The Map and the Territory (37 page)

One morning, as he sipped a glass of Chablis, Jed was approached by the bearded man with the ponytail—one of the first inhabitants he’d noticed in the village. The latter, without knowing exactly his line of work, had identified him as an
artist
. He himself painted “a little,” he confessed, and offered to show him his work.

Formerly a mechanic at a garage in Courbevoie, he’d borrowed money to set up in the village, where he’d started a quad-bike rental business—fleetingly, Jed thought again of the Croat in the avenue Stephen-Pichon, and his sea scooters. Personally, this man’s passion was for Harley-Davidsons, and for a quarter of an hour Jed had to put up with the description of a machine that had pride of place in his garage, and of the way in which, year after year, he’d customized it. That said, quads were in his view “beautiful machines,” which allowed “fun rides.” And on the maintenance level, he pointed out with common sense, it was, after all, less restrictive than a horse; well, let’s say business was good. He had no reason to complain.

His paintings, manifestly inspired by
heroic fantasy
, mainly depicted a
bearded, ponytailed warrior who bestrode an impressive metal charger, obviously a space-opera interpretation of his Harley. Sometimes he was fighting tribes of slimy zombies, sometimes armies of military robots. Other canvases, figuring rather the
warrior’s repose
, revealed a typically male imagination based on eager sluts, with avid lips, generally going about in pairs. In short, they were autofictions, imaginary self-portraits; his faulty painting technique unfortunately did not enable him to achieve the level of hyperrealism and brushstrokes classically required by
heroic fantasy
. All in all, Jed had rarely seen anything so ugly. He hunted for an appropriate comment for more than an hour, while the other man tirelessly took his paintings out of their boxes, and ended up mumbling that it was work of “great visionary power.” He immediately added that he had kept no contact with the art world. Which was, in fact, the gospel truth.

The methodology of the work that occupied Jed Martin during the last thirty years of his life would have remained completely unknown to us if he hadn’t, a few months before his death, agreed to give an interview to a young female journalist from
Art Press
. Although the interview takes up just over forty pages of the magazine, he speaks almost exclusively about the technical procedures used for the fabrication of those strange ideograms, now kept at the MoMA in Philadelphia, that are like nothing else in his previous work, nor, in fact, like anything known, and which, thirty years later, continue to arouse in visitors a sense of apprehension mixed with unease.

As for the meaning of this work which had occupied him during all the last part of his life, he refuses all comment. “I want to give an account of the world … I want simply to
give an account of the world
,” he repeats for more than a page to the young journalist, who is paralyzed by the situation, and turns out to be incapable of stopping this senile chatter, and this is perhaps for the best: the chatter of Jed Martin unfolds, senile and free, essentially concentrating on questions of diaphragm, amplitude of focusing, and compatibility between softwares. It is a remarkable interview, where the young journalist “let her subject speak,” as was commented drily by
Le Monde
, which was dying of jealousy at having missed out on this exclusive, which led a few months later to her being
appointed editor in chief of their magazine—on the very day that Jed Martin’s death was announced.

Even if he speaks at length about it over several pages, the camera equipment used by Jed had, in itself, nothing very remarkable about it: a Manfrotto tripod, a Panasonic semi-professional cameoscope—which he’d bought for the exceptional luminosity of its sensor, allowing him to film in almost total darkness—and a hard disk of two teraoctets linked to the USB outlet of the cameoscope. For more than two years, every morning except Tuesday (always reserved for shopping), Jed Martin loaded this equipment into the trunk of his Audi before driving along the private road he’d built for himself, which crossed his estate. It was scarcely possible to venture beyond this road: the grass, very high and dotted with thorn bushes, quickly led to a dense forest, with an impenetrable floor. The trace of paths through the forest had long been obliterated. The edges of the ponds, dotted with short grass which had difficulty growing on the spongy ground, remained the only more or less accessible area.

