by Heather Rose
She was watching Marina Abramović in her white dress on this final day of her enduring love. For hadn’t it been that for Abramović? An act of love that said, This is all I have been, this is what I have become in travelling the places of my soul and my nation, my family and my ancestral blood. This is what I have learned. It is all about connection. If we do it with the merest amount of intention and candour and fearlessness, this is the biggest love we can feel. It’s more than love but we don’t have a bigger word. It was Kant’s thing, Jane thought. The thing that is, but is also inexplicable, until you see that it just is.
She knew once she would have tried to call it God, but that had caused so many problems in the world, trying to say what God was or is. She thought there ought to be another word and she decided she had a few hundred miles to think on that in Spain under a wide sky on a pilgrimage. And she laughed aloud, because to ruminate on the name of the thought that was God on a long walk seemed fitting. She and Karl would go a long way on that together.
She continued to gaze at the woman in the white dress. She sat and watched in honour of this woman sitting. She watched as the final hours of The Artist is Present passed by, sitter after sitter in a gaze with the woman across the table. Jane felt she had witnessed a thing of inexplicable beauty among humans who had been drawn to this art and had found the reflection of a great mystery. What are we? How should we live?
MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ HAD BEEN SITTING on that chair for seven hundred and thirty-six hours, since 9 March. Today she looked radiant. The buzz of the crowd was intense. Film crews angled for the best shot. Cameras flashed.
All day elation had been growing in Brittika, too, tickling her ribs, feathering the skin on her arms, her scalp. A text came through from Jane in Georgia: Bravo Marina! Such an achievement. I’m leaving for Madrid Sept 1. Carpe diem! My family think I’m crazy. I have surprised them. Nothing compared to what you did! My, oh my. But I feel I understand. Let’s meet again. Will email you. Bravo you too!
Brittika read the text and smiled. She adjusted the black wig she had worn to disguise her from the security guards who would almost certainly have thrown her out if they’d spotted her back in the gallery. They had made that very clear. But they had also been kind, after their initial anger. The police had not been called. There would be no charges. They had seemed to accept the complexity of the situation.
Today, without her pink hair, her coloured contacts and her make-up, she looked to all intents and purposes like any other Chinese girl. In short, she was invisible. She felt the press of the crowd about her. The atrium was packed. The balconies above were packed. She didn’t really know why she had needed to do what she did. She had never been drawn to exhibitionism. But after all this time studying Marina, she had wanted to show her that she had given everything. And that everything was okay.
It turned out that she wasn’t really that special. She had been naked for a few seconds, but really she was just one of more than fifteen hundred people who had sat in the chair opposite Marina over the past three months. She was one of the eight hundred and fifty thousand people who had come to see The Artist is Present.
There were now photos of her across the internet snapped by people on their phones. It had been too fast for Marco, or perhaps he’d chosen not to include it. Her nudity would not be officially captured in the Abramović archives. She hadn’t meant to disrupt the show. Or Marina. She hadn’t even known she could do it until she did. It had happened so fast. But she didn’t regret it. The pictures would be lost in the next million nude photos being uploaded today and another million tomorrow. Perhaps the photos would haunt her at university when she returned, but the ones she had seen made her look delighted. Maybe her parents would hear about it, or see it for themselves, and she knew they would be disappointed. Even angry. And she would face that when she went home too.
This wasn’t her fifteen minutes of fame. She knew that. There would be better moments. But it had been the most honest, uncontrived thing she’d ever done. It had felt like she had birthed herself at last.
Suddenly, there across the room, was the butcher in the red gingham shirt, only today’s shirt was blue gingham. He looked at her then looked away. Then he looked back, and she saw recognition light his eyes. In a few minutes he had moved through the crowd to stand beside her.
‘Almost didn’t recognise you with your clothes on,’ he said.
And she laughed.
MARINA WAS AWARE OF THE white dress, the weight of the boots on her feet, the tiny shutter of her eyelids, the noise growing within the atrium. She sensed the tightness of the crowd. She heard cameras and whispers and escalators humming in the distance. Floodlights had turned the atrium into a stage. The white walls rose around her. She was aware of the skylight high above her and the clouds and sky and sun falling towards Europe and a window on Makedonska Street where a woman sat stroking the forehead of a girl with a migraine so severe it blinded her. Who had she been, that woman? The one who came when the migraines struck? She had worn a white dress. It was only now Marina understood that all her life she had been walking towards herself. The future and the past were present.
She was almost out of time. The barest thoughts came and went. Fragments of her manifesto.
An artist must make time for a long period of solitude.
An artist should avoid going to the studio every day.
An artist should not treat his schedule as a bank employee does.
An artist should decide the minimum personal possessions they should have.
An artist should have more and more of less and less.
An artist should have friends that lift their spirit.
An artist has to learn to forgive.
Her stories had travelled the world. They were fixed in time like the photograph that showed her once-small breasts and slender thirty-year-old body in a gallery in Naples, cut and bleeding from a crowd.
