by Heather Rose
For a moment her dark eyes observed him as if he was a fresh canvas, then she blinked and her gaze settled. It felt like a spotlight had hit him. Life specimen Arnold Keeble. At first it was just the hard chair, the intense white of her dress, her face that seemed to emanate light as if Rembrandt had painted her. But then he felt the lens of her mind asking him a question. He was imagining it. It was part of this game of sitting. This game of mirrors. Still, it niggled at him. She was mute, and yet everything about her was loud. What did she want from him? The scale of the square had expanded so the noise of the crowd felt far away, almost as if he and Marina were underwater.
He thought of his wife, Beatrice, and the coldness that had grown between them since he’d refused to have children. They had agreed, before he married her, there would be no children. It was typical of women to change their minds. But he wouldn’t. There had been scenes. She had tried all sorts of tricks. He’d rather admired her determination to bring a little Keeble into the world. But not enough to allow it to happen. He had taken himself off for a vasectomy and told her about it afterwards. He had wondered if she might leave him, but had guessed she wouldn’t. He’d guessed right. She preferred him to see her suffering. The clothes she needed to buy, the jewellery, the vacations he owed her now that she would never have a baby.
It wasn’t the childlessness that he questioned—even Marina had chosen that. It was significance. What had significance? When he woke in the night, he didn’t want to reach for Beatrice. Of late, he wanted to reach for Healayas Breen. That had disconcerted him.
He didn’t like this train of thought. He wanted to think that Healayas was just another affair. No different to discovering a new vineyard or vintage. A new artist. A new motorbike. Their relationship didn’t matter. It was art direction. He had an exquisite mistress. He had curated his life to be a gallery of careful perfection.
He felt a tear run down his cheek. He blinked and felt confused. Had he been sad? Then he dropped his head, stood up and, putting two hands to his face, rubbed his eyes and cheeks as he returned to where James Franco was standing with the security guard.
When Keeble checked the Flickr feed the next night, he saw he had sat for eight minutes. The photograph captured the moment when that single tear had reached the light on his cheekbone. He would have to answer for it. Had he been moved by the performance? Yes, he could say. I found it moving but also impenetrable. Beatrice would surmise that he had regrets, when she saw the picture. But he didn’t. Regrets would involve thinking about the past. A decade of therapy had taught him that thinking about the past was an expensive hobby.
What exactly had he been thinking? He regarded the photograph, the thick wave of hair, the fine block of nose, the way he held his chin, the uncertainty in his eyes. That was the bit he didn’t recognise. He had liked to think he was never going to get past being a self-indulgent prick, because that was how he’d got to where he was. No one, not a child, not the many pleasures of Healayas Breen, not eight minutes with Marina Abramović, not even Beatrice leaving him, was going to change that.
In the hallway of his apartment he stopped and sat down on a bench. Here he could look out over the bonsai garden and, beyond it, the Hudson. He sat for some time until he nodded, as if agreeing with something unsaid, then turned and went into the bedroom.
LIKE ALL ADULT HUMANS, MARINA Abramović’s body was made of some forty-three kilograms of oxygen, most in dilution as water. She also had the regular allowance of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and a kilo or so of calcium in her bones. After the main elements, things in the human body get a little smaller. Around seven hundred and fifty milligrams of phosphorous, one hundred and forty grams of potassium, ninety-five grams of chlorine, a little magnesium, a little less zinc. There was also silver, gold, lead, copper, tellurium, zirconium, lithium, mercury and manganese. Even a milligram or so of uranium. The human body is an incantation of earth, air and water.
Through the tinted windows of the car, she watches New York go about its 9 am business. Two girls in high heels are each carrying a large flowering pot plant like something from a French movie. Three men in skinny jeans and dark glasses are looking like an advertisement for Vanity Fair. For a moment I hear her consider that the real is literally unbearable. Traffic lights and crowds. Scaffolding where this building and that is being restored, repainted. New apartments advertised on giant billboards. New fragrances and movies and television shows. New everything every moment of the day. American luxury, so tantalising, so tempting and so treacherous.
