by Heather Rose
In the quiet room behind the dunes of Long Island, Alice had unlocked the clips on her cello case. She moved through the Suites for Solo Cello 1−6 and her mother remained entirely silent, fixed by the sea.
DANICA A BRAMOVIĆ WANDERED THROUGH THE retrospective, seeing photos of her daughter’s life that she knew nothing of. Marina had made her life everywhere but Yugoslavia. Even during Milosevic, she never came home. She let herself be slapped by that German, let herself be naked with him, traipsed after him across Europe showing her naked body to the whole world. But it hadn’t brought her happiness. Love was a wasteland. That’s the way it went, Danica knew. ‘You want to be a strong woman?’ she asked the visitors who wandered by, oblivious to her. ‘Then you will never find a man who treats you as an equal. You have to play the little games. Oh, giggling, cooking, making them think they have such a huge cock every time they put it near you. The truth is that men are the empty ones. And women are meant to fill them up. I could count on a few fingers the men I ever truly admired. Give them long enough and men are always disappointing.’
Danica leaned towards a photograph of her daughter carrying an armful of firewood. ‘I shake my fist at that film you made of Serbia, bringing this on our good name. The humping men and naked women showing their pi’cka. Your mockery of our songs. I denounce you, too, for slicing our beloved communist star into your stomach. And that thing in Venice at the Biennale, scrubbing the bones of cows. They gave you the Golden Lion! Has the world gone mad?’
Danica remembered the room in the apartment she had given Marina for her studio and how Marina had smeared shoe polish all over it. But I made her live with it, Danica thought, that ugly smell—but not as ugly as that great pile of rotting cow bones, there in Venice.
People had said to her, ‘Ah, your daughter is so famous. You must be very proud.’
‘I am proud,’ Danica would reply. But she did not say of what she was proud and it wasn’t Marina. What mother could be proud of that? Showing her breasts, burning the communist star. Whipping herself naked. And that time in Milan with the gun and the bullet and all those other things they could have hurt her with. It’s a wonder she wasn’t raped.
She had read Marina’s interviews. ‘My mother bought me only flannel pyjamas three sizes too big each birthday. My mother punished me. My mother hit me. My mother tried to kill me. My mother never kissed me. My mother hid my real birth date from me. My mother this, my mother that.’
Danica, in her new lightweight form, had been there when Marina had gone to clear out her apartment the day after the funeral.
Marina had found the trunk with the scrapbooks.
‘Don’t open them. None of that is for you. It’s not for anyone,’ she tried to tell Marina. But death was impotence.
Inside were the newspaper clippings, the magazine articles, everything dated, catalogued and recorded. Right back to 1967. Every mention of the artist Marina Abramović. Even some little leather clouds, yellowed and curled, stuck into the pages. The first art Marina had made. Danica hadn’t meant to leave the box for anyone to find. She had been too sick to remember it.
Marina had taken every little thing from the trunk. Turned over the war medals. Read the citations from President Tito. Read the letters from the survivors. And there she was, a grown woman, nearly sixty, weeping on Danica’s bed.
‘You see, Marina,’ Danica had said, too late for Marina to hear her words. ‘A mother is just a heart. You pain me, every day of my life, with those dark eyes. You reproach me. But discipline is the only thing that protects you when the world goes mad. I thought it would make you safe.’
From the sixth floor Danica looks down into the atrium at her daughter far below, alone in the middle of the world.
‘You know I would rescue you from a burning truck. I would carry you to safety. Any moment you need it, I would do that for you.’
Love was a wasteland. Danica could no more fly down and scoop Marina up than swim the length of the Danube.
FRANCESCA LANG COULD HEAR HER husband, Dieter, talking in French on the phone. It was another interview with one of the European media outlets. She peeled apples as the one-sided conversation washed through the open door. Marina wasn’t talking to the media for three months, so Dieter must talk for her.
