with John Wilkins
Art student Edmond served as the hall monitor in his residence at the University of Outside London; his fellow students could quickly recognise him by the bright orange sash he wore. He could regularly be seen in the hallways engaging in jocularity with other art students, most of which were female as there was only one other male in his art class. When Edmond painted in his room he painted with the sash on, as it gave him a sense of power that translated well into his brushstrokes. Sometimes he painted with his sash on while a fellow art student plucked sour notes on an acoustic guitar for accompaniment, a bitter smoke billowing around them. He tended to paint during various states of intoxication and lack of sleep; whenever he was in true hall monitor mode and confronted a student, the student would note that Edmond was jocular but obsessed with the strangest things.
While reprimanding the tardy it would not be out of character for Edmond to point out how the ancient Greeks essentially invented the computer, creating a device of about thirty gears that accurately charted the movement of the stars. Once he told a black female art student that a South American civilisation had conceived a primitive form of electroplating. She found this interesting and told Edmond that her name was Annie Smith and that she would like to invite him to a lecture by Edward Hollowankle; as Edmond was fascinated by the creative process and how different people reacted to it he was more than willing to go, and he also agreed to go because he thought that Annie Smith was pretty.
The lecture was to be in a few hours so Edmond invited Annie to his room and there he showed off all of the paintings that he had been working on during that year, and Annie appreciated them with the eye of a futurist, a surrealist and a cubist, saying that her favourite painting was that of the oblong pancake, which Edmond agreed was his best. Most of the paintings were to be sold to the school for use in various buildings, most notably the library where his work was to be showcased during the summer. Annie found this to be mighty impressive and demanded that Edmond see her artwork for comparison after the lecture; whilst strumming an out-of-tune acoustic guitar he said that that was a terrific idea. That was how Edmond and Annie Smith became friends.
To pass time before the lecture they smoked an unusual fruit which heightened their senses and permitted them enjoyment of Edmond’s paintings on a synaesthetic level: they could hear the shadows, they could smell the lines and they feasted on the colours to such an extent that they fully believed they would never go hungry again. It was a strange fruit indeed and Edmond wished he had more of it but it had been a gift from his roommate and his roommate had been missing for more than two weeks: it was in all of the papers and people said that his disappearance had coincided with sightings of an unidentified white light hovering in the sky. Annie remembered reading about it and offered her condolences. Eventually the toxins left their systems and Edmond and Annie exited the smoke-filled room to find themselves ascending the stairs to the lecture hall.
Edward Hollowankle was already standing behind the podium when they arrived; with a notebook computer hooked up to a projector, he set up the presentation for his lecture. They could see nothing in paper form and from their seats in the back they could see even less. While they waited Annie Smith told Edmond about Edward Hollowankle: his work was primarily based in online media, making use of interactive pop-up windows and links to video clips; he was self-taught in HTML and site design; and his art largely referenced French New Wave cinema, incorporating the concepts of consciousness and identity into his videos. Having just seen and hated le Week-end, Edmond was interested in what Hollowankle had to offer.
Edmond was aggravated by Hollowankle’s presentation. Despite working in a medium and format that was rich with potential to stretch the boundaries of preconceived notions of art, Hollowankle managed to avoid such opportunities by creating content that was trite and self-important. A slideshow had begun with a woman’s breathy voice reciting Hollowankle’s poetry over small fragments of his blurry movies and the writing was laughably bad, coming across as excerpts from a formalist teen’s personal diary. Edmond had to suffer through strained musings on wants and needs, disposable anecdotes, and slow motion, hyper-ambiguous web cinema.
He glanced at Annie Smith to gauge her reaction and was shocked to find her leaning forward intently, ears bent towards everything he was opposed to. For the first time since entering university he felt as though he had been transported back in time to his twelfth grade film class, forced to endure half-baked VHS tapes of embarrassing philosophy and angst shot over the weekend.
‘No one wants to hear your boring thoughts!’ he shouted, but was succinctly shushed by everyone in the room, including Annie Smith.
‘Only a fool shouts,’ Hollowankle said directly to Edmond, as one random black and white image blurred into another. ‘Your ideas are just as mundane as mine.’
Edmond leaned back in his chair, arms crossed, trying not to fidget as his mental sacs rapidly filled with venom. A snapping sound came from somewhere within his body.
‘What’s that, you say? You’re drawing parallels between yourself and Godard by incorporating the allure and power of the automobile into your feculent web pages? Oh, do go on! So, you’re entranced by the dirty playfulness of a woman’s New Wave behaviour – in this case chain-smoking – so much so that you decided to make a short film about it, with her as the lead? How precious!’
Hollowankle stopped the current film mid-tear. ‘I’ll be willing to take any questions that anyone has at this point in time.’
‘Your pretentious posing and faux romance are at odds with the technology that supports them! Look, your self-professed love of women interferes with the real star of the show, the medium. I was hoping to see some innovative tech-art, something that could breach the bulwark between the intangible, infinite world of the internet and that of our hermetic cubes of reality. Instead I’m treated to what I loathe the most: the artist as the indecipherable genius, assigning poignancy to their work for the mere fact that it was created.’
Hollowankle applauded. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, an artist!’ he proclaimed, and everyone else in the room clapped as well, however awkwardly and somewhat embarrassed by the turn of events.
After the lecture Edmond and Annie Smith returned to Edmond’s room where they became drunk on alcohol and discussion; they had attempted going to Annie’s room first but her roommate barred them for undisclosed reasons.
Annie Smith’s biggest defense of Edward Hollowankle was that she had found his artwork comfortable, and of course Edmond had to ask her what she meant by that.
‘When I was a kid I used to eat the thorns off roses,’ she said. So the danger of experimentation had been traded in for the politeness of homogenisation.
They continued their discussion while taking swigs from a golden liquid, a drop of which darkened Edmond’s sash. He used it to wipe his mouth.
Paper-Thin Punks
This Pretty Mountain
Paper-Thin Caspar
No Thanks to Godard
Let's Be Frank