Poison Apples
In the dream I woke from this morning, I had started to write something, with the eventual aim of posting it online. It began: “I am thinking of someone I used to be close to, eleven years ago. We have had almost no contact since then.”
That’s all I can remember of what I wrote. He isn’t a dream fiction: there is someone I was close to eleven years ago and with whom I’ve had almost no contact ever since. I have, always, thought of him often, not just because he’s one of the most extraordinary and strange and brilliant people I’ve ever known, but even more so, recently, because a friend and colleague of his — who I met just once, eleven years ago, in a different part of the country — is now a valued colleague, here, and trusted friend, of someone to whom I am close now.
This excellent person wasn’t actually present in the dream. In the dream, I had found a book which collected his essays. It was published by the Penguin Classics imprint so that on the front was printed, in orange, in uppercase, on matt black, just the string of four letters by which he often went online (his initials). The book arrived just at the right time. Wherever it was I was staying — it was rather grand, presumably once the town-house of an aristocrat or something — I had just been introduced to the artwork of my host's father. I didn’t know my host, nor his father. There were several instances of this artwork on the wall of every corridor, each one looking like a reproduction of an oil painting. In every case there was a crisply-rendered apple tree in the foreground, and a patchwork of green and yellow fields in the background.
My host’s father was a slightly gruff and uncommunicative man, whose great hobby and primary pursuit combined two incongruities (for him) which, in combination, became somehow absolutely apt. He had, in his retirement, found himself getting into painting, as well as learning at last how to use computers, and at some point his true calling just clicked into place. Frustrated by his lack of progress in painting by hand, he had stumbled on software for generating art digitally; and now, all afternoon, every afternoon, he trained and prodded neural networks so as to produce his apple tree landscapes automatically, at very high resolution, before sending someone on his staff off into town to have them printed immediately, in very high quality, and expensively framed, and finally hung somewhere on one of the capacious walls.
My host showed me this software in action, and I noticed something. It was striking to me that the gold and green patchworks of fields, which became the backgrounds of these artworks, were all fictional, generated by the software: I’d have assumed my host’s father to have exhibited an annoying, likely problematic nostalgia for his England which required, as an artistic minimum, that a representation of its rolling countryside be faithful to reality. Yet he was, to my surprise, entirely fine with these fields being just whatever the program came up with as looking sufficiently bucolic and pretty, a kind of bullshit Arcadian Albion.
It was far more startling to learn that the apple tree — always one per painting — was never generated by the software. It was found, and selected, by the software, from a curated database of what my host’s father had decided were the most perfect paintings of apple trees, and reproduced exactly. These digital paintings all featured an apple tree appropriated, to the last detail, from a painting done by a Nazi.
I had no idea there was a Nazi tradition of painting apple trees, but it did, in the dream, made the kind of sense to me which it’s hard to nail exactly, now that I’m awake. But it went something like this: as much as we remember the aesthetic that was the formidably powerful Nazi branding, their ideology also needed to appeal to — in fact, comprised, at its core — a kind of twee parochialism; of nostalgic, fundamentally inward-focussed, and passive-aggressively hostile kitsch. It was deliberately a petri-dish for the kind of shit art and shit architecture which is so much more evil than it seems, acting like a kindergarten to nurture and maintain the motives of murderers who will never see themselves as such.
I do feel the need here to say how much I love apples, and apple trees, and that I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with that whatsoever. The just got snarled up in some dream logic. Anyway, at this point, disturbed by the suddenly revealed presence of Nazism in my surroundings, and by the apology for it made by my immediate company, I spotted on a shelf this book of essays, published by the person I used to be close to. The title of each essay in his book was a long, looping sentence, often running to three lines of text. It was heady and intense. The writing reminded me of Lautreamont, of Huysmans, and of Gautier. In reality, I would characterize his writing as I remember it as far, far subtler, significantly less French, and more in the vein of Jonathan Meades (who actually does have a documentary called Gerry Building, about the kitsch of Nazi architecture) — just as strange, but more pleasant and more austere — and, most especially, of John Berger. (No, seriously: you don’t make that comparison lightly, do you.) I woke up before I was able to actually read the book, in the dream, but its mere presence felt like a kind of life-buoy, emotionally. Hopefully it would have been somehow illuminating as to the unsettling art collection I wandered around in.
It was a weird dream, but it was especially weird to wake up and soon realize that digitally-faked English countryside, rendered in all its delusional splendour, with a Nazi apple tree cut and pasted over it automatically, felt entirely topical. If this father and his artworks were real, they’d probably come under the category of ‘outsider art’ — so often a patrician, patronizing name for a patrician, patronizing diagnosis — but I don’t think there is anything ‘outsider’ about the ideology they would conceal, or the sentimentality with which they would sneak it through.