‘After the Biennale? Well, she hardly ever eats meat . . .’
‘Pre Ulay I think she was working out how to be an artist. Then twelve years with Ulay. Post Ulay there was uncertainty of course. And then extraordinary growth.’
‘She calls herself the grandmother of performance art. And this show, it will immortalise her.’
‘The thing that may surprise people is that she’s a very gentle person. Very funny. Incredibly warm. Superstitious. She’s very generous.’
‘She believes in seven-year cycles. So if something goes wrong . . . seven years.’
Right now, Dieter was one of the most powerful men in the art world. More than six hundred thousand people had come to MoMA to see The Artist is Present. Celebrities had come. Sharon Stone. Isabella Rossellini. Andreas Gursky. Antony Gormley. Lou Reed. Rufus Wainwright. Björk. Antony Hegarty. Matthew Barney. The phones at his gallery did not stop ringing.
‘Yes, a huge high to win the Golden Lion . . . Marina was watching the country being destroyed by Milosevic. So that was her way of expressing it . . .’
‘Yes, The Room with the Ocean View was her answer to 9/11. She wanted to create a still point in the aftermath.’
‘It’s all about energy. People talk of her extreme ego. Self-aggrandisement. But she’s not tough on people. She’s very tough on herself.’
‘Well, everything matters to Louise Bourgeois.’
Francesca took him fresh coffee and a letter and CD from Healayas Breen that had been addressed to her. The note said: I thought you and Dieter might be interested in some of the coverage we’ve been giving The Artist is Present. Cordialement, Healayas Breen.
Dieter ran his hand over her buttocks as she moved away. He put the reporter on speakerphone.
Francesca couldn’t stand Arnold Keeble. But of course Keeble was on the guest list. He was on the guest list to any art event in the world. His television series had been a huge hit, but she had smiled when she noticed that the next series featured Healayas too. Arnold had a way of looking at a woman that dismissed, or sexualised. So many men did it without even noticing. On radio with Healayas he was clever, combative, arrogant, irritating. It made Francesca wonder about his relationship with his co-host outside the studio. Healayas was so very striking. It was hard to know if her looks and her accent had always been an advantage.
‘What you need to understand here,’ Dieter was saying to the journalist, ‘and I don’t mean to claim anything, I don’t want to take anything away from her because she does it, but she works best in collaboration. Some artists need it more than others. Some are very self-reliant and that works for them. But Marina . . . it’s not a control thing. We’re both controlling, but together there’s a different sort of exploration. I mean take Michaela Barns and the piece at the Empire State. It could have been terrible but it wasn’t. We pared it back over two years and it gained cogency. Marina is like that. It’s a journey and we’re both on it. I’m sure she’d say she’s learned from it. I have learned enormously from her. I mean, you do from the greats.’
Dieter beckoned to Francesca to sit with him.
‘You each bring a unique perspective?’ the journalist’s voice asked.
‘I see the world through a literary filter, the need for story. Marina sees it in a completely different way. She’s a great thinker. She’s organic. She responds emotionally. But over twenty-five years, I think we know that together we’re greater than our parts. That’s how it is.’
‘How is it that you became interested in art, Monsieur Lang?’
Dieter smiled at Francesca. ‘Well, it’s a cute story. I had a teacher, Miss Stein, in my final year of primary school. She went somewhere on a holiday, and sent us e
ach a postcard of a piece of art she saw. I got Giacometti’s Walking Man. Some of the kids laughed and thought I’d been unlucky. Some of them had Turners or Vermeers. But I got the Giacometti. I wanted to be in the art world from that moment on.’
‘Marina has no family,’ said the journalist. ‘Her marriage to the artist Paolo Canevari has recently ended. Is The Artist is Present also a form of mourning for her?’
‘No comment,’ said Dieter.
‘So art has mattered more to her than love?’ the journalist asked.
