A Dish Best Served Intimate.

I've just discovered Marina Abramovic. Apparently she's the grandmother of performance art. MOMA is doing a retrospective of her work, and The New Yorker has a video slideshow on her work.

My previous attitude towards performance art was that it was bullshit. Most of the time. Sometimes it can be great fun, but I think most of it is mostly nonsense. I think if you took some of the strange shit they do in Angsbacka, which is this tree-hugging hippie commune three miles north of Molkom in Sweden, and put it in a gallery, it could count as performance art. Not all of the shit, but some of it, like the tantric sex thing they do at the end could well count as an art piece, with a few modifications.

But Marina Abramovic's work is compelling, quite unlike other stuff I've seen/experienced so far. Mind you the only performance art I've ever experienced in real life was my own, and I'm just a crazy chick with friends that make that sort of art, and I did most of it drunk, so you can't possibly expect a very favorable review from me of the whole affair.

Her stuff however looks pretty painful. It's how performance art should be I feel. Personal, intimate, and genuine. I really like the one where she gets gallery viewers to use, on her body. a bunch of tools placed beside her. It's almost like being invited to take part in a psychological experiment. The one about the two naked people standing on either side of a narrow doorway so people had to squeeze through them is also pretty neat. It'll be sensational if they brought the work here to Singapore and allowed everyone, including children to participate.

Anyway, I will leave you with this photo. 

I think the best sort of performance art is the one you do for yourself in an intimate setting. It's a pity you can't see my back in it, but he had, while both of is were in an addled haze, talking at 100 wpm, drawn an entire map of some fictional land of wonder on my back.

Have you heard of the Museum Of Broken Hearts? It is a traveling gallery of photographs where people send the one photo that defined a relationship that meant a lot to them but is now no longer. I wish I hadn't lost it, but an ex left a bizarre photo of him tied up to the bookshelf in his girlfriend's red thong. With a jar of Nutella beside his face. With a dildo in it. 



More to come....

Lost Girls for Bedtime.

I finally started reading Lost Girls. I read part of volume 1 ages ago, but then got busy and never carried on. It's Alan Moore's take on the fantasies of Alice, Wendy and Dorothy. Their alternate universes as a metaphor for sexual awakening. The Straw Man in The Wizard of Oz wasn't really a straw man, he was a beautiful blonde boy with not a lot of brains. The Queen of Hearts was Alice's all-powerful controlling lesbian lover, and Peter Pan is a gypsy teaching well brought up and so bourgeois Wendy Darling the joys of sex. Captain Hook, by the way, is a pedophile. So was the bunny rabbit in Alice. Go figure.

One thing that got me laughing out loud was the Austrian character in it called Rolf. So I have this impression that Austrian men are pretty decadent, and can charm your pants of. No idea where I got that from. I've met a few that are like that, and more that aren't. So probably from comic books. There's always an aristocratic Austrian man popping up in comic books charming both ladies and gents.

In Lost Girls, this Rolf character, who is having an affair with Dorothy, gets Wendy's husband to have sex with him. He tells Mr. Potter it's "Natürlich" and that "One commandant at Military school would take me in his mouth. You know? My Little Sausage." I almost pissed myself laughing. I just felt it was quite in an Austrian way (whatever the hell that is) for him to refer to his penis as my little sausage. It's like calling your pussy a popo you know?

Anyway! Good night!

Locked in a Capital "I".

I can not remember where I last heard it. But there's a song about being locked in a Capital "I", the best explanation for this I take from David Foster Wallace's Oblivion:

...of course they were unique and superior in certain crucial ways, how else could they explain the fact that they themselves have been at the exact centre of the entirety of their concious lives? 

 

I normally do not take photographs. I get photos taken of me. If it weren't for picture tagging on Facebook, I would have so little photographic memories of my existence. I almost never post personal photos online because not everyone would like their image on a public blog, but sometimes I just feel compelled to, you know. Just like how I feel compelled to write about pretty intimate details of my life here. I can't help it, although sometimes I wonder if this may actually do more harm then good.

I'm uncomfortable posting the likenesses of people I know anyway, unless I know them very well, and they already have a web presence anyway (like Phil). But even then...

These are photos from the morning of the "Pepper Lunch" that Danielle took. I thought they were pretty cool, and wanted to post them, but couldn't without blanking out the identity of the other people involved, so I started blanking them out.

They turned out a bit cynical, eventually, IMHO. But I like them. They bother me.