Anyway, there’s this TV series that’s has its last episode tonight and frankly, we were over it about a year and a half ago. We have our TV allegiances and we have residual loyalty to SiTC but things have been dragging for quite a while. The only spark in these last weeks has been the sudden and inexplicable appearance of the character of Aleksandr Petrovksy, played by Mikhail Baryshnikov. Petrovksy is an artist and not just any old Hollywood cliché painter either, but a Russian “light installation artist” (that is, he makes installations of some kind with video and lights).
The character first appeared in the series when the scriptwriters had concocted a wholly implausible episode where the main characters ended up in a Chelsea art gallery witnessing an endurance performance piece. We won’t bore you with the details, but it was a total fantasy with a sliver of reality that we really enjoyed. Over the next few weeks we wondered if we were ever going to see Petrovsky’s work but were only given tantalising glimpses inside his studio. The artist was seen welding bits of metal together – which made no sense at all – or he sat glumly at a table in his studio with a video loop playing on a lap top as he gazed off into the distance – which we thought quite realistic.
We also really liked the depiction of his life style, which is all international jet setting type escapades to Paris and Venice, meetings with dour art world figures, three personal assistants and a studio/home loft conversion that would be worth tens of millions. Our favourite moment was a scene where Petrovsky and whatsherface were having lunch when they were pushily “joined” by a famous New York painter, another famous artist and a woman who was the editor of a high brow art magazine called The Art Life. We also thought this was all quite realistic, if bizarrely mannered, and related to the real art world in the way that Dallas was related to the real world of the international petroleum industry.
We’re hoping that tonight we will finally get a chance to see Petrovksy’s art and predict that this will be the final straw in the character’s already tenuous romance. Perhaps if Carrie finally wakes up to the fact that any artist who is invited to ‘show’ in Paris aint all that – and anyone ‘working’ has to be welding bits of metal together – she’s not as big an idiot as we have come to believe. But she is and it won’t. But we can dream.
By a strange quirk of fate, artists are becoming a big element of Six Feet Under through the character of Claire Fisher. From a budding photographer with an interest in the arts, the character discovered she had all sorts of bohemian relatives and eventually got into art school with a portfolio of shots of dead people.
There is something eerily right in the way the show has depicted art school – from the eager first year students and their horrendous end of year art show (bad painting, “political” photography, a pyramid sculpture) to the sex, drugs and more sex and lolling about in second year. We’re only half way through their course (which seems to be unfloding in real time) and already Claire has gone from nervous, non-orgasmic, try-hard bohemian, to a bisexual, multi-orgasmic artist taking photos that veer from Nan Goldin to Wolfgang Tilmans to tiny weeny models inside a dolls house. Meanhwile, the art school characters have stopped making art seriously and are now just getting high, lying about in their apartments, taking photos of each other stoned and then showing up for desultory crit sessions with their out lesbian college lecturer. Maybe we went to the wrong art school but all that we can remember about it is was that it was really drab and straight and we got “high” by smoking weaving cane and drinking 4 litre bottles of moselle (before falling into a potted palm).
Perhaps it’s time we started to put togther our own TV series on the art world – something along the lines of a soap with a veneer of lo-fi, downbeat realism like all the other HBO series that get the plaudits and the awards. It’d be called The Gallery, and follow the ups and downs of a psychotically paranoid art dealer, his stable of artists, their exhibitions and his love life. The series would practically write itself.
