The Museum of Modern Love

by Heather Rose

‘Are you angry with me, Alice?’

  ‘No. Maybe. Disappointed, I think.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure what to make of anything really. I think that other husbands . . . look, forget it. I think she wants you to be happy.’

  ‘So that’s a crime? You think I don’t feel guilty?’

  ‘I don’t think you do, Dad. I’m not even sure you should. And part of me even admires that you can be so selfish. That she can be so . . . generous.’

  ‘Generous! I’m complying with her wishes, and all I get is criticism.’

  ‘I guess you’ve got no excuses.’

  ‘No excuses?’

  ‘For not getting all the music done that you ever wanted to.’

  But somehow it was still about Lydia. If his next album was a success it would be because Lydia had bought him the Steinway for his birthday. Lydia had given him space and time and all the money he’d ever need.

  HEALAYAS BREEN WATCHED THE PATTERN of the Marina Abramović performance. The way the artist dropped her head as soon as a guest left and closed her eyes. Then she lifted her shoulders a little, stretched in minute ways, breathed, settled, and when she was ready, she lifted her head and met the gaze of the next person.

  Healayas wondered what Abramović ate for breakfast to sustain a day’s sitting. Quinoa? Almonds? Spirulina smoothies? Fish? She’d read that Abramović had been a vegetarian since scrubbing all those cow bones in Venice. The performance that had won her the Gold Lion.

  Healayas waited, her legs crossed, her scarf pulled over her hair. The old habit of the hijab. And so effective at stopping all conversation with the people in the queue. MoMA had made Abramović mass market. MoMA had given her a new following and the following was growing. What it would grow to, Healayas didn’t know, but she suspected Abramović would become a household name, even if they didn’t pronounce it correctly. She had heard all sorts of variations. This show was too brave, too simple, too hard not to be noticed far and wide.

  The pain Abramović was in wasn’t obvious. And there was no nudity. No suggestion of sexuality. Up until now, Abramović’s work had been an acquired taste. Not everyone could relate to the rigour or the endurance. Cutting herself with razors. The flogging. Eating onions. The strange crystal phase Abramović had gone through after the walk on the Great Wall of China. But suddenly all sorts of people were magnetised by her.

  Abstinence, Healayas knew, was the last thing most Americans wanted to experience. Discomfort too. Much better if someone else was feeling it for you. Even better if you could laugh at it. Reality TV. The Jackass phenomenon. Johnny Knoxville and Spike Jonze had tapped into the powerful urge to use pain as a device. Mass market it may be, buffoonery for boys, but it was hard core and she understood that.

  The first time Healayas had ever come across Marina Abramović was a photograph of a performance called Rhythm 10. Abramović was kneeling on the floor with a large kitchen knife in one hand. Her other hand was splayed out on a piece of white paper.

  The black-and-white film had been grainy, the sound indistinct. Abramović had fanned twenty knives in front of her. She primed one tape deck then, taking the first knife, she tapped the point fast between each of her splayed fingers like a Slavic drinking game. Every time she cut herself, she chose a new knife. When she had used all twenty knives, she stopped the tape recording. She then listened back to the rhythm of the blades as they beat the floor. Priming the second tape recorder, she let the original tape roll and mimicked the exact pattern, cutting herself in exactly the same place at the same time, changing knives with each cut. Then she played the two tape recorders together listening to the original pattern and the new pattern. The mistakes of the past and the mistakes of the present were synchronised. It had taken place in Edinburgh in 1973, the same year Healayas was born. Healayas had questions but Abramović wasn’t talking to the media for the seventy-five days of The Artist is Present. Healayas wondered if she was talking to anyone at all or if she remained silent in the mornings and the evenings away from here. How hard was that silence? Hardship was in her blood. But hardship had been learned as well. Healayas wondered if the years away from Serbia, the years crossing Europe, living in Amsterdam, teaching in Germany, the life she had here in New York, had filed down the ravages of Abramović’s childhood. Had a life of intense experiences smoothed her like a pebble on the ocean floor, polished her into the radiant woman sitting at the heart of the atrium, this statue of herself, immovable, unknowable?

