by Heather Rose
‘No, I don’t,’ Levin said. ‘I’ve never wondered that.’
‘You know, that’s the gift. You’ve never had to wonder. Me, I keep being an agent and the birth date on my driver’s licence gets further and further away. It’s like the end of Annie Hall when the guy who plays Woody Allen’s brother thinks he’s a chicken. The psychiatrist asks Woody Allen why he doesn’t get his brother locked up. And Woody says, “I need the eggs.” That’s me. I do what I do because I need the eggs.’
‘Are you quitting, Hal?’ Levin asked, his hand on the door handle.
‘No, Arky. I think what I’m trying to say to you is, you don’t need the eggs. You’ve got real choices. Maybe it’s time to choose.’
HEALAYAS BREEN WALKED SLOWLY THROUGH the Abramović retrospective—through rooms of video installations, huge photographs, glass boxes arranged with memorabilia. It was 9 am and she was entirely alone. She had a Sennheiser microphone plugged into her iPhone. It was a prerecord for the show. Her headphones conveyed what the microphone was picking up. She walked quietly, having removed her shoes and tucked them into her orange tote which she abandoned against a wall.
She took a small sip of water, relaxed her shoulders, and then began her introduction, recalling for her listeners how some of the artists currently re-enacting the works of Marina Abramović had reported being groped by visitors. One of the artists stated that several men had fondled her breasts as she stood nude in a doorway re-performing the work Imponderabilia.
‘Imponderabilia,’ Healayas said into the microphone, ‘was first performed in Germany by Abramović and her partner Ulay. It was meant to remind people that the artist was the doorway to the gallery. Originally Marina and Ulay, both naked, were so close to one another that people entering the gallery had to squeeze between them. But at MoMA, thirty-three years later, it is so controversial to have nude performers that visitors have been given an alternative entrance. The two nudes stand far enough apart that a visitor can slip between them without making any actual contact with skin. Even so, only about forty per cent of visitors choose to walk between the nudes. The remainder choose the traditional entrance at the other end of the room. So the original point about artists and galleries seems to have been lost. And in New York nudity is still considered so shocking that it has made the front pages of the major newspapers.
‘Male performers,’ she continued, ‘have also received unwanted advances, having their genitals stroked and squeezed by visitors. One male performer was apparently removed because he became visibly aroused.’
Everyone had their own forms of submission and rebellion, Healayas considered. All her life people had confided in her. Told her things of an acutely personal nature. Even as a child, it had happened to her. Perhaps they sensed even then that there was nothing they could say that would shock her.
She stopped at a black-and-white film of Abramović lying down, her head towards the camera.
‘Bubbles, scales, fish, monotone, monotonous,’ said Abramović, the pace of the words slow and deliberate. Looking very young and dark-eyed, Abramović was speaking Serbian while the English subtitles translated: Molotov cocktail, eyes, eyelashes, eye focus, pupil . . .
The task was to voice all the words Marina’s mind could muster without repetition and without stopping. If she repeated a word or couldn’t think of any more, the performance ended. Healayas was fascinated by how the words connected to one another. ‘Key, wall, corner, preserves, knife, handle, bread, moussaka, apple cake, condiment, whisky, humidity, embroidery . . .
‘Children, names, milk, youth, whisper, yoghurt, legalised abortion, never, travel, puberty, misunderstanding, disagreement, politician, position, struggle for power, German, Australian, panic, picnic, pistol, tank, machine gun . . . lieutenant colonel, soldier, private, regular, menstruation, masturbation, honey . . .’
Healayas thought that if she had long enough, she could map Abramović’s mind by observing the word associations she made. It was words that gave people away. Silence, she knew, after years of interviewing people, was the only safety. Sergio, a former neighbour in Paris, admitted to her that hate came naturally to him. He was a famous academic, but found himself surrounded by hardly anyone intellectually adequate or passingly interesting. Particularly his wife and daughters. Sarah, a friend from California, liked to find YouTube clips about birth defects and torture. Senegal had more than thirty devices for pleasure. Yvette cooked vegetables her husband didn’t like, but was reproachful if he didn’t eat them. He was dying of bowel cancer and confined to bed. Two weeks before he was diagnosed, she had found the little red book of names and numbers and the dates he’d visited that he kept in his glove compartment, but she did not tell him.
