The Museum of Modern Love(46)
After the first ten minutes of the photographic shoot, Marina Abramovi? had given Marco her whole day.
She had said later, when the day was done and they were on the terrazzo drinking limoncello, that if you dipped your fingers in the pockets of Yugoslavia, you could pull out stories of warm bread, onions and mincemeat, vine leaves and plum brandy, cornbread and strudel. You could unravel myths of the sun drawn from a palace by white horses, a young God dropping corn in spring, summer as a woman newly in love but abandoned each autumn. You could cut yourself on ancient mountain ranges and skin your knees on lost valleys, yet there were fields of red poppies and homemade wine and someone singing ballads of virgins wandering in the moonlight and old women who carried the bones of animals to stave off disease.
There were other myths Marina had told him: of large black cats that barked like dogs to protect the cows in the barn through the slow white winter; spirits in the bathhouse, by the front door, by the fireplace; rat-catchers and shepherds, soldiers and priests, the world swathed in black, green, gold, red, magenta.
When she planned this show, he said, ‘I will photograph everyone who comes to sit with you.’
‘Seventy-five days,’ she said. ‘Are you sure? Can you do it? è un periodo lungo.’
‘Sì,’ he had said, not understanding then how long seventy-five days could be. Perhaps Marina hadn’t either.
They conversed always in Italian. He spoke English badly. His Serbian was hello, goodbye, thank you, tomorrow, hungry, delicious, one, two, three, love. She spoke German and French too, and Dutch, and in every language she was funny, intense, and her accent rumbled with Balkan vowels and consonants.
‘I will stay with you for the entire show,’ he said. Even then he felt his devotion to her. ‘Every day, so that nothing, no one is missed. Every face. We will capture every face.’
So here he was, and spring was gracing the city outside. The children in the strollers who came into the atrium had bare legs and were no longer swathed and booted. He smelled rain on trench coats and wind in the wraps and scarves.
For seventy-five days he was an archivist. Every day he took the clipboard and moved along the queue of people and had them sign the permission form to be photographed, making their images available to Marina for any future works, books, films, performances. Nearly everyone signed. Then he returned to his camera and photographed face after face. Every face. He captured the moment when they first sat and their eyes connected with Marina. Then he waited until their emotions began to surface, and he captured them again and again.
A sitting could last two minutes or two hours. Or an entire day. He hadn’t expected people to do that. Nor had any of la famiglia di Marina. So many expressions crossed the faces of those who sat. He looked for intensity. He looked for the moment when the person sitting was consumed by the indecipherable. He felt as if he was inside a world of raw truth. Who would have imagined there would be such faces? He had photographed architecture, history, musicians. Now, day after day, he looked into the human face, painted with curiosity, and he saw the abyss of history within a human heart. Every one was its own beaten, salvaged, polished, engraved, carved, luminous form.
He captured this ephemeral thing, a communion between an artist and her audience. The chair opposite her was an invitation. Come sit if you wish.
Here in New York, where time was everyone’s currency, and to gaze deeply into the face of another was possibly a sign of madness, people were flocking to sit with Marina Abramovi?. She wasn’t so much stealing hearts, he thought, as awakening them. The light that came into their eyes. Their intelligence, their sadness, all of it tumbled out as people sat. Marco, with his long lens and archivist’s eye, captured them all. Il devoto ed i devoti.
WHEN BRITTIKA VAN DER SAR returned to New York for the third time, she went straight to MoMA, ignoring her desire for a shower after the overnight flight from Amsterdam. Marco, the photographer, recognised her and nodded when he saw her. Carlos, who must have sat fifteen times by now, was sitting again. Carlos had a social media following. On Twitter there was an IsatwithMarina hashtag. She saw the silver-haired film composer on the sidelines too, the one Jane had introduced her to. He was in his usual position, seated on a red pillow. He was entirely absorbed in the two people at the table, as if he was watching a movie. She wondered what was going on in his life that this was what took up his time. She must interview him.
Today she was lucky and the queue moved fast. By mid-afternoon it was finally her turn. She strode to the table. She wanted to get it right this time. She gazed into Abramovi?’s brown eyes, sure there was a flicker of recognition, a warming. Brittika smiled and hoped Marco had got just that moment.
She was aware of the noise of the crowd milling and staring. She hoped she looked confident but she felt only nervousness. Why didn’t other people seem to be afraid of the crowd when they sat? It was the hardest thing to pretend confidence when you didn’t feel it.
Her heart was beating hard in her chest and her hands were shaking. There was a sort of tremor running down her spine. Did people on TV get nervous? Did Marina get nervous? Was she nervous right now?
When I get my PhD, I’ll stop feeling like this, thought Brittika. Six more months. Then I won’t feel like a fake any more.
Marco had told her that Marina’s team had taken bets, before the show started, on how many people would sit. Marina’s assistant, Davide Balliano, had predicted more than half a million visitors and fifteen hundred sitters. They had all thought he was way too ambitious. But The Artist is Present was over halfway through and Davide had already won the bet on the visitor numbers and more than a thousand people had sat in the chair opposite Marina.