Artists Brief:
Love hurts… a prelude
A woman came to see me with the unlikely idea that psychoanalysis could make her lover’s behaviour less erratic. She complained of the unexplained disappearances which followed each of his visits to her apartment. But it soon became clear that these disturbances were, in fact, essential to the relation which unconsciously she wished to maintain. Describing the scenario as if it were entirely new, it turned out after some questioning that this had been going on for some ten years. And that, furthermore, a most peculiar ritual had been established. Each time the man left, she would telephone all the morgues in the town in which she lived, giving a description of the man and asking if a body had been found. After all these years, she knew the phone numbers by heart and the morgue employees would recognise her voice immediately. Does this not suggest that beyond the figure of her lover was the shadow of a dead man? Beyond the living lover who would spend time with her was the corpse she searched for. In contrast to the lady of Dracula, instead of finding two figures to incarnate the live man and the dead man, she managed to focus them into a single man. This search for a dead man as a lover is perhaps the reason why people are so often amazed at the fact that a friend has fallen in love with the most incredibly boring man. Men who are particularly boring shouldn’t worry too much about finding a partner since it is precisely for their mortification that they are loved. Beyond the register of the living is the love a woman claims from the dead man.’
Why do women write more letters than they post? Darian Leader. Faber and Faber 1996 —
3 Walls Gallery 