The Museum of Modern Love(53)

Danica leaned towards a photograph of her daughter carrying an armful of firewood. ‘I shake my fist at that film you made of Serbia, bringing this on our good name. The humping men and naked women showing their pi’cka. Your mockery of our songs. I denounce you, too, for slicing our beloved communist star into your stomach. And that thing in Venice at the Biennale, scrubbing the bones of cows. They gave you the Golden Lion! Has the world gone mad?’

Danica remembered the room in the apartment she had given Marina for her studio and how Marina had smeared shoe polish all over it. But I made her live with it, Danica thought, that ugly smell—but not as ugly as that great pile of rotting cow bones, there in Venice.

People had said to her, ‘Ah, your daughter is so famous. You must be very proud.’

‘I am proud,’ Danica would reply. But she did not say of what she was proud and it wasn’t Marina. What mother could be proud of that? Showing her breasts, burning the communist star. Whipping herself naked. And that time in Milan with the gun and the bullet and all those other things they could have hurt her with. It’s a wonder she wasn’t raped.

She had read Marina’s interviews. ‘My mother bought me only flannel pyjamas three sizes too big each birthday. My mother punished me. My mother hit me. My mother tried to kill me. My mother never kissed me. My mother hid my real birth date from me. My mother this, my mother that.’

Danica, in her new lightweight form, had been there when Marina had gone to clear out her apartment the day after the funeral.

Marina had found the trunk with the scrapbooks.

‘Don’t open them. None of that is for you. It’s not for anyone,’ she tried to tell Marina. But death was impotence.

Inside were the newspaper clippings, the magazine articles, everything dated, catalogued and recorded. Right back to 1967. Every mention of the artist Marina Abramovi?. Even some little leather clouds, yellowed and curled, stuck into the pages. The first art Marina had made. Danica hadn’t meant to leave the box for anyone to find. She had been too sick to remember it.

Marina had taken every little thing from the trunk. Turned over the war medals. Read the citations from President Tito. Read the letters from the survivors. And there she was, a grown woman, nearly sixty, weeping on Danica’s bed.

‘You see, Marina,’ Danica had said, too late for Marina to hear her words. ‘A mother is just a heart. You pain me, every day of my life, with those dark eyes. You reproach me. But discipline is the only thing that protects you when the world goes mad. I thought it would make you safe.’

From the sixth floor Danica looks down into the atrium at her daughter far below, alone in the middle of the world.

‘You know I would rescue you from a burning truck. I would carry you to safety. Any moment you need it, I would do that for you.’

Love was a wasteland. Danica could no more fly down and scoop Marina up than swim the length of the Danube.





FRANCESCA LANG COULD HEAR HER husband, Dieter, talking in French on the phone. It was another interview with one of the European media outlets. She peeled apples as the one-sided conversation washed through the open door. Marina wasn’t talking to the media for three months, so Dieter must talk for her.

‘After the Biennale? Well, she hardly ever eats meat . . .’

‘Pre Ulay I think she was working out how to be an artist. Then twelve years with Ulay. Post Ulay there was uncertainty of course. And then extraordinary growth.’

‘She calls herself the grandmother of performance art. And this show, it will immortalise her.’

‘The thing that may surprise people is that she’s a very gentle person. Very funny. Incredibly warm. Superstitious. She’s very generous.’

‘She believes in seven-year cycles. So if something goes wrong . . . seven years.’

Right now, Dieter was one of the most powerful men in the art world. More than six hundred thousand people had come to MoMA to see The Artist is Present. Celebrities had come. Sharon Stone. Isabella Rossellini. Andreas Gursky. Antony Gormley. Lou Reed. Rufus Wainwright. Bj?rk. Antony Hegarty. Matthew Barney. The phones at his gallery did not stop ringing.

‘Yes, a huge high to win the Golden Lion . . . Marina was watching the country being destroyed by Milosevic. So that was her way of expressing it . . .’

‘Yes, The Room with the Ocean View was her answer to 9/11. She wanted to create a still point in the aftermath.’

‘It’s all about energy. People talk of her extreme ego. Self-aggrandisement. But she’s not tough on people. She’s very tough on herself.’

‘Well, everything matters to Louise Bourgeois.’

Francesca took him fresh coffee and a letter and CD from Healayas Breen that had been addressed to her. The note said: I thought you and Dieter might be interested in some of the coverage we’ve been giving The Artist is Present. Cordialement, Healayas Breen.

Dieter ran his hand over her buttocks as she moved away. He put the reporter on speakerphone.

Francesca couldn’t stand Arnold Keeble. But of course Keeble was on the guest list. He was on the guest list to any art event in the world. His television series had been a huge hit, but she had smiled when she noticed that the next series featured Healayas too. Arnold had a way of looking at a woman that dismissed, or sexualised. So many men did it without even noticing. On radio with Healayas he was clever, combative, arrogant, irritating. It made Francesca wonder about his relationship with his co-host outside the studio. Healayas was so very striking. It was hard to know if her looks and her accent had always been an advantage.