To the Editor(s) of Massive Mammaries UK

I’m writing for I don’t know what reason. More accurately, for too many reasons. More than I have the energy to enumerate. I felt compelled to get in touch, let’s say, when I read of the passing of Eddie Neuk, one of your longstanding editorial contributors. At first, I could not quite understand why the news devastated me so. It came to me at random, whilst perusing the small newspaper of the town where Eddie and I grew up together, and to where my wife and I returned in later life. I was scanning the obituary section for quite another reason when Eddie’s name sharpened into focus.

I had not been in contact with Eddie since our school days, when we both had more pimples than principles. It’s debatable, of course, whether the latter ever replaced the former. Nonetheless, I was surprised to find he had no surviving family. From what little I can gather, it seems he lived an ascetic sort of life, if we forgo the indulgence of pornography. He was no different as a lad.

Ah, already I am falling prey to nostalgia. I beg you early on to forgive this tendency to reminisce. As a newly minted septuagenarian, I find myself frequently combing through the ash of my memories, once vibrant things that time has charred to chalky nostalgia. Alas, life’s crackling flames have begun to peter out. Lately, personal events have left me with naught but dwindling embers.

To you, I must sound like every and any old person. Age is going about at the moment, and I seem to have caught a particularly bad bout of it. I request only ten minutes of your attention; we aged are so often ignored and dismissed, a heavy punishment for our simple vices of flasked soup and slippered feet. But heed me: these comforts will one day ravage you, too. Wrinkles will beset the lithe and beautiful bodies in your magazine despite the absurd abundance of oils and other “ointments” that gleam in the photographs.

I digress. To return to Eddie: I found myself dwelling on his death, and the more I came to think of him, the more I realised that it is to him that I owe the entire trajectory of my life…I am a widower.

It is a shortcoming of the written word that the preceding sentence looks simplistic to you. A mere statement of fact. You cannot know that it took me many minutes of shaky hesitation and crossing out before I could finally commit it to the page.

More accurately, I am a recent widower. And it is thanks to Eddie’s influence that I ever came to meet the woman who eventually became my wife: the artist Sarah Fields. How my hands shake to even write her name.

At school, when I was… We’ll say 10 years old, I knew Eddie by his trade. He was blessed with a sharp eye and knack for illustration, particularly concerning the female form. Desperately debased though it was, Eddie could produce impressive life-like renderings in a few clammy moments of concentration. At least, they were as life-like as any of us, his inexperienced schoolmates, could tell. Eddie was that rare breed of entrepreneur, in the right place, at the right time. Puberty had created the market conditions for him to establish a captive audience of hormonal boys, as well as limitless potential for self-amusement. He was, really, the first artist among any of us not just for his skill with the pencil, but also his tendency to masturbate to his own creative genius.

Some of our group went on to be as lucky as Eddie was then, managing to squeeze a steady income from craft and artisanal discipline. I was never one of them, but you mustn’t think me bitter or cynical. I am, and will be to my last gasp, a great adorer of the arts. I lament only my inability to whip admiration into creation.

Though Eddie and I were the same age, he radiated a sense of gravitas. He seemed a possessor of hidden knowledge. This wasn’t all attributed to the lewd drawings, however. Much of Eddie’s allure stemmed from his economic status among his penniless fellows. His pockets were ever bulging with the lunch money of classmates, given in fair trade for steamy sketches. Though, in fact, for many of the boys, the seduction of Eddie’s surfeit of coin came to replace the lust for dirty drawings. I call these fellows non-artists. These are the ones that “grew up” and entered the domains of law, banking, or whatever other manifestation of business could provide the stronger eroticism of chasing capital.

I fell somewhere between the artists and the businessmen. I had no talent. I could not paint, draw, sing, or play. But I also never really grew up, never forgot the early years and the pulsing excitement that flushed through me when I looked at those dog-eared drawings. I went on to become a collector and curator, with my own little museum.

I confess. No, perhaps confess is wrong… I make no admission of any wrongdoing… I admit that as an adult, I am not an avid peruser of smut.

Oh, alright, I will actually confess to a certain piquing upon peeking at some of your back issues. But I mean to say that I am not a regular consumer of contemporary pornography. As such, I was unaware that Eddie had continued to polish… or should we say, hone his craft over the years. If it had not been for the briefest mention in the businesslike obituary of his illustrating a “strip” for a prominent national publication, I likely would have never known. I started my search for Eddie’s work in the broadsheets, of course, but it became quickly apparent that his work was likely to concern broads and sheets of a different kind. Forgive my crassness.

