless he had written them. His Scripts had won prizes, they had been Workshopped to a fine point, they had been circulated and admired and built his reputation. He loved to joke about the implausibility of ever getting a Film actually made. He didn’t waste much time writing anything new; he taught us, and he Workshopped scripts for Competitions, and he collected Fees for Script Consultation, which were always handed over very solemnly in an envelope. It was important that everyone see him get paid, regardless how little, and every Workshop ended with the same serious envelope ceremony. It is very important, he would say, to respect your Craft by insisting on payment for your services, no matter how little. I took his words to heart, but never had the opportunity to insist because no one, despite my obvious talent, was interested in my services.
At the Colony we were required to share work occasionally, so I was forced to finish some Works. I produced short Stories, cynically witty, about the delusions of Society at large. There were sentences in them, sometimes whole Paragraphs, that I could re-read without triggering involuntary Expulsion, but I was insecure about my Work. I could alleviate this ambient Fear when I compared myself to my Classmates, about half of whom suffered a kind of creative Vertigo, a complete failure of nerve that manifested in Migraines and Vomiting when they were required to discuss their progress or share their Works. I could at least discuss my Work with confidence, even as I agreed with every criticism, even as I interrupted my colleagues’ Critiques to make sure I got every justified insult in before they could beat me to it. I was obviously better equipped to be an Instructor than any of them because I didn’t feel insulted by analysis of my defects; after all, we feel cheerful as we pick apart the lesser early Works of great Artists. I had the Stamina to Workshop all day, whether to critique my own work or that of others. I could still Problematise when needed.
At the end of the year, there was a party for all the Artists of the Colony. We were all assured that, regardless of how much or little Art we had produced, we were successes. There were Moments of Silence observed for the several Artists of the Colony who had killed themselves during the year. There was a round of recreational Problematising, in which we discussed the appalling Moral Failures of that year’s crop of Bestsellers and Prize Winners. And then there was the announcement of the Colony Prize, whose winner is selected by the Instructors with assistance from some experts of the University. This Prize was the means by which an Artist could become an Instructor themselves. A nauseating tension was poisoning the Party, emanating from all those who thought themselves contenders, for this could be the decisive event of their life. My predicted Winner was Donna W., who had written a work of Creative Nonfiction about the evils of the Horse-racing Industry, a work so self-effacing that none of us had been able to Problematise it at all. She wrote so evasively that nothing could be firmly attributed to her at all, or to her Characters, indeed her Work had no Characters, not even a Horse; instead she used a mesh of incriminating Quotes pulled from the history of Horse-racing, giving the reprobate Horse-torturers enough rope to hang themselves, so to speak. This made her invulnerable and we all admired her cleverness. Her beautiful face showed no fear, so it seemed she too was confident of winning the Prize. She kept her cool, drinking slowly and with dignity as everyone else nervously slammed glass after glass of supermarket wine.
Fearing everyone would be passed out before the Ceremonies were finished, the Organisers rushed to announce the winner of the Prize: it was Anna, my Girlfriend! The surprise on her face was genuine. Donna W. did magnificently to keep smiling. I was mildly astonished. Not because I considered Anna’s work unworthy, indeed I believed it was much better than Donna W’s cowardly vanishing act in prose, but Anna’s writing had a subterranean, inward, mole-ish quality – while Donna’s was a precise keyhole surgery, a tweezered insertion of her own name into the Zeitgeist, a perfectly executed feat of literary-political marksmanship. I too was mostly delighted, at least 60% delighted, only slightly jealous of Anna’s implied superiority, also feeling that her success surely reflected well on me as her Partner, that I could be credited with some modest percentage of this Victory, or at least that I must be a worthy Partner if this Budding Star chose to be with me. (I maintain that if judged purely on literary Merit – obviously an immoral and reactionary way to judge such a prize – Anna was the deserved Winner, if you could put aside the Antisocial and Traditionalist aspect of her work, which of course you shouldn’t, but after an unrelated conversation with Anna several months later I came to suspect her Victory relied on the intervention of a Lecturer at the University, one who was deeply infatuated with her and who had offered to leave his Boyfriend and become a Heterosexual if she reciprocated his affections, who had engaged her in a prolonged and bizarre one-sided Courtship or Campaign of Harassment which Anna only told me about when it was safely over with her Conscience intact.)
The tension relieved, the party devolved into boredom and Nihilistic drinking. When we were both too drunk to hold a conversation anymore we caught the cable car home. We were surrounded by other drunk Artists, all of us lolling and gurning and dribbling like idiot Children.
This Victory of Anna’s marked the start of a difficult period in my own life.
We moved into the Colony, enjoying the benefits of Anna’s new position as an Instructor. Anna, being a more practical individual than most at the Colony, soon made herself both popular and useful. The other Instructors came to rely on her to take their classes if they were Ill, or had suffered some emotional Setback or had drunk too much. I, however, was neither popular nor useful. I had won nothing and finished nothing of Substance. Reconciling this with the undeniable fact of my Talent remained difficult. Being unemployed, I had time to write, and I tried. I tried to write a Tragic Novel and my pages had the stench of an amateur Stand-up Routine. I tried to write Comedy and the results were objectively Depressing. I took up painting but discovered I had a very specific tic or compulsion: I could only paint the same cartoon Dog, it was involuntary, and seeing this gormless cartoon Canine once may have been charming but it was no basis for a new Artistic Practice. I began to wind down like a broken old clock, to feel the World had no place for me, and I craved nothing more than sleep because I could still feel hope while I was dreaming sometimes.
I could not stop my personality from turning sour as I continued to fail, and the sourness inevitably leaked into our relationship. Anna started to suggest that I should look for Work elsewhere, perhaps walking Dogs or shelving books in a Library. I reluctantly applied for these jobs; they all rejected me without an interview. Despairing, I applied for jobs at the Civic Waste Management Facility – as a Parking Warden – graveyard shift at McDonald’s Restaurant – cleaning Public Toilets… None of them wanted me. Anna, meanwhile, had more work than she could manage, and her own crop of acolytes at the Colony, some of them almost as talented as me but with Jobs and Cars. She tried to be kind to me but it was clear that some of them courted her, and that she was tempted. I couldn’t blame her.
Around this time, I found an intriguing item in the pile of decommissioned Books for sale at the Public Library. It was a trashy Book on The Tarot, and it came with a corresponding deck of Cards. Feeling that it might be a cheap and novel Gift for someone, I bought it for two dollars, feeling embarrassed. When I got home, I examined the Cards and read the whole Book in one sitting.