Catalogue Raisonne Read Online Free

couldn’t remember what they’d done before she arrived – things I’d said, and still said, about Angela too, but was irritated to hear in their mouths – my first thought was that she was a receptionist. Did that make me a snob? It was a creeping affliction. And then there was the fact that I’d got her the gallery job. Given her an inside line on it anyway. It all swirled together muddily.
    So muddily that I was relieved when Ramon summoned me to start pulling things we’d need out of the jumble. L, when he finished primping, helped too. As the freight elevator hauled us slowly upward, Ramon pulled his shirt collar away from his neck. I caught his eye.
    â€œI know.” It was just the newness, or being outside the gallery, that had made the new clothes feel different. Now that we were back inside, moving and lifting, the itching was back too.
    â€œSixty percent cotton again. So important this show, you’d think they coulda gone all the way. Give us one hundred percent.”
    â€œOur job is to look good, Ramon. Not be comfortable.”
    â€œS’pose to be alert, man. ‘Security is Job 1,’ remember? How I’m gonna catch someone, I’m always scratching and sweating?”
    For a guy who’d grown up in Stoney Creek, sometimes Ramon laid on the Spanish speech rhythms of his parents a little too thickly. It seemed, just faintly, like a bid for street credibility, and beneath him somehow. A lack of vanity was central to his cool.
    Upstairs in the MacMahon Gallery, the hippy silk-screener was still doing what appeared to be the same thing, to the same part of the panel. Either he’d made a mistake and was doing it over, or else the
process took longer than I realized. I’d stood by many times while he worked without really bothering to take it in.

    The last two hours before any show were sheer madness. It didn’t matter how carefully you planned, how many hands were helping, or how early a start you got. Angela had done some amateur theatre before we’d met, and she said backstage opening night was the same. Last-minute frenzy was the law.
    Pictures still to be hung – assisting Hans and Peter with that. Paint touch-ups on walls, Polyfilla and paint on missed nail holes and hollows. People walking as quickly as possible on criss-crossing paths, carrying sculpture pedestals, catalogue boxes, sculptures, paintings, a coffee urn. The walkie-talkie squawking another delivery downstairs, another volunteer who needed help up with the freight elevator. Lights to be mounted, adjusted, fine-tuned . . . then done again when a spot of glare was noticed from a certain angle. Flowers. More flowers. A new pen – “One that works!” – for the Comments book. Certain labours where groups of men moved or raised or toppled heavy objects, making one think of jungle peons erecting stone gods, or Egyptian slaves hoisting their blocks. Three of us wheeling the grand piano from a storage room to the lobby. Easing down one of the dividers onto a dolly, pushing it into the freight elevator. Raising another panel – “On three: one, two, heave!” – then six or eight arms sliding it a few inches across the carpet to the indicated spot. Shouldering it back, then forward, then back, into alignment. A volunteer with a tablecloth she needed help folding – Hans cutting in: “Ve’re too bissy now!”
    Everyone showing his temper in his own fashion. Hans barking more, his shed German accent returning. Peter working even more precisely, and faster. Walter’s voice getting a bit quieter and steadier. Neale pointing.
    Finally though, as always, there came a point – a series of points, each one slightly more optimistic than the one before – where having the gallery ready for eight o’clock seemed conceivable, then possible,
then probable, then certain. When the third stage had been reached, Hans sent us down in