My viscous valentine...
Speaking of performance art, this is one of our favorite modern love stories here at Donkay. Giuseppe Difeo and Lidia Mastracchio are yet another example of artists that you are only going to read about when you tune into 1430. Anyway one day in March 1974 these two made a splash exactly the size of their respective bodies. G writes-
I wouldn’t want the fact that it was my birthday when I woke up to be seen as part of why Lidia and I did what we did that day. But I suppose it must be. I woke up to the telephone. Lidia answered, it was my father, we’d given my family the number of our hotel room when we spoke to them the night before, but of course he had to call again now that the day itself had dawned. I tried to clear my voice and… forget it, as I said, there is no clear origin of my actions there in that morning, so I will spare myself the writing of it. But although the mood of the day was continuous with ealier ones,it had a trajectory as different as a rowboat’s when you push off with an oar against a shallow bottom. You don’t change boats, your body doesn’t feel any different, its only way back in some half-physical part of your brain something the shape of a compass is pointing in a different direction.
After all, it was a driving vacation. On the day that happened to be my birthday we had it planned to go to the new contemporary art museum that Antonio Filhaputoni built on the coast.
Now I ask myself, 'Were Lidia and I artists before we went into that museum?' I think as much, or perhaps a little more (or do we all think this?) than the average overeducated indolent young person who watches art and thinks, 'I could do that.' We were no stranger to museums. We moved through them with our heads leaned together, trading comments, using each work to deepen our understanding of each other. And certainly we felt a sense of art at the close of every day, choosing the right words and actions to wrap it in apt proportion. But what made that day explicit?
I can feel the difference, the feeling that lead us both to take off our clothes there in one of the gallerys, but I can’t explain. If I could I would have written only that sentence.
As it was, we shed our clothes without speaking, and I lay on the floor, my neck propped up against the empty white wall. Lidia got on top of me and for one alarmed moment I thought she was thinking sexually, but she only whispered to me, “I am going to vomit on you. I had this idea years ago.”
The thought that Lidia and I weren’t together 'years ago' was transitory.
She started to close her throat, and soon enough she brought out a gag that shook her whole body. A huge clot of white spit slipped out of her mouth and landed on my hip bone. I figured that the whole gallery was looking at us, but at that moment I swear that all I saw outside of Lidia’s face was blue- it was if we were floating in the middle of a river. She convulsed her throat a few more times and spit up a little bit, and then she got up and started walking in slow arcs in front of me.
By now I saw the gallery and the people watching us, and I thought- Should I stare past them like an actor, or should I engage their looks, as I felt compelled to do, at the risk of looking like an amateur? I had my right hand on my penis, but not covering it, just holding it as one does in bed alone. But I have to admit that I started wondering if we would be arrested, if men from the museum would grab us roughly and take us out and then we’d be subversives on the front page of tomorrow’s paper. I wondered how long we could go to jail for indecent exposure. These were the things influencing my decision whether or not to make living eye contact with people in the gallery as they looked at me. I wanted to, but I was afraid that they would no longer consider me art if looked back at them. Lidia was keeping her eyes mostly to herself as she walked around me. She had a haughty look that brought out the beauty of her jawbone, and I got the basic idea that in this piece she was living and I was dead. This feeling led me to the conclusion that I should look at the people when they looked at me. I was telling them what it was like to be dead, or that I wasn’t dead, or at least not to them, only to myself and to her.
After a while a guard came out of a door beside us. He was shocked, but neither Lidia nor I broke our guises. I looked down to where my left leg was laying, and I saw that there was a thin line of red tape that extended from the doorway. It seemed to be a guide for the placement of art, delineating the full swing of the door so that no art would be knocked over. My foot was just short of the line. The open can of spinach that we had placed at my feet was exactly upon it. Were it a football, it would not have marked a goal, and thus I felt we were saved.
The guard didn’t change the stride that had brought him through the doorway, but as he crossed the room and I could tell he was trying to comprehend our presence. I was left with the feeling that he felt he was in the wrong, that he felt he was supposed to know about us. Maybe it was the recent inception of the museum, that convinced him that two naked artists could suddenly be occupying one corner of the gallery. Some other official people came and looked at us, trying to look casual, but no one disturbed us.
We stayed in it all day. Sometimes Lidia would lay her head on my chest, sometimes she would gag herself, sometimes she would take her thighs on a haughty walk. But I had decided I should never move. This was easy for me. A few people watched us for hours. Most started to regard us as passingly as the other works of art. On the whole I can’t explain the variety of musics that were playing in the eyes of those who met my glance.
At closing Filhaputoni and the curator came down and congratulated us. They had taken our picture, Lidia’s neck tendons strained with the effort of a gag, my eyes above her. They invited us to spend the night in the hotel adjacent to the museum, (that night I dreamt the hotel was full of typists at work throughout the night) and in the morning we left. Ernesto went there in August and said the picture was hanging where I had been lying. But it wasn't there a year later. Maybe they found out we weren’t doing any other art. I don’t know, Lidia and I discussed once what the other had been thinking, found it both similar and different and I don’t think too much about it anymore.
