Marina Abramovic @ The Guggenheim Museum
SISTER
To my marina,
I often think of my sister, marina, lying in her bed across the room. I have written about her many times before. My childhood was not as austere, perhaps, as your own. I grew up in an Italian American household on a block where almost every house you entered mirrored your own: had the same landscape, the very same form with the same couches and easy chairs encased in plastic. There was a spiritual poverty that my little soul railed against. But my sister, my sister, was the one sentient being I had access to and I craved her love. We slept in separate beds but when I was afraid I knew she was there and I wasn't alone.
The inherent problem, of course, was that, in our tiny life, there was only one source of true love that we could understand -- the complicated and contradictory duality of our common parental fountain. My sister stood in the way of me getting that limited obstructed life force. It was not her fault, of course, but together we both learned that love was limited and that became everything we knew. Even when we craved each other, we knew, some how deep inside that we would have to kill each other to get the true true love. We learned that at the table, in order to eat, there was only room for one. Even in America, in the affluent 60s, so unlike your childhood in Yugoslavia in every other way, there was poverty in the air. Like the smell of fear, the assumptions of deprivation permeate everything.
SENSITIVE
" . . . extreme sensitivity is a form of conceit - I think I am the focus of everybody's actions . . "
-- courage to change, al-anon daybook (please excuse any presumptions)
I am extremely sensitive -- like you my dear marina -- like you I carry the world around inside me. I can answer, cannot help but answer, to the vibrations of someone I love, extremely close or far, far away. Whether or not these vibrations concern me, I place myself in the center of them. I can answer and do, with urgency. The message in my body is that I must throw myself off into the chasm of this disruption in order to set the universe right.
Of course now this information, the information of how to solve deep personal female states of alarm is made public and is easily accessible through the internet, easy for any teenage girl to learn -- how to access, form and release the pain. We had to teach ourselves how to plunge into oblivion, how to plunge into the chasm and we learned how to do it publicly -- me loving strangers alone and without protection, you screaming til silent, brushing your hair til you bled -- publicly and dangerously, in order to prove our sincerity inside our hearts, in order to be seen but most importantly and more privately, to feel.
Someone can only do something to us if we allow them to. We can only hurt ourselves when we want to. I hurt myself daily by my ruthlessness in the name of love (art). Is it because I use my body for art (love) that I feel like there is no room for another in the path of love (art)? I am sorry, marina.
PROTECTION
The last time I saw you, you were naked.
I was there on the final day of the house with the ocean view at sean kelley. I had never seen you in public before. I had thought you were my hero. I watched you come down the stairs that day to your adoring public. I saw you lifted actually, by -- I hope I am remembering this correctly -- your man and your other man, mr. kelly and others, they seemed like body guards, as I remember it, but I am probably exaggerating.
The press, the throngs, your adoring public surrounded you, you spoke faintly, in your robe, into a microphone, for just a few minutes before you were whisked away -- into seclusion, I imagined.
The deification surprised me, that day and also at the guggenheim, the way you always place yourself above your audience. I didn't expect that. It is another form of protection that I never allow myself. I am thinking it goes along with the ability to think so highly of yourself, to protect yourself through self–importance. I envy that ability. I always blame my mother. I know only how to put myself on the train tracks in front of the locomotive. I'm confused what is real.
Marilyn Monroe once said (this is loosely quoted) being famous is like being a baby put in the middle of traffic but I'm not quite so sure, maybe this was true in her day, maybe her management was not that good, maybe they really didn't understand the fame machine in those days, maybe they thought the adoration really was love, but now celebrity security it is an art . . but this kind of security is only functional from the outside and only works if those wishing to infiltrate are afraid of the consequences.
I have to admit, I still believe there is still time for me to be discovered, just for being me – still time to be a rock star, super model, superconceptualinstallationperformanceartist, be discovered maybe even there, right there at the guggenheim, I could be discovered, milling around with the glitterati and paparazzi, everybody whispering, standing, ignoring, flirting . . . everyone milling around the center ring of you, whispering like they were at some kind of hybrid championship prize fight/playoff/funeral, you with your rabbit and gold . .
I had to remember why I came here; my mission was to soften my heart, to love you. I sat at your feet and tried to give you all my attention, to focus. Inside I was alternately sweet and attentive and mean. The mean feelings felt more real. It bothered me when I recognized that I wanted you to fail. Knowing that I would benefit from loving you did make it easier.
I enjoyed watching your man pace the floor behind you, even if it did make me jealous, watching him protect you from the cameras (or was he protecting your arrangement with the guggenheim or the inviolate protection of your documentation and the book that will come out of it all, which he had every right to protect, for that is your livelihood, is it not, and don't we all have the right to support ourselves). He paced the floor behind you, at one point going outside the front door of the guggenheim to stop someone from filming outside the glass. sean kelly was on task as well, assisting guggenheim security by having polite words with those with cameras, everything very civilized and genteel, a slight reprimand, nothing confiscated. I had to love you extra hard as I watched your men protecting you. I had to pretend I was you and that they were there for me, and how good that would feel, just for a minute.
LOVE INSIDE/LOVE OUTSIDE
I loved you two ways, with my eyes open and closed. When I really looked at you, I had to wonder, what was on the other side of your eyes, your stare inscrutable. The soul empties itself through the eyes out into the world, and I thought I saw sadness. I might have been projecting that, my own vulnerability, but I empathized with you and wondered if you ever worried, in the middle of everything if it -- the performance, everything -- was working. Sometimes I hate my own vulnerability and my ruthless hunger. I hate that inside myself, it perpetuates my isolation.
But the truth is, I did feel sad for you, and for me, the two of us utterly self-conscious, achingly self-conscious, aware of everything shiny and reflective.
I was the most sad when you moved your dead bunny, manipulated your dead bunny, as you held him close and tender, grandfather one minute, teenage girl the next, the bunny your only company in the freeway of your audience's gaze. I was with you as you moved the ear and the paw with your fingers. I had to love you with my eyes closed when you put the bunny's ears in your mouth and began to crawl on the stage.
Ultimately, I could only love you from the darkness within myself; I could not look at you and love you with all my heart. The darkness softened you and I was able to cherish you there, inside my head. I could taste the sweetness of loving you and I have gratitude towards you for this. It is in there, with my eyes closed, that I felt my heart surge forward and settle back rhythmically, the draw and pull of it, so familiar, that could translate as a form of love.
And it was in my quietness that I faced myself and shared my true communion with you, and it was not pretty or anything I was proud of. By loving you, through that complete and utter narcissism -- to believe that I was the one, the one, the only one that could really see you and love you, that I traveled all this way to love you, that this was my triumph, to be the most special and to claim you as my own. In this way, I would win; I could lift myself up with you on the pedestal -- so good, so good, better.
NEXT LOVE: TRACEY EMIN "I CAN FEEL YOUR SMILE" @ LEHMANN MAUPIN NYC
It's messy, isn't it? All this loving and hating but trying not to but still trying to be connected to something "true." I admire your fortitude in the on-going experiment of trying to embody this love project. The honesty and raw/real-ness of it all is both compelling and a bit repellant. Yet, you keep at it... Marina, Tracey, Mike.... I wonder who's next. Tackling the age old question of "Do I want to be you or do I want to fuck you?" You're a brave soldier. Onward comrade.
Heidi
Posted by: Heidi | December 12, 2005 at 12:28 PM