by Heather Rose
Later, the man with the angel eyes sat again. He wept and Marina wept with him. Then the announcement came over the loudspeaker before Brittika was ready for the day to end. The gallery is closing in fifteen minutes.
She thought of Marina in the green room slipping off the red dress. Perhaps Davide, her assistant, would tell her it was raining outside. She would put on pants and a sweater. He would hold out her coat.
‘Come. Time to go home.’
Brittika knew that at some level she was quite terrified of Marina Abramović. That was part of what kept her working on her PhD. She wondered what terrified Marina. At 1 am, did Marina wake panicked and straighten the sheets, fold under the corners until there was no trace of her body as her mother had made her do, midnight after midnight? Did her heart still pound when she woke? Did she have to tell herself that she wasn’t seven any more? Nor ten. Nor twenty. Her mother was dead and could never wake her again. Could never hit her again.
Yet when her mother had lay dying, it had been Marina who had massaged her feet with lavender oil. Tended her bedsores. Loved her.
Brittika and Jane found a nearby diner and ate chicken burgers and key lime pie. Then Brittika returned to the tiny 43rd Street hotel room with the noisy aircon and dry white sheets. She typed, her back up against the laminated bedhead. At 11am she put away her laptop and did some relaxation poses. She could put together the pieces of Abramović’s life this way and that, but what was at the heart of that unconquerable gift for endurance?
At 2 am she woke and browsed again the faces on the Flickr website showing everyone who had sat with Marina since 9 March. The boy with the mop of black hair, the girl with the vivid green eyes, the woman with the splatter of freckles. The expressions were so bare. Each of them spoke of days lived, life unfolded and refolded, opened and shut, and all of the days weathering a face. She saw her own face, the curious light in her eyes, the mouth that was tight. The worry that seemed to sit on her brow. She didn’t want to look worried. She wanted, next time, to smile.
At 3.33 am she closed the laptop and switched off the bedside light. The day was running towards her, coming at her from Europe, travelling relentlessly on and she must sleep while she could. She wished she had melatonin. Something about the performance was turning her into an insomniac. She wondered where Marina slept in Manhattan. Did she have sleeping tablets? Marina who could not take a nap through the long afternoons, couldn’t pee or stretch or yawn or sneeze or roll her shoulders or tap her feet or scratch her nose. What were her nights like?
Brittika set her alarm to wake her at 8 am, giving her time to grab a blueberry muffin before she lined up outside the gallery for day thirty-five. If she was lucky, she’d get to sit again today.
HERE IS MARINA, AGED FOUR, in Belgrade. This is a true story. This was, I like to think, her first public performance. Playing to an audience of one. Me.
Marina was seated at the kitchen table. Her grandmother said she would be back. But already it had been a long time. Her grandmother had gone to the shop. The shop was not far. The shop was down the stairs, past the little garden and the barking dog. Wait in the queue. Talk to the other women. Talk about bread. Talk about sausage. Talk about the neighbours. Finish shopping and talking. Then, holding the bag, walk past the little garden and the barking dog back up the stairs. Put the key in the door.
Marina heard people coming up and down the stairs but none of them turned the key in the lock. None of them was the sound of her grandmother arriving home. She thought about going outside and asking if anyone had seen her grandmother but she was not tall enough to turn the handle on the door. She could get on a chair to do it. But she did not. She sat.
Her grandmother had said to sit and wait. So she sat and waited. She could hear the sound of a fly caught between the glass and the curtain. She could hear her own breathing. The tap in the bathroom dripped. The pipes creaked and gurgled. Someone upstairs was playing music. Soon it would be time to light the candles.
Marina observed the glass of water on the table. She was very thirsty now but she did not touch it. She thought that if she drank the glass of water, her grandmother would not come back. She wanted to pee. She needed to pee. But she would not pee. If her grandmother didn’t come back who would live with her? Her mother and father might take her to live with them and the new baby, when it arrived. She did not want to live with a baby. She wanted to live here. She wanted her grandmother to come home.
Her grandmother had gone. The door had closed. The door would open again. Her grandmother would come back. If she sat very still.
The clock ticked on the wall. It was the sound of no time passing. In the glass of water she saw tiny specks of colour. The table through the glass was moving as if it wasn’t really a table at all.
‘What are you doing?’ her grandmother asked. Suddenly she was there and Marina had not heard the footsteps, nor the key in the door. Her grandmother smelled like outside.
‘I said to sit and wait, but I didn’t mean you couldn’t leave the chair. They didn’t have what I needed. I had to take the trolleybus. But then on the way home it broke down.’
Marina gazed at the face of her grandmother, full of dust and light.
‘There, there. You must be hungry. Tsssk. To think you sat there the whole time. What were you thinking?’
Marina observed the glass of water, reached for it and took a sip. There were no words. Her grandmother had come back and the hours crafted from silence were over.