Marina loves luxury as much as anyone. She loves fabrics and food. Simple is the hardest thing to achieve. She thinks of Klaus Biesenbach, who invited her to create this show at MoMA. Marina and Klaus were lovers years ago. He still loves her and she him, the way some people manage to do love in all its forms. He is one of the great curators. He has made this possible. You might imagine he has a house filled with art but he doesn’t. He lives in the simplest apartment in the world. An ultimate Manhattan view with blank walls and not a painting or sculpture anywhere. Why would he need them when he spends every day in one of the most wonderful galleries in the world? Why indeed.
When Marina was sixteen, Danica employed an art tutor. He was very short, in a red coat, with a dark beard. He was the latest in a long line of people employed to make the young Marina into something Danica could be proud of. First it was a pianist, then a linguist. Later an historian, and then, as a last resort, an artist. Perhaps the little man understood this about a certain type of mother. So once the door was closed, and he was alone with the young Marina, he did not bring out paper and pencils. He unrolled a small canvas that he pinned to the floor. Then he squeezed red, yellow and blue paint onto the canvas. He scraped the colours this way and that, until it was all a brown smear. From a glass jar he took grit and gravel and poured this onto the painting, again scraping and smearing. He took a small pair of scissors and clipped his nails, the hair on his head, and all of this went onto the canvas too.
‘You want to be an artist,’ he said, ‘then it takes everything. Everything. You do the other. You get a job. You become a wife. A mother. You contribute to the machine. The machine is always seeking volunteers. But art is not a machine. It does not ask. You ask of it, in your unworthy way, if you might add a little thread. If you ever do add a thread, then that is something to be marvelled at. I will never do that. I’m old enough to know that now. But you are still young enough. You have time to find it. Find what it is that lives inside you, and only you.’
With this, he poured turpentine onto the painting. Striking a match, he picked up the painting and set it alight. It dripped and flared, and only when the flames licked his fingertips, did he let it float to the ground. It sputtered and smoked and the fire died.
He said, ‘Art will wake you up. Art will break your heart. There will be glorious days. If you want eternity, you must be fearless.’
With that he gathered up his satchel and bowed his head briefly to her before closing the door behind him. Marina tacked the remnant of canvas onto the wall. It was as if she had been given the skin of a dragon. She pressed the charred flakes on the floor into her skin, where they left a dark powdery smear.
She watched the dragon skin through the autumn that followed, and the winter, and the spring and summer beyond. She observed as it aged and decayed. Art, she thought, could be something unimaginable.
She painted car crashes, portraits and clouds, but they did not convey the unimaginable. She discovered Joseph Beuys, Yves Klein and Zen Buddhism. Klein declared his paintings were the ashes of his art and she wondered if the little man had paid him a visit too. She read Helena Blavatsky, who said there was no religion higher than truth. But was there an art higher than truth? What was the most truthful art? She wanted to know what came before art, what was underneath art. She wanted to understand infinity.
She longed to harness the subtle bodies Blavatsky described. But it was hard to know how to leave her body. It seemed that o
ther people visited more often than she left. There was a self that watched her parents fighting from a vantage point above the kitchen sink. There was a woman who appeared in the darkness and sang her back to sleep after her mother had forced her awake yet again, haranguing the young Marina to smooth the sheets and blankets on the bed, insisting that even in sleep Marina must have a soldier’s eye for order and be ready for anything. There was an old woman in a white dress who sat beside the bed when the migraines came with every period, and put her cool hand upon the teenage Marina’s brow.
The car pulls in to the kerb and Marina’s assistant Davide comes around to open the door for her. She is unbelievably tired. She has lost more than seven kilos. Sixty-eight days are behind her and seven ahead. Klaus is there to welcome her.
‘I would like to lie on grass,’ she says to Davide in the green room. ‘Tonight, once we are finished.’
