The Museum of Modern Love(25)
But they were on air and Keeble was completing his introduction. She had to be present. If he caught her inattention, he would be like a viper snapping at her vulnerable ankle.
‘Abramovi?’s objective,’ he was saying, his voice redolent of an English university with gargoyles, ‘is to achieve, she says, a luminous state of being—an energy dialogue with her audience. Whatever that means. She does have her clothes on for this performance, even if this feels rather like an Emperor’s New Clothes kind of moment. I mean what is an “energy dialogue”? And is she really going to make it through to the end of May?’
Healayas said, ‘At this halfway point, I think it is already an extraordinary success. The Artist is Present will be the longest-duration solo work of Abramovi?’s career—a marathon of seventy-five days. She has said she does not allow herself to contemplate failure.’
Keeble was wearing the shirt she knew his wife had given him for his birthday and his black and silver hair was slightly mussed with some kind of wax. The time was 7.37 pm. Her tea was finished and her lips were dry. She sipped water from a white plastic cup as he spoke. The red ON AIR light was refracted in the studio glass.
Keeble said, ‘This is Abramovi?’s attempt to confess something publicly. I mean, is this really any different to Tracey Emin’s bed? If she wants to meditate, that’s all very well and good. If she wants to sit about for days at a time and contemplate her mortality, the problems of the world or whatever she’s doing, fine. But why should anyone go to see this as art? Perhaps on one level she’s giving us an impression of how it is to look at a painting. Fair enough. But why spoil it all with this operatic construct of the ball gown? The Swedish furniture? She’s gone from works that were tough, terrifying and extreme to a surfeit of emotion in a diva’s gown.’
Healayas observed in near profile Keeble’s dark eyes and fierce eyebrows. Such good eyebrows. A large, lovely nose.
‘This work,’ she countered, ‘gives us both the sum of all those parts we see upstairs in the retrospective and also the evolution of that into something else. It belongs to this time, to this city, to this artist at this time in her career, and I think we won’t see its like again.’
Keeble countered her argument, expanding on his pet theory of the inadequacy of post-modern art to move beyond theory into genuine substance.
Keeble’s wife, Isobel, was beautiful. Healayas had met her at work functions and gallery openings. Isobel understood that women desired Arnold and she gave Healayas no time at all. Isobel was regal, cold. But that coldness, Healayas thought, was probably in part due to the effect of living with Keeble. He was not a person to live with. He would eat a woman’s confidence. They had no children.
Keeble liked to put his face between Healayas’s legs and he had liked it for some months now. She didn’t know whether it was she who had succumbed, or him. She simply knew that one night she took him home with her and he had been eating her pussy ever since. And that was just the place for him, she decided. Where she could see him.
‘This show is an evolution of the Nightsea Crossing works begun in Australia in the seventies, which she and Ulay performed over four years,’ offered Healayas. ‘And 2002’s The House with the Ocean View which was such a potent evocation of stillness and rhythm.’
Keeble said, ‘There was the dreadful standing version at the Guggenheim when she wore that gigantic blue dress. Does she really need to inflict herself on us again in this way? I have never been entirely convinced by Abramovi?. I think the early works—Rhythm 0, Rhythm 10, 5 and 2 all had clarity and focus. The work she did with Ulay had context. It was explorative. But afterwards there were some very silly things. Crystal shoes, snakes and scorpions.’
Again Keeble extrapolated, and Healayas gave him further opportunities to show off his knowledge of the life and times of Marina Abramovi?, in case the audience had forgotten his glittering intellect, his savage opinions and salted caramel voice.
Healayas knew his shoulders beneath the fabric of his shirt. His skin had the veined translucence of marble. The hair under his arms, around his nipples and his balls, was dark as ink with traces of grey, just as it was at his temples. He was a Jewish atheist and she . . . well, she had decided to believe in very little. He spoke three languages. She spoke five.
‘So what you are saying is that because there is no blood or knives or nudity, The Artist is Present is less worthy?’ she asked.
He swung back to her, glancing at the clock as if he had things he must do. She had analysed his style, watching and listening to years of interviews before she’d auditioned. He liked to distract his guests, catch them unawares. In those early weeks of working together, once he realised she was here to stay, at least for now, she had persuaded him she could make him look good. She rarely agreed with him and even more rarely in public.
‘Of course not,’ he said, in that elegant, reasonable tone he had perfected. He wasn’t nearly so right about things when he was naked. He was curious, childish and carnal. ‘I don’t think you can divide art into meditative or non-meditative categories. But you must agree that performance art falls into self-indulgence with ease. You cannot avoid the undertone of what she’s doing here. Is she mimicking some sort of Indian guru? A Zen master? Is this something she’s picked up on her travels in Vietnam, China or Japan? We have seen Chris Burden being shot, Stelarc’s suspensions, Bob Flanagan’s sado-masochism, Tehching Hsieh’s Cage Piece. Is The Artist is Present truly an evolution of performance art? Or should this show be in an Orthodox church?’