I wouldn’t want the fact that it was my birthday when I woke up to be seen as part of why Lidia and I did what we did that day. But I suppose it must be. I woke up to the telephone. Lidia answered, it was my father, we’d given my family the number of our hotel room when we spoke to them the night before, but of course he had to call again now that the day itself had dawned. I tried to clear my voice and… forget it, as I said, there is no clear origin of my actions there in that morning, so I will spare myself the writing of it. But although the mood of the day was continuous with ealier ones,it had a trajectory as different as a rowboat’s when you push off with an oar against a shallow bottom. You don’t change boats, your body doesn’t feel any different, its only way back in some half-physical part of your brain something the shape of a compass is pointing in a different direction.
After all, it was a driving vacation. On the day that happened to be my birthday we had it planned to go to the new contemporary art museum that Antonio Filhaputoni built on the coast.
Now I ask myself, 'Were Lidia and I artists before we went into that museum?' I think as much, or perhaps a little more (or do we all think this?) than the average overeducated indolent young person who watches art and thinks, 'I could do that.' We were no stranger to museums. We moved through them with our heads leaned together, trading comments, using each work to deepen our understanding of each other. And certainly we felt a sense of art at the close of every day, choosing the right words and actions to wrap it in apt proportion. But what made that day explicit?
I can feel the difference, the feeling that lead us both to take off our clothes there in one of the gallerys, but I can’t explain. If I could I would have written only that sentence.
As it was, we shed our clothes without speaking, and I lay on the floor, my neck propped up against the empty white wall. Lidia got on top of me and for one alarmed moment I thought she was thinking sexually, but she only whispered to me, “I am going to vomit on you. I had this idea years ago.”
The thought that Lidia and I weren’t together 'years ago' was transitory.
She started to close her throat, and soon enough she brought out a gag that shook her whole body. A huge clot of white spit slipped out of her mouth and landed on my hip bone. I figured that the whole gallery was looking at us, but at that moment I swear that all I saw outside of Lidia’s face was blue- it was if we were floating in the middle of a river. She convulsed her throat a few more times and spit up a little bit, and then she got up and started walking in slow arcs in front of me.
By now I saw the gallery and the people watching us, and I thought- Should I stare past them like an actor, or should I engage their looks, as I felt compelled to do, at the risk of looking like an amateur? I had my right hand on my penis, but not covering it, just holding it as one does in bed alone. But I have to admit that I started wondering if we would be arrested, if men from the museum would grab us roughly and take us out and then we’d be subversives on the front page of tomorrow’s paper. I wondered how long we could go to jail for indecent exposure. These were the things influencing my decision whether or not to make living eye contact with people in the gallery as they looked at me. I wanted to, but I was afraid that they would no longer consider me art if looked back at them. Lidia was keeping her eyes mostly to herself as she walked around me. She had a haughty look that brought out the beauty of her jawbone, and I got the basic idea that in this piece she was living and I was dead. This feeling led me to the conclusion that I should look at the people when they looked at me. I was telling them what it was like to be dead, or that I wasn’t dead, or at least not to them, only to myself and to her.
After a while a guard came out of a door beside us. He was shocked, but neither Lidia nor I broke our guises. I looked down to where my left leg was laying, and I saw that there was a thin line of red tape that extended from the doorway. It seemed to be a guide for the placement of art, delineating the full swing of the door so that no art would be knocked over. My foot was just short of the line. The open can of spinach that we had placed at my feet was exactly upon it. Were it a football, it would not have marked a goal, and thus I felt we were saved.
The guard didn’t change the stride that had brought him through the doorway, but as he crossed the room and I could tell he was trying to comprehend our presence. I was left with the feeling that he felt he was in the wrong, that he felt he was supposed to know about us. Maybe it was the recent inception of the museum, that convinced him that two naked artists could suddenly be occupying one corner of the gallery. Some other official people came and looked at us, trying to look casual, but no one disturbed us.
We stayed in it all day. Sometimes Lidia would lay her head on my chest, sometimes she would gag herself, sometimes she would take her thighs on a haughty walk. But I had decided I should never move. This was easy for me. A few people watched us for hours. Most started to regard us as passingly as the other works of art. On the whole I can’t explain the variety of musics that were playing in the eyes of those who met my glance.
At closing Filhaputoni and the curator came down and congratulated us. They had taken our picture, Lidia’s neck tendons strained with the effort of a gag, my eyes above her. They invited us to spend the night in the hotel adjacent to the museum, (that night I dreamt the hotel was full of typists at work throughout the night) and in the morning we left. Ernesto went there in August and said the picture was hanging where I had been lying. But it wasn't there a year later. Maybe they found out we weren’t doing any other art. I don’t know, Lidia and I discussed once what the other had been thinking, found it both similar and different and I don’t think too much about it anymore.
posted by M.N.V.L. Local 1430 at 6:50 PM
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