In his song “Hearts and Bones,” Paul Simon, describing the dissolution of his marriage to Carrie Fisher, sang, “You take two bodies and you twirl them into one . . . And they won’t come undone.” The pomp and pageantry of love and commitment—whether that of a traditional wedding or a conventionally romantic night out with red roses and candles—looms large in our collective imagination. These rituals offer couples emotional generators to affirm their shared reality and identity. But rituals can also provide opportunities for much-needed transitions when ending relationships, whether we call it breaking up, divorcing, or separating.
Can couples craft new rituals to help them decouple—to acknowledge that their once-shared reality is now fragmented?
This is precisely where Ulay and Marina Abramović found themselves in the spring of 1986, despite their cosmic connection and shared birthdays. They had just performed a show together at the Burnett Miller Gallery in Los Angeles. The show, for her, was symbolic of their love and their artistic vision. It represented what she describes in her memoir, Walk Through Walls, as “creating this third element we called that self—an energy not poisoned by ego, a melding of male and female that to me was the highest work of art.”
Ulay, on the other hand, felt their performances and interactions with the spectators afterward were becoming routine. The business and networking aspect of their art had become a habit he wasn’t sure he wanted to cultivate. Whereas Abramović was ready to embrace the life of a world-famous art star—with its requisite duties and attendant inconveniences—Ulay longed to live a more itinerant and anarchist existence. Instead of attending celebrity parties and art pavilions, he was eager to return to his nomadic life traveling across Europe in a van.
“Oh, you know how to deal with people,” he told Abramović while she worked the room at the show’s after-party. “I’m just going…
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