Sublime

deep sleep—and woke up enlightened. This is how I read the story: that to achieve a goal, you have to give everything until you have nothing left. And it will happen by itself. That’s really important. This is my motto for every performance. I give every single gram of energy, and then things either happen or they don’t. This is why I don’t care ab

OPENING THE DOOR. For three hours, very slowly open a door, neither entering nor exiting. After three hours the door is not a door anymore.

Then, just before midnight, the same door opened and the same five guys carried in another huge platter—with Jan Hoet lying on it, naked except for a bow tie. Imagine any other museum director in the world doing that.

One of the artists I met in Rome was a Brazilian, a couple of years older than me, named Antonio Dias.

This was life. Could art, should art, be isolated from life? I began to feel more and more strongly that art must be life—it must belong to everybody. I felt, more powerfully than ever, that what I had created had a purpose.

I was so fond of him that at one point I thought I wanted to marry him. He said, “Why marry?” I didn’t really have a good answer.

At the Cologne Art Fair that fall we did a new piece called Light/Dark. Clothed this time, and in jeans and identical white T-shirts, with our hair pulled back in identical buns, we knelt facing each other and took turns slapping each other in the face. After each slap the slapper would slap his or her knee, giving the performance a steady one-two

Every morning we would go to a field somewhere, and in hierarchical order, starting with the oldest women and moving down to the youngest, they would show us, using a stick to make drawings in the dirt, what they’d dreamed the night before.

Suddenly it worked. I ran the extra distance, and my column moved. The crowd cheered. But as I continued backing up and slamming into the column, over and over, the mood changed. Now I was in an altered state: the performance had become frenetic.