The Museum of Modern Love (11 page)

BRITTIKA VAN DER SAR, A PhD
candidate from Amsterdam, sat next to Jane Miller. Brittika had a laptop perched on her knees and was grabbing screenshots off the webcam. Sitting opposite Marina Abramović was the writer Colm Tóibín. Brittika hadn't recognised the author or known his books, but Jane did.

‘I love his face,' Jane said. ‘It's as if he has absorbed all the stories of the Irish and it has made him sad and a little perplexed.' Tóibín was looking at Marina as a child might. Curious and slightly confused.

‘I'm going to do a blog on it. Tell me again the titles of his novels?'

Jane did and Brittika tapped away furiously as the writer and the performance artist sat without words, without sweet tea and biscuits, without vodka and olives, and gazed into each other's eyes.

Jane turned to Brittika and said, ‘What is it like to be out there, with her?'

Brittika replied, ‘I felt acutely exposed with the crowd watching but that made me think that the whole thing is about exposure. I didn't really understand that until I was there, on that uncomfortable chair. I know that's kind of obvious, but I never really
got the impact of that before about performance art. It's about total exposure. The audience are this enormous force watching you. The first time I only lasted eight minutes. The second time twelve minutes. I think I could do it better.'

‘You must feel like you know her, though, after so much research,' Jane said.

‘In a way, but I still wasn't prepared . . .'

‘What do you think she's trying to say with this piece?' Jane asked her.

Brittika had neon pink hair, red lips, purple contacts and false eyelashes all decorating a delicate Asian face. She was wearing a t-shirt with a cartoon character Jane only vaguely recognised, a short skirt, patterned leggings and platform boots.

‘She did a version of this with Ulay, her partner,' Brittika said. ‘It was in the seventies, in Australia. They sat at either end of a really long table and stared into each other's eyes. It was called
Nightsea Crossing
. They were going to perform it one hundred times. But Ulay got sores on his butt from sitting all day. He lost too much weight. A doctor told him his spleen was going to burst from the pressure of his ribs, if he kept sitting. One day, when the pain was too great, Ulay just got up and left the room. He didn't like it that Marina kept sitting without him. I think it made him hate her a little bit. Knowing she could be stronger.'

‘Still, what is she trying to say?' Jane asked again.

‘What she's been saying since the start, I think. That everything is about connection. Until you understand what connects you, you have no freedom.'

‘Are you an artist too?' Jane asked.

Brittika shrugged. ‘Not really.'

At age nine, Brittika van der Sar had glimpsed that knowledge was everything. Her only currency was to have more of it than other people. She'd had one or two teachers who had
been pivotal in driving her on. And now, her PhD subject was becoming more famous by the day. Brittika knew she was in the right place at the right time. If there was no time for the sketches she had done as a child, if the paints and brushes were stacked in a cupboard in her parents' house, if there was barely time to do a quick observation of a face on a train, then that was where she was at in life. When you came from the Amsterdam of immigrants and unemployment, there wasn't time to linger on what might be. There was what had to be. She worked the normal social media channels, ensuring her supervisors were kept abreast of how her research was progressing. She regularly wandered the waiting queue, making sure she met the right people—scanning faces, asking questions, introducing herself. The place was a magnet for art curators, critics and academics. Her looks took her a long way with people. People found it hard to ignore her.

Colm Tóibín departed the table and the next person crossed the floor to sit. Marina appeared to look carefully into the woman with the weathered face haloed by white hair.

Jane was struck by the kindness the older woman exuded. She said to Brittika, ‘Don't you think that woman has a question, but she can't ask it, not even with her mind? Did you have questions you wanted to ask? When you sat?'

‘I wanted to understand how she manages her energy. I think what I got from sitting was that it's all in her breath. I mean, that's not new, it's what yoga teaches, but seeing her sitting there, the only thing that's really happening is her breath.'

