Prelude-fugue

Prelude

Step by step a three year old girl, who lost her mother without knowing the meaning of death, became engrossed in her own obsession with the end of life, which she interpreted through her mother’s funeral that was full with beautiful flowers, the smell of incense and candlelight. The funeral looked so holy and unobtrusive, with the guests in black suits and their composed faces. She was impressed by the expression of solemnity, while she saw her mother’s face smiling in a black and white photo nearby her coffin, with different kinds of flowers all around. “Only a dead person can really smile, not a living person,” she thought.

Since then she looked at the depth of the pond in her grandma’s garden, took the gun of her father she found in his bedroom and put it nearby her while reading an old poetic text, composed by King Rama II. She was reading loudly in melody, like practicing in a primary school’s literature class when she was in Primary 6.

Before we hear the next part, which concerns art, we should realize that one holy art teaching point for young art students in her period was that an artist should be honest to him/herself by doing art and being alive.

1990: The Dream of Mother, which was during her printmaking when she studied art in a German art school, refers to her wonder why mother’s hair was blown around the house even when the windows and doors were closed in the night-time near her bed. “Death should bring some holy act to her mother after suffering with her twenty-nine years of life” the girl assumed.

1997: Without father’s gun she sat near a female body in a morgue, reading the same poetic text from her childhood to the body.

2005: In The Class of 2005, she was teaching through her video work using a strategy of question and answer. She told her students, who had died through a range of different conditions, that for herself she preferred to be like the writer pilot (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry) who flew his plane and disappeared.

2006: She sat among the female insane in a psychiatric hospital and had a seminar with those people whose realities she never understood, with their strange illogical thought. This was in The Storytellers of the Town videos.

2007: In a Blur of Desire, she showed dying animals: pigs, cows and buffaloes in a slaughterhouse.

2008: In one hotel in London, the news about euthanasia of a young English man came to her both from television news and a morning newspaper under the hotel’s door. Since then she has tried two times to apply for euthanasia from that country, but has failed.

For over twenty years she has found another form of healing for herself by taking care of stray dogs. She is living with from seventeen to over twenty dogs at a time in her house in the country.

2012: She and one ex stray dog ‘Prince Jood’ (means ‘prince diarrhea’, with his two steel legs from an accident when he was abandoned at the edge of a super-highway as a puppy) traveled to Documenta13 in Kassel, asking for donations for helping stray dogs in their country.

By the way, before we go to the fugue, which should have more intensity of meanings than a prelude, it could include her feeling of remorse for using deceased humans as subject in her previous works. And she might refer to those deceased for her decision to seek atonement.

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Fugue

Necessity’s Rhythm is about her last indefinite-length art project, trying to apply again for euthanasia from some organizations. Due to her twice-failed applications, she expects that the mind should be given the same value as the body’s damage, illness and disorder. Giving respect to an individual decision as the owner of both body and soul, and especially (not only) giving respect to the birth of life under the conditions of biology, lust, sexual culture, loss and grieving in daily living; all these issues are not the reason why life should be claimed as the kind of existence that humans often refer to as a positive cliché for keeping life or surviving. Existence especially is never denied and always involves un-ended consumption, despite many world problems.

The lack of determination to protect the world, which is distorted by capitalism, over- emphasis on the economy than any other thing, and too easy consumption, causes the life of the female artist to be no longer desirable.

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