C. D. Rose’s latest novel is a surreal joyride through the world of the experimental installation artist Sigismunda Conrad and her exhibition “We Live Here Now”, which closes abruptly when it causes staff and visitors to disappear without trace. Things get stranger following Conrad’s disappearance and the weird experiences of the crew who worked on the project, including visions of burning ships and infinity symbols.
The novel unfurls over twelve chapters, bookended with essays by the critic and Conrad devotee Che Horst-Prosier. The challenge Che faces is saying anything substantial about the artist. “Let me propose a question”, he writes. “What do you remember about Sigismunda Conrad? It seems straightforward enough, doesn’t it? But try answering.” This turns out to be a persistent problem people face when talking or thinking about Conrad: facts are vague; memories are partial; images blur. Her works are never really described; all we get is a sense of their bewildering effects.
Rose deftly handles the ensemble of technicians, scientists, dealers (art and drug) and hangers-on of Conrad’s network. There is Kasha, an “art consultant” who helps private buyers to save on their taxes by offshoring artworks. There is the sound engineer Rachel Noyes, “stuck in a bland apartment in a fashionable part of Berlin” waiting for a Zoom call from “someone she didn’t know to offer her an unspecified amount of money to do she did not know what”. Oreste Lauro, Che’s main source on Conrad, assiduously records his near-death experiences. (He is on number forty-six so far.) Conrad’s photographer, Ryan Vaunt, is commissioned by the influential arts podcaster Zinnia Laerp for a portrait of her father, a billionaire whose business interests include cables, shipping and weapons. Thomas Vyre, a theoretical physicist with whom Conrad worked, is trying to solve an extreme case of stolen identity. Ton, a musician, is obsessed with a video of kids scaling a derelict Soviet radio tower. The jobbing actor Joe Coyle shoots a film on the Scottish island where Conrad owns a studio hangar and where a missile test site operates. Kasha’s drug- dealing boyfriend, Silas, forges some Conrads, but he is soon obsessed with having one himself.
The characters are drawn into each other’s orbits through recurring experiences and motifs: mechanical humming, people waving from afar, unusual clouds, surveillance, memory loss, technology failing unexpectedly. In the background lingers the rumour that Conrad is working on something new.
In Rose’s blackly comic vision of the contemporary art scene, we find a culture infected by digital utopianism and devotion to “capital”. Characters endure inane speeches about NFTs, cryptocurrency, AI and “flow”. A group of iPad-wielding business representatives meet various people to purchase artworks, always in the same outfit (sunglasses, bland suit, no tie), always speaking in “standard corporate hokum”, usually without much indication that they know or care about what they are buying. Rose parodies brilliantly the junk language of “disruptor” tech companies and the sinister activities that it can obscure. When Zinnia gives an interview at an art lecture by the “greatest living thinker”, Lukas Lemnis, hosted in one of her father’s arms factories, it is unclear whether she is commenting on creative practices or a military system.
Up until now … we’ve worked with non-static location, a kind of body without organs – or, maybe, organs without a body! … We were very much against physical space but then we realised we had to rethink space, territory, consider what it could be, project it into a future.
Perhaps she is talking about drones. But whatever the case, all she really cares about is whether her Deleuze reference is “too passé”.
Rose has rightly been likened to Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino and Don DeLillo, though his main cast are often more sympathetically drawn than such comparisons might suggest. At the Lemnis lecture, Rachel despairs of the “artspeak” chatter around her: “everything’s always ‘addressing,’ ‘interrogating’ or ‘mediating,’ … I just want something to be what it is”. Her plea goes unheard. Attention, not substance, is the currency. “Everyone was doing the artlook. No one was looking at each other. They were looking for someone who might be more interesting.” By never quite coming into view, Conrad stays the most attention-grabbing character – and artwork – of all.
We Live Here Now is a deeply satisfying, witty literary mystery that ducks and weaves through pressing ideas about how art shapes the way we look at the world, and the forces at work trying to dictate what we see.
W. J. Davies writes for the TLS, Exacting Clam and Review 31, among other publications
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