Brittika imagined for a moment Marina getting up from her seat and doing a little dance for the audience, rubbing her breasts and singing a song of fertility, like in her film
Balkan Baroque
. But Marina stayed completely still. There was none of the wild green Serbian hills, the embroidered peasant finery,
the humping naked carnality or the fecund earth about this performance. There was just this enforced solitude of the gaze, the visitor who remains silent, the unspoken connection between two faces, two minds.

Jane watched the question leave the old woman's face. Soon she rose from the chair and was gone. And so it continued with the next person, and the next person, while Brittika wrote beside her.

‘Do you think,' whispered Jane, ‘that to Marina, all the people become one person?'

‘Maybe she thinks about the people who won't come. Paolo, you know, her husband. They separated a few months ago.'

‘How long were they married?'

‘Eight years.'

‘Mourning,' said Jane. ‘Maybe she's in mourning. How awful.'

‘I can't imagine many men could live with Marina,' said Brittika. ‘I mean, she'd be tough.'

‘Yes,' said Jane. ‘She's tough. But I don't think it's toughness that keeps her there. I don't think that's what makes all these people come and want to sit. All the great art makes us feel something quite indescribable. Perhaps it's not the best word—but there doesn't seem to be a better one to capture how art can be . . . transformative. A kind of access to a universal wisdom.'

‘I'm going to use that,' said Brittika, tapping away. ‘I mean, she's using the audience to create this effect, but the audience has also created this experience by how seriously everyone has taken it.'

‘So what makes it art?' Jane asked.

Brittika smiled.

‘Why does most everyone who ever sees your Van Gogh's
Sunflowers
kind of sigh with happiness?' Jane asked.

Brittika had never thought of him as
her
Van Gogh. There was an old Holland where everyone was blond-haired and blue-eyed, she knew. Then there was now. Full of Africans and Middle Easterns and Asians like her, so that the blond-haired, blue-eyed Dutch seemed to be a lingering oddity in some parts. A bit like London.

After a while, Jane said, ‘I wonder what would have happened if they had stayed together—Marina and Ulay.'

Brittika shrugged. ‘I think she's been a better artist beyond him. When you look at what's upstairs . . . the retrospective, this performance. Her father, her mother, Ulay. They were steps along the way. Now she's alone.'

‘So it's a funeral?'

‘Yes, she's always liked the idea of her funeral,' said Brittika.

‘And she invited us!' Jane laughed. She grasped the younger woman's hand briefly. ‘I will go home and never forget this,' she said.

I feel as if I know her, Brittika thought. I'm sitting here on a concrete floor. I've made two trips from Amsterdam to see this and I'll probably make another one yet. I've spent three years of my life writing about her. I know what she has said and done, but being here, I look at her and realise that even though I thought I knew who she was, maybe I don't. It's hard to tell what's fact and what she's told over and over again so it seems like truth, but maybe it isn't. I want her to remember me. But she doesn't know me. She doesn't know what it's taken these last few years. I may never meet her, though I've stared into her eyes longer than I've done with anybody. Perhaps I am just another art student. Maybe she is only nice to people who have something she needs. She knows Amsterdam. It was her home for years. She and I have almost certainly walked some
of the same streets, visited the same galleries, eaten in the same restaurants, braced ourselves against the wind off the North Sea, seen the same canals frozen over, seen the daffodils in spring, maybe ridden bikes on the same paths. All that time she was in Amsterdam, she was the same Marina Abramović who would one day be here. I have no idea where I'll be at her age. Or who I'll be. Will I have slept in a field, or stood naked before a table of implements in Naples? No, unlikely. I couldn't do what she does. I have no appetite for pain. Or deprivation. Perhaps I got all that out of my system young, before, back in China, before being adopted. What did I love then? I'll never know. Maybe I loved nothing. Maybe I learned to love, but coming late it's harder. I wonder if I ever waited a very long time for someone to come back. I think I probably did.

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.