Meredith’s husband, Barney, spent the insurance money after her death on a holiday in Antigua. Upon returning home he expanded his interests from the girl he visited on E116th to another further uptown. Margaret shoplifted books. She had several coats specially adapted. She said it was orgasmic leaving with a hardback. John whispered to his father, in the palliative care centre, ‘No one has ever loved you,’ and his father had nodded and said, ‘I know.’
Healayas knew that all guilt ultimately corrodes.
She remembered Abramović’s re-performance of Seedbed—the Vito Acconci piece –at the Guggenheim in 2005. Healayas had sat on the raised stage while underneath the floorboards Abramović had masturbated unseen, but not unheard. A microphone under the stage captured the narrative. On the platform, the people sitting avoided making eye contact with each other. Couples and friends giggled. One man lay face down on the floor and started to hump against it while underneath Abramović moaned, her words coloured by her Serbian accent. ‘Do you like to see another man making love to me while you’re masturbating? . . . Pull my pussy lips out of the way so my clitoris is exposed—spreading legs wider, pinching nipples. Who are you? . . . Can I come? . . . I need to know you’re there. Are you with me? . . . Are you my fantasy?’
Healayas had often thought about playing that recording on Art Review and seeing what people made of it. Was it art and not pornography because it was in the Guggenheim? When Acconci had performed it back in the long summer of love in 1972, it had been winter. He’d given four performances over two weeks, each lasting six hours. His cock must have been rubbed raw.
Healayas continued through the retrospective, recording her observations. Abramović and Ulay in a film running naked at one another in an underground car park. They slapped into each other then retreated back to their separate concrete columns almost as if they were on a long length of elastic. Then running towards each other they collided again. A crowd observed as the whack and slap of flesh against flesh went on and on.
There was a film where they breathed into each other’s mouths, locked together until one of them began to pass out from oxygen deprivation. In another film they were kneeling face to face and Ulay slapped Marina’s cheek. Marina slapped Ulay. Hand to cheek, hand to cheek, slap, slap, slap. The slaps became harder, the sound of the sting greater. Each of them was reeling a little. Until at last Ulay gave a slap so strong that Marina’s head swung with the impact. She responded with her own slap to his face, just as hard. They both bowed their heads, unable to go on.
In another film they screamed at one another, guttural screams directly into the other’s face until they went hoarse.
Artists were more honest than most people, Healayas thought. The performance artist Stelarc had grown an ear out of his left arm with the help of a team of doctors and scientists. A microphone was inserted and Stelarc’s conversations could be heard, making the ear a remote listening device for anyone who cared to listen in on Stelarc’s life.
Most people, Healayas knew, didn’t want to look inside themselves, let alone magnify that inner life for the world to see or hear or criticise. Perhaps that was the invitation at the heart of The Artist is Present. ‘Come and be yourself.’ And the people who sat found out how hard, how confronting, and how strange
that was.
At the back of the retrospective, Healayas sat down on the floor and watched the video showing Abramović and Ulay walking the Great Wall of China. The Lovers. Two figures in red and blue walking towards each other over thousands of miles to say goodbye.
For eight years Abramović and Ulay had planned that walk. They were to begin at either end of the wall. After three thousand miles they would meet and marry. Instead, after thirteen years together, they had used it to formally end their relationship and their artistic collaboration. Abramović had said: ‘We spend so much time focused on the beginning of relationships, why do we not give equal consideration to ending them?’
Ulay walked on a cliff above a distant snake of silver river, he tramped across a sienna desert. His gangly frame was cloaked and his face shadowed. His stride was steady and light. He traversed broken fragments of wall and fissures caused by earthquakes. He walked across grasslands where the wall had disappeared, and places where it had long fallen into disrepair.