I looked at that small dark-haired, dark-eyed girl and I thought, ‘Bravo.’
HEALAYAS KNEW HER VOICE HAD always been one of her best resources. It was the voice that had convinced teachers she was not lying. It was the voice that soothed her mother when she had been suspicious. With singing, in media and with her lovers, it was her weapon. She kept it supple with daily exercises. Coaching had helped to free it from the confines of her French accent, making her completely accessible to any American ear. Now her vocal lessons were focused on maintaining her longevity: ensuring she didn’t strain her voice or develop habits that would limit her lifespan as a singer or as a media personality.
The microphone was her metier. In the softness of the recording studio, on a TV set under lights, on the stage, the tension between her mind, her mouth and her body was palpable. She often came away with sweat drying on the skin between her shoulder blades. With Arnold Keeble she had gained more nerve.
Being black, raised Muslim in Paris, she had learned early the peril of defying men. She was too tall, too rebellious. It had not done her any favours. But as an international student at NYU, then as an intern, and through her early jobs at various radio and television stations, she had discovered she could make men pliable. Keeble had been brusque, arrogant, rude even when they had first met. He was handsome and famously opinionated, irritating but also often wise. She had found herself drawn to him almost unwittingly, not recognising the early signs of attraction—the multiple wardrobe changes before going in to do a show with him, the part of her that lost concentration as she was prepping. It was lingering by the red peppers in Wholefoods and imagining him at her table that did it. It was because he was powerful, she told herself. The most powerful person she had worked with to date.
In the audition, when she’d surprised him by making him laugh, he’d finally been charming. He didn’t think they’d make him have a co-star. Why would he need one? But for all his power, he was another pawn in the ratings game. When she started, he spun her questions back at her. But she had measured up. Especially during the making of the TV show. The art world was a savage and self-serving oligarchy with a few key players pulling all the strings. Keeble was one of them in New York. What mattered here was anyone who could make you famous. Gagosian, Zwirner, they all wanted Arnold Keeble to review their shows. They were inviting her too now. The TV series would be out in June and she knew it was good. There would be more invitations. Keeble might look old in comparison to her. She smiled at the thought, but n
ot unkindly. She had always liked older men. Her father complex, no doubt.
But they were on air and Keeble was completing his introduction. She had to be present. If he caught her inattention, he would be like a viper snapping at her vulnerable ankle.
‘Abramović’s objective,’ he was saying, his voice redolent of an English university with gargoyles, ‘is to achieve, she says, a luminous state of being—an energy dialogue with her audience. Whatever that means. She does have her clothes on for this performance, even if this feels rather like an Emperor’s New Clothes kind of moment. I mean what is an “energy dialogue”? And is she really going to make it through to the end of May?’
Healayas said, ‘At this halfway point, I think it is already an extraordinary success. The Artist is Present will be the longest-duration solo work of Abramović’s career—a marathon of seventy-five days. She has said she does not allow herself to contemplate failure.’
Keeble was wearing the shirt she knew his wife had given him for his birthday and his black and silver hair was slightly mussed with some kind of wax. The time was 7.37 pm. Her tea was finished and her lips were dry. She sipped water from a white plastic cup as he spoke. The red ON AIR light was refracted in the studio glass.
Keeble said, ‘This is Abramović’s attempt to confess something publicly. I mean, is this really any different to Tracey Emin’s bed? If she wants to meditate, that’s all very well and good. If she wants to sit about for days at a time and contemplate her mortality, the problems of the world or whatever she’s doing, fine. But why should anyone go to see this as art? Perhaps on one level she’s giving us an impression of how it is to look at a painting. Fair enough. But why spoil it all with this operatic construct of the ball gown? The Swedish furniture? She’s gone from works that were tough, terrifying and extreme to a surfeit of emotion in a diva’s gown.’
Healayas observed in near profile Keeble’s dark eyes and fierce eyebrows. Such good eyebrows. A large, lovely nose.
‘This work,’ she countered, ‘gives us both the sum of all those parts we see upstairs in the retrospective and also the evolution of that into something else. It belongs to this time, to this city, to this artist at this time in her career, and I think we won’t see its like again.’
Keeble countered her argument, expanding on his pet theory of the inadequacy of post-modern art to move beyond theory into genuine substance.
Keeble’s wife, Isobel, was beautiful. Healayas had met her at work functions and gallery openings. Isobel understood that women desired Arnold and she gave Healayas no time at all. Isobel was regal, cold. But that coldness, Healayas thought, was probably in part due to the effect of living with Keeble. He was not a person to live with. He would eat a woman’s confidence. They had no children.
Keeble liked to put his face between Healayas’s legs and he had liked it for some months now. She didn’t know whether it was she who had succumbed, or him. She simply knew that one night she took him home with her and he had been eating her pussy ever since. And that was just the place for him, she decided. Where she could see him.