Francesca frowned. She wanted to say to the journalist that it’s never as simple as art or love. Look at the greats in any field. Relationships are hard. She is one of the most famous women in the world and she has millions of dollars in art and property. And there is no one to go home to at night.
When Dieter did not answer, the journalist added, ‘It seems that her life is a metaphor for performance art. Nothing will remain.’
Dieter said, ‘Oh, I think a lot will remain. There will be books, a film to come. There’s a documentary in the making. Things we can’t see yet will come from this. But this, what we’ve seen at MoMA, will never happen again. It’s been very special. More than anyone had hoped for, I think. Especially Marina.’
She’ll be a page, Francesca thought, half a page in the history of art in a hundred years. And Dieter? He would have helped to make it possible.
‘No re-enactments?’
‘I can’t promise that.’ She saw Dieter allow himself a small smile.
‘Has fame always been her driving force?’ the journalist asked. ‘Yes,’ said Dieter. ‘It has. It is for many artists, if you stop to ask them, or they are honest enough to answer truthfully.’
After the interview was over, Francesca suggested to Dieter that he offer Healayas Breen an interview with Marina the night the show ended. The world media would be clamouring to get to her.
‘Not Arnold? He’ll be furious.’
‘I think Healayas will do it well,’ Francesca said.
‘Alright.’
She enjoyed swirling these little pools of influence for other women. God knew, the women of the world needed all the help they could get.
She returned to the kitchen and arranged apples in bubbling brown sugar and butter. Slowly she turned them and watched as the white flesh became translucent. The smell rose up and she blew on the spoon and licked it. She thought of Marina sitting in that white room day after day. And then, when she was at home, drinking water every hour to avoid dehydration. And the pain that must be everywhere now. Even for a woman as experienced as Marina, it was a big ask.
My dear friend, she thought. I send you sunshine, and blue sky, and spring becoming summer. Just twenty days to go. Just twenty days and I will make you a feast.
She began listing on a piece of paper everyone that she and Dieter must invite to that meal.
I will never sit for seventy-five days, Francesca thought. I will never slice my stomach with a razor blade or eat a kilo of honey. I will never show my body to the world nor have students who think me wise and brave. But because you do this, Marina, I am stronger. I am more certain of that every day. You live your art and it is inseparable from you. And with it you bring me courage. You are a woman and this is a fact. No matter what people make of anything else, your gender is unequivocal.
AS SHE WAITED IN THE queue to sit again, Brittika thought about her soul. Was it really a quivering dark shadow wrapped in gold leaf? Had she really eaten it? And where had it come from? Had she left it somewhere? She thought of the Murakami novel in which the soul of a man was in a woodshed dying of cold. This wasn’t the time for her to dive into New Age self-analysis. It had been an hallucination. Simple as that. She had to put it behind her and focus. She had to get through these seventy-five days. Ironic that her thesis on endurance should become an act of endurance in itself.
She’d been back to Amsterdam to meet with her supervisors, and she had worked on the latest draft of her thesis. She had done some long shifts at the local co-op, and then booked the cheapest flight to New York for the final days of the show. Her credit card was sagging under the weight of The Artist is Present. The hostel on 46th was no friendlier with familiarity. The air conditioner had become noisier, as had the noise coming up from the street.
Endurance had become the role of everyone in the audience too. Perhaps, after fifty-four days, Marina had moved on from endurance into some other state. In March, Abramović had worn a dark blue dress. In April it became a bright red version of the same dress. Today was the first day of May. The long red dress had been replaced with an identical gown of pure white.
Brittika thought, She has become her own flag. The blue, red and white of the nation of Abramović.
The nation of Abramović, she observed, had drawn an army of believers. What they believed in was anyone’s guess, but they kept coming. The atrium was more crowded every day. Why did they cry? Did they find reassurance, awakening, mystery? Something was happening. It was there in the tears. The endless tears from the people who sat in that chair opposite Abramović.
