Freedom

The Peel 018

Stefano’s Forehead

Looking at photos of Marianne Faithfull in the wake of her death last week, and Stefano Pilati’s forehead tattoo, and Leigh Bowery in anticipation of the opening of this Tate exhibition, the question of freedom hangs in the air.

What does it mean anyway? And how would you get there if you knew? When discussing AVM out in the world, people tell me I must feel free, that there is surely great freedom in writing about whatever I want. Oh yes, I say, but AVM is my job. And like any workplace, there is expectation, duty, care. It is precisely because I have AVM to return back to, that I can be free.

At fourteen, I got my first job. My mum took me for breakfast on my first day. I drank my coffee from its huge cup, and asked her what the quotidien meant, in the cafe’s name. Everyday, she said, or daily, habitual. In current climes, where the basic human need is unmet, how could we think about freedom? Instead, we seek comfort in aspiration. Obsession with the lives of the eminent, rich and cool. What do you eat to be so goddamn rich? What thread count of bedsheet will ensure success?

Interest in the behaviour of others is baked into the human psyche. But we only ask these questions of the extremes; rich man, beggar man, recovered man, man who spends his fortune denying death, no one in between. Not the nobodies, or everybodies - those risen up high or returned from depths.

Frank Auerbach rises at five, drinks coffee, leaves the house. For an hour, he walks Camden’s streets. He returns before the binmen, after the first market traders have set up their stalls. He works for the rest of the day; visited by sitters, correcting pieces from the day before. He stops for half an hour to eat in the middle of it, and calling it an evening by 6pm. For the next three hours, he is a father, a husband, a friend to Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud. By 9pm he is in bed, in the studio’s adjacent bedroom, and so it repeats. The painter’s obituary in The Financial Times dubbed this a ‘monastic routine’.

Selfish? Boring? To me, it sounds ideal. If it weren’t for their dissolution c.1536, perhaps I’d be doing up the monastery right now. Forgive me for shaking my fists at a holy man on a Sunday, but…Thomas Cromwell! Why I oughta!

Frank’s Feet

Perhaps it’s no surprise that Auerbach’s wife divorced and remarried him. Perhaps she worked out that he wasn’t going to change his life but she wanted to be in it anyway. Not all men are born fathers, and perhaps those men shouldn’t have children. Perhaps the painter must simply be allowed to paint. The painter remained in his studio until his death last year. Frank had his perch.

The landscape of expression seems more conservative, more homogenous than ever. Daring toward boldness, difference and the other, requires an even larger leap. Dear reader, we must do it anyway.

I’m no expert, I’m only here to bring you the words. But as I rebuild my life, having had to leave most all of it behind, I have come to think that it may be the frameworks which allow for freedom. That, and the daily choice to act as though others aren’t watching, judging, they’re not even in the room.

It used to seem that one had to be entirely outward, exposed and raw and ready, so that experience could come by, through, and leave its mark on the other side. Where does safety fit in there? Or tethering, or somewhere at all to return? Maybe it don’t gotta be wild to be free.