The body of work it had taken to reach this day swelled in her mind like a wind behind her. The letters, photographs, films, stage plays, interviews, tapes, sketches. The bureaucracy, submissions, applications, proposals, budgets, faxes, emails, phone calls, meetings, paperwork, visas and flights, floor plans, sketches, trains, maps, hotels, car rentals. Negotiations, gallerists, administrators, government officials, police, occupational health and safety officers, security, curators, agents, photographers, minders.
So many people. So much paper. So much intensity and laughter. So many bruises. Scars and wounds and faces she would never see again. A way to spend a life. She could feel the beat of her heart, the swish of blood through her veins. And then it wasn’t blood but rain. She was standing in the rain in Serbia rubbing her naked breasts and singing Balkan songs with the women of her country. She was on the Great Wall with a thread of river far below. Sunlight flared against the red earth. The path was going up and on before her. Her legs ached. Her feet ached. Her heart ached for something she could not find.
Here was a snake around her shoulders. There were crystals on her feet. A scorpion on her face. A snake. Tears. Onions burning her mouth and throat and eyes. She could hear herself saying, ‘I want to go away, somewhere so far that nothing matters any more. I want to understand and see clearly what is behind all this. I want to not want any more.’
Here was the doorway where she stood with Ulay, looking into his eyes while people pushed between them. Then she was on a chair, dizzy and losing all control of herself as the drugs for schizophrenia and then catatonia took hold of her.
A skeleton lay on her and she breathed and the bones rose and fell as ribcages did every day in the living. Now she was staring up at The House with the Ocean View. Dieter and all the staff had gone home and there was only the wooden bed, the wooden chair, the metronome and the silence and herself, eating her own madness, chewing away on the collective insanity of the world through the long hungry night.
Here were the children in Laos holding replica AK47s. Here were Eight Lessons on Happiness with a
Happy End. Seven Laotian girls between pink sheets accompanied by their machine guns.
Here was an arrow poised to pierce her heart and Ulay holding the bow. Here was the van driving round and round and round for sixteen hours while her voice over the loudspeaker slowly broke down. There was the woman who fell in love with a man who had the same birthday as her: 30 November.
Here was the flesh of her stomach and the star that must be cut into it with the razor blade, again and again and again. Here was the child fed on her mother’s discipline and the pain that came if she failed.
Here was the child who went with her grandmother each day into the incense and coloured light that poured through the high windows of the cathedral. Here was the child who watched her grandmother light the candles at dusk in the apartment, making shadows that danced down the hallway to bed.
Here was the woman who was once a girl and will yet be dead. Here is Marina Abramović, who knows something of what life can be—a series of moments, blades and snakes, honey and wine, urgency and delay, patience and generosity, forgiveness and despair and a hundred ways to say I love you. Here was Antony Hegarty singing, ‘Hope there’s someone who will take care of me, when I die, when I go. Hope there’s someone who will set my heart free, nice to hold when I’m tired . . .’
This is it, she thought. I am dying. I am living. They are both entirely the same.
It was easy to gain strength from chaos because it had about it the abyss—always so tantalising—as the heroin addicts knew. But the journey to the abyss was short-lived. The harder road was to draw strength and not power. To gain footing not in the wild uncertainty of immortality but the abiding knowing of mortality.
The days had been fields of faces, bright, unique, vivid, strange. There was no greater solitude, and no greater connection, than being within the performance with the audience holding her in its gaze. She had expected it to be an energy exchange. A simple thing. But it hadn’t been simple. Every face was a song that carried her like love or pain into nothingness. Every face told countless lives and memories and parts of humanity she had never glimpsed, not through all the years of seeking. Here was the truth of people writ mysterious in every line and angle and eye. The taste of their lifetimes faded on her tongue as they each stood to go.
Until at last there was Klaus. Dear Klaus. He was her cue. After Klaus it was the end. It was day seventy-five and there was only one thing to do. Still, she took in his eyes, the sense of no time and all time and the infinite words of silence. She loved him. She loved everyone in the room. She loved everyone alive and everyone who had ever lived to bring them all to this time, all the millennia that had gone before and the millennia of people yet to come. She felt enormous.
Klaus dropped his head. He stood.
Don’t go, not yet! It is too soon, she thought.
But Klaus was walking away.
Suddenly she sensed her mother high on the balcony looking down at her. She heard her voice as if Danica was right beside her.
‘You must step away from the fields and forests, from the voices and tears, Marina,’ she said. ‘I wave you a farewell. You must slip back into the skin of yourself. And I go on. I will see you when you are ready. But not too soon. That place you have in the country, spend time there. Take a new lover. This is your great work. You have added a thread to the great tapestry of art. This is what they will write about. So rest now. Be happy. You’re not getting any younger. And believe me, you are dead a long time.’
Marina didn’t want it to end. She wanted to stay in this place. She didn’t want to surrender to the wild wind of life. But it was time.
She dropped her head and for a moment pure grief struck through her. She must let it go, this room, this story, this work. It was over. She must relinquish this atrium where she had lived from spring until summer. She must give up the faces that had shown her a mystery that had no explanation. But how to stand? How to rise and meet this room?
She felt her legs trembling. Would she stumble? She was the sadhu walking from the cave. She lifted her head and opened her eyes. She summoned the strength in her legs and back. She felt the floor beneath her feet. She breathed in once and then again. A rush of cold burned through her.
