The Museum of Modern Love(54)

‘What you need to understand here,’ Dieter was saying to the journalist, ‘and I don’t mean to claim anything, I don’t want to take anything away from her because she does it, but she works best in collaboration. Some artists need it more than others. Some are very self-reliant and that works for them. But Marina . . . it’s not a control thing. We’re both controlling, but together there’s a different sort of exploration. I mean take Michaela Barns and the piece at the Empire State. It could have been terrible but it wasn’t. We pared it back over two years and it gained cogency. Marina is like that. It’s a journey and we’re both on it. I’m sure she’d say she’s learned from it. I have learned enormously from her. I mean, you do from the greats.’

Dieter beckoned to Francesca to sit with him.

‘You each bring a unique perspective?’ the journalist’s voice asked.

‘I see the world through a literary filter, the need for story. Marina sees it in a completely different way. She’s a great thinker. She’s organic. She responds emotionally. But over twenty-five years, I think we know that together we’re greater than our parts. That’s how it is.’

‘How is it that you became interested in art, Monsieur Lang?’

Dieter smiled at Francesca. ‘Well, it’s a cute story. I had a teacher, Miss Stein, in my final year of primary school. She went somewhere on a holiday, and sent us each a postcard of a piece of art she saw. I got Giacometti’s Walking Man. Some of the kids laughed and thought I’d been unlucky. Some of them had Turners or Vermeers. But I got the Giacometti. I wanted to be in the art world from that moment on.’

‘Marina has no family,’ said the journalist. ‘Her marriage to the artist Paolo Canevari has recently ended. Is The Artist is Present also a form of mourning for her?’

‘No comment,’ said Dieter.

‘So art has mattered more to her than love?’ the journalist asked.

Francesca frowned. She wanted to say to the journalist that it’s never as simple as art or love. Look at the greats in any field. Relationships are hard. She is one of the most famous women in the world and she has millions of dollars in art and property. And there is no one to go home to at night.

When Dieter did not answer, the journalist added, ‘It seems that her life is a metaphor for performance art. Nothing will remain.’

Dieter said, ‘Oh, I think a lot will remain. There will be books, a film to come. There’s a documentary in the making. Things we can’t see yet will come from this. But this, what we’ve seen at MoMA, will never happen again. It’s been very special. More than anyone had hoped for, I think. Especially Marina.’

She’ll be a page, Francesca thought, half a page in the history of art in a hundred years. And Dieter? He would have helped to make it possible.

‘No re-enactments?’

‘I can’t promise that.’ She saw Dieter allow himself a small smile.

‘Has fame always been her driving force?’ the journalist asked. ‘Yes,’ said Dieter. ‘It has. It is for many artists, if you stop to ask them, or they are honest enough to answer truthfully.’

After the interview was over, Francesca suggested to Dieter that he offer Healayas Breen an interview with Marina the night the show ended. The world media would be clamouring to get to her.

‘Not Arnold? He’ll be furious.’

‘I think Healayas will do it well,’ Francesca said.

‘Alright.’

She enjoyed swirling these little pools of influence for other women. God knew, the women of the world needed all the help they could get.

She returned to the kitchen and arranged apples in bubbling brown sugar and butter. Slowly she turned them and watched as the white flesh became translucent. The smell rose up and she blew on the spoon and licked it. She thought of Marina sitting in that white room day after day. And then, when she was at home, drinking water every hour to avoid dehydration. And the pain that must be everywhere now. Even for a woman as experienced as Marina, it was a big ask.

My dear friend, she thought. I send you sunshine, and blue sky, and spring becoming summer. Just twenty days to go. Just twenty days and I will make you a feast.

She began listing on a piece of paper everyone that she and Dieter must invite to that meal.

I will never sit for seventy-five days, Francesca thought. I will never slice my stomach with a razor blade or eat a kilo of honey. I will never show my body to the world nor have students who think me wise and brave. But because you do this, Marina, I am stronger. I am more certain of that every day. You live your art and it is inseparable from you. And with it you bring me courage. You are a woman and this is a fact. No matter what people make of anything else, your gender is unequivocal.





AS SHE WAITED IN THE queue to sit again, Brittika thought about her soul. Was it really a quivering dark shadow wrapped in gold leaf? Had she really eaten it? And where had it come from? Had she left it somewhere? She thought of the Murakami novel in which the soul of a man was in a woodshed dying of cold. This wasn’t the time for her to dive into New Age self-analysis. It had been an hallucination. Simple as that. She had to put it behind her and focus. She had to get through these seventy-five days. Ironic that her thesis on endurance should become an act of endurance in itself.

She’d been back to Amsterdam to meet with her supervisors, and she had worked on the latest draft of her thesis. She had done some long shifts at the local co-op, and then booked the cheapest flight to New York for the final days of the show. Her credit card was sagging under the weight of The Artist is Present. The hostel on 46th was no friendlier with familiarity. The air conditioner had become noisier, as had the noise coming up from the street.