The Museum of Modern Love(69)
MARINA ABRAMOVI? HAD BEEN SITTING on that chair for seven hundred and thirty-six hours, since 9 March. Today she looked radiant. The buzz of the crowd was intense. Film crews angled for the best shot. Cameras flashed.
All day elation had been growing in Brittika, too, tickling her ribs, feathering the skin on her arms, her scalp. A text came through from Jane in Georgia: Bravo Marina! Such an achievement. I’m leaving for Madrid Sept 1. Carpe diem! My family think I’m crazy. I have surprised them. Nothing compared to what you did! My, oh my. But I feel I understand. Let’s meet again. Will email you. Bravo you too!
Brittika read the text and smiled. She adjusted the black wig she had worn to disguise her from the security guards who would almost certainly have thrown her out if they’d spotted her back in the gallery. They had made that very clear. But they had also been kind, after their initial anger. The police had not been called. There would be no charges. They had seemed to accept the complexity of the situation.
Today, without her pink hair, her coloured contacts and her make-up, she looked to all intents and purposes like any other Chinese girl. In short, she was invisible. She felt the press of the crowd about her. The atrium was packed. The balconies above were packed. She didn’t really know why she had needed to do what she did. She had never been drawn to exhibitionism. But after all this time studying Marina, she had wanted to show her that she had given everything. And that everything was okay.
It turned out that she wasn’t really that special. She had been naked for a few seconds, but really she was just one of more than fifteen hundred people who had sat in the chair opposite Marina over the past three months. She was one of the eight hundred and fifty thousand people who had come to see The Artist is Present.
There were now photos of her across the internet snapped by people on their phones. It had been too fast for Marco, or perhaps he’d chosen not to include it. Her nudity would not be officially captured in the Abramovi? archives. She hadn’t meant to disrupt the show. Or Marina. She hadn’t even known she could do it until she did. It had happened so fast. But she didn’t regret it. The pictures would be lost in the next million nude photos being uploaded today and another million tomorrow. Perhaps the photos would haunt her at university when she returned, but the ones she had seen made her look delighted. Maybe her parents would hear about it, or see it for themselves, and she knew they would be disappointed. Even angry. And she would face that when she went home too.
This wasn’t her fifteen minutes of fame. She knew that. There would be better moments. But it had been the most honest, uncontrived thing she’d ever done. It had felt like she had birthed herself at last.
Suddenly, there across the room, was the butcher in the red gingham shirt, only today’s shirt was blue gingham. He looked at her then looked away. Then he looked back, and she saw recognition light his eyes. In a few minutes he had moved through the crowd to stand beside her.
‘Almost didn’t recognise you with your clothes on,’ he said.
And she laughed.
MARINA WAS AWARE OF THE white dress, the weight of the boots on her feet, the tiny shutter of her eyelids, the noise growing within the atrium. She sensed the tightness of the crowd. She heard cameras and whispers and escalators humming in the distance. Floodlights had turned the atrium into a stage. The white walls rose around her. She was aware of the skylight high above her and the clouds and sky and sun falling towards Europe and a window on Makedonska Street where a woman sat stroking the forehead of a girl with a migraine so severe it blinded her. Who had she been, that woman? The one who came when the migraines struck? She had worn a white dress. It was only now Marina understood that all her life she had been walking towards herself. The future and the past were present.
She was almost out of time. The barest thoughts came and went. Fragments of her manifesto.
An artist must make time for a long period of solitude.
An artist should avoid going to the studio every day.
An artist should not treat his schedule as a bank employee does.
An artist should decide the minimum personal possessions they should have.
An artist should have more and more of less and less.
An artist should have friends that lift their spirit.
An artist has to learn to forgive.
Her stories had travelled the world. They were fixed in time like the photograph that showed her once-small breasts and slender thirty-year-old body in a gallery in Naples, cut and bleeding from a crowd.
The body of work it had taken to reach this day swelled in her mind like a wind behind her. The letters, photographs, films, stage plays, interviews, tapes, sketches. The bureaucracy, submissions, applications, proposals, budgets, faxes, emails, phone calls, meetings, paperwork, visas and flights, floor plans, sketches, trains, maps, hotels, car rentals. Negotiations, gallerists, administrators, government officials, police, occupational health and safety officers, security, curators, agents, photographers, minders.
So many people. So much paper. So much intensity and laughter. So many bruises. Scars and wounds and faces she would never see again. A way to spend a life. She could feel the beat of her heart, the swish of blood through her veins. And then it wasn’t blood but rain. She was standing in the rain in Serbia rubbing her naked breasts and singing Balkan songs with the women of her country. She was on the Great Wall with a thread of river far below. Sunlight flared against the red earth. The path was going up and on before her. Her legs ached. Her feet ached. Her heart ached for something she could not find.