Tag: breakup

Alex Dimitrov

Letter to Carl George from Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Postmarked June 21, 1988. (Detail) © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation

Postcard from Ross Laycock and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Drawing by Felix. Postmarked April 9, 1987, Canada. © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation

Marina Abramovic invented conscious uncoupling way before that dude from Coldplay.

Marina Abramovic, The Lovers (Two Vases), 1966, C-print

“In 1988, Ulay and Abramovic decided to end their relationship and to mark this with a performance, which became the legendary endpoint of their collaboration. After years of negotiations with the Chinese authorities, the artists got the permission to carry out ‘The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk’, in which they started to walk from different ends of the Chinese Wall in order to meet in the middle and say good-bye to each other. Abramovic started walking at the eastern end of the Wall, at Shan Hai Guan, on the shores of the Yellow Sea, Gulf of Bohai, walking westward. Ulay started at the western end of the Wall, at Jai Yu Guan, the south-western periphery of the Gobi Desert, walking eastward. After they both continuously walked for 90 says, they met at Er Lang Shn, in Shen Mu, Shaanxi province. Here, they embraced each other to go on with their life and work separately from then on.”

Sophie Calle, Exquisite Pain, 2000
Embroidery, photo panels

Left page: He was a friend of my parents. He was very handsome. By the time I was ten years old, I was in love with him, but I had waited for more to declare myself. Then he made himself known to me. He went so far as to offer me beautiful scenes of jealousy. When I accepted this course of study in Japan, he warned me that it was too long: he was likely to forget me. I loved him but I left. I was sure he was merely trying to scare me, to punish my insubordination. He would wait for me, I wanted to believe it. On January 24, 1985, after a separation of three months, we were to meet at the airport in New Delhi. He did not make the rendezvous. He had sent a message: “M. cannot join you. Accident. Paris Hospital, Contract Bob. Thank you”. Ten hours of imagining the pitiful scenarios, before joining him at home to learn by phone that he had fallen in love with another woman. Distraught, I spent the rest of the night fixing a red phone in room 261 of the Imperial Hotel. To reproach me for this journey, this challenge. Yet the solitary, monastic life he offered was not made for me. Too rigid. One day or another, I would have given it up. Only he stole my vitality. He did not give me time to leave him first. 

Right Page: It was in 1964. a September evening at the terrace of a cafe of Saint Germain des Prés, L’Old Navy. It was hot. We were twenty-two years old, and I had been living with her for six months, a total, absolute love. I knew she was married. that her husband had been missing for over a year. She had not wanted to say more, but she had warned me that if he returned, she would follow him. At around seven o’clock, in the crowd, someone broke off, approached. quietly. she told me in a calm tone: it’s him, he’s back. He said, "Hello!” she replied, “I’m introducing you to a friend” he sat down. He asked me what I was doing. he had a suspicious elegance of thug. After a few banalities, a coffee, he said to her, “Well, are you coming?” She got up, greeted me with “One of these days maybe?”, And they left. I’m riding in my car, a convertible green Oceane Simca. I lowered the hood, thinking to rush into the Seine. I finished the night under their windows, park on the parking lot of their suburban HLM.

vjeranski:

DUANE MICHALS
PERSON TO PERSON

Tom had no idea how long he had been sitting there. It did not matter. She would never call. Yet, deep inside, he still believed in his power over her.
He always had power over her. Tom knew how to make her cry.
Even now, when he thought of her, it was her body that he missed. He wanted to touch her.
By leaving him, her absence gave her a power over him that she had never had when they were together. Tom was filled with an anxiety he could no understand.
He began to think that he saw her everywhere.
His room was filled with a terrible melancholy without her. When he would return, he hoped she would somehow be there. He was always disappointed.
He wondered if she would let a stranger touch her the way he had. He wondered if she had let strangers touch her when they were together.
Leaving a shop one afternoon, he saw her unobserved. Tom was paralyzed and could not move or speak. Later he realized that he was relieved that she had not seen him.
He dreamt one night that she came and kissed him, and with that kiss she entered his body. She looked through his eyes and listened with his ears. In the morning nothing had changed.
Tom found an old night gown of hers in the bottom of his closet. He liked to drape it over his head. It still smelled of her body.
Soon he began to wear a rose in his lapel, because it was her favorite flower. Her favorite things became his favorite things.
He hated himself for sitting there. He hated her for making him want to sit there. Tom began to believe that he could will her call, that his need for her could make her call him.
Suddenly, he knew, at that very moment she was dialing him. It was true. His power had made her call. Now the telephone would ring.
Hello, no Tom isn’t here anymore. I know he’ll be sorry that he missed your call.

Source: vjeranski