The Museum of Modern Love (32 page)

AT HOME, JANE MILLER WATCHED
Marina Abramović on the webcam.

‘Today is the day,' she kept thinking. ‘Today is the day.'

And she ignored the washing she'd done for her daughter that needed bringing in, and the ants that were invading a light switch on the wall, and the emails she needed to reply to, and watched. She understood that her fate and Marina's were somehow linked. When Marina stood up, Jane too must stand up. There had been this time of mourning and the mourning would live forever in her. Karl was as much a piece of her as her liver or pancreas. Grief was as tangible as rain. Millions of people were suffering from it at any one time. It'll pass, people said, but it didn't really.

Grief was a threshold thing that lived at the heart of the inevitable. She sensed that when Marina stood up, she, Jane, would take her place one step back from the inevitable. She would walk across Spain. She would carry her grief and her love and her observations of a life of fifty-five years. Here at home her children and their children would be among their own inevitabilities. And maybe this was art, she thought, having spent years trying to define it and pin it to the line like a shirt on a windy day.
There you are, art!
You capture moments at the heart of life.
A boy waiting for the eggs to poach. A crowd listening to music in a park or walking in the rain or bathing in the Seine. Liberty leading the people and the guns of the firing squad raised against the men at the wall. The bloom of waterlilies and the anguish of a scream, the red square that lived in every heart, a rhythm of colour across a wheat field, stars wheeling through a night sky.

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 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.