‘This show is an evolution of the Nightsea Crossing works begun in Australia in the seventies, which she and Ulay performed over four years,’ offered Healayas. ‘And 2002’s The House with the Ocean View which was such a potent evocation of stillness and rhythm.’
Keeble said, ‘There was the dreadful standing version at the Guggenheim when she wore that gigantic blue dress. Does she really need to inflict herself on us again in this way? I have never been entirely convinced by Abramović. I think the early works—Rhythm 0, Rhythm 10, 5 and 2 all had clarity and focus. The work she did with Ulay had context. It was explorative. But afterwards there were some very silly things. Crystal shoes, snakes and scorpions.’
Again Keeble extrapolated, and Healayas gave him further opportunities to show off his knowledge of the life and times of Marina Abramović, in case the audience had forgotten his glittering intellect, his savage opinions and salted caramel voice.
Healayas knew his shoulders beneath the fabric of his shirt. His skin had the veined translucence of marble. The hair under his arms, around his nipples and his balls, was dark as ink with traces of grey, just as it was at his temples. He was a Jewish atheist and she . . . well, she had decided to believe in very little. He spoke three languages. She spoke five.
‘So what you are saying is that because there is no blood or knives or nudity, The Artist is Present is less worthy?’ she asked.
He swung back to her, glancing at the clock as if he had things he must do. She had analysed his style, watching and listening to years of interviews before she’d auditioned. He liked to distract his guests, catch them unawares. In those early weeks of working together, once he realised she was here to stay, at least for now, she had persuaded him she could make him look good. She rarely agreed with him and even more rarely in public.
‘Of course not,’ he said, in that elegant, reasonable tone he had perfected. He wasn’t nearly so right about things when he was naked. He was curious, childish and carnal. ‘I don’t think you can divide art into meditative or non-meditative categories. But you must agree that performance art falls into self-indulgence with ease. You cannot avoid the undertone of what she’s doing here. Is she mimicking some sort of Indian guru? A Zen master? Is this something she’s picked up on her travels in Vietnam, China or Japan? We have seen Chris Burden being shot, Stelarc’s suspensions, Bob Flanagan’s sado-masochism, Tehching Hsieh’s Cage Piece. Is The Artist is Present truly an evolution of performance art? Or should this show be in an Orthodox church?’
Healayas smiled. She wanted to keep looking into his eyes, but she looked away, her mouth always maintaining its correct distance from the microphone. ‘Abramović has been exploring the physical and mental limits of her being. She has withstood pain, exhaustion and danger in a quest for emotional and spiritual transformation for forty years. She has taken psychiatric drugs to show us their effects, she has whipped herself, sliced a star into her belly innumerable times. Maybe for an artist, in an evolutionary context, what follows after forty years is stillness and silence.’
‘And the need to simply sit down?’ Keeble suggested. He clearly wanted her to laugh, but Healayas did not.
‘As a woman, and as part of her artistic expression, she also embodies the heroine. The warrior. The sufferer. There is this tension between intensity and passivity.’
‘And now we are the supplicants?’ Keeble pursued.
‘I think people cry during The Artist is Present because they are genuinely moved.’
He was most comfortable when he could be superior, condescending, certain. His face became contorted when he orgasmed.
‘For several centuries now art has sat beside religion,’ he said. ‘When we get overlap we get outrage. Take The Black Madonna. Piss Christ. Wim Delvoye tattooing the Madonna onto a pig’s back. I’m uncomfortable with how religious it feels to walk into MoMA right now and see all those people literally kneeling or sitting about and staring at Abramović as if she was a saint.’
‘She simply invites us to participate,’ Healayas said. ‘It may be therapeutic and spiritual, but it is also social and political. It is multi-layered. It reminds us why we love art, why we study art, why we invest ourselves in art.’
She knew she had him. He had been distracted. Had it been when she had imagined him supine, erect, bleeding from his lip where she had bitten him, hungry still, as she mounted him?
‘So will you sit with her before the show is over?’ Healayas smiled.
He laughed silently but his voice was calm. ‘I could.’
‘Will you?’
‘Alright. Two weeks from now, we have a show featuring interviews with the clothed—and unclothed—re-performers. We will find out what it feels like to be fondled in public.’
‘And I will take a walk though the retrospective and report back on that.’
‘That’s the show for tonight. You’re listening to Art Rev
iew from New York on NPR. From me, Arnold Keeble . . .’
‘And me, Healayas Breen . . .’
‘Goodnight.’
‘I’ve sat with her,’ Healayas said as they finished up, waving to their producer and pushing through the soundproof doors into the corridor. ‘Twice.’
‘Why didn’t you say so?’
‘It was personal.’