PETER LAND'S SHIRT NO, OH ...
Peter Land's ShirtNo, oh no. Imagine a starched, crisp white shirt containing that impossible object, Peter Land.
Better introduce him now, sooner rather than later!
And his shirt too!
Face up to the trouble!
Here comes the beer, in the heavy mug with all the little windows. Each of them shows a square of a golden micro-cosmos, raised high in Land's fine white hairless baby-like hand, mug filled to the brim and shaking a bit. His other hand rests on the table, curled up in a half-fist with a cigarette butt burning dangerously close to the sooty filter. It is already quite predictable...
Peter Land sits at the very back of Bang's Bodega. Or Salatfadet, or Niels Juel, or Mexico Bar, or Hong Kong, or Andy's or Cosy or any odd drinking club in Copentown, or London, or in the Milky Way. His immaculate shirt beams like a beacon in dense coastal fog, white and unblemished. It is a fresh, pristine tablecloth on opening hour of Copentown's best restaurant. But this is night life and not life filed for eternity. The air is smoke, and the fumes of old beer slops and male guilt mingle in the harsh bodega odour.
Land routinely wets his lips, pouts to receive the drink, lowering his clean shaven chin so flaps of flesh cover the collar and the top button, when somebody opens the door wide and falls in, bellowing a drunken hello the entire room and is sick on the floor. Hoarse, surly grunts respond to the cold autumn wind that sneaks in with the regurgitating night-walker, and sweeps invisibly through the room with turbulent graphic lines of cigarette ash and debris revealing its treacherous course through the room. In the sudden draught the embers of fading tobacco shoot out coaly fangs that rapidly sink through the last millimetres of the cigarette paper and eat away at the filter, stuck in the soft pink spot between fingers like a comforter between helpless, milk-smelling baby paws.
OUCH!
Peter, Peter, Peter!
Not an edifying spectacle to see.
The golden liquid in his glass receives an extra impetus from the jolt spreading up through Land's electrified body when his innocent digits painfully burn with cigarette butt punishment for his absent-mindedness (the absent-mindedness that Peter Land has conditioned to respond to any sort of exterior discipline, but that he has also extended to personal carefulness). The golden shower cascades out on both sides of Lands cherub cheeks like the foamy release of a hop geyser, and splashes symmetrically down his short neck in two thick and curly baroque streams that explode when they reach his little humbug and wets the breast and shoulders of his crisp and starched white shirt. Drip drip drip.
Vexed but even-keeled, Land fans his hand and puts out the stub while he holds the beer mug tightly like it were the fist of an insubordinate child. His tiny mauve nipples show hard through the greyish and sticky textile. Well, he thinks to himself, there's no use in reproaching myself. This liquescent incident should rather be seen as a half intentional, albeit tragic attempt to become one with the world, with nature; an attempt at dissolving my physical limits. Peter Land solemnly toasts to himself in what remains of the beer.
- In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind is a fading coal, that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be, Land quotes to himself in his Oxbridge twang, beer pearls in the strands of his beard.
Now, don't get him wrong, this body, this Land. You are quite mistaken if you take him to be the buffoon who wears a drunk's red nose for applause: this Land is also the masterful figure to whom the waiter goes straight to in a laying for twenty persons in order to have the most educated gentleman at the table taste the wine.
- Thank you, that is fine, he will say quickly, unpretentiously, smacking his lips and looking up at the waiter who will nod, his eyes half closed in servile agreement. And his empty glass will be filled in red. Peter Land is no fastidious modernist, but a religious temper, cheers. Indeed, he is a messianic figure with resolute nostrils and wise, deep set eyes. The messianic promise, with all historical objectivity and existential guarantees are gone, of course. We can do away with the actual content of all of big history's big Messiahs coming down from each their mountain and telling us in various performances, "humanity, behold, if you do x you will achieve y, if you worship a you will be safe from b". But what we can't do away with is the promise: The promise inscribed in all human experience. The messianic Peter Land doesn't promise anything concrete, he knows better than that. With his will to do what he can with what he has to do it with, he promises something else, he promises a self to come. It isn't here yet. And it might never arrive in the full splendour that human imagination ascribes to its fantastic coherence. Its place is empty but ineradicably empty, and so it is a continual commitment. Esse, non videri! Peter Land admonishes us. Be what you are, don't seem like something you are not.
But let us not forget the little intermezzo.
The evil art critic!
It is to him we owe our bleak temper tonight.
