The Museum of Modern Love(15)
Levin felt an incredible urge to tell her about Lydia. Several times of late he had been overwhelmed with the urge to blurt the story out to a complete stranger. Someone on the subway or a waitress serving him coffee. Some days it felt as if it was a weight swinging inside him like a pendulum, and if he didn’t tell someone, anyone, it would knock him right over.
This last week he had discovered that if he went out and spent the day at MoMA watching Abramovi?, he could return to the apartment as if he was some other man, a man returning from a day at the office, a composer who must work a day job and then squeeze his imagination into the silence of the evening. An artist quite alone, quite unobserved. A widower perhaps. Or single. Never married.
He’d been tinkering with new ideas. He’d made an album after he and Tom had made their last film together. His first in almost twenty-five years. That album had garnered mixed responses. One reviewer called it ‘overly complex’. He had worn it as a badge of honour. The next album was referred to as ‘an acquired taste’. Worse had been the review that said, ‘It can be disturbing watching an artist change vehicles. Tom Washington’s one-time composer is now foraging in modern music for truffles of genius. What he’s lacking, in this wandering ode to everyone from Joe Hisaishi to Philip Glass, is direction.’ Levin had been furious, had even thrown something at the wall. His phone. He remembered how Lydia had got the hole replastered.
Still, it had sold, if modestly. Just enough for Levin to think the next album would be the breakthrough. He had started to yearn for a different kind of acknowledgement; not simply for his work, but as revenge. He wanted the Carnegie Hall night. He wanted what Peter Jackson had given Howard Shore when he’d offered him the Lord of the Rings films. He wanted to prove to Tom that he’d been a fool to end their partnership. Levin knew he could have done that last film of Tom’s. Could have done it better than the young hopeful Tom had employed. Levin was ready for something big. What was the point of turning fifty if you weren’t ready to peak?
This is where I watch artists stumble, as they oscillate between force and submission. You would be amazed how rare it is for artists to feel moments of true satisfaction. When they’re inside their craft, inside colour or movement or sound, words or clay or pictures or dance, when they submit to the art, that is when they know two things—the void that is life and the pull that is death. The grand and the hollow. The best reflects that. To be such harbingers of truth is not without its cost. It’s no easy task to balance a sense of irrelevance with the longing for glory, the abyss with the applause. Artists run their fingers over the fabric of eternity.
I HAVE STOOD BESIDE ARTISTS a very long time. I was there at the rape trial of Artemisia Gentileschi. I was there as she drove the painted blade through the neck of Holofernes. I stood beside her as she wrote, ‘I shall show you what woman is capable of. You will find Caesar’s courage in the soul of a woman.’ Imagine that, five hundred years ago!
I was there for two decades as Dorothea Therbusch gave her life to her children until at last, when her vile mother-in-law died, she resumed the career she was born to. It was I who visited Camille Claudel in the insane asylum, her brilliant hands idle. I watched her die slowly for thirty years, while I could persuade not a single man, not her lover Rodin, nor her brother, to offer her freedom or clay. I stood beside Meret Oppenheim when she covered the spoon and cup with fur and Max Ernst proclaimed that she, at the age of twenty-three, had outstripped them—Duchamp, Breton and all the Surrealists.
I have seen young women gifted beyond measure—Sofonisba Anguissola at just twenty years of age, Catharina van Hemessen too, Clara Peeters at just thirteen. All of them born before the year 1600. Seek out their paintings if you do not know them. Each had a father who understood their promise and celebrated their value. Each had a mother with talent, too, but a life of housekeeping, wifery and childrearing expected of her. So many women were neither offered nor were able to acquire paint or palette, canvas, ink, tuition, paper, time. And so we have the great imbalance.
Marina Abramovi? has been learning to reject expectations her whole life. It is day thirty-one on the road she has titled The Artist is Present. She has been hallucinating since day one—sometimes for moments and sometimes for an hour or more. It doesn’t look painful, this business of sitting, but believe me it is.
It’s sure to get worse before it gets better, the hallucinating, the pain. The body is never forgiving in such circumstances. It does not like to be ignored. There are systems at work that rue the dictatorship of the brain. Endocrine, nervous, circulatory. Lymphatic. Exocrine. Digestive. Urinary. Respiratory. Muscular.
We see Marina’s stillness, her gaze, her focus, and inside a war has begun. All those systems trying to function while she remains motionless. And her mind? Well, for all the illusion of calm, it is no less busy than everything else. She is full and she is empty because that is the paradox too. She is swimming in sensations, thoughts, memories and awareness like everyone else, but while this happens she looks into the eyes and hearts of strangers and finds a point of calm. It is her metier to dance on the edge of madness, to vault over pain into the solace of disintegration.
AT THE RESTAURANT JANE AND Levin commented on the rustic decor, the luck of getting a table, the menu. They both ordered foie gras to start. Behind them a table of twelve women continuously erupted in laughter, making the opportunities for conversation strained.