Already Brittika had waited nine hours in the queue and still there were four people ahead of her. She had made new connections, traded emails and shared research, collected quotes, ideas, interviews and stories. Yesterday she had sat all day in the queue but missed out on sitting with Abramović by five people.
She’d interviewed Carlos, who had sat seventeen times. He thought sitting opposite Marina was like psychic housekeeping. Like cleaning out an old cupboard.
Brittika was sure they’d soon start limiting the time people could sit. There were rumblings from the queue once people sat longer than fifteen minutes. And the stampede up the stairs at 10.30 am had become dangerous. This morning someone had tried to create order from chaos by handing out numbers along the queue. She had received number twenty-six at 5 am. People had slept on the street outside MoMA. They had been hopping about in sleeping bags trying to warm up, laughing at the madness and the seriousness of their intent.
Brittika inserted her earphones again. She was listening to the Dirty Projectors’ ‘Stillness is the Move’. She smiled at the coincidence. Maybe stillness was the move. A young man in a red-and-white gingham shirt tapped her on the shoulder and she removed an earphone.
‘Hi,’ she said.
‘I’ve seen you sit before,’ he said, squatting down beside her, ‘so I wanted to ask you: are you sacrificial in some way?’
‘In what context?’ He had lovely eyes. He didn’t look like a nut but it was New York.
‘Well, this waiting to sit with her, is it a sort of ritual?’
‘Wouldn’t sacrificial imply some kind of death?’ she asked. She could see his biceps beneath his shirtsleeves, the breadth of his chest.
‘I’m not implying it,’ he said, smiling, and it was a wide, white smile. ‘That’s exactly what I’m saying. Even waiting in the queue? There’s a death of expectation. And on the chair, it’s a death of personality. People are caught out.’
‘I’m not sure if we’re caught out,’ Brittika said.
‘But I saw your photo online. You looked surprised by what you saw. Even shocked.’
‘Are you an art student?’ she asked, flattered but still wary.
‘I’m a butcher,’ he said. ‘But I’ve come a few times. I don’t think I’ll get to sit but that’s okay.’
‘Are you really a butcher?’ she asked. Somehow this disappointed her. And then she considered that he was probably a millionaire butcher in that shirt. Some kind of New York inheritance.
‘Yeah, I am. Doesn’t it seem enough?’ he said.
‘No, it’s just . . .’
‘Where are you from?’ he asked.
‘Amsterdam,’ she said. ‘I’m just here for the show.’
‘I like your accent. So what have you noticed about New Yorkers?’
‘That they’re surprisingly patient. Because I really have only seen this show.’
He gr
inned. ‘Then let me tell you: we’re poets. Even the developers, the bureaucrats, and us butchers from Brooklyn. You just have to ask us how we feel about this city and we start getting lyrical. That’s the way we are here. New York is a much more romantic city than Paris.’
‘And you know Paris?’
‘I’ve watched the movies.’ He laughed. ‘And I might get there one day.’
He gestured to Abramović. ‘That’s why this show works here. I don’t think it would work in any other city nearly so well. It would need more. You know, multimedia or whatever. But it suits us. It gives us a little moment to remember we’re poets, even if we never write a word.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I gotta go.’
‘Nice to talk to you,’ she said, wishing he wouldn’t walk away. Ridiculously wanting to kiss him goodbye. ‘I’m Brittika,’ she said impulsively, holding out her hand.
‘Maybe I’ll see you again, Brittika.’
‘What’s your name?’ she asked in a rush.
He grinned. ‘Charlie.’
‘Are you coming back?’ she asked.
‘Will you be here?’
‘I will. I’m in New York now until the end.’
‘I hope I see you before then.’
IT WAS EARLY AFTERNOON AND Levin arrived to find the atrium crammed with people. Marina was in a long white dress and the table was gone. Now there were just two chairs facing one another. The intimacy of the situation was even more startling.