I gave my heartbeat to an artist…

Cross Hyde Park facing East, get to the Serpentine Gallery, see no red (as you arrive from the West). Encounter a make-shift white box. Enter. Participate. Collaborate. Remember. Take your heart back home with you. Forget.

A long way ago, entertaining the young son of my friend the nurse, I found a stethoscope amongst the pile of children’s toys. I slipped in the earpieces and put the disc on my chest, then nearly fell backwards at the loud thudding noise of my own heart.This was before MP3s and in-ear buds. Walkmans with flimsy sponge headphones didn’t cancel noise and turn you inwards like that stethoscope did.

Hearing my hearbeat was an uncanny experience. For the first time in my life, I experienced the knowledge that I was real and solid, but machine-like in my fragility. Hearing the workings of my own body, the symmetry of my blood transmissions, I gaped in awe at the miracle of life. I was not just an outside shell with airy thoughts in the head and bones to hold me up, I was full of thick, juicy, rich cogs and wheels, running up and down and palpitating in sync. I learned that peripheral vision can work inwards as well as laterally. The thudding sound in the stethoscope was me: nothing else but that rhythmic, all-exterminating noise. Wow. One of my many epiphanies…

Christian Boltanki’s hearbeat recording booth for his Les Archives du Coeur project arrives in London from Monumenta Paris. It’s beautiful in concept, but collides with my current ponderings on data-gathering. I want to hoard and store all paintings, books, photos, documents, etc., but I wrestle with the futility of it – there is a destruction of time in revisiting lived experiences, which makes archiving a pretty egotistical pursuit. Reading Art, Time and Technology (Charlie Gere, 2006) this week I found this message: ‘Andreas Huyssen suggests that one response to the ever-greater ubiquity of real-time systems is an increasing interest in memory. (…) The more memory we store on data banks, the more the past is sucked into the orbit of the present, ready to be called upon the screen.’

After that, Wolfgang Tillmans‘ photographs (the artist as curator) and Jean Nouvel’s red pavillion (glowing) were less moving than they might have been without my flashbacks.

#Collaboration #Installations #RelationalArt