He nods and smiles.
‘I want to lie and watch leaves.’
‘Then it shall be so.’
‘And we will do the invitation list for the party? Can you talk to Dieter? I cannot wait for a party. It will be so good to laugh.’
She will make it now. Seven days is nothing. Surely.
IT WAS DAY SEVENTY - FOUR AND the atrium was crowded. Everyone recognised the actors. First it had been Alan Rickman, elegant and focused in a myopic kind of way. Now Miranda Richardson stepped from the middle of a huddle of MoMA staff and waited at the entrance to the square. The whisper of her name went around the atrium like a cave echo.
‘She’s tiny!’
‘She looks great!’
She was dressed very simply in pale pants, a white wrap, her hair back in a ponytail. She had perfect cheekbones and looked to have aged carefully with no obvious work. The guard bent his head and spoke into her ear. She nodded and smiled at him. Marina sat at the table with her head bowed. The room had filled. People flocked to the white line, sitting, standing. Levin had never seen so many people. He felt giddy with fatigue; grimy and stiff from the night he had just spent on the pavement outside MoMA with forty-three other people desperate to sit with Marina on the second-last day of The Artist is Present.
The guard nodded and Miranda Richardson moved to the empty wooden chair. The crowd hushed. Cameras clicked, flashes blinked.
‘No photographs,’ a guard said loudly.
A man on the opposite side of the square openly ignored the guard and continued to aim his baby Minolta. People clandestinely positioned their phones in their hands and clicked away.
Marina raised her head, opened her eyes and gazed at the actress. A flicker, perhaps only imagined, passed across Marina’s face. The room swelled with an inaudible sigh. The city beyond vibrated with its eight million people, but there for a moment within the square everything was still.
For ten minutes Marina and the actress gazed unwaveringly into each other’s eyes, then the actress bowed her head, stood up, and walked back across the square. The guard scooped up her soft brown sandals and handed them to her.
Next the woman accompanying the actress crossed the floor and sat. Marina opened her eyes and looked up again. The room shifted about. There were seven people ahead of Levin.
Healayas had been beside him for much of the night. He had told her his plan to wait in the queue and she said she couldn’t miss the chance to interview the people who were willing to sleep on concrete in order to participate in an art event.
‘But not me,’ said Levin. ‘If you don’t mind.’
‘Of course not, if you don’t want to be interviewed,’ she said. ‘I’ll just keep you company.’
Still, he had been surprised and delighted when she had arrived at 9 pm and thrown her duffle bag and an air mattress down next to him, explaining to the boy next to Levin that she was a journalist and she wasn’t jumping the queue or planning on sitting. She was just here doing her job. The boy looked so struck by her beauty, Levin thought Healayas could have told him anything and he’d have agreed.
Levin inflated the mattress for her as Healayas worked her way along the queue. He couldn’t quite believe the madness of what he was doing. All his life he had avoided camping.
Healayas had told him to buy an air mattress, but he’d thought it would be overkill. By midnight he regretted acutely that he’d only brought his Pilates mat. For twenty bucks at Kmart he could have been comfortable. He could have cried at his own inadequacies that seemed, under the rigid overlit sky, to be countless.
‘You can’t be afraid of stars. How did I not know that?’ Healayas had laughed as the chill crept into their coats and hats and they huddled against the wall in their respective sleeping bags.
‘It’s not something I can help.’
‘Well, be afraid of the sea. Or cars. Something that can kill you—but not something so beautiful, Arky.’
‘It’s just emptiness. In fact, it’s the past rushing at us. Everything out there, other than the sun, died years ago.’
‘That’s kind of depressing. How do you get around such miserable thoughts?’
He had laughed. ‘Music.’
‘Is that enough?’
‘Probably not.’
Along the queue the conversation slowly grew subdued. They settled down and waited for sleep to overtake the night.
At some point Healayas rolled over and looked at Levin on his pathetic layer of rubber. She grinned at him. He gazed back.