Nevertheless, what a colourful and educational journey I had among the top shelf literature of my local newsagents. Of course, my search through the erotica was virtuous, rather than lecherous, a point which fell on the disbelieving, or perhaps merely indifferent, ears of the shopkeeper when I presented my stack of Massive Mammaries for purchase. My virtue of course being respect for Eddie and his craft.

After all, his school-day drawings had taught me much, not least the dangerous intoxication of imagination crossed with desire. They were lessons in the possibility of something from nothing; an image, an intention, an idea materialising from vacuum, white space—this alchemical power revealed itself to me on tightly folded notepaper, smuggled home between the pages of my school textbooks and examined in the privacy of the family bathroom. You might regard all this as an old man retrospectively justifying pubescent sleaziness, and in truth, it is. But I would hope that you, editors who made an eponym of ginormous breasts, can understand when I say that those little sketches were a taste of what art can do to a person. What it can do to me, at any rate. I wonder if you often have to justify your place in the cultural milieu? It’s a sticky fact, but one we all must contend with: all art, culture, and entertainment owes a debt to horny little devils like Eddie.

I know this now, of course, but not back then. I did not grow up around art. I did not care for it in the slightest, as a boy. Nor did my parents. I had no innate appetite for quality culture in general. Not until I watched Eddie scribble magic from nowhere did the fireworks ignite in my head. Only then did the seed of my desire to be close to art begin to germinate. It blossomed into a drive, or a craving, for more of that same intoxication: the gnaw and bashfulness of experiencing art that resonates. This pursuit led me to study art history before my curatorial career, and eventually to my first meeting with Sarah… I note that her name was easier to write this time…

How strange that I can speak of her now, to you, faceless editor(s), when I could scarcely muster the air to utter a pitiful Amen at her funeral. Would she be appalled or would she laugh to know that my lamentation finally uncoiled itself in correspondence to a magazine which features a shagony aunt? Ah, but what do I know? Perhaps the only meaningful difference between a Botticelli and the jelly-like bottoms in your publication is the presence of a gilded frame (or a cellophane pocket).

I will forge on while the courage remains. Sarah was a talent whose prowess with the brush was unfathomably cruel to other painters. It was cliché how I admired her in the same ways I admired all masterpieces, and how I revered the unutterable privilege of seeing her grow old. What she saw in me, with her eye so practised and precise, I never knew. Perhaps she was fatigued by her own work and sought relief from wrangling colour and light and beauty. If so, then it was my life’s honour to be her dose of the inelegant.

It was a gallery where I first met Sarah. In the beginning, I romanticised our meeting, thinking it a meaningful balance of good fortune and fate that our paths should cross in such a place and at a time when my very soul was vulnerable and bared, ready to be bruised by pugilistic portraiture. But nothing hanging on the walls hit me harder than that first sighting of Sarah. Even in the bleached halogen luminescence of the gallery, light seemed to surrender to her.

Of course, I came to realise that this chance encounter was less significant cosmic orchestration and more basic probability. She spent the majority of her free time in art galleries. They were her chapel. She attended them with pious regularity, but not for worship. She was an apostate. While I was besotted with the old masters, she looked upon their work seemingly to spot their shortcomings and find spaces wide enough to accommodate her own artistic style.

She was not deficient in ruffled, diffident male admirers, either; men who fancied themselves the discoverers of an artistic promise that only their astute eye could have recognised. We are a patronising breed in surplus in the art world, one in want of culling. Yet, for some still unknown reason, Sarah took to me like she hadn’t taken to the other wet fellows that dared insist upon her attention. Perhaps it was because I knew little of art at that time. Nor did I pretend to. I just liked to look at beautiful things.

Which brings me back to Massive Mammaries. Having flicked through back catalogues and seen Eddie’s more recent work, I believe there is still artistic merit to be found in his material. Ribald illustrations pressed to the margins by unyielding flesh, but the work of an artist nonetheless.

Perhaps Eddie’s hindrance was obscurity, his work too anonymous; in the same manner that a Van Gogh, say, may convey less emotional impact if the viewer is not already aware of its melancholic prologue. That said, I do not know if he was a sombre man. Nor do I know if he was artistically fulfilled, or even if he harboured any higher artistic ambitions in the first place. But I do know that the man was a talent. I understand talent. I have spent the last 40 years cohabitating with it.

