My darling. I’m waiting for you. How long is the day in the dark? Or a week? The fire is gone, and I’m horribly cold. I really should drag myself outside but then there’d be the sun. I’m afraid I waste the light on the paintings, not writing these words. We die. We die rich with lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we’ve entered and swum up like rivers. Fears we’ve hidden in – like this wretched cave. I want all this marked on my body. Where the real countries are. Not boundaries drawn on mapswith the names of powerful men. I know you’ll come carry me out to the Palace of Winds. That’s what I’ve wanted: to walk in such a place with you. With friends, on an earth without maps. The lamp has gone out and I’m writing in the darkness.

Image: © Roberto Foddai, styled by Predrag Pajdic with Nathália Mello in a dress by Predrag Pajdic, July 2010.
Text: From the 1996 film The English Patient directed by Anthony Minghella based on Michael Ondaatje’s novel.
Music: Day-V from Found Songs (2009) by Ólafur Arnalds (born 1987).

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow -
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand -
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep – while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Images: © Hedi Slimane
Text: A Dream Within A Dream by Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849)

I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

Image: Iñigo Urrutia by Simon Pais-Thomas ©
Text: From the speech by William Faulkner (1897 – 1962) at the Nobel Prize Banquet after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature (10 December 1950).

I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls,
With vassals and serfs at my side.

But I also dreamt, which pleased me most,
That you lov’d me still the same.

Images: © Daniel Sannwald, styled by Stevie Westgarth with Jacob Coupe and Charlie France for Harper’s Bazaar China.
Text: From a libretto by Alfred Bunn, I Dreamt I Dwelt In Marble Halls from the opera The Bohemian Girl, Act 2. (c. 1841), set to music by Michael William Balfe.

From 9 – 15 of September, visual artist Amir Baradaran will debut Transient, a series of 40-second video installations infiltrating NYC taxicabs for one week.

Transient is intended as an ephemeral gift, foregrounding the possibilities of liminal states. Baradaran seeks to capture, challenge and transform the everyday modalities of NYC cab rides by interrupting Taxi TV’s regular programming flow in 6,300 taxicabs, to be viewed by approximately 1.5 million passengers. Using the technology against itself, Transient solicits focus in a space marked by dispersed attention and invisible human boundaries. Comprised of shots of a driver’s steady gaze in the rear-view mirror or through the grainy, often-stained plexiglass partitions, the incisive videos take the experiential disjuncture between the driver and passenger as their point of departure. “It was not my intention to make a humanist statement,” says Baradaran, “but rather to create a space of introspection.”

The yellow taxicab presents a striking paradox: the car itself is one of the most visible icons of NYC, while its drivers, many of whom are minorities, seem invisible. Recent media reports have inundated commuters with articles portraying taxicab drivers as an ‘other’ class, erroneously intimating that some three quarters of all drivers actively prey on their fare. Even though these reports have since been reassessed and somewhat retracted, they have created a climate of distrust. Baradaran’s reactive installations emerged from this context.

New York-based visual artist Amir Baradaran (b. 1977) was born in Tehran and raised in Montreal. Baradaran’s artistic practice is marked by a recurring exploration of the cross-section of race and gender. Baradaran’s previous work, The Other Artist Is Present (2010), a guerrilla performance in four acts at the Museum of Modern Art, honored, questioned and ultimately departed from its inspiration, Marina Abramovic’s The Artist Is Present (2010).

Images: © Amir Baradaran, Transient series, digital photograph, 2010

She resisted the conventions of her craft and the politics of her business for one year. Every new film propagated her image of beauty and lust with unrestrained promiscuity. Every man who watched her on celluloid became enamoured and jealous, possessive and demanding. A saviour to all, she was. The women saw a threat but none could forget the agency of her ingenuity in the few moments she was allowed to show it.

Her range of emotions increased auspiciously with every new middleman she dealt with and all the ambitious female allies she made. Fame was almost close enough to touch and she could feel it. One, two, then infinite lies took her to new levels of achievement. I watched, amused.

When she bowed out of her screen self at the end of rehearsals we used to meet at my flat between Franklin and Ivar avenues to drink shots of Jack’s. She would always ask: “Lucius, do you think I will be a star someday?” In the Oracle of my mind, my answer came back as multiple distorted echoes through barely-used synapses to help me understand she belonged to her public and the end of our intimacy was nigh.