‘Come. You look so alone there. Come cuddle me.’
And he had. For a few sweet hours he had held Healayas Breen, and later she had held him, on an air mattress outside MoMA, spooning together like two children at a sleepover, while the city carried on around them.
Levin dreamed of Lydia. They were both laid out on funeral biers and elaborately clothed in traditional garments for the dead. They were being carried by a crowd of anonymous mourners into a funeral home. But they weren’t dead. He had woken her, ran with her from the funeral home and across the street into a cafe, where he had kissed her passionately. When he woke he remembered a fight they’d had.
‘What you’re dissatisfied with has to be about you, Arky,’ Lydia had said to him.
‘Well, fine, seeing your life is always going so well.’
‘Are you serious? Have you noticed something about my life?’
‘I’ve noticed lots of things.’
‘But not the fact that . . . fuck, Arky, you are so blind.’
‘I do notice . . . but I’m the last person you help. It’s always Alice first, then your clients, your girlfriends. I mean, when the fuck is it going to be about me?’
‘It is about you, sweetheart. It’s always about you. Everything is done for you, and you don’t even notice. But I can’t keep doing it. It’s not my responsibility. I am pretty busy over here in my own life. Sorry if my being fulfilled in my life confronts you. So sorry if I don’t have time to provide your fulfilment as well.’
‘Fuck you. If it’s so desperate here, why don’t you leave? You and Alice, just go.’
‘Oh, that’s right, so everyone will feel sorry for you?’
With Alice gone there had been much less to fight about. But still he felt ashamed. She had been so ill and he had taken her positivity for buoyancy, not bravery.
When he woke again, morning had arrived and people were going for coffee and pie runs. A great cheer went up when the hot dog seller arrived opposite at 7 am. He and Healayas drank coffee and ate bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches he brought back from a cafe on Sixth. They laughed at their night together and curled up again for a while longer as the morning brightened.
Then finally, at 9.30 am, they’d been allowed into the lobby of the gallery. And at 10.30 the queue, in an orderly single file, was carefully conducted by security guards up the stairs to the familiar sight of Marina Abramović in her white dress with her head bowed, waiting on her chair. The night queue had been joined by new arrivals and there were now over a hundred people snaked back around the gallery, all waiting to sit. The
famous people were over and done with by 10.50 and when they had departed everyone else, one by one, began to cross the floor to take their place opposite the artist.
‘What if someone decides to sit the whole day?’ Levin asked Healayas.
‘There would be a riot. Don’t worry, you’ll get your turn. I know it.’
Throughout the morning Healayas moved through the atrium, recording more interviews. When the person ahead of Levin finally went to sit with Marina, Healayas came back and stood beside him.
‘Any advice?’ he asked her.
‘Count to ten as you walk towards her,’ she said.
‘We’re here from London,’ said some people behind Levin. ‘We didn’t realise the queue would be so long. What time did you get here?’
‘Five-thirty,’ he said. ‘I mean last night. The gallery closed and the queue started.’
‘Wow,’ they replied. ‘You mean you waited outside all night?’
‘Slept on the street.’ Levin grinned. ‘Hard core.’
Levin considered how he would look on the live cam. He thought about Pillow-Marina and how he had thanked her yesterday afternoon before he’d dismantled her, putting her parts back on the couch and into the closet.
He thought about Lydia. Would she recognise him if she were to see him on the live feed? Would it compute? It pained him to think of it.
And then the person in front of him vacated the chair. The guard tapped him on the shoulder.
‘It is time,’ he said. ‘Maintain eye contact, do not speak. When you have finished drop your eyes. Walk away.’
Levin was crossing the square and counting to ten. He was taking a seat. The chair was fixed to the floor. He hadn’t known this until now, but that’s why everyone sat the way they did. He could not move the chair. Abramović had her eyes closed, her head lowered. He breathed. He could feel the prickling of fatigue and the same frequency of nerves that he had before the orchestra played his music for the first time.