The Report: A Novel

I cannot honestly call this a review, given the fact that I haven’t yet finished the work under scrutiny. I may never finish it. Indeed, I feel pretty sure that’s what will happen. I shall try here to explain why.

The work under discussion is a book, apparently a novel (such is its title), by the now legendary, Toronto-based painter Ron Martin. Its full title is The Report: A Novel and, as befits any novel presenting itself as a report, it is written in a stupefyingly starchy, bureaucratic style that renders it simultaneously enraging and compelling. The compelling quality stems, I think, from the feeling you get that these accumulating reports (which serve as chapters)—if painstakingly, tenaciously sluiced like a pan of gravel-occluded gold flakes—might somehow offer riches.

What sort of riches? Well, pursued patiently (with, say, the patience of a saint), there may well turn out to be genuine critico-philosophical treasure somewhere within these obscurely devised, opaquely managed, sometimes funny, sometimes oafish, uphill pages. The payload dangled tantalizingly before the reader speaks drily, earnestly and endlessly of ideas no less searching and sweeping than, for example, the possibility of an understanding of “the creation of thought as an end in art.” As ruminative discourse, this kind of para-thinking, unaided by specificity, reads like the prose of practised politicians: it is momentarily arousing but then, almost immediately afterwards, empty and bathetic.

In this regard, the pages of The Report—so oddly lucid phrase by phrase and yet such a tumultuous shambles in aggregate—very closely resemble, in tone and intellectual ambition, Martin’s “Pages” series of painted notebook pages from 1998. In the act of handwriting his thoughts, scoring them into wet, white acrylic paint on ruled, page-like supports (he mentions their similarity to Hilroy school exercise books), Martin has said—in an artist’s statement on his website—that “the formal aim of the Page demonstrate (sic) there is no gap between the intent of the form and the form that intent takes in the art work.” And so on. And this is exactly the way the eventual “novel” reads as well. In fact, some of it is word-for-word the same.

The novel—which was, in fact, written shortly after the “Pages” works were made—that is to say between 2000 and 2004—is a fable. It is a fable—a quasi-sci-fi sort of fable (rather like a prose equivalent to Ed Wood’s 1959 film Plan 9 From Outer Space)—set mostly in the 23rd century, with creaky flashbacks to our own time. Actually, while the book is a fable, it is also a prophecy-in-reverse, a White Paper, a philosophical clearing house, a cautionary tale and, oddly, a roman à clef.

But who is who, and why? I feel as if I ought to summarize the “plot” of The Report at this point, but I’m not sure it can be done. Not by me, at any rate.

The Report is built upon the existence of some kind of perpetual conflict called The Pea Wars. The book gets off to a bright, confident beginning with what is almost the work’s only crisp, clear sentence: “The Pea Wars have raged on for over 2000 years.” The Pea Wars involve an “entrenched conflict between pea-shooters, and misunderstood and abused viewers.” The use of the word “viewers” would suggest that peashooting (does anybody know what a peashooter is anymore?) is, in fact, about art and critical responses to art, carried on amidst the deep befuddlements of the public. I am assuming this to be true because, on page 6, Martin notes that “Curiously, two thousand years ago the pea wars [sometimes they are capitalized and sometimes not] were staged in buildings designated as ‘public/private galleries….” And so the novel is a progress report on the trajectory of the pea wars and how they got that way, with some highly prolix accounts of certain individuals—rather Ron Martin-like in program and purpose—who modify the forward roll of the author’s fictive unfurling of the history of art and artmaking.

One pleasant point: if there is some occasional leavening of the book’s prose oppressiveness, it lies in Martin’s flair for character names; we encounter a “free publisher” (whatever that is) named Christopher Marker (Christopher Cutts melded with filmmaker Chris Marker?), a critic (I think) named, oddly, Pub Point, an unassailable mega-artist named Roland Whitfield, an artist radical named Jennifer Proof, a Mr. Therpea (“therapy,” get it?), somebody named Muff, who runs the Muff Gallery, Mr. B.E.S., a painter from Earth called Winnifer Goodheart, two entities named Bumpy and Lumpy and even the painter Ron Martin himself—who eventually receives, by surgical implant, Einstein’s brain. The machinations of all these beings could have been rollicking and pointed, I suppose, if only Martin the painter could write (with or without Einstein’s brain). But a Tolkien or a Mervyn Peake he isn’t.

Martin has always expected a lot from his viewers—which is fair enough. In fact his high, rather bullying, inquisitional demands upon anyone who looks at his work or listens to him talk about it can serve to convince you that, especially in this careering age of hand-held surfaces, most artists today are not nearly slow and ponderous enough—that is to say, serious enough in a certain theoretical way. Art today has cultural width, but not much depth. Martin, by contrast, has so much depth he is in continual danger of generating a sort of terminal verticality in what he does or says. The abysses Martin and his work open up can swallow you whole. Which, I suppose, is not always a bad thing.

But sometimes—as in the throes of a text—Martin seems ponderous and off-puttingly self-important. I remember first meeting him in 1968 in London, Ontario, and squirming through an encounter in his studio, during which he intoned a passage (chosen at random, I thought) from a book by philosopher G E Moore. After the sermon-like reading, he carefully replaced the book on the shelf, fixed me with a look of deep, endless meaningfulness, and said to me, “You see? A painting by Ron Martin.” Ever since then, I have had to enjoy his paintings (and I have enjoyed a great many of them, such as the glorious “World” paintings from 1970, the thrilling “To Foil Oils” from 1997 and the works from the inexplicably exciting “All in One” series, 2007–8), despite this indigestibly leaden episode—which I cannot seem to put behind me. Well, we were both young.

Martin’s humourlessness, his relentlessness, can make you crazy. This often works alright in the paintings, where the relentlessness reads as unswervable purposefulness. But prose is quite a different kettle of experience. For voyaging around the right (Einsteinian) brain, Martin has certainly got the stuff. But the stuff rather precipitously deserts him when he writes. The Report is—for me, anyhow—a puzzling affront, a word-hoard (who knows what lurks there in embryonic informe?) without a key. ❚

The Report: A Novel, by Ron Martin, published by the Christopher Cutts Gallery, Toronto, 2012, 110 pages, $40.00.

Gary Michael Dault is a critic, poet and painter who lives near Toronto.