In the spring of ’89 she entered the elite group of actors who can control their public image and projects after a masterful performance that earned her domestic and foreign awards. She mentioned me in her acceptance speeches! I was proud and full of joy for her.

One night, after celebrating yet another award, she turned to me, still smiling for the cameras and made me promise never to tell anyone about her childhood. She had finally entered the safe haven of wealth and its power to intoxicate her out of sad memories. Our friendship had become a dangerous part of the past she had been relentlessly escaping from because she was being born again.

The last time we met, she chose Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. We walked in the afternoon arm in arm. We laughed, then quarrelled over Champagne memories and finally stopped on the corner of La Brea and Sunset Boulevard. Tears fell from behind her cat’s eye framed dark sunglasses and gave me one last kiss, to remember what we were. She called a taxi and left me in the final act of her wondrous live performance. I was in the Boulevard of Broken Dreams.

Text: © Lucius Bod, 2010
Images: © Neil Krug

From the surreal beginnings of the tragedy of star-crossed lovers and an adopted family that made the Sopranos seem tame, the heady story of BillyBoy*’s youth doesn’t even hint at the incredible life he has led. This European born, American life begins to sound like a who’s who of ‘art royalty’ and it might be easy to lose oneself in the fantasy of perception until you meet this highly original, creator and artist. It doesn’t matter that he was Warhol’s student, Onassis’ protégé; he is unmistakably, every inch, his own man and don’t be lost in his doll collection either… feel the life, see the love and listen – that’s what I did recently when I interviewed this immensely down to earth and still very much ‘real’, cultural icon.

PP. Where do we even begin? Your life is like a fairy tale, a treasure chest filled with jewels of the most precious kind.

BB*. That’s a hilarious way to think of me, but sure, we can start with my childhood, a looooooong tale, a bit like Romeo & Juliet with a dash of Pop Art.

PP. I am all ears.

BB*. I was born in Vienna, Austria to a mother who was 14 and a father who was 15. Their families were extremely religious Theologians, my dad’s family Jewish, my mom’s Catholic. They exchanged ideas on Theology and I guess… let the children play together.

When I was born it was an immense shame to the families, literally the moment I was born, I was taken away and put in care of an orphanage, but a sort of private school of orphanages, almost chic, though I clearly don’t wish to imply this place was chic. It was for very rich, very aristocratic illegitimate children, to be secreted away.

So, I am a Catholic boy who has a very Eastern European, Viennese Jewish look. I am a reject to both religions according to their perspective rules, so I have never had much “foi” but I adore all the imagery of the religions and the symbols.

PP. What happened then?

BB*. My mom and dad wished for me to carry the name, which was a big both legal and emotional battle for years. An aristocratic Russian family living in Manhattan then adopted me. They ran away from some revolution or something and settled in New York and became very big in the Russian mafia. But I was treated like a little angel/cherub. I was adopted at the age of four and sent to these Russians.

My real mom and dad, now 18 and 19 committed suicide. In their (respective) wills, I was sole heir, with the stipulated wish I carry their names, both names.

My adopted parents, in a conundrum, decided to call me BillyBoy* after a British Earl’s family member they had, named Boy and Billy after Wilhelm (or actually Vylyam) and the other names: Zef Sh’muel Roberto Atlantide. Atlantide because I am a double Pisces. I added the asterisk of course.

PP. So you must be an extremely emotional being?

BB*. So, from a dire, quite bleak and austere Viennese orphanage to a very big, very loud, very exuberant Russian mafia family living like royalty in Manhattan. It was extreme. I am like a typical double Pisces, either too emotional (which I usually hide) or dead stone cold. I have learned how to moderate and through the years realised extreme feelings are not good.

I think now, with my knowledge of life, I have found a nice place in the middle. In saying that, I think that my feelings are tainted with these experiences, which were extreme and when I do express let’s say, an unpopular opinion, I defend it to the death… and this can make me seem extreme as well as annoy people. So I have learned how to be diplomatic, especially since the rest of my family were diplomats, notably in France during the 30’s and 40’s.

Now, when I think something is grotesque or stupid I just say nothing. I don’t have any wish to get into big discussions with people, not like when I was really young. Well, USUALLY I say nothing! I have had some seriously annoying discussions once in a while despite my wish to be light about things.

PP. Lets talk about your Manhattan years and your discovery of arts.