  Abramović had once said that in theatre the blood wasn’t real. The swords weren’t real. But in performance art, everything was real. The knives cut, the whip ripped skin, the ice blocks froze flesh and the candles burned. For one piece, called Lips of Thomas, a naked Abramović had lain on her back on huge blocks of ice forming a cross. Then she stood up and used a razor blade to slowly cut a large five-pointed star into her stomach. After each cut she ate from a kilo-jar of honey and drank from a bottle of red wine. She whipped her back over and over with a cat-o’-nine tails until her skin burned in a mass of red welts. Donning a soldier’s cap, she stood and listened to a Serbian hymn of war while holding a white flag stained from her bleeding stomach. For seven hours she repeated these actions in a cycle of freeze, cut, honey, wine, whip, song. When she’d first performed Lips of Thomas in Germany, she had been thirty-two. At the Guggenheim in 2005 she had been fifty-seven.

  Did Abramović leave MoMA each afternoon for a five-star hotel where she was cossetted by room service, masseurs and shiatsu therapists? Or did she go home to her Greenwich loft with her own pillow? What were her dreams? Healayas wondered if, when Abramović closed her eyes at night, she saw the faces of all these strangers looking into her, wanting to catch her soul amid the shadows, wanting to draw a little piece of courage from her, wanting to scratch a length of skin from her cheek and eat it like a wafer from the altar of truth.

  Healayas heard one of the people in the queue enthusing about the David Altmejd giant at the New Museum. She had loved it too. He was one of the sexiest men she had ever seen, all fibreglass and steel, a bird on his shoulder. Someone behind her was saying how inconvenient it was that the National Library reading room was closed while a performance took place each afternoon. And two people to her right were discussing the pleasures of reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog. As the morning stretched on into afternoon, the queue continued to deliver people to Abramović’s table. She is teaching them about time, Healayas thought. I have sat here for three hours, the morning has slipped away, and I have done nothing but think. She couldn’t remember the last time she had done such a thing.

  At last her turn came. She discarded her scarf, slipped off her shoes, crossed into the square and took her place. Abramović lifted her head and their eyes met. It was the same tangible effect as the previous time, earlier in the week, as if she’d been plugged into an old resonance.

  She settled into the gaze between them, aware of chatter and movement in the atrium. But it was peripheral. She focused on the world of Abramović’s dark, moist eyes and pale mouth. She noticed her own eyes blinking, but Abramović hardly blinked at all. Healayas stilled her breathing and reached into the darkness beyond Abramović’s eyes.

  She saw white linen on the table, silverware and wineglasses half full. She began spreading a sliver of toast on her plate with parfait. She bit into it and the toast crunched between her teeth. The texture hit the roof of her mouth, the flavour languid and creamy. She detected salmon, black caviar, sour cream, dill, black pepper.

  Instead of Abramović, Tom sat opposite her in a white shirt, the way only Tom could wear a white shirt. He was smiling at her. Instantly her eyes filled with tears. He looked as he had looked that last winter, the shirt ironed, the salt-and-pepper hair just curling above his ears and swept back, the careful close two-day beard, the scent of something citrus on his skin.

  ‘Alone?’ he asked.

  ‘So it seems,’ she replied.

  ‘
Well, you know why.’

  ‘Yes, I guess I do.’ She gazed into his eyes.

  ‘Not celibate?’ he asked. ‘Like being on a diet for you.’

  ‘My senses become dull without sex. So of course I am not celibate.’

  ‘You are still terrifying.’

  The glass before him was full of red wine and he put it to his lips and drank. The same lips that had done such wonderful things to her body.

  ‘A man can never really love a woman who is an artist,’ she said, leaning in across the table, drawn to smell him.

  ‘Is that what I said?’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied. She wanted to bite his skin until she could feel the texture of it in her mouth. She wanted to suck the smell of him inside her. He had gazed into her eyes as he orgasmed, and told her that he loved her as he exhaled.

  She smelled steak and looked down to see chateaubriand, green beans, a truffled pommes puree, sauce Bernaise and a red wine jus. It was a meal they had shared in Australia. Two weeks in the heat and tropical rain making love and every night eating the most exquisite food at a little restaurant with canvas awnings, a giant fig tree and the raucous noise of fruit bats.

  ‘So, are you singing?’ he asked.

  ‘Not much. We’ve got the Lime Club starting in June, but I haven’t heard from Arky. Lydia . . .’ She trailed off.

  ‘Are you still angry with me?’

  ‘Yes.’ She sipped the burgundy and felt the oak run under her tongue. ‘I have never given my heart to anyone like I gave it to you.’

  ‘Ditto,’ he said.

  ‘Why wasn’t it enough?’

  ‘Sometimes it was.’

