The Museum of Modern Love(26)
Healayas smiled. She wanted to keep looking into his eyes, but she looked away, her mouth always maintaining its correct distance from the microphone. ‘Abramovi? has been exploring the physical and mental limits of her being. She has withstood pain, exhaustion and danger in a quest for emotional and spiritual transformation for forty years. She has taken psychiatric drugs to show us their effects, she has whipped herself, sliced a star into her belly innumerable times. Maybe for an artist, in an evolutionary context, what follows after forty years is stillness and silence.’
‘And the need to simply sit down?’ Keeble suggested. He clearly wanted her to laugh, but Healayas did not.
‘As a woman, and as part of her artistic expression, she also embodies the heroine. The warrior. The sufferer. There is this tension between intensity and passivity.’
‘And now we are the supplicants?’ Keeble pursued.
‘I think people cry during The Artist is Present because they are genuinely moved.’
He was most comfortable when he could be superior, condescending, certain. His face became contorted when he orgasmed.
‘For several centuries now art has sat beside religion,’ he said. ‘When we get overlap we get outrage. Take The Black Madonna. Piss Christ. Wim Delvoye tattooing the Madonna onto a pig’s back. I’m uncomfortable with how religious it feels to walk into MoMA right now and see all those people literally kneeling or sitting about and staring at Abramovi? as if she was a saint.’
‘She simply invites us to participate,’ Healayas said. ‘It may be therapeutic and spiritual, but it is also social and political. It is multi-layered. It reminds us why we love art, why we study art, why we invest ourselves in art.’
She knew she had him. He had been distracted. Had it been when she had imagined him supine, erect, bleeding from his lip where she had bitten him, hungry still, as she mounted him?
‘So will you sit with her before the show is over?’ Healayas smiled.
He laughed silently but his voice was calm. ‘I could.’
‘Will you?’
‘Alright. Two weeks from now, we have a show featuring interviews with the clothed—and unclothed—re-performers. We will find out what it feels like to be fondled in public.’
‘And I will take a walk though the retrospective and report back on that.’
‘That’s the show for tonight. You’re listening to Art Review from New York on NPR. From me, Arnold Keeble . . .’
‘And me, Healayas Breen . . .’
‘Goodnight.’
‘I’ve sat with her,’ Healayas said as they finished up, waving to their producer and pushing through the soundproof doors into the corridor. ‘Twice.’
‘Why didn’t you say so?’
‘It was personal.’
‘If I buy you dinner will you tell me about it?’ he asked.
‘Perhaps another time.’
She walked away, tingling, knowing he was watching her go. Somehow they had got in deeper than they’d planned. Sex did that. The drug of skin and lust. But she kept walking.
SNOW HAD BEEN FALLING AT record levels. It was February and Lydia had been in the Hamptons for a month. Levin had received only the barest reports from Alice after Lydia’s stroke. There was no good news. The city was slick with ice and everything felt hunkered down. The days barely became light and the nights were whipped and chastened by Atlantic storms. That day everyone had been braced for a blizzard born in Canada. The weather stations were calling it a Category 1 hurricane. But New York, despite snowdrifts up and down the city, was dauntless. The lights were still on and he’d received an email from Hal.
Where are you? Can’t reach you. Call me. Work.
‘Arky, hi,’ said Hal. No one ever sounded like Hal on the phone. Hal had constructed a New York drawl from a Kansas twang (his father) and a New Zealand clip (his mother). His vowels were organic. ‘Where have you been? Did your phone get stolen by reindeer? I’ve been calling you for weeks.’
‘I’ve been busy.’
‘Okay,’ said Hal. ‘So how are you? How was your weekend?’
His weekend? Levin’s one trip out had consisted of a brief foray to eat breakfast at the Grey Dog. The city was dirty with trampled snow and bitterly cold. Tourists were in for the winter sales, filling up the Village, flocking into Bloomingdales, congesting Spring and Canal and everything in between, trawling the little boutiques selling Swiss Army knives and designer satchels, tea towels and shirts, moving from one warm retail cell to the next. Every cafe and restaurant within a two-kilometre radius of NYU was filled with students back after the holidays. But this was what Lydia had wanted. She had wanted to live on the square a stone’s throw from the campus.
Without Lydia, Levin had lost the rhythm of the week—the certainty of Monday to Friday, the habit of Saturday, the reprieve of Sunday. It was all gone. The day could be any day. If he wanted, he could take three Sundays in a row and wander through the city, take in a gallery, walk for hours along Riverside. Without Lydia coming and going from her office, the structures of the working week were abandoned like stone walls where the grass had won out and the whole edifice had fallen into disrepair. But wasn’t creativity the grass that did just that? Worked away at structures. What sort of brainwashing, he had wondered, had created a world in which people worked fifty or sixty hours a week, every week, no matter how beautiful the day outside, no matter what thoughts they were having? Where would the paintings come from? The novels and sculptures? The music?