BB*. I grew up surrounded with a lot of artists and such around me. My aunt was Schiaparelli’s big mannequin mondaine, and best friend to Dali. As my family was large I had loads of aunts and uncles everywhere and they were all surrounded by artists. One aunt was a Ziegfeld showgirl in the 20s and 30s and her children were in all the arts, music, literature, theatre and painting.

I saw the first Silver Factory of Andy’s which was at 231 E. 47th Street. “It was a strange surreal place which smelled of cigarettes, paint, people and ‘old place’ smell. It had one of those fabulous embossed tin ceilings which for me, were so ultra New York architecture which I was so nostalgic for. The place had a dirty odour also which for a child was so strange it would stick in my head forever after. I remember the clothes of the time and the black glasses worn indoors. I was a child of 5 or 6 at the time and I don’t really recall much more than that. I had brief glimpses of Edie Sedgwick, just about the time she broke up with Andy. She turned into a folk-y type hippy and my cousins saw that Bob Dylan-influenced side of her, because the silver-haired Youthquaker was long over for her by that time.” The quote is from my book. It pretty much sums it up. I have been friends with many of the other Superstars, notably Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn, Ondine and Taylor Mead. I was supposedly the “last Superstar”, the “dauphin” according to Andy at the time and the elder ones now.

I recall Edie and all those Factory people a lot because my cousins and aunts were really into the Pop thing, hanging around with the crowd which is now, I guess you’d say, famous.

PP. Now with a certain distance from that time, how do you feel about those years?

BB*. I was lucky in that I got to see my era’s underground and also very conservative highbrow cultures at the same time, I saw a lot of theatre and musical venues, concerts from Yehudi Menuhin to Janis Joplin. I think I was lucky as I was not raised with a dull family despite the setbacks. I was steeped in amazing cultural experiences from the most conservative to the most underground. I was raised with a private tutor and a Montessori school, which I feel saved my life.

PP. Saved your life in what way?

BB*. My education was the best thing that came out of my childhood, I mean, my adopted family could have been anyone, and they had the intelligence to give me a very good education instead of making me into one of them. I am indebted to my adopted family for this and in a strange way to my real family, my parents who, literally, died, to help me. What I inherited from them was money, but I think I more importantly received their genes, their minds and souls so I don’t think I turned out too badly. I feel close to them… so between their souls, minds and the money, and the fortune of my adopted parents to give me an unusual education, I guess, I turned into myself or rather had an easier time turning into myself.

My education saved my life in that I feel by letting me just be myself. That too opened many doors for me. I think it takes half a century just to become yourself, the first 20 years, you are like a sponge absorbing education, so you are just getting your mind and body prepped for life. 20 to 30 it’s a mess because you are not grown up nor are you young. 30 to 40 you realise you are mortal and in 50s you can finally get started on being yourself since you at last have some experience. Then you realise you better hurry up and living life as fully as possible. If you are super lucky you get to really do what you have in you to do. I think I have been living life fully but only now, I commence to have the real wisdom you require to live life, in the best way possible. I feel really better than ever before now though I have incorporated mortally into the picture, with is bittersweet of course.

PP. You are certainly a man of many talents. What was your first job?

BB*. My first job, I was a TV commercial actor and model. I posed for ads and did commercials for toys, candy, hair products and teen music records, at that time advertised on television. In those first things, I look like a very simple and nice boy with pretty eyes.

I am always flattered to hear people might think I have “many talents“. I have no idea what I have, I just do my thing, with a lot of conviction and people seem to like it. But in truth, the people I admire for talent, I am nothing compared to them. I admire scientists and stuff like that. Being an artist for me was my only option. I had no other skills at all. Being an artist was my only possible life direction since I am much too undisciplined to do any thing else. My artwork is a result of the chaos of aesthetics bouncing within me all day and night long.

PP. Do you think that being an artist is an option or one is simply born with it?

BB*. I think you are both born with a predisposition and it is then encouraged by nurturing. My adopted mom always says I was an artist. From the first day she saw me she says I was born the way I am and I had my own personality from the beginning. She would know, I guess.

I know when I was in the orphanage I was different from the few others. I didn’t have much contact with other children but I was different.

PP. Isn’t that also the case with being gay?