Another admission: though I’ve spent my life trying, I’ve never been able to adequately describe the art that moves me. I believe this failing began with those dirty sketches in school, when I was overcome with embarrassment for my puberty. I never spoke to the other boys about Eddie’s illustrations, even though many of them put their heads together and discussed bodily dimensions, lurid fantasies, and tall tales of their own romantic escapades (always involving similarly proportioned vixens of convenient geographical distance and different schooling). But not me. I was perhaps shy of admitting to a human baseness or a base humanness at the time. I also lacked the vocabulary to describe what I was experiencing when I gazed at the drawings. Yes, I had the words to praise the depictions of ludicrous tantric frisson, but not what the images were doing inside of my head, beyond the obvious.

This obstacle has continued. God, let’s face it. This whole letter was a perfect example. Diving into muddy puddles of boyish memory to distract from the bitter reality of life without Sarah. In my career, too, I fritter on the margins, discussing the era in which a piece was created, the artist’s circumstances, trivia which has no direct bearing on the art itself. I can’t look directly at the sun, so I describe the clouds. I ramble on and on, though I know that beauty doesn’t require a rhapsody. The simplest words will do.

I loved my wife like I have loved nothing else; will love nothing else.

Funny how grief will evade us when we feel ready to confront it, only for it to attack at unforeseen times. Sarah is everywhere I look—her work covers nearly every inch of our home—yet, since her passing, I have felt as though I lost sight of her. My mind, for want of a better scapegoat, has not allowed me to hold her and see her as she is now. My grieving has been impotent.

Such guilt and confusion then, when I erupted with emotion at the news of Eddie’s demise, a man I had scarcely considered for over half a century. Only now, as I bare myself to you, do I realise the significance of both their deaths. Without the one, there would not have been the other. And now both are gone.

Sarah’s reputation is such that it not only precedes (and succeeds) her, but it also precedes me. I am known, in what remains of our greying circles, as her husband, first and foremost. An honorific that I wear with pride. But who will keep Eddie’s spark alive in the same way? Where are his exhibitions? Buried between the shiny pages of your magazine, viewed only by the geriatric or suspicious, demographics that eschew the ease of internet pornography. And why should it be that this man’s talent, squandered or not, should fade ever further into obscurity?

I can give no decent answer to these questions. And so, the purpose of my letter is finally revealing itself. I would like to request archival issues of your magazine, covering Eddie’s entire tenure. You have gained, if nothing else, a new customer.

I think I will manage one last curation of work before I retire for good and lick my wounds in private. It will be an exhibition of Eddie’s art. His pieces will be cut out and stuck to what slivers of real estate are left in my home, between the shoulders of Sarah’s work. His dirty drawings will be boxed in on all sides by the mahogany and oak edges of her paintings, and so Eddie will finally have his frame.

If I were able to, I would thank Eddie for showing me that a life is no more or less than a tireless attempt to align youthful, imagined ideals with the far more exquisite material of reality. There are worse ways to learn this than the sobering realisation that love is not what’s depicted in smutty drawings—art is rarely what is in the frame. I would tell Eddie that his sketches set me on a quest for something that though impossible to find, instead led me somewhere all the more enriching when I failed to find it.

Yours,

F. Liston

————————

Dear Mr. Liston,

We hope that the past issues of Eddie Neuk’s published work, as well as our archived draft material, served you well. You might have noticed that last month’s edition contained an advert for your exhibition, too. Though, we won’t knock you for missing it. Nobody really browses our magazine for the articles.

It sounds like you were able to host an interesting exhibition of Eddie’s and your wife’s work. I’m not sure if you keep up with art journals, but I came across a piece written in The Gaze about your exhibition. In case you missed it, or generally avoid these kinds of things, I attached a copy to this letter. I really think you should read it if, or when, you feel ready.

Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us again if you feel the urge.

Best,

Sam Lobb

Editor-in-chief

Massive Mammaries UK

From the review pages of The Gaze, July

Hip to Hip: A Showcase of Eddie Neuk, appraised by Michelle Payne

F. Liston is a name well-known among those of us that make the effort to seek out the smaller exhibitions dwarfed by the classicist Goliaths of the city. Although I myself have written rather scathingly of some of his museum’s lacklustre offerings over the years, Liston’s latest installation is a beast unlike the others. Or, it’s opening night was.

