Touch the Heart – Feel the Crash

Abstract

A performance art piece by Marina Abramović (512 hours, 2014), a rock concert by Nick Cave (The O2 Arena, 30 September 2017) and a book by Connie Palmen (Logbook of a Merciless Year, 2011) are approached as enactments of grief. They are brought together in a story trying to make sense of loss, which is based on the attuning to the rhythm of the heartbeat of a beloved person, made possible by the intertwining of tactility and aurality. The silence of the beloved person’s heartbeat causing the wreckage of loss, the arrhythmic heartbeat as the longing of wrecked survivors/artists for their lost intimacy, and the use of the remains of the wreckage to attune to heartbeats of strangers during art events, are approached through the philosophy of tactility of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Luce Irigaray. Longing, which is suggested as the temporality of grief, opens up physical bodies of survivors as the sites of personal grief, towards the bodies of their art works, as the sites of public events. Thanks to the reworking of grief with strangers through tactility and aurality, the lost love that was transformed into grief, is reinvented in events where art becomes eros.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The author receives funding from the TECHNE AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership.

Notes

1 Description based on my experience on 10, 12 and 14 June 2014.

2 Translations from Dutch sources have been made by the author.

3 Harmonic rhythm is the rate at which harmony changes during a musical piece.

4 Can you feel my heart beat; The world would stop spinning now since you’ve been gone; Stranger than Kindness; It goes boom, boom, boom; Mercy Seat.