Send me a postcard

My first break-up happened in 2009. I was with the art historian for 4 years. He left me for another art historian. A very famous one. That art historian happened to be best friends with Sophie Calle.

I was destroyed. But also relieved. Because the relationship had gone to the point where neither person was going to break-up with the other because it was more comfortable not to disturb the peace of misery (if you know what I mean—I know some of you know what I mean).

One of the last times I saw him (for years—though we recently reconnected in London this past summer) we were both attending a Sophie Calle piece at the Guggenheim in the winter of 2009. He was there with his famous art historian boyfriend and sitting next to Sophie Calle. I was there with my best friend. We sat on opposite sides of the auditorium and I looked at him the entire time.

Sophie Calle was showing a video she took of her mother dying. Her mother’s last breaths. The last time she held her hand. The last time they spoke. People had given her a hard time in the press for this. They said she was “exploiting” trauma and pain. I wondered whose trauma and pain she was exploiting but her own. And what exploitation meant here. And if the people who wrote those bad reviews had ever gone through grief or mourning.

Before I left my ex, I stole a copy of Sophie Calle’s book Exquisite Pain from his art history collection. It is an expensive out of print book. In it, she goes around and asks hundreds of people to tell her of the most painful experience of their life and how they survived it.

People talk about their parents dying. Break-ups. Losing jobs. Material things. Their minds. Etc. In return she tells them about her most recent break-up. The man she thought she was going to marry had left her after a year away—she was on residency in Japan to make art. They were supposed to begin their life together when she returned. It never happened.

She wanted to tell the story over and over to so many strangers, that eventually, the story would lose its power. She would grow tired, bored even of telling people about her pain because she had done it so many times. It was, according to her, the biggest pain in her life at that point. I imagine, until losing her mother. That’s why I always loved that Guggenheim piece I saw that day with my ex and his new boyfriend and Sophie in the audience.

Years later, it must have been 2011, Sophie Calle did an installation at the Lowell Hotel in New York, on the Upper East Side (where I would soon live, but I lived in the Lower East then). You could walk into her room—she would be in it—at any point, and look at the art pieces she had arranged around the suite. It was her classic way of letting strangers—people really—into her life. And her art.

I walked in close to midnight on a Friday. I had the book Exquisite Pain with me. I came up to her after looking at a photograph (for a long time) of Sigmund Freud, which she had framed. I thanked her for her work and told her it had helped me live my own life, as an artist but also as a person on Earth.

She smiled. I handed her Exquisite Pain. And she put her glasses on and looked up at me. This is a very rare book, she said. You are very young. When did you get it, she asked. I stole it, I told her. I stole it from my ex-boyfriend who at the time left me for your best friend.

She smiled again and signed it, For Alex, the thief of Exquisite Pain.

I will never forget it. Her strength—unlike Marina Abramovic, another favorite artist—is in her stoicism. Marina’s is in her intense passion. In Barcelona last year I watched Marina, front row, break a vase over her feet in front of 9,000 people.

I’ve had a difficult year. And I want to mark the end of it with both stoicism and passion.

It would mean a lot to me if you chose a postcard with some kind of meaning to you, and wrote 3-4-5 sentences on the back telling me about surviving a difficult time in your life. I don’t need the sad story. I just want the survival part.

1457 Meridian Ave, Apt 102, Miami Beach, FL 33139

I’ll be in Miami until mid January when I return to New York for Wilde Boys, Night Call and the release of Ecstasy. And to teach my classes. Do sign up for the Zoom workshop here. The in-person is already full but I will do another one very soon in my apartment. One-on-one consultations are always available. Also in my apartment or at The Well (on 15th and 5th) or on Zoom.

Thank you.

Love, Alex