BB*. Oh yes, I think so. My adopted mom is a militant lesbian. My dad did Athletic Model Guild soft-core porn when he was a teen. They not only accepted my being gay, but actually, I can tell you this anecdote:

My mom when I was a young teen said, “Billy, I have to ask you something very, very important. I know you express yourself as you want, we’ve always wanted that, but this is very important for me to know”. I thought she was going to ask something of such a huge importance, I started to get a bit frightened, I couldn’t imagine what she wanted to know. “Are you gay?”, was her serious question. Within one second after this super serious question, my reply was a blank, “oh, that, yeah” (little did she know!) for which she embraced me and nearly crying said, “Oh, thank God, thank God, I was afraid you might not be, you’d have such a dull life as a straight and straights would NEVER get you at all!”. She thought I was doing that just to pretend to be gay to shock the neighbours. I questioned her sanity for a few moments there”. I am quoting my autobiography here.

My mother was very much into my being in Gestalt therapy since I was adopted. She was into “expressing yourself” She really wanted me to “Express myself” but with a capital “E”. If I’d had asked to be sent to the moon to toe dance, it’d have been possible.

PP. So you tell me this is not a fairy tale. People, just don’t have lives like you BillyBoy*.

BB*. I don’t know. I don’t live other people’s lives and from what some of my friends say, ones who had supposedly “typical” family lives it’s all so different, for me that is more fairytale. Once, I guess in my 30’s, I wished I had had one of those “normal” upbringings, a little more normalcy would not have hurt me. I used to get jealous when friends would say they are going home for Christmas and stuff like that.

PP. Have you ever thought of making a film about your life?

BB*. Well, I wrote my autobiography which is represented by Jeffrey Simmons in London. Jeffrey always feels he’ll sell the rights for a film easily. I was always told that but I haven’t ever pursued it. You know, you can take any life… with the right filmmaker, it can be astounding. I think every single person in the universe has a fascinating life compared to someone else.

It would be very funny to take isolated periods or moments in my life and make a film because my life has been very tragi-comic in so many ways, and that is what film should, can and often be.

My autobiography My American Family, In One Era, Out The Other was bought and paid for in 1988 by Crown Publishers on the huge best-seller success of my Barbie book, Barbie Her Life and Times, The BillyBoy* Collection which came out a year before. They paid a fortune for it and by some miracle I am glad it happened this way. Jeffrey took it back and I got to keep the payment; it had something to do with the contractual deadline for publication. Anyway, the book back then was just about my successes and my positive outlook on life. Now, 20 years plus later I added all the sadness, the negative things and all those years of experience. It’s a much better read. I also talk about my sex life, which, without it, makes my life not very understandable. Now it’s a much better book I think.

PP. When did you move to Europe from New York and why?

BB*. My parents sent me on three world tours from age 8 to 15 years old. I moved permanently at the end of the 1970s to Paris where my aunt lived. I was really not that happy in the USA, though I have divine memories of New York and all over the USA actually. The last thing I did before moving back to Paris was buy a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Oregon on the coast and open a gallery and to do this I drove across America in a vintage Cadillac. It was divine. I think I saw the last of Old School Americana before the internet and chain malls wiped it all away. I was super-lucky in this regard. Seeing all that American Vernacular and Route 66 style life. It was fabulous. I cherish the memory of America in those terms.

I learned a lot from America. I really did, but Europe is my home and my birthplace. People have often made the mistake that I am American born and raised. I just borrowed America for a few years, that’s all.

Mattel, when I designed Barbies, said in a booklet something obscure: “Some say he was born 6,000 years ago in Egypt and found floating down the Nile in a lime green basket. Others claim he was born on another planet. But when asked, he says he was born on Earth – and more specifically, planet Earth, although his past remains a mystery. BillyBoy*’s future looks exciting…” [Mattel, USA, 1987]

I would love to think I sold my soul to the company store, but in truth, though Mattel themselves are hideous corporate America at it’s worst, it was hilarious being part of that whole machine. They even mystified my own birthplace though in truth, I wrote it and they just cut and pasted it because what THEY wrote was a lot worse… and out there in space sounding.

PP. Oh this is fantastic!

BB*. You think so? I think it is utterly absurd, Theatre of the Absurd.

PP. Absurd perhaps, but never the less fabulous I believe.

BB*. Diana Vreeland, I was her protégé, and I was Jackie Onassis’ protégé as well… and Diane LOVED to mystify herself so when my career got going thanks to both of them, (and others), she said all of it is good, even the ridiculous was good… and Jackie said nobody will ever write the truth about me, so I might as well not get upset ever at ridiculous things. So between the both of them, Diana (who by the way, one called Diane, like du Poitier) and Jackie, I learned to embrace the absurd.

