Jonathan Dee - Palladio

Well, that was a fucking waste of time, she said. Where have you been, anyway?

DEX, ACCORDING TO Elaine, was no help at all. He flat out refused to go to New York and do the filming for her; she made it clear he’d be very well compensated for it, but he said the money wasn’t an issue. Then, as much as she tried to keep him on the topic, he kept asking her biographical questions, what had she done before this, what sort of writing had she always dreamed of doing, how did Mal recruit her, etc. He wanted to know how much control Mal exercised over her work, over everyone’s work; he wanted her to divulge the identity of the client who was paying for the production of this so-called short film she was working on. When she answered him — Mal doesn’t control content; there was no client — he said he didn’t believe her.

I placated her by promising we’d spend the next morning on the phone lining up a crew to get her airplane shot for her. Then I went off to find Dex, really just to apologize to him for any misunderstanding. Colette told me Mal had taken him out in the Triumph for a drive to see James Madison’s house; Molly, too.

* * *

IT MIGHT SEEM odd that when Palladio is as busy as it’s ever been, at the apex of its influence and success, its leader feels free to go off on these joyrides through the Virginia countryside. Mal’s traveled a lot this spring, too, sometimes on a kind of quasi-official business (he’s now on the board of the Guggenheim in Bilbao, for instance), sometimes just for the hell of it. He bought a house in Umbria, and he’s been over there twice to supervise its renovation. He’s doing less and less work these days, it’s true; but that’s all by design, a design he discusses only with me.

Not that he lacks for things to do, or at least for opportunities. For a period in the aftermath of that speech at NYU, half my day was spent sifting through and then politely rejecting all the offers that came his way. My sense of it is that there’s a kind of ego conflict going on within Mal right now. He’s well known, on a national, maybe even an international, scale, and he gets a lot of what’s generally classified as star treatment. People ask for his autograph; total strangers show up on the Palladio grounds to take his picture or to try to talk to him or put in his hands something they’re working on. Magazines arrive in the mail with articles devoted to him, some of them on a scholarly level, some treating him as just another element of the pop-culture firmament, wondering who he’s dating (nobody, is the answer to that one), reprinting his high school yearbook photo.

Having that kind of talk in your ear, I don’t care who you are, has to have an effect. There’s a part of Mal that sees this space being cleared for him, this space in the national psyche, and he wants to take his rightful place in it. He wants to respond, though up until now he hasn’t, whenever some reporter calls up to ask for a quote on the awarding of the Pritzker Prize or the role of propaganda in Castro’s Cuba or how he would have advised Bill Gates before his testimony on Capitol Hill.

But the true Mal, to me, is the facilitator, the one who stays behind the scenes. Real power is secure enough not to feel this constant need to show itself. I can understand that kind of feeling, actually. He doesn’t want the focus on himself. It’s counterproductive. It goes beyond simple modesty; I wouldn’t call Mal a modest man, exactly. He wants praise, but he wants it for his work, and so, in order to prevent people from making the reductive mistake of worshiping him, he hides himself from view. That’s one reason why he has me.

Anyway, in a nutshell, what he tells me sometimes is that his greatest achievement when all is said and done will be his own obsolescence — the withering away of the state, he calls it, which I subsequently learned is a phrase from the Communist Manifesto. In the early days, he had to ride the artists constantly, try all kinds of tricks to get them thinking out of the box, to break down the culturally imposed barriers between their own ways of thinking (about art, about advertising, about money, about form, about originality) and his vision of the way things might be, ought to be done. But once they get it — once they understand, and internalize, that new way of thinking — they don’t need him anymore. The more they work, the more they establish a tradition, one from which the next generation of artists will spring. Mal is laboring to make himself disappear. If he also seems ambivalent about this idea at times, I think that’s understandable.

* * *

MAYBE I HAD an original agenda in asking Dex and Molly into the house for a few days; but if so, Dex certainly had his own in accepting, and he hasn’t lost sight of it. He goes right around me, it seems, and through Colette to get to Mal, figuring, I suppose, that all he needs is enough time in which to ingratiate himself before Mal will relent and allow himself and all of Palladio to become the subject of some hip indie nonfiction film.

In one respect he’s been successful: Mal seems infatuated with him and with Molly, to the point where the three of them have spent much of the last few days together. Mal took them out to Monticello, he took them out to Il Cantinori and also to his favorite barbecue place out on Route 20; he arranged for a screening of Throw Down in the ballroom and of the Matthew Barney Cremaster films; he’s even had them up to the sanctum sanctorum, Mal’s own living quarters on the fourth floor of the east wing, where usually only I’m invited — and even then only in the little dining alcove, never in his bedroom at the opposite end of the hall. (Not that Mal makes me feel unwelcome — just out of respect for his privacy; besides, I’d have no reason to be in there anyway.) Of course there were times during the day when Mal was unavailable to them for one reason or another, and during those periods I’d sometimes see Dex just strolling through the ground floor, down to the basement, peeking into the different rooms, trying, somewhat insensitively I thought, to engage the artists in conversation about what they were working on, what they thought about Palladio itself.

Then today Fiona came to see me in my office. She’d seen Throw Down the previous night, by herself in the ballroom, and she was powerfully impressed. She’d been thinking recently about a video installation, a sort of after-Warhol piece in which she’d be filmed while sleeping, only every time she fell asleep, she wanted the person doing the filming to wake her up again, by poking her, making a loud noise, whatever was necessary. She envisioned this going on for ten or twelve hours; she wanted a record of her reactions. This is actually a somewhat chaste-sounding project for Fiona, who’s about five feet tall, a voluptuous and deadly serious young woman whose work usually involves a strong, some would say discomfiting, element of sexuality. Would Dex, she wondered, be interested in collaborating on it with her?

Let’s find out, I told her. I looked around for him or for Molly but they were out somewhere. So I wrote Dex a note and slipped it under the door to their third-floor bedroom.

He turned up in my office a few hours later. We talked idly about the virtues and the downsides, for an artist, of living in New York, while my assistant Tasha went downstairs to round up Fiona. When everyone was seated, Tasha left and closed the door behind her.

Fiona started by complimenting him effusively on his one film, a ritual Dex made no effort to hurry to a close. Then, leaning forward in her chair, she described for him the project she had in mind. It was just as she had described it for me with the exception of the added detail that she’d be sleeping naked. She knows how to sell herself, that’s for sure.