Green in the face from bile and with an air as altmodisch as veal stew, the evil art critic had entered the gallery earlier that day. Only minutes before, his dapper appearance was accidentally soiled by a careless child who had passed him by on Vesterbrogade and had waved its hand like a happy idiot, planting a greasy palm on the evil art critic's camel-hair coat. And the child had laughed in its high pitched child's laugh before entering the Tivoli gardens with its mother.
- I hope you choke to death in candy floss! The evil art critic hissed in the direction of the child. Thus sullied and degraded in his own eyes, and in a callous mood indeed, the evil art critic decided to review an art exhibition.
-Ach, erbŠrmlicher Mensch! He exclaimed under his breath in admixture of pure aversion and hate, and joy of having found what he was looking for. His glasses went steamy and his green countenance broke out into red excited spots on soft downy skin. Before him on the gallery floor was an accumulation of the strangest kind, indeed to an evil art critic of the most U-N-A-C-C-E-P-T-A-B-L-E kind.
A male person had apparently stripped himself of all his clothes (except for shoes and socks). All the items had, upon stripping, been tossed carelessly in a red substance on the floor that had been allowed to congeal with the clothes in a blood red grip. A stiff, abominable rag in a shimmering and mouldy variety of colours caught his eye. The evil art critic got tears in his eyes and a lump in his throat of sheer, helpless disgust. How could a sane person make himself do such a thing? The archaeological textile, this sartorial funeral, was the artist's fuming unmentionables.
UUUGH! UUUGH!
On the walls were electric light bulbs in cages, casting horrific shadows on the walls and thus intimating a prison cell. A plaque with schizophrenic babble was placed on the wall. A single line from the text would linger half-consciously in his mind, holding his entire body in a steely grip when he in the months to come would wake up dripping with sweat in the middle of the night, imagining himself to be stark naked, floating freely in white, fluffy clouds in a loving embrace with Peter Land: "I know my hands are cold, but it's not a matter of how they feel. It's what they do. Yours truly, Peter Land".
Dizzy and swaying on the spot, spasmodically clutching his walking cane with the little ruby-eyed skull knob, the evil art critic looked down in the well of time to find historic reflections, something he had learned or heard, in order to try to piece together this sophomoric attempt at art to an event with consequences. Nothing appeared on the evil art critic's inner evil art critic's display but a inscrutable mish-mash of more or less perverted cultural resources of yore (West Coast performance, North Sea snaps, R. D. Laing, W.C. Fields, and - I beg your pardon - slacker art), in other words dark and indecent chapters in the history of human spirit that it would be a disgrace to invoke at this point in time. An obtuse, puny erection announced the coming of a great article.
- Scandale! He exclaimed in French with an intonation that left the only listener in the gallery, the artist himself who stood silently and coldly perspirating in a dark corner, with the certain knowledge that this scandale was a bourgeois shocker of the kind that had to be proclaimed as such before the general public. Land felt an embarrassment not unlike when he as a youthful guard in the Royal Theatre experienced the extremely unsettling ordeal of having his red uniform trousers springing open at the bottom as he rose from his chair to service the audience that poured out from the balconies in the intermission. Land had to perform his organ-grinder's little trained monkey hopping about on the barrel-organ dance routine in order to avoid the crowd's curious inspection of his freezing and uncovered rear.
Peter Land, victim of unprovoked and negative orgiastic reviewing.
A feverish dream: big dark horse rearing red-hot hoofed over helpless, hapless me.
Mother!
The evil art critic chuckled icily to himself and rolled his blood-shot eyes. He cast another look at the gallery space to take in the full extent of this moral decrepitude. Grey pointed teeth appeared behind his everted lips, and going into a shrill and hawking laughing fit he threw his head backwards, while his whole frame shivered with cramps. As suddenly as he had arrived, the evil art critic took off from the floor and flew backwards out of the entrance, flapping the sinewy bat wings that had shot out from his shoulders in the sulphur-reeking gallery air, while his suddenly oversized and putrid, barbed member rose between his flaccid legs as he took off.
So, here we are. This explains our melancholy sojourn at Bang's Bodega (or Zum Goldene Pferd, or Barnets Far, or any other drinking club in Odense or in the Milky Way). Another twist of fate, another turn of failure on the downwards spiral towards the black hole of artistic and existential damnation. Or worse yet, another standstill, another moment of utter entropy, without even the resonance of the fall.