PP. Tell me about your Paris years please.

BB*. Paris, I was super lucky. I had my aunt, a legend in Paris, I had the friendship of Bettina, the model from the 40s, we were very, very close, and many others. I knew pretty much everyone and anyone you can mention in art and fashion from Dali, Leonor Fini, Boris Kochno, Line Vautrin, Jean Schlumberger, Diego Giacometti, Bernard Buffet, André Beaurepaire, Eliane Bonabel, Botero, Courrèges to YSL; from Jacques Griffe, Hubert de Givenchy and his lover Philippe Venet, Marc Bohan of Dior and master illustrator Réné Gruau who did Mdvanii’s logo and a Barbie drawing for me (the one I did for Mattel) and of course the dear Monsieur Alexandre de Paris hairdresser to royalty and stars, who did all my hairstyles and Mdvanii’s later on when I’d invented her. I shaved my head the day he died as a homage to him. Since he was gone, I had the best, nobody could do better, so I did not need hair anymore.

Lala and I did a homage to Monsieur Yves Saint Laurent with Lala’s song “L’Amour n’a pas de prix” for Diane Pernet’s AVSVOFF3 festival at Centre Pompidou in Paris. He was a great supporter of my work. He wrote about me in the 80s. “It was with surprising pleasure, thanks to BillyBoy*, that I discovered my childhood again. For it was by making clothing for my sister’s dolls that it all began. As one can see, my apprenticeship started quite early, and even though I may have learned a lot since, I can never forget these privileged moments by the Mediterranean Sea, when I first discovered the secret of an art which was to engage my whole life.

I have never seen dolls since without thinking of that period of my life when I believed that clothes were just part of a wonderful game, with colors and fabrics playing together in endless happiness.

I’ve learned since then how difficult this craft is, because if it gave me many great joys, it also gave me doubts and anguish. I hope with all my heart that these dolls attract today’s children and that they find, through dolls, the road to their vocations.” [Yves Saint Laurent, 1984]

I still knew Dali, who drew me as a child. We were rather close when I was a kid and teen. Paris was a very happy time for me. I knew a lot of the old stars like Marlene Dietrich, Arletty and Suzy Delair. They gave me Schiaparelli stories and even clothes.

But most significant thing was that I met Lala! MY LIFE CHANGED!

It was the first real boyfriend I had. And it was the first time I was in love!

I met Lala! Wow! I was so lucky!

It was amazing. All of a sudden, I felt really sorry for all the people who claimed they were in love with me in the past. I couldn’t really understand or even believe them, and I am convinced I seemed put-offish and a bit cold, as youth is – speaking in my defence a bit – but suddenly I was really in love and I knew if I were to be brushed off by Lala the way I brushed people off I’d have died. Fortunately he loved me back. It was 1983.

PP. What was so special about Lala that made you fall in love?

BB*. Lala… well so much… he loved me for the real me. He made me feel protected and understood and that has never changed in all these years. He was talented, he was a very unique musician with some certain success, a singer and an artist; we complimented each other in so many ways. The sex was great which cemented (ahem) the deal, he was a totally fabulous person and I worshipped him.

PP. And you still do.

BB*. Yes, I still do, I adore Lala, he and my son make my life valuable, much more than any achievement or possession or even my own expression. I adore them. Lala – life would be quite meaningless without him, really. It’s as simple as that.

We immediately were creative in all ways together. He was so understanding about my many flaws and he didn’t give a hoot about my past. He did not judge me. I am so easily judgeable, people love to make a decision on how they believe me to be and they judge me on that, condemned without a trial.

PP. You also have been working together and came up with some extraordinary artworks, jewellery, dolls… Have I forgot anything else?

BB*. Well, we do videos, music, our artwork which is Mdvanii who happens to look like and seem like a doll, jewels, writing, photos… “Extraordinary”? You are sweet. It has been very hard for people to understand what we do though we have had a great deal of success. I am not sure if people really understand just yet. Of course, some do, but most people don’t invest the time it takes to understand what we do.

I think in many years from now, long after we are gone, our work will be really understood for what it is, as contemporary art. We have really had to do quite a few things, exhibitions etc just to get people to understand. We have had support from great curators, which helps. I think a good curator is AS important as the artist. It’s like speaking a crazy foreign alien language and without the interpreter/ curator, it’s not so easy.