Ostensibly, this was to be a quiet viewing, open to the public, yes, but advertised in only the least salubrious of publications. The work itself, rather unusually, was in Liston’s own, surprisingly spacious home. The art comprised the smutty illustrations of a man named Eddie Neuk with whom Liston shared his onanistic adolescent years at school. It was advertised as something of a safari of ribald Neuks, positioned among the straight-faced landscapes of Liston’s late wife Sarah Fields—the home is practically wallpapered in private works of hers, never before seen by the public.

All this to say, your intrepid arts correspondent went in expecting at best scandal and at worst pity for a man who seems, in recent months, to have been held under by rampant grief.

Liston opened his exhibition with a terse speech about Neuk and his tenuous relationship with the artist. He was a man dazed, or aloof, as he rounded off his introduction with a declaration that this was to be his last curation. The polite tuts and empathetic groans from the gathering appeared not to penetrate Liston’s obvious malaise, however.

It may well be that others at the opening did find the installation to be scandalous or provocative. The hitherto unseen selection of Fields’ work is unquestionably intriguing to the art appreciator, but there has never been any doubt of her talent. And, of course, Fields was never painting for a menagerie of masturbators any more than Neuk was creating work for an artistic audience. Then, why the forced juxtaposition? The lens through which all of this must be viewed is Liston himself, the man that orchestrated the collision of these two artistic forms.

This, for me, is where the exhibition has its meaning. It has long been known in the British art scene that Liston latches onto talent for want of a modicum of it for his own. He is on record saying as much, in much more acerbic language. And before the reader levels the very same accusation my way, please note that I view Liston as a peer in this regard. After all, what is a critic if not someone with their nose pressed to the windowpane of talent, most of us groping for a handy brick?

Liston at least champions artists with his obscure museum and his exhibitions, most of which must have resulted in financial loss. He is a fringe figure, to be sure, but one in good standing in the arts community at large. And now, with this latest feat, he has achieved the thing he always desired: he is an artist. In fact, for one night only, he became the art.

I give plaudits to Liston for his positioning of the Neuks among the Fields in some cases. One particular combination involving a pastoral scene, wellie boots, and a deluge of fluids generated a consistent rumble of laughter among the gathering. I invite the reader to puzzle out which of these elements belong to which artist.

Titillation and its titters were both elusive for me, in the main, though. Neuk’s work is technically impressive, there’s no doubting it, but also oddly parochial. The illustrations lack an openly punkish, caustic edge, and rather feel like peering into the mind of a man who sketched with one hand while the other was busy.

Some ten minutes in, I found myself looking beyond the breasts and the bucolic and instead focusing on the curator’s habitat. First impressions were of neglect, the grimy struggle of a man forced to condense a king-sized life into one small enough for single-living. As I, and my fellow observers toured the home-cum-gallery, never knowing when and where lithographic labia might suddenly declare themselves, I noticed less the dirty art and more the dirt all around; the forgotten crumbs, the little pyramids of fluff accumulated at the corners of carpets. If it wasn’t for Liston’s very public marriage to Fields, and the outpouring of moribund admiration that filled column inches in the aftermath of her death, I might have taken the home’s state of disrepair to be part of the exhibition itself. A still life, or a comment on the lure of eroticism and how it can threaten a person’s ability to meet basic needs in other facets of life. But I didn’t read it in this way—nor, I think, did any of the others.

After giving his opening remarks and thanking the evening’s attendees for coming, Liston made himself scarce. Perhaps to allow the solemnity of an art gallery to accrete in the homely space. But he could be spotted, here and there, flitting in and out of the gathering, answering a handful of questions as they were volleyed at him in passing. Moments later, he would whisk away again, having made himself a cup of tea or retrieved a book from the coffee table, exiting in a limp flutter of stained dressing gown tassels. The evening wore on, and as I craned over the dining room table to scrutinise Massive Mammaries Ed. 167, November, 1999 — a scratchy illustration of three absurdly curvaceous women’s admirable impression of a human pretzel—I suddenly felt wrong. The piece was tacked to the wall just above a collection of decorative cups and saucers that had the air of heirlooms. This was not discovery, but a kind of predatory voyeurism.

