The Museum of Modern Love(22)

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 Abramovi? 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.’