Anyway, the short answer is Lala and I have done many things for a long time. We work now since 15 years with my son who is an artist in his own right and has nothing to do with what we do when he does his own work… a work I think is quite marvellous, very youthful.

PP. Well in that case I will also have to interview him one of these days, and Lala as well.

BB*. Well, yes, Lala is a very articulate person and I think a very different kind of person than I am in some way, which for me, makes him so amazing. My son, Alec Jiri, I am super protective of. As I share my son with Lala, we both are in fact. He’s very, very shy, and like a Prince. He has princely qualities and I am devoted to him. He is one of the sweetest people I know and it’s not because he’s my son. Gosh! I sound like a typical dad! I guess as he gets older and expresses himself more with his work people will discover that on their own.

Thinking about your last question, we work as a family in fact, and I must point out something about our work, there are those who do understand. I think more and more people understand much more quickly. It seems lately we have made ten paces forward which in the past would have taken much longer. It’s the times they are catching up with us and I guess for some, our work is very much understood, more and more. Maybe it’s the communication vehicles.

I think as I get more mature and the work gets more mature, you continually rethink the dialogue to simplify it even more to get the message clearer and with more grace. I would hope this is what happens in our current work.

PP. People are becoming more understandable or conscious I believe these days, maybe because of the internet. It is much easier to communicate effectively now.

BB*. I invented many things which are very common now. The way in which I started my career, the way I looked at things in art and fashion were considered really way, way out there but have now not only become accepted but the norm. Of course, I did not do it singularly, but the immense publicity I received and reviews for my work popularised a number of things which have become standards. So now, my dialogue is streamlined, and more mature, though as I get older I think “my goodness, it’s all getting crazier and crazier” and I feel more and more like a child.

Communication, yes, I think people are simply more aware due to easier access to information. The down side of that is many people, very unqualified people feel that their small, not very deep opinions matter to the world… zillions of blogs and chats and groups and websites of meaningless drivel.

I would sometimes like to go back to the days of LESS communication, where people read every line of the newspaper for culture, news and entertainment. Sometimes I think it’s too much.

On one hand, I feel our work is better understood in some ways, and in other ways less understood because so many people have misinterpreted it, and it’s OUT THERE, for good or for bad, for well interpreted or not, it’s out there it seems indelibly.

I am not very optimistic with the outcome of all this communication and in the end, what I want the most is Lala and my son and I to live healthy, calm lives, create works which express beauty and it’s re-interpretation… and make people feel new ideas. But I don’t want an avalanche. Lala (and my agent) tells me that when my book comes out, due to the controversial nature of so much of it, my language, opinions, freedom, will cause all sorts of allies and enemies. I don’t want to have enemies but I am not ready to censor my ideas. It’s a mini conundrum. You cannot please everyone however, that I know.

PP. What is your biggest dream?

BB*. Oh, my biggest dream… well, first off, health and calm for my immediate family and friends. Concerning my work: publish my book and get a dialogue going with people on a positive level… amuse people. I publish excerpts once in a while on Fierth, this is new to me and fun. I excerpted a piece about Lee McQueen, who I knew in a peculiar way as I explained in the piece. I enjoy sharing parts of it. I enjoy the feedback.

PP. When will the book be published?

BB*. The book is with my agent right now. He is deciding whether my Schiaparelli book which is finished as well and which took me literally 30 years to do should be published first or not. It’s called so far, “Frocking Life – The Life of Elsa Schiaparelli”. I am thrilled with the result to tell you the truth, it’s a question of which should be published first Schiap or my book.

We have many projects which are being prepared for, museums shows, exhibitions in Russia, New York, Tokyo and Switzerland, videos and book for this autumn and early next year and I’d like to see them realised and done. I think more in terms of immediate future than long term since my long term dream was to have a husband who loves me and my son be happy and that is the case, so I can’t improve that dream for the time being.

I wish sometimes I had pursued my acting career. I’d have loved that, but I was represented by Triad in Los Angeles and what I saw of Hollywood was so ghastly, it was totally not for me. But acting, I adore it and wish I’d developed this in my life. I was in tons of Warhol things and commercials and stuff but I’d have liked to have made something interesting with acting.

