Jump On The Bed Happy
Tableau Vivant inspired me when I saw Carolee Schneemann’s “Interior Scroll” and the audiences adverse reaction to it, while they had none to Chris Burden sitting in his own excrement for days, or shooting himself in arm, or nailing himself to a car like Jesus and backing it out of driveway. No, the audience was more horrified when a woman pulled a harmless scroll out of her vagina and read from it.
Continuing the States of Anxiety series, Jana Astanov interviews Gabriel Don.
Vestibular Disturbance
A few years ago in the Louvre’s Salle Rembrandt, though, I heard an old man softly crying as he sat before Bathsheba at Her Bath. Though it felt sinful to listen, listen I did. (It was Graham Greene, I believe, who witnessed a mother at her son’s deathbed and realized without enough shame that he was taking notes on the scene.) My French was just good enough, and the old man’s whisper was just loud enough, that I understood him when he told his granddaughter– who had managed to get him there despite his obvious grave illness – that he was crying because it was the last time he would see his favorite painting.
The entire museum was eerily empty that day in a way that I have not seen before or since, and I left them alone. When I returned an hour or so later to gaze at Bathsheba myself, the old man and the young woman were only just leaving and his face was still wet.
By Elise Blackwell.