Marina, starting at the eastern end of the Great Wall, had the familiar rammed-earth wall, the stone balustrades and staircases. Step by step, staff in hand, she climbed. She appeared diminished by the scale of the ancient fortress and the steepness of the steps. Up and up, down and down, up and up, on and on she walked, her red clothing moving in the wind. The light beyond was golden. Her head was set, her gaze impassive, her step resolute.
Three thousand miles to say goodbye. Healayas watched as the film continued through to the final moment when Ulay and Marina met.
Healayas thought of her sister pleading with her to come home for their father’s funeral.
‘Why do you have to be so difficult?’ Airah had asked her. It had always been her mother’s complaint. That she, Healayas, was difficult. ‘I’d like you here to help me sort everything. I don’t know what to do with it all.’
‘Throw it away.’
‘He loved you. He loved you more than anyone. He never blamed you,’ Airah had cried. ‘Why can’t you come home and say goodbye to him?’
‘There’s nothing to say.’ Not to her father nor to his grave.
In the afterlight of the call, she thought she could have volunteered some shared memory. ‘Do you remember how we’d toss those little stick boats he made into the Seine from the bridge? Remember when he came in at night and how he smelled of bitumen after rain?’ But if she started that conversation it might never end.
She didn’t want to see her father’s name on a grave. She didn’t want to see the house without him there playing music. She didn’t want to see his clarinet. She remembered how, as a child, when he played she saw rainbows. How his eyes had been the saddest eyes she had ever seen. How his hand had closed about hers like a wing about a body. How even when she was almost as tall as him, he’d take her hand to cross a street. How he’d remained sure of her course, sure that she was capable and wise, long after she’d proved to him she wasn’t.
I would walk three thousand miles to see you again, Papa, she thought. I will wear red and you will wear blue. I would walk beside the Yangtze, across desert, up and down stairs, fending off bureaucrats and a million tourists, just to see you again. You are not dead. You are simply ahead on the path. When my time comes, I will be ready and you will be there. You with a flag bearing the Maltese cross. Me, I carry no flag. See, I have taken no other country than yours. Your warm, dry fingers will fold around mine and I will be safe.
‘Healayas,’ a voice said. It was Octavia, the MoMA media person they’d assigned to her. ‘Are you alright?’
‘Yes, yes, of course,’ Healayas, said, standing.
‘We’re about to open. It’s ten twenty-five.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s very moving. Don’t worry. Lots of people cry.’
MARINA HAS A MONTH TO go. On the radio they’re playing Antony and the Johnsons. It’s ‘Hope There’s Someone’ and Antony sounds like a sixteenth-century castrato. At least one person listening through headphones in the queue is feeling as if she wants to drink petrol and set herself on fire for the sheer beauty of vivid, searing extinguishment. The city has slipped through a misty dawn and is now poised beneath neatly arranged Pixar clouds. Alice Levin is arriving sixty seconds early to a lecture. Healayas Breen is drinking Gatorade after swimming fifteen hundred metres at the pool.
Marco Anelli, the official photographer, is carefully repositioning his Canon EOS-1D Mark IV. Every evening, after he has reviewed the photographs from the day and made his recommendations to Marina, who checks them all before he uploads them, Marco has time to sleep. He can live on six hours, although he sleeps until midday on Tuesday, the one day of the week MoMA is closed and they all get a twenty-four hour reprieve to recover a little normality. Sometimes on Tuesday night he cannot imagine how he will resume the schedule for another week and another.
There is no time for friends. No energy for friends. All day he is surrounded by people. All day he spends observing faces. His dreams have become strange police line-ups. Sometimes he is weeding faces in a giant garden, other times he is scooping them up as if they have fallen like moonbeams onto the river’s surface. Last night he dreamed of a party where he went from room to room looking for someone in particular, but never found them, and everyone was dressed as iridescent blue birds with dark masked eyes and beaks of sparkling beads.