Then she was standing. Her arms were outstretched. She felt the welcome of the crowd swelling inside her. Cameras were flashing. Applause was rising up into the atrium. It was pure cacophony, a study in simple, unbridled delight.
Klaus was beside her. Davide too. Francesca. Marco. Dieter. Everyone was clapping, crying and cheering. The square had become a great circle of people. They were calling her name. They were calling to her. She was burning with return. She was inbound, flying home, white with light, bright, bright, brighter. She was laughing and crying and every face she looked into was doing the same.
AND SO WE COME TO the part that might break your heart. Certainly, I cannot bear such moments, because there are days beyond this even I cannot see, and they are not always good or easy days. Yet this is also art. The things that sear a heart. Make of it what you will, and hold on to it, as the days beyond appear and there is no turning back. A human life is short and yet filled with moments of wonder and convergence.
Lydia Fiorentino is seated in a wheelchair by the window. Her hair is drawn up away from her face. She is wearing a white kimono embroidered with gold butterflies. The room is warm and quiet. She is staring out to the silvered evening sea. The hue of sunset is beginning to mark the sky from west to east.
‘I’m here,’ Levin said as he sat down beside her. He took her hand.
‘Hello, my darling,’ he said. ‘I’m here. It’s Arky.’
She blinked.
‘Lydia. Sweetheart. I’m so sorry. I didn’t understand. I’ve been in a sort of hell.’
She continued to stare at the sea and her hand was limp in his, her skin cool.
‘I have missed you so much. I want you to know I do understand. You were right. I have no way to take care of you. I don’t have a part of me that can do it. But I want to try. It isn’t home without you. It isn’t my life without you. There is no one but you who matters to me.’
She gave no indication of hearing or seeing him.
‘This is our moment. One of us needs care. Both of us need care. I’m here. I’m not ready. But there isn’t time to be ready.’
Her face was the face of night. Tranquil, vivid, startlingly empty. Her gaze was unfocused. Carefully, he angled her chair to face him.
In this fragile world there is so much to despair of. When certainty can be so frightening, uncertainty can be a form of protest, a sort of passive resistance. Levin gazed into her face. In that moment she was the whole world and all women and one woman and his wife, and he was her husband and all men and one man in the whole world.
There was the murmur of the facility about them. The distant breath of waves. And her face was as pale as moonlight. But he had come.
Levin did not know who he would become with Lydia to care for. There were questions that terrified his sense of order. His deepest sense of how live should be lived. Ought to be lived. But should and ought were words for certainty. What words belonged to uncertainty? Today, he thought. Today is uncertain. Now. Now required something. I feel . . . I feel could be the most uncertain of beginnings. It was what happened when he waited for an arpeggio, a melody . . . as if all creative ideas were simply feelings waiting to be plucked from some flowering sky. He understood with vivid clarity that the best ideas came from a place with a sign on the door saying I don’t know.
I don’t know . . . that’s what made things happen. His thoughts abhorred a vacuum but his heart responded to the blank canvas. Every song, every painting, every book, every idea that changed the world—all these things came from the unknowable and beautiful void.
And then, as if a conductor had indicated the beginning of a symphony, Lydia shifted her eyes and gazed back at him. She continued to hold his gaze and now there was intensity in her eyes as if she was reaching out,
pulling herself up, drawing herself in. Perhaps it was a trick of electricity running through her brain. But he would take it.
IN GRATITUDE
TO MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ, TO WHOM it is dedicated. Thank you for your remarkable life and for your trust in allowing me to represent you in fiction.
To David Walsh, to whom this book is also dedicated, for extraordinary generosity in so many things, but in particular for providing me with a studio at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Tasmania, where I was surely the happiest writer in the world.
To Marco Anelli and Davide Balliano, who also agreed to be represented in fiction.
To Sean Kelly of the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York, Marina’s real long-time representative and gallerist, for an invaluable interview, and for setting the bar very high.
To my father Kevin, my mother Dawn, my sister, Melinda, and my many friends who consider art and literature to be of such vital intent. In particular, Caroline Lawrence, Harrison Young, Delia Nichols, Genevieve de Couvreur, Brigita Ozolins, Christine Neely, Katherine Scholes, Roger Scholes, Caroline Flood, Mary Dwyer, Amy Currant, Brett Torossi, Cath Maddox, Jane Armstrong, Mark Clemens, Ross Honeywill, Greer Honeywell and Tania Price.
To Mary Lijnzaad—the finest companion (and librarian) while I worked at MONA.
And John Kaldor for his passion for art and generous hospitality.
To Simon Kenway for help with musical composition. And Felice Arena for last-minute Italian.
In loving memory of Wendy Weil, for early encouragement. And in loving memory of Neil Lawrence, who reminded me at a critical point that creativity was my purpose. You are missed.
To Beth Gutcheon, Martine Gerard, Milton and Denyse Kapelus, Hugh and Elizabeth Hough, Hank Stewart, Jimmy Stone and Fernando Koatz, who have all helped to make New York feel like my other home.