  ‘How will I ever trust a man again?’

  ‘That’s not a question for me.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘You were asking it before I came along.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘Yes. It is. It was claustrophobic.’

  She became aware of the buzz of people. The face before her with its pale skin and shining eyes. She felt tears on her face. She saw tears in Abramović’s eyes. How had that happened? How had she slipped into some other place with Tom in a restaurant?

  She continued to gaze at Abramović but the vision did not reappear. It was over. There was nothing more. She inhaled, dropped her head, closed her eyes, stood up and crossed the room back to her shoes and bag. She had no words. She went down the stairs, across the lobby, out into the bright street, past trestle tables selling celebrity coffee cups and film scripts. Then, only then, did she laugh. It rippled out of her like a huge wave of relief.

  ‘My god,’ she said. ‘My god.’ She checked her watch. She had sat for over an hour. She must hurry. She was due at work by five.

  BRITTIKA VAN DER SAR, A PhD candidate from Amsterdam, sat next to Jane Miller. Brittika had a laptop perched on her knees and was grabbing screenshots off the webcam. Sitting opposite Marina Abramović was the writer Colm Tóibín. Brittika hadn’t recognised the author or known his books, but Jane did.

  ‘I love his face,’ Jane said. ‘It’s as if he has absorbed all the stories of the Irish and it has made him sad and a little perplexed.’ Tóibín was looking at Marina as a child might. Curious and slightly confused.

  ‘I’m going to do a blog on it. Tell me again the titles of his novels?’

  Jane did and Brittika tapped away furiously as the writer and the performance artist sat without words, without sweet tea and biscuits, without vodka and olives, and gazed into each other’s eyes.

  Jane turned to Brittika and said, ‘What is it like to be out there, with her?’

  Brittika replied, ‘I felt acutely exposed with the crowd watching but that made me think that the whole thing is about exposure. I didn’t really understand that until I was there, on that uncomfortable chair. I know that’s kind of obvious, but I never really got the impact of that before about performance art. It’s about total exposure. The audience are this enormous force watching you. The first time I only lasted eight minutes. The second time twelve minutes. I think I could do it better.’

  ‘You must feel like you know her, though, after so much research,’ Jane said.

  ‘In a way, but I still wasn’t prepared . . .’

  ‘What do you think she’s trying to say with this piece?’ Jane asked her.

  Brittika had neon pink hair, red lips, purple contacts and false eyelashes all decorating a delicate Asian face. She was wearing a t-shirt with a cartoon character Jane only vaguely recognised, a short skirt, patterned leggings and platform boots.

  ‘She did a version of this with Ulay, her partner,’ Brittika said. ‘It was in the seventies, in Australia. They sat at either end of a really long table and stared into each other’s eyes. It was called Nightsea Crossing. They were going to perform it one hundred times. But Ulay got sores on his butt from sitting all day. He lost too much weight. A doctor told him his spleen was going to burst from the pressure of his ribs, if he kept sitting. One day, when the pain was too great, Ulay just got up and left the room. He didn’t like it that Marina kept sitting without him. I think it made him hate her a little bit. Knowing she could be stronger.’

  ‘Still, what is she trying to say?’ Jane asked again.

  ‘What she’s been saying since the start, I think. That everything is about connection. Until you understand what connects you, you have no freedom.’

  ‘Are you an artist too?’ Jane asked.

  Brittika shrugged. ‘Not really.’

  At age nine, Brittika van der Sar had glimpsed that knowledge was everything. Her only currency was to have more of it than other people. She’d had one or two teachers who had been pivotal in driving her on. And now, her PhD subject was becoming more famous by the day. Brittika knew she was in the right place at the right time. If there was no time for the sketches she had done as a child, if the paints and brushes were stacked in a cupboard in her parents’ house, if there was barely time to do a quick observation of a face on a train, then that was where she was at in life. When you came from the Amsterdam of immigrants and unemployment, there wasn’t time to linger on what might be. There was what had to be. She worked the normal social media channels, ensuring her supervisors were kept abreast of how her research was progressing. She regularly wandered the waiting queue, making sure she met the right people—scanning faces, asking questions, introducing herself. The place was a magnet for art curators, critics and academics. Her looks took her a long way with people. People found it hard to ignore her.

  Colm Tóibín departed the table and the next person crossed the floor to sit. Marina appeared to look carefully into the woman with the weathered face haloed by white hair.

