A "museum" is nowadays an institution, an anchor
of civic pride that comprises the local cultural treasury,
often begun as a collection of trophies picked up in military
or economic wars. In its older sense, though, a museum is
a ragtag assemblage of bones and shells, reliquaries and chromolithographs,
medical oddities and thinly veiled pornography. That sort
of museum could once be found in storefronts, in the back
rooms of bars, in tents on the fringes of popular resorts,
and in wagons traveling an endless circuit of small towns.
It might pretend to some edifying purpose, although that was
transparently a hustle; on the other hand it could actually
contain meaning, although very often one unknown to its proprietor
and imparted to its visitors through some invisible means
that bypassed thought. It is in that sense that this museum
should be understood.
It
is a collection of curiosities of sometimes dubious pedigree,
assembled entirely from my walls, my filing cabinets, and
my attic. The bipartite name, in part an homage to the
nineteenth century language of broadsides and sermons,
establishes the twin poles of a visual predilection. This
predilection—not necessarily identical with a taste or a sensibility—is
mine, although I don't entirely understand it.
I was born in the middle of the twentieth century in southern Belgium. My father's urban working-class family were probably not much more than Easter Catholics, but my mother came from the peasantry of the Ardennes mountains. There the faith was absolute and unquestioned, dark and punishing, image-ridden and all but animistic, based far less on scripture or theology than on barely syncretized pagan rituals from the old religion of the hills as it existed before the Roman conquest.
Religion
supplied most of the aesthetic substance of my childhood.
The first music I heard was Gregorian chant; the first
paintings and sculptures I saw were displayed in the naves
and side chapels of the many local churches. A large percentage
of the decorative matter in our home was religious. This
iconography had little in common with the anodyne nursery
scenes and honey-colored Jesuses of present-day suburban
Christianity. Our religious imagery was black and white
and red. It was somber, forbidding, immediately menacing.
It presented a world of stark absolutes. You could die
at any moment—you could choke on your dinner or be run over by a streetcar—and
then you would face the hanging judge, who had created
you and therefore knew just how much of a sinner you were.
There was no chance of going to heaven; the best you could
hope for was an interminable sentence in purgatory.
There
was worldly imagery out there, too, of course, if not a
great deal of it. I read comics from an early age; my father
read books about the war. We didn't have television—few did, there and then—and
I didn't see my first movie until I was at least eight
years of age. My mother was determined to preserve me from
the corruption of adult popular entertainment. My first
New York City memory, after we had emigrated to the United
States when I was six or seven, is of walking down 42nd
Street while my mother holds my head turned away from the
sidewalk displays of the movie theaters. Naturally, it
did not take me long to begin pursuing the forbidden, embodied
as the imagery most actively shunned in our home. That
wasn't sex, which was so far beyond the pale it was not
even remotely alluded to, and it wasn't violence, exactly,
since that permeated everything: religion, the war, every
example of history. Rather, it was crime.
Crime
was, above all, the repository of every mystery of adult
life. It occurred at night, on city streets, in bars and
nightclubs, and it involved women in low-cut evening gowns
and men with their coat collars turned up. There was drink
involved, and guns, but even more striking and enigmatic
were the corresponding emotions: a kind of knowingness,
a sort of cold passion, a dead calm in the midst of chaos.
That much I was able to glean from the paperback covers
and movie posters I occasionally saw. My father didn't
like crime novels, but they came into our home anyway,
since he had a sister and brother-in-law who were news
agents and who fairly often sent us boxes of miscellaneous
printed matter—they didn't discriminate among genres.
Any lurid cover of a Fleuve Noir mystery, briefly glimpsed
before it was silently whisked away, was a telegram from
the actual world, the life that went on while I slept.
I
did not grow up to become a criminal, although I made a
few stabs at it in adolescence. I remained enthralled with
the imagery of crime, however—one of the few things
I've saved from high-school art classes is a meticulous
copy of the cover of an Avon paperback of James M. Cain's Double Indemnity.
Eventually I began to write about crime, in both its fictional
and nonfictional forms, for many of the same reasons that
drew me to the subject initially—I was never as interested in violence as I was in the settings, the preliminaries, the characters, the language of cigarettes and currency and facial expressions, and the ways in which crime represented a momentary spike in the landscape of flat banality. Sooner or later it occurred to me that what we call crime—and here I mean property crime—is merely a form of commerce, labeled deviant because it is generally practiced by the powerless. I became increasingly interested in crime as its ostensibly legitimate analogues—ownership, marketing, development, “growth,”—increasingly
dominated the formerly marginal world I inhabited.
In
the meantime I had lost all attachment to religion, long
ago, at the threshold of adolescence. But my fascination
with the imagery of crime had led to a generalized fascination
with the commonplaces present in that imagery: the bedrooms
and gas stations and bus depots and vacant lots. I was
drawn to emptiness and mundanity, as well as to the fleeting
dramas that erratically lit up that empty landscape. The
ecstatic counterweight to crime was religion, specifically
the American phenomena of tent revivals and river baptisms.
What I loved about the imagery of religion in pre-corporate
America was its stubborn plainness, its resolute materiality.
There was no fanfare, no gold, no Gothic architecture—the
visual language of religion was consonant with the farmyard
and the city street. Poverty constrained it, but dogma
also assured its hard, unpainted surface, its words of
one syllable, its meta-phorical arsenal that translated
scripture into the terms of a life dictated by landscape
and weather.
And then I worked my way back, visually, to the religion I was born into, and discovered that it had much in common with its American analogue. It was dark and menacing because soil conditions were bad and climate could not be relied upon. Failure was the usual outcome. European Catholicism involved some knowledge of history, but it was history in the form of ruins, its grandeur a sort of unreliable memory. In both countries, religion and crime were outlets for the extreme emotions kept in check by the exigencies of labor.
Crime and religion are competing mystery cults, both pointing to doors leading out, to an unknown that might prove to be a void. Both trade in fear, with an occasional and fleeting dose of exhilaration. Their imagery has a great deal in common because they make allusion to a sphere outside daily life, but expressed strictly in terms of that life. Both are dominated by black and white and red, which are the shades of extremity. Both face down death by converting it into a promise.
Luc Sante
© 2007 |