The Art & Life of Dee Ridley: Part Four – Primary Cut

Jo Manby

In the fourth instalment of a series of creative texts by writer Jo Manby, her character Dee Ridley visits the PAPER Pavilion, presented within the context of the Venice Biennale 2019. Read ‘Part One – Double Face’ here, ‘Part Two – Nettle Sting’ here, and ‘Part Three – Fenced Up’ here. 

Dressing Room

Like an idiot I’ve let Perry, king of dodgy deals and father of my art dealer boss Camille, pressurise me. He wants me to take a stick to someone in exchange for a package. 

-        I fund Camille, he says. If you want any more of her business, you’ll have to fall into line.

-        What’s my cut?

-        Your cut is that you’re not thrown out onto the street.

The first I hear about it I’m in Camille’s dressing room in her London flat, applying lipstick. To my side is a red lacquered Chinese cabinet. A three-way mirror occupies the dressing table. I line my lips with a MAC lip pencil and fill in with Rouge Dior. While I fold a tissue in half and place it between my lips to blot the colour with the flat of my palm, I spend some moments looking at the Dubuffet on the wall, giving it an estimate. A vibrant scuffed mass of red, blue and black acrylic. When I turn back to the mirror, the Caulfield print that hangs adjacent to it sings out from behind my head with its clean black lines and homogenous primary colours.

Camille, in a scarlet leopard spot T shirt and black jeans, lets someone into the apartment. I can hear their voices but not what they are saying. The intervening wall redacts their speech. My head is full of black and red. Columns of figures. Teetering pagodas of profit and loss.

The man barges past her into the dressing room – unannounced – and tells me that I have to go to Venice and meet someone and take delivery of a package. I have to give them something in return. Then I have to come back with the package.

-        Why me?

-        Because Perry says so.

-        What’s in the package?

-        A painting.

-        What do I have to hand over? Cash?

-        A stick.

Does anyone know anything about the data on a stick if the stick falls to the ground in a completely empty forest? Or on a completely empty street, or into a canal, with no-one there to shove it into a USB port? Do I have to go through with the deal? Well, I was planning to see the Biennale anyway. All the more reason to go.

Studio 

A week later I board the flight to Venice. Images of the kind of well-dressed thug I might have to encounter during the exchange tomorrow bother me, so I try to distract myself by looking up the highlights of this year’s festival. I’m going to pack in as many of the shows as possible. Also, I’m interested to visit PAPER’s stand at the Palazzo Mora, where it’s exhibiting as part of the European Cultural Centre’s fifth instalment of the ‘Personal Structures’ exhibition. I’ve become fond of visiting the gallery since I started renting out my London flat and made a part-return to Manchester – partly to be closer to Tamsin, if I’m honest, who was the one who first introduced me to it. Before I left, she was telling me about the focus of PAPER’s Venice presentation – themed around ideas of the artist’s studio. Its significance and the mythical role it plays in artistic creation, where the artist turns base materials into gold. I’ve visited lots of studios over the years. Most recently, that of my old acquaintance Matthew Houlding, who happens to be among the six artists PAPER is exhibiting.  

I drove over from Manchester to the Lancashire/Yorkshire border a couple of days ago to collect the stick from a man at some out-of-the-way café. I called in on Houlding afterwards when I remembered that his studio wasn’t far away. That afternoon, while he and I chatted, light filtered through the windowpanes, picked out the edges of the yellow Perspex shapes that punctuated his work surfaces. Selections of interlocking laminated boards, cut-out cardboard, and found, pierced screens made evident his process of condensing utopian architectures into models and wall-based 3D works.

So here I am today, sitting on a plane with some most-likely incriminating digital files in my pocket which I’m about to exchange for a valuable work of art. Hardly alchemy. I feel like a fraud and a criminal before I even set foot in the magical city. 

The plane taxis around before take-off. Looking out of the window, I compare the airport complex that we’re gliding past to the panels and boards that characterise Houlding’s works, such as NKB Bearings from 2009, a hybrid model falling between a wooden pier and a stage set. Its blue geodesic dome and the way it’s lit with the artificial sunshine of orange and yellow Perspex. Geometrical structures that mimic functional, structuralist spaces, aesthetically engaging from any angle, achieving a harmonious balance with measured metric intervals and intersecting planes. 

Houlding’s work, he told me, pays homage to an ideal of perfection that can’t be achieved. In a way that’s how it is with Venice – beautiful to look at but all façade, and, in a way, already lost as it sinks ever deeper into the surrounding sea. Houlding is attracted to a brand of futurism that has already been left behind and abandoned, in a similar way to how Modernism became wrapped up and sealed off by the end of the 20th century. Swiping through the Biennale online, I see that Dubuffet has a retrospective at Palazzo Franchetti. One of so many stellar Modernist artists, their lives and times relegated to history, while today their work passes between peoples’ hands like any other commodity.

As I look down the plane cabin, the white plastic trimmings round the baggage shelving and the lights running down a perspectival chute makes me think of Gestalt – the German term for the way that humans perceive objects through a lens that reduces them to similarities, proximities and continuations. Reality in its simplest form. A hotel as an entire structure rather than the sum of its parts. And yet, as an artist you have this kind of shorthand.

Palazzo

Arriving in Venice, the vista of the Basilica Santa Maria della Salute and its white stucco flanks hover above a jade Grand Canal. My hotel room looks out on coppery green depths and sparkling white foam. I’ve got a loose plan to visit the International Pavilion, the Ghana Pavilion, Dubuffet, then PAPER’s stand at Palazzo Mora before the exchange in the evening. Then tomorrow, I’ll fit in as much as possible before my return home. A flying visit, as they say.