  Jane was struck by the kindness the older woman exuded. She said to Brittika, ‘Don’t you think that woman has a question, but she can’t ask it, not even with her mind? Did you have questions you wanted to ask? When you sat?’

  ‘I wanted to understand how she manages her energy. I think what I got from sitting was that it’s all in her breath. I mean, that’s not new, it’s what yoga teaches, but seeing her sitting there, the only thing that’s really happening is her breath.’

  Brittika imagined for a moment Marina getting up from her seat and doing a little dance for the audience, rubbing her breasts and singing a song of fertility, like in her film Balkan Baroque. But Marina stayed completely still. There was none of the wild green Serbian hills, the embroidered peasant finery, the humping naked carnality or the fecund earth about this performance. There was just this enforced solitude of the gaze, the visitor who remains silent, the unspoken connection between two faces, two minds.

  Jane watched the question leave the old woman’s face. Soon she rose from the chair and was gone. And so it continued with the next person, and the next person, while Brittika wrote beside her.

  ‘Do you think,’ whispered Jane, ‘that to Marina, all the people become one person?’

  ‘Maybe she thinks about the people who won’t come. Paolo,
you know, her husband. They separated a few months ago.’

  ‘How long were they married?’

  ‘Eight years.’

  ‘Mourning,’ said Jane. ‘Maybe she’s in mourning. How awful.’

  ‘I can’t imagine many men could live with Marina,’ said Brittika. ‘I mean, she’d be tough.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jane. ‘She’s tough. But I don’t think it’s toughness that keeps her there. I don’t think that’s what makes all these people come and want to sit. All the great art makes us feel something quite indescribable. Perhaps it’s not the best word—but there doesn’t seem to be a better one to capture how art can be . . . transformative. A kind of access to a universal wisdom.’

  ‘I’m going to use that,’ said Brittika, tapping away. ‘I mean, she’s using the audience to create this effect, but the audience has also created this experience by how seriously everyone has taken it.’

  ‘So what makes it art?’ Jane asked.

  Brittika smiled.

  ‘Why does most everyone who ever sees your Van Gogh’s Sunflowers kind of sigh with happiness?’ Jane asked.

  Brittika had never thought of him as her Van Gogh. There was an old Holland where everyone was blond-haired and blue-eyed, she knew. Then there was now. Full of Africans and Middle Easterns and Asians like her, so that the blond-haired, blue-eyed Dutch seemed to be a lingering oddity in some parts. A bit like London.

  After a while, Jane said, ‘I wonder what would have happened if they had stayed together—Marina and Ulay.’

  Brittika shrugged. ‘I think she’s been a better artist beyond him. When you look at what’s upstairs . . . the retrospective, this performance. Her father, her mother, Ulay. They were steps along the way. Now she’s alone.’

  ‘So it’s a funeral?’

  ‘Yes, she’s always liked the idea of her funeral,’ said Brittika.

  ‘And she invited us!’ Jane laughed. She grasped the younger woman’s hand briefly. ‘I will go home and never forget this,’ she said.

  I feel as if I know her, Brittika thought. I’m sitting here on a concrete floor. I’ve made two trips from Amsterdam to see this and I’ll probably make another one yet. I’ve spent three years of my life writing about her. I know what she has said and done, but being here, I look at her and realise that even though I thought I knew who she was, maybe I don’t. It’s hard to tell what’s fact and what she’s told over and over again so it seems like truth, but maybe it isn’t. I want her to remember me. But she doesn’t know me. She doesn’t know what it’s taken these last few years. I may never meet her, though I’ve stared into her eyes longer than I’ve done with anybody. Perhaps I am just another art student. Maybe she is only nice to people who have something she needs. She knows Amsterdam. It was her home for years. She and I have almost certainly walked some of the same streets, visited the same galleries, eaten in the same restaurants, braced ourselves against the wind off the North Sea, seen the same canals frozen over, seen the daffodils in spring, maybe ridden bikes on the same paths. All that time she was in Amsterdam, she was the same Marina Abramović who would one day be here. I have no idea where I’ll be at her age. Or who I’ll be. Will I have slept in a field, or stood naked before a table of implements in Naples? No, unlikely. I couldn’t do what she does. I have no appetite for pain. Or deprivation. Perhaps I got all that out of my system young, before, back in China, before being adopted. What did I love then? I’ll never know. Maybe I loved nothing. Maybe I learned to love, but coming late it’s harder. I wonder if I ever waited a very long time for someone to come back. I think I probably did.