Shivering on the Edge

Consider the private pool and the public pool.

In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, Jay Gatsby’s dead body is found floating in his backyard swimming pool. In John Cheever’s 1964 short story ‘The Swimmer’, Neddy Merrill swims home across his wealthy suburb via the pools of friends to find himself at the end of his life. Actors Alain Delon and Romy Schneider play out their jealousies in the French thriller La Piscine (1969). And Joe Gillis sums up a tragic vector of desire and passion found in private pools in Sunset Boulevard (1950), addressing his own dead body: ‘The poor dope – he always wanted a pool.’

But public pools in literature and art have a different cadence, a buoyant joy at the edge of weightless danger. If I think of public pools, I think of British artist Leon Kossoff ’s noisy oil paintings, a tradition continued by Hurvin Anderson’s large-scale work Audition 1998. I think of Cathy Moriarty’s character in Raging Bull (1980), seducing Robert De Niro at the Tony Dapolito Recreation Center in Manhattan. Or Bill Murray scattering the summer swimmers in Caddyshack (1980) with a chocolate bar, afloat in the deep end. The young, the self-conscious, the ecstatic.

A public pool is an arena. A false grotto, an echo chamber of bodies and joy.

I was 14 when I earned my Bronze Cross badge, which in Canada meant I could apply to work as a junior lifeguard at the high-school swimming pool. I filled out an application and waited in the pool office, a place I’d come to know over the past four years from logging hours at public swim, taking lessons and hauling myself through swim team practices.

Five years earlier, when I was nine, I had seen two lifeguards making out in the same office. One of them, Dave, coached my summer swim team. He was puppy-stocky and sandy-blonde. Beth had red hair, wore aviator sunglasses indoors, and her shorts looked perfect on her waist. I’d crept in, dripping, to replace a Band Aid. Beth had hoisted herself onto the orange Formica countertop. Dave stood between her spread knees, facing her, hands on her lower back. Their eyes were closed. I stood there for a beat, feeling a new, weird heat from each of them as they changed into different people; a warmth starting at the sides of my scalp. I felt younger and older at once. I shimmered in that second, knowing they hadn’t noticed me. I turned and left, slipping back into the waters of the deep end.

I’ve always liked the similarity between the words ‘literal’ and ‘littoral’. The former has to do with a clarity of written meaning. But the latter is blurry – the edge of a shore, the slope into the water and, more symbolically, an undefined area where things wash up. In a primordial sense, it’s where our aquatic ancestors first took to the land. The littoral exists in shorelines but not, traditionally, in pool architecture. Pools are generally cuboids, with sheer sides and right angles. They are artificial, sui generis, not replicas of nature. Their abstraction of nature seems almost military to me, a fetish of straightness and control. But inside the pool, the action turns primeval. The diving platform is like a food chain. An Aztec pyramid, bodies plummeting. Poolside presentation, preening, peacock, primp. Thrashing, gasping, shivering.

In my class for the senior Minnow badge, all eight of us were taught basic water safety. We sat on the deck in our wet swimsuits. We took turns simulating death. One half of the class waited in the changing room while the other half arranged themselves in positions of peril. ‘Look around the deck!’ our instructor bellowed as we rushed out to assess the situation, ‘Is there broken glass?’ One child lay on the blue tiles, pretending not to breathe. Another treaded water, faking distress. Yet another wandered the deck, calling for her mother.

Cautionary tales and myths have played out waterside: Narcissus, The Lady of the Lake, Yeats’s Stolen Child. Pools are foils. They either reflect or conceal. You’re either in or out. Wet or dry. It probably began with Wagner, with his Venusberg Grotto, in the opera Tannhäuser (1845). If Wagner’s grotto was a womb and locus of erotic adventure and contest, then the indoor public swimming pool is a similar, more modern, civic and coliseum model. It is, as Hurvin Anderson puts it so well in his painting’s title: an audition.

In all cases where pools intersect with art, there is transformation, sex, darkness and the refraction of light, of folly and humanity. A pool invites experience but restores innocence. It tests survival, both physical and artistic. Grotto or ghetto. Old or young. Sink or swim. In his other paintings, Anderson places figures in arenas of sport or leisure that feel conditional, or boundaried. A court is fenced; a house is gated. The tension in his Audition feels particular to adolescence and acceptance, and makes me think of another coming-of-age pool scene, the one in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). In it, the character Cameron Frye – catatonic with stress on realising he won’t get away with having taken his father’s prized Ferrari for a spin – tips himself off the diving board and, like The Graduate’s (1967) Benjamin Braddock, sinks to the bottom of the pool. His friend Ferris Bueller pulls him to safety and Cameron is reborn – he decides to stand up to his controlling and cold parent, and ultimately ‘kills the car’, sending it through the garage glass wall and into a ravine. Ferraricide. Who among us does not want absolution? Or at least ablution.

^{Hurvin Anderson, until 23 August}

^{Leanne Shapton is a Canadian artist and writer who lives in New York. Her book, Swimming Studies, a memoir of competitive swimming, is published by Daunt Books.}

^{Supported by The Parker Foundation and the Huo Family Foundation. With additional support from the Hurvin Anderson Exhibition Supporters Circle, Tate Patrons and Tate Americas Foundation.}