I went to see Bob Wilson’s Life and Death of Marina Abramovic today, in the Lighthouse Cinema, as part of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival.
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A person’s art is about that person: a tautology.
(A child is about her mother.)
All that I possess, in the end, is my life, and my body which both carves and endures that life (which has both carved and endured it): How much control does my body have?
A person is at her most honest (at her most raw, natural, generous, vulnerable) when she offers that which she cannot give up (what is necessarily hers): this is the only real way to share.
What is a life? (What is my life?)
Somebody else, and again another person, must tell me, and must tell me in different ways.
After the fact, there is usually (there will be) corroboration, of some sort: consensus.
This is all we can do: To show a life, to animate it, would be to conjure it back
(to wake the dead, so that if nobody left knew whether the person who has died was ticklish, they could find out).
(Why would I like to be present at my own funeral?
To know the consensus. To escape the confines of this impossible freedom: to know that there will come a relinquishing of control. I would like to know what songs will be sung. At the removal of my body, it will have made marks which are about it but which are not it. There will be something in the newspaper.)
If my body and my life are possessed by me, who am I, the owner?
How can I find out? What would you tell me if I tried to show you?
(Art is always a telling, and when things are told by others, they pretend an inevitability: there is comfort in this.)