He passed the clipboard with the permission slip to the next person in the queue, and they filled it out, signed it and asked him, as they all asked him, ‘Will it be long?’
He smiled, and said to each person who asked, ‘It is impossible to tell.’
He tried not to engage in conversation in the atrium. He was not a spokesperson. He was the photographer. When he and Marina had discussed this show, they had imagined the chair opposite Marina would often be empty. They had never imagined people would be so compelled to sit that they would queue for hours and hours.
He checked his watch, a gift from Marina. How perfect that she should have given him time. It was the thing they shared. While ever she was here he was also here. For seventy-five days he was her constant witness.
They had met in Rome when he had asked to photograph her and she offered him ten minutes the next day. It was all the time she could give him, she said. She had greeted him at the appointed time and he had surprised her because it was not her face he wanted. It was her scars.
The scars told her real stories. The scars that came from knives and ice, fire and scalpel; years of work on the tightrope between art and spirituality. Years of trying to create a philosophical bridge between east and west. He did not pretend to understand her, so he admired her. She was squisita the way older women could be squisita. They knew their own voice, the way they moved, the way to dress. They knew their curves and their own face and if they had lived, really lived, there was something like a well in them that, as a younger man, he wanted to drink from. It wasn’t entirely sexual but it was entirely sensual. That was what he felt. The sensuality of devozione for Marina. Her strength, her humour, her solitude, her impromptu meals—pollo arrosto, melanzane ripiene, risotto ai funghi. She had a way of making him feel like family. Making them all feel like family. La famiglia di Marina.
He looked at her through the lens of his camera and saw in her dark eyes generations of Slavs and Arabs, Greeks and Persians who had migrated on foot, on donkey, taking with them the possessions that would see them through the next winter. Into that crumpled landscape they had gone, at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East. Being Italian he understood the sense of country people had. He imagined it wasn’t easy for your country to change names, have different masters, be a pawn in the games of monsters. Italy had known all that. Even now, Italian soldiers were dying in Iraq for Bush’s war that was now Obama’s war. The war Berlusconi, il buffone, had signed them up for. Italians understood how people who were once your neighbours could become your enemy. Italy had not united as a nation until after the First World War. But in Yugoslavia the
fighting had been long and bitter and of a different order. There was a particular voltage of hatred between Serbians and Bosnians, Croatians, Albanians, Montenegrins, Slovenians. Between Muslims and Christians—una vecchia guerra.
People had picked up axes and killed women and children who lived in the same street. That was Yugoslavia. A no-longer country. A fairy story place of madmen and musicians, lovers and killers on a stretch of peninsula between Austria and Macedonia. Marina came from the once-Yugoslavia, a place that had been squeezing and twisting and folding itself up longer than places had names. A peninsula of steep-sided valleys, rushing rivers, blue lakes, winding villages, snow-capped mountains. An origami landscape with endless segreti.
After the first ten minutes of the photographic shoot, Marina Abramović had given Marco her whole day.
She had said later, when the day was done and they were on the terrazzo drinking limoncello, that if you dipped your fingers in the pockets of Yugoslavia, you could pull out stories of warm bread, onions and mincemeat, vine leaves and plum brandy, cornbread and strudel. You could unravel myths of the sun drawn from a palace by white horses, a young God dropping corn in spring, summer as a woman newly in love but abandoned each autumn. You could cut yourself on ancient mountain ranges and skin your knees on lost valleys, yet there were fields of red poppies and homemade wine and someone singing ballads of virgins wandering in the moonlight and old women who carried the bones of animals to stave off disease.
There were other myths Marina had told him: of large black cats that barked like dogs to protect the cows in the barn through the slow white winter; spirits in the bathhouse, by the front door, by the fireplace; rat-catchers and shepherds, soldiers and priests, the world swathed in black, green, gold, red, magenta.
When she planned this show, he said, ‘I will photograph everyone who comes to sit with you.’