The Museum of Modern Love(63)
Through the tinted windows of the car, she watches New York go about its 9 am business. Two girls in high heels are each carrying a large flowering pot plant like something from a French movie. Three men in skinny jeans and dark glasses are looking like an advertisement for Vanity Fair. For a moment I hear her consider that the real is literally unbearable. Traffic lights and crowds. Scaffolding where this building and that is being restored, repainted. New apartments advertised on giant billboards. New fragrances and movies and television shows. New everything every moment of the day. American luxury, so tantalising, so tempting and so treacherous.
Marina loves luxury as much as anyone. She loves fabrics and food. Simple is the hardest thing to achieve. She thinks of Klaus Biesenbach, who invited her to create this show at MoMA. Marina and Klaus were lovers years ago. He still loves her and she him, the way some people manage to do love in all its forms. He is one of the great curators. He has made this possible. You might imagine he has a house filled with art but he doesn’t. He lives in the simplest apartment in the world. An ultimate Manhattan view with blank walls and not a painting or sculpture anywhere. Why would he need them when he spends every day in one of the most wonderful galleries in the world? Why indeed.
When Marina was sixteen, Danica employed an art tutor. He was very short, in a red coat, with a dark beard. He was the latest in a long line of people employed to make the young Marina into something Danica could be proud of. First it was a pianist, then a linguist. Later an historian, and then, as a last resort, an artist. Perhaps the little man understood this about a certain type of mother. So once the door was closed, and he was alone with the young Marina, he did not bring out paper and pencils. He unrolled a small canvas that he pinned to the floor. Then he squeezed red, yellow and blue paint onto the canvas. He scraped the colours this way and that, until it was all a brown smear. From a glass jar he took grit and gravel and poured this onto the painting, again scraping and smearing. He took a small pair of scissors and clipped his nails, the hair on his head, and all of this went onto the canvas too.
‘You want to be an artist,’ he said, ‘then it takes everything. Everything. You do the other. You get a job. You become a wife. A mother. You contribute to the machine. The machine is always seeking volunteers. But art is not a machine. It does not ask. You ask of it, in your unworthy way, if you might add a little thread. If you ever do add a thread, then that is something to be marvelled at. I will never do that. I’m old enough to know that now. But you are still young enough. You have time to find it. Find what it is that lives inside you, and only you.’
With this, he poured turpentine onto the painting. Striking a match, he picked up the painting and set it alight. It dripped and flared, and only when the flames licked his fingertips, did he let it float to the ground. It sputtered and smoked and the fire died.
He said, ‘Art will wake you up. Art will break your heart. There will be glorious days. If you want eternity, you must be fearless.’
With that he gathered up his satchel and bowed his head briefly to her before closing the door behind him. Marina tacked the remnant of canvas onto the wall. It was as if she had been given the skin of a dragon. She pressed the charred flakes on the floor into her skin, where they left a dark powdery smear.
She watched the dragon skin through the autumn that followed, and the winter, and the spring and summer beyond. She observed as it aged and decayed. Art, she thought, could be something unimaginable.
She painted car crashes, portraits and clouds, but they did not convey the unimaginable. She discovered Joseph Beuys, Yves Klein and Zen Buddhism. Klein declared his paintings were the ashes of his art and she wondered if the little man had paid him a visit too. She read Helena Blavatsky, who said there was no religion higher than truth. But was there an art higher than truth? What was the most truthful art? She wanted to know what came before art, what was underneath art. She wanted to understand infinity.
She longed to harness the subtle bodies Blavatsky described. But it was hard to know how to leave her body. It seemed that other people visited more often than she left. There was a self that watched her parents fighting from a vantage point above the kitchen sink. There was a woman who appeared in the darkness and sang her back to sleep after her mother had forced her awake yet again, haranguing the young Marina to smooth the sheets and blankets on the bed, insisting that even in sleep Marina must have a soldier’s eye for order and be ready for anything. There was an old woman in a white dress who sat beside the bed when the migraines came with every period, and put her cool hand upon the teenage Marina’s brow.
The car pulls in to the kerb and Marina’s assistant Davide comes around to open the door for her. She is unbelievably tired. She has lost more than seven kilos. Sixty-eight days are behind her and seven ahead. Klaus is there to welcome her.
‘I would like to lie on grass,’ she says to Davide in the green room. ‘Tonight, once we are finished.’
He nods and smiles.
‘I want to lie and watch leaves.’
‘Then it shall be so.’
‘And we will do the invitation list for the party? Can you talk to Dieter? I cannot wait for a party. It will be so good to laugh.’
She will make it now. Seven days is nothing. Surely.
IT WAS DAY SEVENTY - FOUR AND the atrium was crowded. Everyone recognised the actors. First it had been Alan Rickman, elegant and focused in a myopic kind of way. Now Miranda Richardson stepped from the middle of a huddle of MoMA staff and waited at the entrance to the square. The whisper of her name went around the atrium like a cave echo.