The Museum of Modern Love(44)



Healayas knew that all guilt ultimately corrodes.

She remembered Abramovi?’s re-performance of Seedbed—the Vito Acconci piece –at the Guggenheim in 2005. Healayas had sat on the raised stage while underneath the floorboards Abramovi? had masturbated unseen, but not unheard. A microphone under the stage captured the narrative. On the platform, the people sitting avoided making eye contact with each other. Couples and friends giggled. One man lay face down on the floor and started to hump against it while underneath Abramovi? moaned, her words coloured by her Serbian accent. ‘Do you like to see another man making love to me while you’re masturbating? . . . Pull my pussy lips out of the way so my clitoris is exposed—spreading legs wider, pinching nipples. Who are you? . . . Can I come? . . . I need to know you’re there. Are you with me? . . . Are you my fantasy?’

Healayas had often thought about playing that recording on Art Review and seeing what people made of it. Was it art and not pornography because it was in the Guggenheim? When Acconci had performed it back in the long summer of love in 1972, it had been winter. He’d given four performances over two weeks, each lasting six hours. His cock must have been rubbed raw.

Healayas continued through the retrospective, recording her observations. Abramovi? and Ulay in a film running naked at one another in an underground car park. They slapped into each other then retreated back to their separate concrete columns almost as if they were on a long length of elastic. Then running towards each other they collided again. A crowd observed as the whack and slap of flesh against flesh went on and on.

There was a film where they breathed into each other’s mouths, locked together until one of them began to pass out from oxygen deprivation. In another film they were kneeling face to face and Ulay slapped Marina’s cheek. Marina slapped Ulay. Hand to cheek, hand to cheek, slap, slap, slap. The slaps became harder, the sound of the sting greater. Each of them was reeling a little. Until at last Ulay gave a slap so strong that Marina’s head swung with the impact. She responded with her own slap to his face, just as hard. They both bowed their heads, unable to go on.

In another film they screamed at one another, guttural screams directly into the other’s face until they went hoarse.

Artists were more honest than most people, Healayas thought. The performance artist Stelarc had grown an ear out of his left arm with the help of a team of doctors and scientists. A microphone was inserted and Stelarc’s conversations could be heard, making the ear a remote listening device for anyone who cared to listen in on Stelarc’s life.

Most people, Healayas knew, didn’t want to look inside themselves, let alone magnify that inner life for the world to see or hear or criticise. Perhaps that was the invitation at the heart of The Artist is Present. ‘Come and be yourself.’ And the people who sat found out how hard, how confronting, and how strange that was.

At the back of the retrospective, Healayas sat down on the floor and watched the video showing Abramovi? and Ulay walking the Great Wall of China. The Lovers. Two figures in red and blue walking towards each other over thousands of miles to say goodbye.

For eight years Abramovi? and Ulay had planned that walk. They were to begin at either end of the wall. After three thousand miles they would meet and marry. Instead, after thirteen years together, they had used it to formally end their relationship and their artistic collaboration. Abramovi? had said: ‘We spend so much time focused on the beginning of relationships, why do we not give equal consideration to ending them?’

Ulay walked on a cliff above a distant snake of silver river, he tramped across a sienna desert. His gangly frame was cloaked and his face shadowed. His stride was steady and light. He traversed broken fragments of wall and fissures caused by earthquakes. He walked across grasslands where the wall had disappeared, and places where it had long fallen into disrepair.

Marina, starting at the eastern end of the Great Wall, had the familiar rammed-earth wall, the stone balustrades and staircases. Step by step, staff in hand, she climbed. She appeared diminished by the scale of the ancient fortress and the steepness of the steps. Up and up, down and down, up and up, on and on she walked, her red clothing moving in the wind. The light beyond was golden. Her head was set, her gaze impassive, her step resolute.

Three thousand miles to say goodbye. Healayas watched as the film continued through to the final moment when Ulay and Marina met.

Healayas thought of her sister pleading with her to come home for their father’s funeral.

‘Why do you have to be so difficult?’ Airah had asked her. It had always been her mother’s complaint. That she, Healayas, was difficult. ‘I’d like you here to help me sort everything. I don’t know what to do with it all.’

‘Throw it away.’

‘He loved you. He loved you more than anyone. He never blamed you,’ Airah had cried. ‘Why can’t you come home and say goodbye to him?’

‘There’s nothing to say.’ Not to her father nor to his grave.

In the afterlight of the call, she thought she could have volunteered some shared memory. ‘Do you remember how we’d toss those little stick boats he made into the Seine from the bridge? Remember when he came in at night and how he smelled of bitumen after rain?’ But if she started that conversation it might never end.

She didn’t want to see her father’s name on a grave. She didn’t want to see the house without him there playing music. She didn’t want to see his clarinet. She remembered how, as a child, when he played she saw rainbows. How his eyes had been the saddest eyes she had ever seen. How his hand had closed about hers like a wing about a body. How even when she was almost as tall as him, he’d take her hand to cross a street. How he’d remained sure of her course, sure that she was capable and wise, long after she’d proved to him she wasn’t.

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