rather, selections and compilations of them, got shown alongside the installation itself, so that everyone who visited knew that they were themselves being filmed; and someone had written a big essay in Artforum about this, about the viewer and the voyeur in Sirena Shahid’s work. And because she’d made this gag her gag, she’d unwittingly led people to behave in extraordinary ways, sometimes, while they were visiting Wonderland: there’d been the couple that simulated fucking in public, and the university student who came through the installation in a furry white bunny suit, with enormous ears … Of course, Sirena didn’t show videos of these spontaneous interventions, but bemused critics wrote about them and asked probing questions about the line between art and exploitation, whether this was collaborative art or mere comedy, and whether there was a willful or incidental degradation in these cases, in the approach of art to reality television.
That said, nobody denied that Sirena made thoughtful and beautiful and emotionally affecting art—they all said so. In the space of two short years, she had successfully rendered herself controversial in certain ways, and this controversy had made her famous, certainly in Europe, but even in the North American art world, so that her inclusion in the Brooklyn Museum’s inaugural feminist exhibition in the spring of 2007 seemed, ex post facto, by no means a favor or a risk taken by the curators but was, rather, artistically utterly de rigueur. That famous art historian–cum–curator could now assert that she would no more have left Sirena out of her show than she would have cut off her fingers or included a man.
All this I knew from my Google Alerts; but all this I feigned not to know. And it was interesting—always, she was interesting, even when she caused me pain—to hear how she spoke of herself, and of her boys, and of our by then long-gone time together.
“Isn’t it funny,” she said, stroking with an inky finger the beads of condensation on her glass of white wine, “that year was such an unhappy one, for me. Remember poor Reza? And Skandar away so much—and that weather. Do you remember, Nora? I’ve never had a harder time.” (Except, she said “time-e.”)
“I guess I didn’t realize it was that bad,” I said. What else could I say?
“Realize it was that bad? But that’s the extraordinary thing. It can’t have been so bad, or it was bad for a purpose—because the Wonderland I made—” She paused, and with a gentle tilt of her head, she added, “That I made with your amazing help, and could not have made alone—that Wonderland has been an enormous change in my life. I sometimes forget, because it hasn’t been always easy—I’m not supposed to say this, because then you’re ungrateful for success, but to you, my Nora”—the hand upon my arm—“I can tell the truth. So these past two years, they’ve been tough. All the travel, Reza doesn’t like it; nor Skandar. He’s not a showy person, but that’s because he’s the center of attention; and when the attention is not for him, he’s not such a sunny character. He can be unhappy, and difficult, and behave badly. Also, his mother has been very sick, last year—she’s better now, but cancer, does the worry ever go away afterward?—so, yes, it’s all been much too busy, and not so easy”—all this time I was really looking at her, waiting for her to recognize me, waiting to see her properly in her eyes; but they were either downcast or darting about, and didn’t focus on my face—“but it’s as if the time in Cambridge, yes, such a hard time for us all—is in a separate box, now it’s put away, it doesn’t have a place in my every day. Even though it’s where things began to change, because it’s where I met you, my friend, and made the beginnings of my Wonderland.”
“But you remember it?” As I asked, I had so clearly before me the winter light from the windows into the studio, the paint-spattered faucet at the sink, the chipped cups and the poufs and the grimy, bruise-colored rug under the coffee table. I could see their town house, feel the flimsiness of its painted plywood front door, the door handle slipping in its socket, see the stains on the beige broadloom going up the stairs inside the entrance, and smell the faintly institutional biscuity smell that the house retained even after they’d illicitly smoked many cigarettes in it.