The Museum of Modern Love(20)

‘You know, I never did. I really never did. But I’m fine. Really, I’m fine.’

‘Really? I’m not.’

‘Are you angry with me, Alice?’

‘No. Maybe. Disappointed, I think.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, I’m not sure what to make of anything really. I think that other husbands . . . look, forget it. I think she wants you to be happy.’

‘So that’s a crime? You think I don’t feel guilty?’

‘I don’t think you do, Dad. I’m not even sure you should. And part of me even admires that you can be so selfish. That she can be so . . . generous.’

‘Generous! I’m complying with her wishes, and all I get is criticism.’

‘I guess you’ve got no excuses.’

‘No excuses?’

‘For not getting all the music done that you ever wanted to.’

But somehow it was still about Lydia. If his next album was a success it would be because Lydia had bought him the Steinway for his birthday. Lydia had given him space and time and all the money he’d ever need.





HEALAYAS BREEN WATCHED THE PATTERN of the Marina Abramovi? performance. The way the artist dropped her head as soon as a guest left and closed her eyes. Then she lifted her shoulders a little, stretched in minute ways, breathed, settled, and when she was ready, she lifted her head and met the gaze of the next person.

Healayas wondered what Abramovi? ate for breakfast to sustain a day’s sitting. Quinoa? Almonds? Spirulina smoothies? Fish? She’d read that Abramovi? had been a vegetarian since scrubbing all those cow bones in Venice. The performance that had won her the Gold Lion.

Healayas waited, her legs crossed, her scarf pulled over her hair. The old habit of the hijab. And so effective at stopping all conversation with the people in the queue. MoMA had made Abramovi? mass market. MoMA had given her a new following and the following was growing. What it would grow to, Healayas didn’t know, but she suspected Abramovi? would become a household name, even if they didn’t pronounce it correctly. She had heard all sorts of variations. This show was too brave, too simple, too hard not to be noticed far and wide.

The pain Abramovi? was in wasn’t obvious. And there was no nudity. No suggestion of sexuality. Up until now, Abramovi?’s work had been an acquired taste. Not everyone could relate to the rigour or the endurance. Cutting herself with razors. The flogging. Eating onions. The strange crystal phase Abramovi? had gone through after the walk on the Great Wall of China. But suddenly all sorts of people were magnetised by her.

Abstinence, Healayas knew, was the last thing most Americans wanted to experience. Discomfort too. Much better if someone else was feeling it for you. Even better if you could laugh at it. Reality TV. The Jackass phenomenon. Johnny Knoxville and Spike Jonze had tapped into the powerful urge to use pain as a device. Mass market it may be, buffoonery for boys, but it was hard core and she understood that.

The first time Healayas had ever come across Marina Abramovi? was a photograph of a performance called Rhythm 10. Abramovi? was kneeling on the floor with a large kitchen knife in one hand. Her other hand was splayed out on a piece of white paper.

The black-and-white film had been grainy, the sound indistinct. Abramovi? had fanned twenty knives in front of her. She primed one tape deck then, taking the first knife, she tapped the point fast between each of her splayed fingers like a Slavic drinking game. Every time she cut herself, she chose a new knife. When she had used all twenty knives, she stopped the tape recording. She then listened back to the rhythm of the blades as they beat the floor. Priming the second tape recorder, she let the original tape roll and mimicked the exact pattern, cutting herself in exactly the same place at the same time, changing knives with each cut. Then she played the two tape recorders together listening to the original pattern and the new pattern. The mistakes of the past and the mistakes of the present were synchronised. It had taken place in Edinburgh in 1973, the same year Healayas was born. Healayas had questions but Abramovi? wasn’t talking to the media for the seventy-five days of The Artist is Present. Healayas wondered if she was talking to anyone at all or if she remained silent in the mornings and the evenings away from here. How hard was that silence? Hardship was in her blood. But hardship had been learned as well. Healayas wondered if the years away from Serbia, the years crossing Europe, living in Amsterdam, teaching in Germany, the life she had here in New York, had filed down the ravages of Abramovi?’s childhood. Had a life of intense experiences smoothed her like a pebble on the ocean floor, polished her into the radiant woman sitting at the heart of the atrium, this statue of herself, immovable, unknowable?

Abramovi? had once said that in theatre the blood wasn’t real. The swords weren’t real. But in performance art, everything was real. The knives cut, the whip ripped skin, the ice blocks froze flesh and the candles burned. For one piece, called Lips of Thomas, a naked Abramovi? had lain on her back on huge blocks of ice forming a cross. Then she stood up and used a razor blade to slowly cut a large five-pointed star into her stomach. After each cut she ate from a kilo-jar of honey and drank from a bottle of red wine. She whipped her back over and over with a cat-o’-nine tails until her skin burned in a mass of red welts. Donning a soldier’s cap, she stood and listened to a Serbian hymn of war while holding a white flag stained from her bleeding stomach. For seven hours she repeated these actions in a cycle of freeze, cut, honey, wine, whip, song. When she’d first performed Lips of Thomas in Germany, she had been thirty-two. At the Guggenheim in 2005 she had been fifty-seven.