I finally reach the PAPER Pavilion around midday and it feels like bumping into an old friend ­after getting to know the gallery so well over the past few months. Houlding’s work, Essential Joys and New Pleasures, stands out with its clean, crisply cut shapes and sheer luminosity like a four-colour regimental standard. At his studio he’d shown me how he photocopied images of American modernist architecture – mainly by Albert Frey and Richard Neutra, pioneers of the Desert Modernist style characteristic of Palm Springs, California. Neutra was Austrian; Frey was a Swiss architect who worked for Le Corbusier in Paris. Houlding takes the images and cuts out some of the superfluous detail and flips them over to produce these white, flat, mirror-image perspectival shapes. A minimising, abstracting process that in some way echoes the demise of modernism. 

The standard colours and the regular album cover size of the four works are reminiscent of Pop Art, but also, he told me, the result of looking at experiments from the Bauhaus with incremental colour by Josef Albers, the highly influential German American artist and educator. Like Frey and Neutra who also emigrated to the US, Albers resettled in America during the Second World War. Europe at the time was not a good place to be. Today it’s the only place I want to be, but then things have changed. 

The nostalgic element in Houlding’s work – for past ideologies and abandoned utopias – comes out here as a sublimation of European culture. There’s something laudable about that. I start to question my own moral code, my ethics. If I am prepared to do Perry’s dirty work, what kind of a person does that make me into? What are my ideals?

Before going to the exchange (which is effectively a case of handling stolen goods, possibly stolen European Modernist art), I stray off my original plan to squeeze in some more of the Biennale after I reach the Venezuelan pavilion and find myself taken by the building’s international modernist style. Looking it up, I find that it is one of a few prized examples of constructions in Venice by Italian Carlo Scarpa. I spend the rest of the afternoon walking around the city locating Scarpa’s Giardini sculpture garden and the historic Querini family palazzo, which makes a virtue of allowing canal water to flow through it. I feel this is good for my soul, a kind of architectural pilgrimage.

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All I’ve been told to do is to wait at a certain table for two in a café in St Mark’s Square. After a few minutes, a woman wrapped in a velvet coat greets me as if she knows me.

-        Ridley – how lovely to see you after all this time.

-        Likewise.

She can see I’m on the back foot but sits down at the little table and waves over a waiter. We order espresso and mineral water.

-        I have something for you, she says.

-        Same here, I say, trying to read her. But she is all smiles. Takes the small white box tied with a green ribbon from me and puts it in her pocket. Hands me a package that measures no more in width and length than a laptop.

-        Where are you staying? She asks.

I’m non-committal, I drink the coffee and then make a move to go.

-        It’s been great to see you again, she says. Till the next time.

On my way back to the hotel, I am sure I am being followed. But when I get into the lift, I am alone. I take the precaution of hiding the painting behind the ventilation grille in the en-suite, nonetheless. Later when I am drinking and lounging around, talking to Tamsin back in Manchester on FaceTime, I hear a scratching sound outside my window. My hiding place isn’t going to cut it, I decide. It’s about midnight. I tell Tamsin I’ll message her later and quietly let myself out of my room, locking the door behind me. I head for below stairs. The kitchens are in the basement. There’s a tall skinny lad hunched over a huge murky sink of washing up but he has his back to me. I slide the painting, complete with packing, into a freezer and leave it there underneath a tub of pistachio flavoured gelato. A conservator’s nightmare.

I walk out of the hotel and saunter down to the port area. In a bar painted jade green with a fish tank the length of the optics, a girl spills her crème de menthe stinger on my arm and her boyfriend wants to know why I made her do it. I get a black eye and a bruise on the cheek, finger marks on my shoulders.

When I finally let myself back into my hotel room, someone’s done it over. The carpet’s been taken up. The grilles are hanging off the air con vents. The mattress flops lop-sided over the bedframe, sheets and quilts spill onto the floor.

Customs

The old lady (ancient bluestocking with Schiaparelli pink lipstick and a Hermes scarf; I stereotype far too easily) sitting next to me on the plane home the day after says it’s a good job you only came away black and blue. As in, not dead.

-        Want to tell me about it? She asks.

-        Not really.

-        Want to know what I’ve been up to?

I look at her as if to say, Meaning? And she pulls a drawing book out of an old-fashioned Chanel handbag and passes it to me. It’s full of hastily executed drawings of views of Venice in blue biro. Some of the best known, some of the best kept secrets. Some of the Carlo Scarpa buildings that I’d been looking at myself.

-        They’re my aides-memoires, she says. To remind me of my journeys.

 I’m happy to be shown them. It’s a welcome distraction. I mention that I work in the art world, give her a saccharine version of my involvement. She is interested, to a point. But from time to time her attention wanders, as if she is preoccupied with something ethereal. Something just out of reach.

When it’s time to get off the plane I lose sight of her. Then, just as I’m walking through the baggage collection area, she taps me on the shoulder and hands me the sketchbook.  

-        I’ve got hundreds of these at home, she says. Take it – a reminder of your wanderings.

She disappears through Nothing to Declare. I go the same way, but then I am hauled over by security. Liquid ice runs the length of my spinal cord. They want to know about the package I am carrying along with my overnight bag. Frisk me and swab me and so on.

-        Nice painting, says a security guard. I notice that his eyes are the same colour as his shirt. Cornflowers.

-        It’s a fake, I stammer.

-        Worth anything?

-        A fraction.

I come away from the airport feeling I have to clean up my act.

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