The Museum of Modern Love(5)

Perhaps it was really Karl on the tops of all those buildings; not thirty-one sculptures in cast iron and fibreglass, but her husband watching out for her as she moved across the city. Impulsively, she had waved up at the sculpture and smiled.

She had taken the E train from Canal to 53rd, liking how it had become familiar in the past three days. Passing the Dunkin’ Donuts store wafting hot baked goods, climbing the stairs. The pavement was patterned with years of grey gum which at first she had mistaken for confetti. The noise of traffic, the movement of people, it was all intense. But there was also the surprise of sea air blowing between buildings. This time she wasn’t ferrying a bunch of students on an excursion. She wasn’t trying to explain anything to Karl. She had only herself to consider, and it had been a long time since life was that. Better still, she had two more weeks in which to do whatever she liked.

Jane considered again the words stencilled on the wall of the atrium that she had now read several times:

The Artist is Present distorts the line between everyday routine and ceremony. Positioned in the vast atrium within a square of light, the familiar configuration of a table and chairs has been elevated to another domain.

Visitors are encouraged to sit silently across from the artist for a duration of their choosing, becoming participants in the artwork rather than remaining spectators.

Though Abramovi? is silent, maintaining a nearly sculptural presence with a fixed pose and gaze, the performance is an invitation to engage in and complete a unique situation . . .



She frowned at the line: distorts the line between everyday routine and ceremony. Rather like Karl being dead, she thought. His death had distorted the everyday routine. He could not be called to supper or asked to please fix the broken lock on the back door. Yet she wanted so badly to believe he could still hear her, see her. She had spent every day for weeks saying, Please, God, let him get better . . . please don’t let him die. And then, Please, God, let him die. Please don’t let him suffer any more. But God had proved useless other than being the person to whom she could direct such requests.

She had likewise begged the flowers in her garden, the oak tree at the start of the driveway, clouds above the greenhouse. Even the lilies in the Monet print on their bedroom wall. She had looked for any kind of power that might make the everyday something more than a battle of time and biology. But nothing had made a stick of difference. He had died, her Karl, and not pleasantly. Reluctant. Frustrated. Frightened. Desperately wanting there to be more life.

She kept a candle burning by his photograph on the hall table, and every time she left the house or returned, she said, Hello, Karl. She continued to set a place for him at dinner. She didn’t serve him food—she wasn’t mad—but she laid a knife, a fork, a plate and a water glass and that felt entirely natural. She wasn’t ready to let him go and she didn’t think he was ready to go either.

Sometimes she was certain Karl was sitting in his chair. So they spent the evening like that, her reading, him just quiet. Sometimes she put a ball game on for him and he seemed to like that too. She was somewhere between everyday routine and ceremony. A ceremony for the letting-go of life. It was called mourning, but it was much more like the farm at night. Smell and sound were heightened, and other senses came into play. Texture, memory, scale. Mourning had its own intense, pungent intimacy.

A woman’s voice behind Jane said, ‘If she was painted she would be a Renoir.’

‘Without the dancing or the spring flowers,’ a man’s voice replied.

‘God, don’t you think she must be bored?’ the woman said.

Abramovi? was now sitting opposite a woman in a soft blue top. They were of an age and they looked into each other with an acute regard.

Then Jane heard the woman say, ‘Is it art, do you think, what she’s doing?’

‘How do you define art?’ the man asked.

Jane glanced back and saw the man and woman wore matching trench coats. And the woman was possibly his third wife. At least twenty years younger.

‘I don’t want to argue with you,’ the woman said.

‘But I’m not arguing,’ he said, in a Midwestern drawl. ‘What you have to understand is that art is irrelevant. If everything goes to crap, it won’t be art that saves us. Art won’t matter one iota. You can’t write your way alive, or paint your way out of death. Sitting is not art, no matter how long you do it for.’

‘Then what is it?’ the woman asked as she continued gazing at the two people in the centre of the room.

‘It’s sitting,’ the man said. ‘Nothing changes that. Like running or eating.’

‘Maybe it’s meditation,’ the woman said.

The man chuckled. ‘Who wants to see a Bosnian meditate?’

‘Serbian.’

‘Still the last people in the world anyone should take advice from.’

‘But she’s an artist.’

‘Double whammy,’ the man said. ‘Serbian artist.’

‘She’s doing something, otherwise all these people, they wouldn’t stay.’

‘Yeah, and Warhol painted tins of soup and sold them for millions. Rothko painted big red squares. And someone put a shark in formaldehyde. You put anything in a frame, call it art, get enough publicity, and people will think it has to be important.’

‘People are stupid, right?’ the woman said.