The illustration was, as I’ve said, proficient, and I daresay I could tease some esoteric artistic message from the act of hanging the lewd piece in a room commonly reserved for familial nourishment. But this would be a contrivance beyond what even I feel comfortable writing. Would a well man eat a meal beneath such imagery? Voyeurism mutated into guilt.  Here were we, distant acquaintances and strangers with dirty shoes, standing in the midst of a disrupted homelife. We were invited, yes, coaxed in by the promise of promiscuity, but the fact was that it felt closer to taking advantage of vulnerability. No art is worth intruding on grief in quite this way.

I would love to frame myself as being the catalyst for what followed, but the truth is that I cannot say for certain which of us was the first to act. Something seemed to fall into place at roughly the same time for all the attendees, regardless of whether one was in the cob-webbed dining room or leaning over the dusty living room television set to get a closer look at an awkwardly placed ménage à sept, high on the wall.

All at once, we started to clean.

For even the most seasoned art critic, those of us who have endured countless audience-participatory performance art purgatories, there is nevertheless the hard-wired cardinal rule to never touch the art. This night, though, there was no hesitation among the modest crowd, no apologetic or bashful air as we vaulted the imagined velvet rope. Sleeves were stretched over hands, the better to wipe dirty picture frames. Fluffy pile, the synthetic droppings of doors, was plucked from carpets by hand and rolled into balls to be deposited in the kitchen bin. The engorged kitchen bin was taken out to the back garden to be emptied into a wheelie bin. Around the garden, a small but hardy workforce was wrenching weeds from between the flagstones.

I found myself cleaning the clutter around the edges of the dining room and then hunting for furniture polish to resurrect the parched table. It seemed of paramount importance.

And all around, the hum and chunter of that polite, whispered talk that can only be heard in art galleries. None of us discussed our actions, either from awkwardness or the lack of necessity. But we did discuss Eddie Neuk’s illustrations and the works of Sarah Fields that were being uncovered before us by the indefatigable efforts of a feather duster passed from person to person. One fellow—I never got his name—produced a vacuum cleaner and set to work on the hallway rug; every so often, he would halt, turn the machine off and offer aloud an opinion or thought regarding one of the artworks nearby. We were all experiencing that universal sensation of everyday monotony giving over to piercing clarity or inspiration—when a genius idea might erupt from the mindless suds of the washing up. Only, this time, these monotonies were in service of someone else. The reader may be tempted to scoff, thinking it either an arch piece of performance or that I have lost my edge for denigrating such cod sentimentality. Perhaps it will be a classic case of you-had-to-be-there, because I don’t believe any of us felt the situation to be contrived at the time.

Liston himself seemed initially flabbergasted by the activity; a man hardly known for his acting prowess. The commotion must have disturbed him, or else he had fluttered back among us on some errand or other. I caught sight of him propped up against the corner countertop in his kitchen, trembling as he watched the bustle all around. Some of the others teased snatches of conversation from him as they worked, remarks upon the exhibition and the two artists’ oeuvre.

I loitered on the kitchen threshold, standing to the side to let an elderly woman squeeze past with arms full of laundry. And here was the art, at last: I watched as Liston slowly came to himself, his eyes brightening, his tongue loosening into earnest discourse with those interlocutors closest to him. They discussed the significance, if there was any, of the two artists’ styles being hosted together, what the contrast might be telling us, if he thought Fields herself would enjoy the exhibition. At this last, though I couldn’t at first believe it, Liston laughed aloud and muttered a sotto response drowned by the vacuum cleaner’s predatory return up the hallway behind me.

I was then pulled aside, back into the living room to assist in moving the larger pieces of furniture so that we might clean the skirting boards behind. When I eventually returned to the kitchen, I found a new Liston.

The drab dressing gown had been ditched in favour of a pressed and belted pair of linen trousers and a matching open-collared shirt. The man himself was clean shaven, cheeks the burning pink of a recent scrubbing. He was ducking in and out of the fridge, reading sell-by dates and tossing those things that were too far gone into the waiting mouth of a bin liner held open by a young man I know to be a promising sculptor. Liston was animated, chatting freely and with eloquence, discussing his future plans for his museum’s next exhibition.

I look forward to it.

The works of Eddie Neuk will remain open to the public in F. Liston’s home until the end of August, at which point selected pieces will be moved to the museum proper. Liston’s personal collection of Sarah Fields’ work will not be moved.

         Fields completionists—or those interested in seeing the private collection in the context of Neuk’s work—have until the close of the exhibition to view the pieces in their natural home. Cleaning will be neither required nor expected.

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