Life Exchange-choices
1.
Naive letter:
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To whom it may concern,
In 1960 a three year old girl confronted the meaning of Death without understanding it, through her mother’s eternal disappearance.
Since then, as a child, she has innocently wished to make contact with the mysterious death. The girl’s interest is in a pond’s dark depth and the body of a dead bird in the garden, little sparkles on a still urn containing mother’s ashes under the light of day-time through the window and solemnity of her mother’s funerary ritual; all were in her usual memory until 1987, when she found the way to be a friend of the dubious death through her art process.
There was the process of printing with a dead bird and a lifeless tree in mysterious landscapes from 1979-1990, to human dead bodies in video performances in 1997/8. After that, the dead bodies were seminar participants and students in two 2005 performances. Those were for her, not just for art, but were strategies against the overwhelming nature of mental illness.
All of this saved her from the coming point of suicide, which has been a kind of waiting for an occasion between two parts; art and death. Parallel to this has been the mutual care given to and received from stray dogs from 1996 up to now.
Her imaginative arrangements in her house as safeguards from her depression are: living with seventeen dogs; a narrow pool next to her bedroom in which she can float her cold body, a beautifully designed stove with charcoal in her writing room along with the five old and sick dogs’ sleeping places, whom she plans to leave with her at the same time; shooting practice with the gun that she bought many years ago; a long rope with which she sometimes practices hanging from a beam in an open area, from which she would be able to see the sun and the moon in the last second of life.
Defusing and delaying committing suicide by doing challenge artworks, non-stop taking care of others’ lives year by year, used to be a better way of controlling life’ direction than now, due to the present world’s many disturbing realities.
During artwork and life in the last five years she has seen herself as a consumer by using so many things and materials all the time, with both sense and nonsense. In life one cannot avoid consuming and using materials and things, which are now overflowing problems: junk, climate, lack of sympathy.
This brings her to the idea of ‘one person’s stopping consumption’; the exchange of her life for peoples’ realization of the world’s disaster and their own human kindness through her assumed last project ‘Necessity’s Rhythm’.
As one person, who is pained enough in her long life, now 62 years old, the woman feels too much to continue struggling against her mental sickness by still doing artworks, taking care of stray animals and trying to change the perspective of the living towards consumption. At this point through applying for euthanasia, is a final gamble towards achieving some realization in humans of their perverse living.
The euthanasia part, part 1, is parallel to part 2, what she calls the Jao-Jorn Donation (donation for stray animals) and part 3 is environmental realization (activities with reading, talking together). These three parts are in the art of life project ‘Necessity’s Rhythm’, for which the artist is now requesting that your organization support her application for euthanasia.
Sincerely yours,
2.
Philosophical letter:
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To whom it may concern,
The little girl is applying to move into a new line.
‘How would you like to live in Looking-glass House, Dog? But oh, Dog! Now we come to the passage. You can just see a little peep of the passage in Looking-glass House, if you leave the door of our drawing-room wide open: and it’s very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond. Oh, Dog! How nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking-glass House! I’m sure it’s got, oh such beautiful things in it! Let’s pretend there’s a way of getting through into it, somehow, Dog. Let’s pretend the glass is all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it’s turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It’ll be easy enough to get through — ‘ She was up on the chimney-piece while she said this, though she hardly knew how she had got there. And certainly the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist”
Such a strange way to start a letter, by asking for permission for euthanasia! A Girl? A Dog ? A Glass that is melting all forms and turning them into a silver mist? Perhaps this introduction to the underground world is strongly associated with the arts that have always discovered, created and searched different points of a reversal: from the inside to the outside, from the surfaces to the depths. To enter inside the depths of the mirror we have to conquer the surface, to institute a game of chess, and from this to draw a single line that will traverse corporeal events into virtualities, uncovering any dimensions that are hidden at the depths of matter, like a mist rises over the earth.
Becoming big / becoming small. Becoming young / becoming old. Becoming gold. Becoming silver. A series of events that unfold upon and within the crystals of time. Such an unfolding is a reversal of forms or a reversal of their depths; a metallurgy? Only animals – the artists, it has been said, are deep and have depth, and this is not a compliment. They will dig, destroy or stretch any surface and any body that they might encounter. And from this, a new body has to be designed, sculptured and performed, one that will not just actualize a virtual event, but another world that has to be lived, even if such a world is an illusion, a mythical dimension or an irony. In such illusionary worlds there is always a little girl that plays – Duchess and Queens that order and design, and surfaces that have to be cracked. The girl artist is not a child that renounces play, crying, “I would not play anymore”. Quite the opposite, she always searches for more; more diagrams, more planes, more destructions, more events. And even when there is nothing left; she cries:” I would play more with any events, of matter, with anything that has been left”. And the Duchess says: ‘Tis love, ‘tis love that makes the world go round!’
The girl still seeks the new events to actualize, to stretch them to their limits to unfold them inside their own tragic dimension and from this act to confront and create the new. A new artistic body, a new dimension, new ways of existing. But discovering new ways of existing; isn’t it a process of finding new ways of dying?
Blanchot in his book Espace litteraire writes: “By way of suicide I desire to kill myself at a determinate moment; 1 connect death to now: yes . .. now, now. But nothing shows the illusion, the madness of this I want, for death is never present. . . . Suicide, in this respect, is not a welcoming of death. It is rather a wishing to abolish it as the future, to deprive it of that part of the future which is its essence. . . .”
Common People argue that such a way of thinking is pathology. An ill ego that…….
But how can entering into depths, which reverses and dismantles the body and its common sense, be considered as a creative act? How can we create out of a process of which the body loses all its biological powers and is perceived as a point of weakness?
But they forget to ask what is pathos and what are logos. What kind of passion is euthanasia, a self-made act that transverses life into Thanatos?
Pathos is an affection that flows within the riverbanks of desire and streams into our consciousness in such a way that it becomes the drive force of things.
Truly, are these depressive and destructive realities or are they part of the beauty and joy of life? And the Girl? Through all her years, she would keep the simple and loving heart of her childhood, gathering other children to tell them her tales. She would feel their sorrows and find pleasure in their simple joys. But the girl also understands the limits of language and logic, the limits of a limitless world of possibilities, without the arrow of time, without signification or reference. And in understanding this will be not just a woman with a simple and pure heart, but a woman who understands: a thinker … a philosopher … an artist.
Sincerely yours,
Put her to sleep, save us and ours 