Although he had at his disposal an extensive range of lenses, he almost always used a Schneider Apo-Symmar, which had the astonishing particularity of opening to 1.9 while reaching a maximum focal length of 1200 mm in 24-by-26 equivalent. The choice of his subject “responded to no pre-established strategy,” he asserts, several times, to the journalist; he “was simply following the spur of the moment.” In any case, he almost always used very high focal lengths, concentrating occasionally on a branch of a beech tree waving in the wind, sometimes on a tuft of grass, the top of a bush of nettles, or an area of loose and saturated earth between two puddles. Once the framing was done, he plugged the power supply of the cameoscope into the cigarette lighter socket, switched it on, and walked back home, leaving the motor to run for several hours, sometimes during the rest of the day and even overnight—the capacity of the hard disk would have allowed him almost a week of continuous shooting.

The responses based on the appeal to the “spur of the moment” are essentially disappointing for a general-interest magazine, and the young journalist, this time, tries to find out more: after all, she surmises, the shots done on a certain day were to influence the shots done on following
days; a project had to be gradually elaborated and constructed. Not at all, maintains Martin: each morning, when he started the car, he had no idea what he intended to film; every day, for him, was a new day. And this period of total uncertainty was to last, he adds, almost ten years.

He then treated the images obtained according to a method that belongs essentially to montage, even if it is a very particular form of montage, where he occasionally keeps only a few photograms out of three hours’ shooting; but it is well and truly montage that enables him to achieve those moving plant tissues, with their carnivorous suppleness, peaceful and pitiless at the same time, which constitute without any doubt the most successful attempt, in Western art, at representing how plants see the world.

Jed Martin “had forgotten”—that is, in any case, his assertion—what had pushed him, after about ten days uniquely devoted to filming vegetation, to return to the portrayal of industrial objects—first a cell phone, then a computer keyboard, a desk lamp, and many other objects—that were very diverse at the beginning, before gradually he concentrated almost exclusively on those containing electronic components. His most impressive images remain undoubtedly those of computer motherboards on the scrapheap, which, filmed without any indication of scale, resemble strange futurist citadels. He filmed these objects in his cellar, against a neutral gray background destined to disappear after their insertion in videos. In order to accelerate the process of decomposition, he doused them with diluted sulfuric acid, which he bought in carboys—a preparation, he added, usually used for killing weeds. Then he also did a montage, sampling a few photograms separated by long intervals; the result is very different from simple accelerated motion, in that the process of decomposition, instead of being continuous, takes place by levels, by sudden upheavals.

After fifteen years of shooting and montage, he now had at his disposal about three thousand modules, all of which were more or less strange, and of an average duration of three minutes. But his work only really began to develop when he went in search of double-exposure software.
Used mainly in the early years of silent cinema, double exposure had almost completely disappeared from the production of professional filmmakers, as from that of amateur video makers, even those who worked in the artistic field; it was considered to be a dated, outmoded special effect, due to its unashamedly self-proclaimed lack of realism. After a few days’ searching, however, he ended up discovering a simple double-exposure freeware. He contacted its author, who lived in Illinois, and asked him if he would agree, for a fee, to develop for him a more complete version of his software. They struck a deal, and a few months later Jed Martin had exclusive use of a quite extraordinary tool, which had no equivalent on the market. Based on a principle quite similar to that of Photoshop layers, it allowed you to superimpose up to ninety-six videotapes, by setting for each of them the brightness, saturation, and contrast; by making them, also, progressively pass to the foreground, or disappear in the depth of the image. It was this software that allowed him to obtain those long, hypnotic shots where the industrial objects seem to drown, progressively submerged by the proliferation of layers of vegetation. Occasionally they give the impression of struggling, of trying to return to the surface; then they are swept away by a wave of grass and leaves and plunge back into a plant magma, at the same time as their surfaces fall apart, revealing microprocessors, batteries, and memory cards.