PP. Well I certainly can’t wait for both of your books to come out. Thank you very much for your time BillyBoy*.

BB*. Thank you. AND I admire your work greatly and am so happy to be a teeny part of what you do.

Images: Courtesy of BillyBoy*
Text: © Predrag Pajdic, Augist 2010

I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance. That is my religion, and every day I am sorely, grossly, heinously and deeply offended, wounded, mortified and injured by a thousand different blasphemies against it. When the fundamental canons of truth, honesty, compassion and decency are hourly assaulted by fatuous bishops, pompous, illiberal and ignorant priests, politicians and prelates, sanctimonious censors, self-appointed moralists and busy-bodies, what recourse of ancient laws have I? None whatever. Nor would I ask for any. For unlike these blistering imbeciles my belief in my religion is strong and I know that lies will always fail and indecency and intolerance will always perish.

Images: © Katharina Hesse
Words: By Stephen Fry from Trefusis Blasphemes, radio broadcast

You are wretched and I am forgiven
There was nothing I could prevent
It is impossible to define a long life
Secret teachings are no longer secret
I have returned to embryonic state

When the Hubble showed us those sharp clear images
Two men down a mineshaft did not change their perceptions of
The hours left to work and breathe in the smoke, the grit, the lead dust
Fairy dust. That’s what Ragazzoni was looking for. That’s what Ragazzoni
Didn’t find. And Einstein is wrong, possibly, again.
Just like when he accused next door’s dog of stealing the sausages.

You are forgiven and I am wretched
There is something I could prevent
It is definition of a long, impossible life
Longer teachings are occluded in secrecy
State returns embryo to me

This continuum doesn’t really stretch linear-like from the past
To the future. If it did, it would be one dimensional and at the time of
First kissing you I have already buried you and mourned the passing of
Us. But while I am Newton and this is a dimension, I travel through it.
But when you are Kant, it’s all in my mind and we are no longer together.
I’m depending on radiation to mark and deliver, to measure and scratch.

I am you, forgiving the wretched
Preventing the existence of nothing
Life defines the length of the impossible
Teaching secrets no longer
I state the embryonic return

Urdr, Verdandi, Skuld beckon away from this moment
I am known as moment. It hangs on a thread, literally and
Just to be safe, I keep a basket of apples for offerings. I am
Looking at it. Feels like an elaborate stitch, woven by elves and
Giantesses. My children are safe from their gaze, from my gaze,
From yours. I am no longer serving the sentence à la carte.

You and I are both forgiven and wretched
Prevention of nothing sits here
It is life, the impossible definition
Secret length is teaching
Embryonic returns me to state

A bridge still stands and all the footsteps which previously trod
Have washed into the river beneath. I have already grown older.
Snakes lie still, yesterday is still happening but there is no tomorrow
Until my sunrise occurs. I stare at the picture of Bacon and Freud on my desk.
You are thousands of miles away, learning how to live.
I am alive. This commentary stands already out of date.

You are wretched and I am forgiven
There was nothing I could prevent
It is impossible to define a long life
Secret teachings are no longer secret
I have returned to embryonic state.

Text: © Now by J. L. Nash, August 2010
Images: © Roberto Foddai, styled by Predrag Pajdic with Katarina Mootich in the dress by Manuel Estevez, August 2010

Artistic direction by Predrag Pajdic and Mara Vujic with Oreet Ashery, Perry Bard, Stefania Bonatelli, Meta Grgurevic, Katharina Hesse & Lara Day, Jessica Lagunas, Vesna Milicevic, Nandipha Mntambo, Katarina Mootich, Maflohé Passedouet, Kira O’Reilly, Petra Reimann, Yvonne De Rosa and Judith Witteman.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back is a group exhibition, borrowing its title from a 1904 revolutionary pamphlet by Vladimir Lenin. The purpose here is not to relate to Lenin’s paper but to use its title in examining a situation where, seemingly for every attempt to make progress in a task, an actual retrograde performance is achieved. The exhibition focuses on “now”, at this very moment, the present in relation to time, future and past. What is our understanding of now? Do we live it, or deplete it by waiting for better days? What is reality and does it have to reflect upon the past in order to survive today? Are we aware and conscious of our history? Do we care about it? Could one exist without a past? What would future be?

