(Art) Projects

First and foremost:

Happy Birthday, B!!!

Yesterday I spent a good chunk of time sitting in front of the computer. Mystic writes: Why can't you be honest with Narc? why not say exactly whats on your mind ? What are you afraid of? Later, he wrote to Hammer: Why not just try plain good old fashioned honesty. You and Hyde come from the same cloth.

Well, the thing is, I have been honest with Narc. So many things have been said so many times. I thought I should write a post including all of that history. I started to do it, and you can expect that post in a day or two, but I realized that it was a bigger project than I had time for last night.

In any case, it led me to another idea--another new project. I'm now in the process of archiving my blog! I'm also going to make a little A-Z dictionary for it. Why? Because I like obsessing about things past and it helps to have something massive in front of me that has nothing to do with my school work. Eventually, I'll post the link permanently on this site, but if anyone is terribly bored and feels like checking out my work in progress, for the moment, it can all be found here.

Yesterday afternoon, Bezoukhoff joined me and my parents at the Guggenheim to see the exhibit on Russian art. Basically it included over 250 artworks spanning from the 13th century to the present, many of them never having left Russia before. It was a beautiful exhibit--especially for a Russophile like me!

While we were there, I picked up a brochure to check out the performance art going on this week. On our way out we saw a guy whose head was covered in gold-leaf and honey cradling a dead rabbit, surrounded by an audience of 40 or so museum goers. I recognized this as a reinactment of Joseph Beuys, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965). I had learned of the piece a few years back in an art class. Some of the other "reinactment" projects on the program I had never heard of, but they are equally strange, if not more so. I thought I'd share a few of them with you here:

Nov 10: Vito Acconci. Seedbed. (1972. Sonnabend Gallery, NY). Acconci occupied the space under a false floor, masturbating and speaking through a microphone to visitors walking above in an attempt to establish an "intimate" connection with them.

Nov. 11 Valie Export. Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969, Augusta-Lichtspiele, Munich). Wearing pants with the crotch removed, Export walked through a cinema during a film screening, offering the spectators visual contact with a real female body. Walking up and down the aisles among the mostly male patrons, she challenged them to "look at the real thing" instead of passivley enjoying images of women on the screen.

Nov. 12 Gina Pane. Self Portraits (1973, Galerie Stadler, Paris). Pane lay on a metal bed above lit candles. She made incisions with a razor blade in the skin around her fingernails and lips while slides of women painting their nails were projected on the wall. Her back turned to the audience, she recited "They won't see anything" while a camera recorded women's reactions in the audience. Facing forward again, she gargled with milk and spit it into a bowl, until the milk and her blood had mixed.

This one is my personal favorite--

Nov. 14 Marina Abramovic. Lips of Thomas (1975, Galerie Krinzinger, Innsbruck) Abramovic ate a kilogram of honey and drank a liter of red wine out of a glass. She broke the glass with her hand, incised a star in her stomach with a razor balde, and then whipped herself until she "no longer felt pain." She lay down on an ice cross while a space heater suspended above caused her to bleed more profusely.

And you can go to the Guggenheim and watch this! Kind of strange, no?

I've got a busy day ahead of me, so I don't have time to write more now. I'm going to go brush my teeth and try to ignore the small sadness gnawing at me in the pit of my stomach.

"Don't freak out, Hyde," I'm telling myself. "It's only been since Friday night that he hasn't answered your texts or called you back. It's only the Narc roller-coaster. You knew this was coming. You've been on this ride a thousand times before and it's okay. It's always ended up okay."

Okay? Okay.

Let's hope the day goes well...

-h

PS: Mystic issued a dare on his blog and I can never resist a dare. He writes:

Post something on your blog that you would not want the following people to know. 1 Your partner/spouse, 2. your best friend, 3. your boss

1. Although I can't really call Narc a "partner," this entire blog consists of things I don't want him to know-- how much I think about him, how much impact his every mood and every move has on my emotional life, and especially, how much I let his personal business be known to the world.

2. My best friend (and let's hope that B doesn't read this)-- after we broke up, I knew his email password and in a fog of sorrow and insecurity, I secretly checked his email several times. (I know-- I'm hanging my head in shame. Keep in mind, though, the password is the same, and I haven't checked it in over three years...)

3. My boss? This one is easy-- I missed class a few times last semester due to drug/alcohol use. And I've frequently taught with the effects of alcohol still coursing through my veins.

So, there you go, Mystic...

Oh! And PS, again: We may hit the 10,000 mark today for real. Let's see who it is!