Jed’s health was declining: he could no longer eat anything other than dairy products and sugary foods, and he began to suspect that he would, like his father, die of cancer of the digestive tract. Some examinations done at the hospital in Limoges confirmed this prognosis, but he refused to be treated, to begin radiation therapy or other heavy treatments, and just took comfort medication—that relieved his pains, which were particularly acute in the evening—and massive doses of sleeping pills. He made his last will and testament, leaving his fortune to various animal-protection associations.

At around the same time, he began filming photographs of all the people he had known, from Geneviève to Olga, including Franz, Michel Houellebecq, his father, some other people too, in fact all those he had photographs of. He fixed them to a neutral gray waterproof canvas, and shot them just in front of his home, this time letting natural decay take
its course. Subjected to the alternations of rain and sunlight, the photographs crinkled, rotted in places, then decomposed into fragments, and were totally destroyed in the space of a few weeks. More curiously, he acquired toy figurines, schematic representations of human beings, and subjected them to the same process. The figurines were more resilient, and in order to accelerate their decomposition, he again had to use his carboys of acid. He now fed exclusively on liquids, and every evening a nurse came to give him an injection of morphine. But in the morning he felt better, and until his last day he could work for at least two or three hours.

It was thus that Jed Martin
took his leave
of an existence for which he’d never totally signed up. Some images now returned to him, and, curiously, while his erotic life had had nothing exceptional about it, they were above all images of women. Geneviève, sweet Geneviève, and poor Olga pursued him in his dreams. He found himself remembering Marthe Taillefer, who had revealed desire to him, on a balcony in Port-Grimaud, at the moment when, taking off her Lejaby bra, she had exposed her breasts. She was then fifteen, he thirteen. That very evening he had masturbated, in the toilet of the company flat that had been allocated to his father for overseeing the building site, and had been astonished to find so much pleasure in it. There returned to him other memories of supple breasts, agile tongues, and tight vaginas. Come on, he hadn’t had such a bad life.

About thirty years before (and it is the only indication outside the strictly technical plan he gives in the interview to
Art Press
), Jed had made a trip to the Ruhrgebiet, where a big retrospective of his work was being organized. From Duisburg to Dortmund, from Bochum and Gelsenkirchen, most of the old steel factories had been transformed into places for exhibitions, shows, and concerts, at the same time as the local authorities tried to set up an
industrial tourism
, based on the re-creation of the working-class way of life at the beginning of the twentieth century. In fact, the whole region, with its blast furnaces, slag heaps, abandoned railway tracks where freight wagons rusted, its lines of identical and neat
and tidy terraced houses, sometimes brightened up by allotments, was like a conservatory of the first Industrial Age in Europe. Jed had been impressed at the time by the menacing density of the forests that, after scarcely a century of inactivity, surrounded the factories. Only those which could be adapted to their new cultural vocation had been rehabilitated, while the others were gradually disintegrating. These industrial colossi, where once was concentrated the bulk of German productive capacity, were now rusted, half-collapsed, and plants colonized the former workshops, creeping between ruins that they gradually covered with impenetrable jungle.

The work that occupied the last years of Jed Martin’s life can thus be seen—and this is the first interpretation that springs to mind—as a nostalgic meditation on the end of the Industrial Age in Europe, and, more generally, on the perishable and transitory nature of any human industry. This interpretation is, however, inadequate when one tries to make sense of the unease that grips us on seeing those pathetic Playmobil-type little figurines, lost in the middle of an abstract and immense futurist city, a city which itself crumbles and falls apart, then seems gradually to be scattered across the immense vegetation extending to infinity. That feeling of desolation, too, that takes hold of us as the portraits of the human beings who had accompanied Jed Martin through his earthly life fall apart under the impact of bad weather, then decompose and disappear, seeming in the last videos to make themselves the symbols of the generalized annihilation of the human species. They sink and seem for an instant to put up a struggle, before being suffocated by the superimposed layers of plants. Then everything becomes calm. There remains only the grass swaying in the wind. The triumph of vegetation is total.