Through performances, video, photography and installations, a group of international artists examines ‘today’ by reconstructing, revisiting and reinventing, not always pleasant but certainly significant moments in their lives; instants that for some reason are nothing else but the blemishes from the past, difficult to comprehend and mostly hard to forget. They may be someone else’s reality all together, yet mingled in a group consciousness that cannot escape it.

One doesn’t choose a war necessarily, or a flood, or famine… or even the trauma that such circumstances may convey. Still, one can relate to it with a full awareness of course or choose oblivion as observed in performances ‘Still Life’ by Vesna Milicevic and ‘Which Way Is Left?’ by Katarina Mootich. Both artists belong to the generation that once lived in Yugoslavia, now torn apart into many small countries. To be born in one place and to suddenly exist in another, without even moving your home, has confronting, psychological impact. Certainly one can rewrite history books and change all the symbols of the previous state, but would that mean one could just move on and forget? And if the history books are rewritten, whose past do Milicevic and Mootich relate to?

During the 90’s Yvonne De Rosa worked voluntarily in an old psychiatric hospital in Italy. Six years after the healthcare structure closed the institution down, the artist returns to the rooms and already decaying corridors to document the void left by the patients. Her ‘Crazy God’ project is a sensitive, touching study consisting of portraits of the objects abandoned by the patients and their wall writings – sentences that are often astonishingly lucid.

Similarly Petra Reimann in ‘Unprecedented Development’ visits the Stasi top security prison in the Former East Berlin in order to grasp unjust imprisonment and torture that went until the 90’s on her very doorstep. De Rosa and Reimann tap into this emptiness to record as archive before it is obliterated through the passage of time.

It is not surprising that the South African artist Nandipha Mntambo, in her video installation ‘Ukungenisa’, rehearses the steps of a bullfighter in an abandoned arena in Maputo where black Mozambicans once fought as entertainment for the colonial Portuguese. The bullfight staged by Mntambo is an atypical one, as she confronts a metaphoric bull. With a vacant arena, this once public spectacle has become a private act, a lonely dance, an intimate display of fear and a resulting fearlessness. This deeply moving and highly charged video retains all its power through the absence of a visible threat. An empty shadow makes it more difficult to set the fighting and the protecting apart: as confrontation and refuge, masculine and feminine, aggression and defence, they are by nature at opposite ends of the same spectrum.

Perry Bard’s ‘Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake’ is a unique documentation of daily activities from a myriad points of view, uploaded by the general subsequent uploads were processed by software that specifically archived, sequenced and streamed the work to create a film which spans a single day unfolding from sunrise to sunset incorporating footage shot in a number of cities, often using the same shot more than once.

By applying hair onto herself, donated by the audience, Oreet Ashery in her performance ‘Hairoism’ transforms from a general of the Israel Defence Forces during the ’50s to a senior member of the Palestinian organisation Hamas. Once more she metamorphoses from the current Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs to a rock star… and yet again until her body and face are covered entirely by hair visually shifting into animal… ape?… monster?

Perhaps one should just let go! Or slow down at least as Kira O Reilly in ‘Stair Falling’, attempts to find moments of balance, which are lost to the ungainly. Let go as Judith Witteman may suggest in her installation ‘(1947 – )’, consisting of her mother’s entire collection of perfume bottles she had been using over a period of 25 years. Her mother kept them all, perhaps refusing to surrender to the present, which is certainly not the case with Witteman.

In her performance ‘Oracle’, her entire body is smeared with honey, which slowly slides down until lying flat on the ground. Its creeping descent, moving little by little, resembles a slow-motion dance. The artist cannot see. She is unable to hear, being utterly alone in her on world. She is vulnerable and not aware of what surrounds her.

Vulnerability continues in Meta Grgurevic’s blood bleeding ballerina entitled ‘Unhappily Being Happy’ or Jessica Lagunas who removes her pubic hair and applies mascara, nail varnish and lipstick in a ritualistic manner until her body is transformed from its beautiful, natural condition into an increasingly chaotic, masked muddle.

But where is the future in all this? Do we really want to know? And even if we do, there is no way we can. Perhaps one should just let go of time and exist in this very moment, because it is the only one you know you certainly have. Alternatively, should we see time as a spiral, all moments in time existing simultaneously, and in that second, meaning is intensified, loaded and wisdom in the emptiness of not yesterday and not tomorrow is left in the viewer’s mind.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
SKUC Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Opening on the 12th of October 2010
Part of International Festival of Contemporary Arts
City of Women 2010
Between Past & Future