Couplings, decouplings plus one

I  chanced upon the work of Maria Legault -a performance artist who is based in Toronto-- on Facebook of all places. All I did was click on a link for a photo album titled 'Memories of my Ex'--which I thought was an unusual title. The album was so compelling in its beauty. Maria poses with her lover-- a home-crafted life-size doll with a somewhat wistful expression.

So Maria and lover, whose name is Plus One are at the beach, they're getting married, they're kissing, they're on honeymoon --they enact all the public rituals of courtship. 

In her artistic statement, Maria says: "The futility of this romantic debauchery aims to explore the structures, boundaries and conventions of love relationships. Plus One embodies the surrogate lover, the transitional object that is an ideal ground for romantic projection. I use his uncanniness to paradoxically deconstruct love taboos while still indulging in their beauty and romanticism." 

The results are astonishing. I found the photographs so lyrical and moving. This one here, photographed by Beni Kori, took my breath away...To see the entire project, go here:http://www.mariaplusone.com/

I thought about why this made such an impression on me and I realised there are several reasons. One is of course, coincidence. I stumbled across this just when I was thinking about the commercialisation of couplehood and certain frozen gestures of courtship and how they translate in social media. Come to think of it, the public image of couplehood and what constitutes it are pretty standard even though there are as many different types of being a couple as there are people.

Another reason this appealed to me was because I had also just read a column about the somewhat unrealistic expectations we have of our lovers. (I have two favourite agony aunt columnists--one is Mariella Frostrup who writes for The Guardian and the other is Cary Tennis for Salon). The clever Ms Frostrup tells a bored wife: "We expect a lot of our romantic unions these days - continuing romance, fulfilment, great sex, solid support, procreation, equal duties, selfless devotion, high-octane excitement, stability, longevity, unpredictability. You don't have to study that list for long to see how unachievable it is in its entirety."

So coming as it did, immediately after these thoughts and readings, Maria Legault's work seemed all the more relevant and wonderfully refreshing.

Book Impressions

The formality of the book review is a great thing but I must confess that I'm obsessed with copying down passages that resonate with me. I feel pretty anxious if I don't preserve a fragment or paragraph somewhere because it is a way of cataloguing the book in my brain. I hope to contruct an uneven and long trail of found words--fictional accounts that reflect some of my realities and the equal and opposing truths that make our world both bleak and wonderful. I recently read two very good books--The Gathering by Anne Enright and The Sorrows of An American by Siri Hustvedt. 

The Gathering is a book of immense power. Both were gifts from my permanent housemate -- the first he found while he was away in Delhi and the second, here in Singapore. He has my eternal gratitude for introducing me to Enright's wonderful writing. Here is a paragraph I felt compelled to copy. I haven't put it in a notebook yet like I usually do, but recording it on this blog seems to assuage the anxiety of losing track of it. 

"There are so few people given us to love. I want to tell my daughters this, that each time you fall in love it is important, even at nineteen. Especially at nineteen. And if you can, at nineteen, count the people you love on one hand, you will not, at forty, have run out of fingers on the other. There are so few people given us to love and they all stick."

Siri Hustvedt's 'What I Loved' is a stunning book so I had great expectations for her newest book,  'The Sorrows of An American'. She explores psychotherapy and neurological machinations as well as the compulsion to document, exhibit and reveal. My only quarrels with this book were a couple of almost made-for-Hollywood type climactic scenarios. That said, it is a great read and this bit stayed with me. It is so, so brilliant:

"I've often thought none of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalises the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions."