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A murmur rose from the startled crowd.
For an exhilarating moment, she stood there naked.
Abramovic had been sitting in that chair for two and a half months.
Thousands of visitors had taken turns sitting across from her, bathing in her gaze.
But the young woman would never get a chance to take part in this singular ritual.
Flustered and tearful, she tried to explain herself to a documentary crew outside the exhibition.
I would have obeyed the rule if I had known, she said.
I just wanted to be as vulnerable with her as she makes herself to everyone else.
The woman, Josephine Decker, was a 29-year-old SAT tutor and an aspiring filmmaker.
Her latest work,Shirley,stars Elisabeth Moss as the horror writer Shirley Jackson.
Cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grvlens camera hovers over the characters faces like a housefly.
Scenes crash into each other without warning or exposition.
Decker lives in Los Angeles with her partner and their 6-month-old daughter.
Decker is lithe and pale, and she wore her dirty-blonde hair in a ponytail.
In the film,when Rose falls under Jacksons sway, she is destabilized while the writer is revived.
Decker wasnt raised in a culture that encouraged the sort of openness she displays in her work.
She grew up in TexasHouston and then Dallas.
The communitys silence around sexuality, especially female pleasure, weighed heavily on her.
I remember, when we were kids, asking my friends, Are you guys masturbating?
And they were like, No, gross, she recalled.
I was very sexually repressed.
In her early 20s, after graduating from Princeton, she co-directed a documentary about bisexuality.
She found it difficult to shake the Christian concept of sin.
We were filming all this wildly sexual stuff and I was very guilty, she told me.
A moment later, she corrected herself: Felt guilty.
A turning point came when she discovered Abramovics work.
It undid me and all the ways I thought about myself, she said.
I became wildly open.
Much of the work was explicitly sexual.
I was naked a lot that year, Decker recalled.
Swanberg made movies quickly and cheaply, casting his friends in roles that often mirrored their real lives.
It was a very confusing, nebulous cloud of emotion, sexuality, power, Swanberg told me.
They made their first film,Uncle Kent, in the summer of 2010.
It was a very sexy experience, she recalled.
I felt liberated and excited to be seen as a sexual being.
ButUncle Kentwas very PG 13.
Their next project,Art History,which they filmed later that summer, was not.
It was a very vulnerable time, she said, her eyes drifting.
Feels scared, she continued.
Because I felt scared.
Not always, not always.
But it was hard to tell if I was respecting my own boundaries.
That wasntmypet cause, she continued.
But I was the body.
I really wanted all of our energy to just flow.
And I kept being like, Just get over it, its not a big deal.
Its not a big deal.
Decker focused on her aesthetic concerns: That kind of image just says porn to me, she wrote.
Swanberg replied, Yes, lets talk about this.
When I spoke with Swanberg, he said, it creates this weird asterisk on the movie.
He said he wished shed been more direct at the time.
A chaperone approach of repeatedly saying Are you sure?
feels antithetical to the relationship the two of us had, he said.
She never said, Joe, I hate this shot.
I dont want it in the movie.
The question is: Could I have intuited that at the time?
For her part, Decker isnt sure.
The conversations had gotten her thinking about her upbringing.
Im really good at projecting a calm, collected exterior while inside Im fully panicking.
But I cant blame him, or I dont know how much to blame him.
Was I the one exploiting myself?
How much did I actively hide the emotions I was having?
Decker still prizes their collaboration, perhaps in part because negotiating their limits has been so challenging.
I grew a lot from Joe and having to have difficult conversations with him, she said.
I asked whether shed ever work with him again.
She thought about it for a long time.
But talking to him recently, something had shifted.
Id make a piece with him about this, she said.
Bauriedel had taught her as an undergrad at Princeton.
In her college days, she was clearly brilliant but buttoned-up, he said.
Now, a decade later, she seemed completely uninhibited.
She had a certain kind of freedom that was unstoppable, he said.
He recalled one performance in particular; it involved her speaking in tongues while wearing a clown nose.
A clown nose is a little mask, and at the end of the day you take it off.
She was one of the people who had a hard time taking it off.
By then, she had already premiered her first feature film, 2013sButter on the Latch.
Swanberg, who plays a leading role in the film, recalled laughing when she sent him the script.
I would use air quotes around script, he said.
It was like a long poem.
Why dont I just come to Kentucky and you tell me what to do.
They cried together and agreed to work together on a film.
She encouraged the actors to improvise scenes based on their own lives.
The boundaries between life and art became very murky, Decker said.
Throughout rehearsals, the cast and crew would talk through aspects of the process that made them uneasy.
Theres a power dynamic, and we cant pretend were all creating together.
But Howard said she never felt exploited on Deckers set.
Decker accepted her decision, but as they talked it over, July realized her fears had abated.
Every time I talk to you, she remembers telling Decker, I actually feel fine.
On the phone, as July related the story, she started crying.
Shirley Jackson and her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, were both obsessed with ritual and mythology.
Hyman studied these ideas, and Jacksons stories blunt, haunting parables embodied them.
When we next spoke, Decker led me in a ritual shed learned at the Pig Iron Theatre Company.
Its all about finding your primitive voice, she said.
For the next five minutes, we stared at each others faces while making a variety of guttural noises.
We cried out like newborns, groaned like people dying in agony.
You shed one person and become another, she said.
You lose your fear.
