Alien romancing

A reason to wake up and live." That’s what you used to say as you rose from the bed and grabbed the nearest cigarette.

"With every cigarette, I have a companion for five minutes," she replied as you walked out the door.

Trysts with bodies, images, objects and thoughts: illicit affairs committed by the extraterrestrial who suffers for the want of more human conquest and romance.

* * *

Could there be a possibility of other loves? Couldn’t we expand the conceptual geography of love?

I remember a conversation I once had with Matthew Higgs, former curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and now director of White Columns in New York:

Yason: Art is a good reason to wake up and love.

(In response to this foolish platitude, Matthew argued for a more externalized practice of art and love – as social acts.)

Matthew: Well, one can embrace more complexities, embrace more geographies, embrace more bodies. Embrace more experiences.

What can we do to make life and love interesting?

Celebrate real life. See love as the art of visual excess tempered by melancholy.

The strangeness of white, the loneliness of silver, the excessiveness of camouflage?

Yes, a visual softness manifested through craft and decoration.

Thirteen crafts materials to decorate your love life – wigs, hats, scarves, brooches, beads, sequins, labelling tags, mixed confetti, buttons, shoes, the watch, the mobile phone, the answering machine

Whatever the desire it should be celebrated. Desire as a form of exchange.

* * *

I remember a line from the movie Heavenly Creatures wherein two pubescent girls grapple with a love that does not dare speak its name. That, although they felt desire towards a man (singer Mario Lanza), they found themselves having the most profound affection for one another – an extraterrestrial romance between two fellow/s girl/s. The Kate Winslet character said something to this effect: "Because we are the two most brilliant people on earth."

Fade in music, You and Me Against the World.

Cut to the film, My Own Private Idaho.

River Phoenix: I really want to be close to you. I really want to kiss you, man.

Keanu Reeves: You know I only have sex with a guy if I get paid. You know that two guys can’t really love each other.

River Phoenix: I don’t know. I know I can love someone without having to get paid for it.

Isn’t love, then, the greatest taboo? Our world right now lacks the ability to look inward, and this loss of psychic space has resulted to fragmented selves suffering for the want of love. I make no moral judgments about this condition. I don’t even prescribe that we strive for a wholeness, a transcendence even. On the contrary, I am more interested in the contradictions that both inform and challenge standard human relations and stable subjectivities.

* * *

In the introduction to Marc Chaimowicz’s monograph Past Imperfect, critic Jean Fisher illustrates the dilemna facing artists, namely "the mythic contest between the critical role of the artist and private self, between requirements of the culture and his own desires and sensibilities." This notion of subjectivity creates a self in terms of an opposition with the other. But as many recent thinkers argue today, subjectivity is a work in progress, an indeterminate form moving in time and space. In psychoanalytic terms, the experience of loss is central to the repetition and/or destabilization of subjectivity. The Lover is fragmented. He or she is not an incomplete being due to an inner flaw. Romantic love is always, and will always be, an incomplete task. Our own psyches are incomplete, missing in parts. But we also hope to make it complete by subjecting ourselves to love’s project. The Love Story is after all, a series of figures, scenes and tasks that attempt to harmonize the real and the self through the beloved/the other. In Julia Kristeva’s words, "Love is loving a contradiction." Again, the tautology of love’s paradox.

* * *

"At this point Kitty thinks of asking what she knows must be a very obvious question. It’s a question she’s never felt confident to ask in the past, specially since Vergil once told her about how irritating it is, when people ask what any of his performances mean. As though – his voice aquiver with queenly righteousness – artists need to justify their art with anything other than the art itself! And just what is the point of this one, sweetie? She finds she simply has to ask it this time, despite Vergil, despite herself and the fear of overstepping her bounds. Promptly, Vergil drops the mirror on the bed, yanks back his shoulders and sticks out his chest, faces her akimbo, smacks his lips and, looking straight into her eyes, declares flatly and in all certainty: "Simple, my pearl. We cannot love what can change. Whom we love, we freeze."

Vergil’s fallen asleep in his mother’s gown. After fixing up the room a little – stacking the tapes on the shelves, returning the toiletries to the medicine cabinet, and untangling video cables scattered about the floor – Kitty decides it’s time to go home. It’s almost four, but that’s okay since no one waits up for her anymore. She can’t help but smile when she sees Vergil’s dark face in the middle of all that white tulle, as though it’s a kind of gift, like a piece of fragile, tektite-glazed ceramic – a squat, angel-faced vase? – still cradled in the abundant, whorled softness of its packaging. She takes out the clumsy still-camera from her duffel bag. It’s strange – she discovers – she’s not had to use it for sometime now. She steps closer to the bed, thinks of what might be a good angle, and stoops to give Vergil a wee three-second kiss on the plush, delicately parted lips. She steps back to her old position, regains her bearings, trains the camera’s eye on the scene, and clicks. A flash, and the sound of tiny cogs and wheels turning. Vergil stirs a little, but quickly falls back to the unknowing solidity of his sleep." – J. Neil Garcia, "Kitty and Vergil (for Y)"