- Bald ruhest du auch, he quotes Goethishly to himself with his head in his hands, and reaches for a glass with a heel tap.
The bodega is a timeless zone, just like Peter Land is a timeless man. He is an enlightenment philosopher, tirelessly pursuing the progress and transparency of human existence under his powdered wig. He is the slightly alcoholised tropical doctor in Zanzibar, sweating himself thin under his sun helmet, heroically curing people for cholera and measles while the bar is gushing gin and tonics. And you could imagine him in the 1950s, sitting in a railway restaurant, drinking his beer and munching his steak, his bowler hat next to him on the table. And he is as unbounded as he is timeless:
Say his name in Danish: Peter Land!
Say his name in English: Peter Land!
Say his name in German: Peter Land!
Yes, say his name in every tongue, in every land! His humbug may look like a drowned mouse, he may need a clean shirt, and his shoes may smile. But he carries deep within him the eternal and boundless will to live, and the despondency therefore almost ceases to be despondency and virtually, all but disappears.
Yes, he wants to live! And to love! He wants to have sex again, it has been years (six, to be exact)! He wants to look towards the future, where nude dancing video works lie in wait to be executed with a beautiful camerawoman on the set, her camera cuddling for his naked butt as he dances solo to a string piece by Saint-Sa‘ns; to days to come when his hands have dimples and a wedding ring and no cigarette burns; to better times when he will have a gallerist grovelling at his feet and attend his every need...
And here we find it quite relevant and in order to interrupt ourselves, for a damsel has made her way to Land's table - as it happens not very rarely as it were, a fact denied only by his own modesty, and complicated by his flurried ways when accosted by reality in its most rosy-cheeked and maturely motherly fashion.
- Hello, I am Deliria. Would you like to dance? She says, all eye-lashes and husky determination.
Would you like to dance, he mumbles to himself, winking and casting red, sidelong glances at the neighbouring tables as if to disclose a conspiracy. He thinks, could this be a happy ending after all, while Deliria just stands there in her nervous blouse and lovely, lovely blue jeans. Peter hesitates (while we, the audience, are sitting excited in the darkness of the theatre, staring wide-eyed at the couple on the big bright stage, going: Dance, Peter, dance!). Peter Land feels a voice urging him deeply from the bottom of his soul. He feels it rising like the bright morning sun. And from every dark pore of his skin, every sloshed cell in his corpus, every valley in the smoky grey of his brain sounds the glorious cry: Dance, Peter, dance!
When he finally accepts the invitation and gets up after vegetating for hours in his corner, his buttocks are sore and red as freshly tonsured skulls of two 80s artists. Rising from his chair and breathing in determinedly his supple anus wheezes, like air being blown over a beer bottle. Peter Land keeps a straight face, and takes the damsel's hand.
Swaggering towards the dance floor's yellow lino you can see that he feels sure of himself. This is his thing, this is his floor. With his coattails flying like a exalted penguin he spins around and grabs Deliria by the waist, and Land the dancer dances on the tips of his toes, somersaulting the feathery Deliria high in the air, while the crowd spontaneously gathers around the couple beneath the twinkling spotlights, excitedly applauding the two as the natural centre of their attention. The bartender is pouring out an orange ocean of Peter Land Specials on the house, and the evergreen on the jukebox goes
Éthere's nothing left to make me feel small
luck has left me standing so tall
gold
always believe in your soul
you've got the power to know
you're indestructible
always believe in, because you are
gold
glad that you're bound to return
there's something I could have learned
you're indestructible, always believe in
after the rush has gone
I hope you find a little more time
remember we were partners in crime
it's only two years ago
the man with the suit and the pace
you know that he was there on the case
now he's in love with you, he's in love with youÉ
For Peter Land, this is a time full of joie de vivre and the loss of a lot of money. But then again, for Peter Land the times are always this way. And on through the starry night, like it is a debtor's prison, like a fall of man, the shirt continues to accumulate abject layers of drink, cigarettes, dandruff and lipstick upon Peter Land's happy, flabby, weightless body.
Lars Bang Larsen
This text contains samples from James Joyce: "Ulysses" and Spandau Ballet: "Gold".
A Peter Land Special is one part gin, one part vodka, one part Pernod and a Fanta.
'Originally published in Peter Land, published by Hatje Cantz Verlag, for the exhibitions in Villa Merkel, Esslingen, Kunsthaus Glarus and Stadt Galerie Kiel ISBN 3-7757-9056-X