Tag: intimacy issues

My friendship with Vita is over. Not with a quarrel, not with
a bang, but as ripe fruit falls. No I shant be coming to London
before I go to Greece, she said. And then I got into the car.
But her voice saying ‘Virginia?’ outside the tower room was
as enchanting as ever. Only then nothing happened. And she
has grown very fat, very much the indolent county lady, run
to seed, incurious now about books; has written no poetry;
only kindles about dogs, flowers, & new buildings. S[issinghurs]t
is to have a new wing; a new garden; a new wall. Well, its
like cutting off a picture: there she hangs, in the fishmongers
at Sevenoaks, all pink jersey & pearls; & thats an end of it.
And there is no bitterness, & no disillusion, only a certain
emptiness. In fact-if my hands werent so cold-I could here
analyse my state of mind these past 4 months, & account for
the human emptiness by the defection of Vita; Roger’s death;
& no-one springing up to take their place; & a certain general
slackening of letters & fame, owing to my writing nothing.

Virginia Woolf, Diary, 4, 287

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. As their work had often employed ritualized actions, mythology and Eastern thought, ‘The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk’ has to be considered the perfect end of the common oeuvre – also due to the Wall’s mythological and philosophical connotations. The performance was recorded by Murray Grigor for the BBC (16mm film, transferred to video), which resulted in the documentary ‘The Great Wall: Lovers at the Brink’, of which there exist a long screening-version and a shorter VHS-version