Being and Sleeping

The Artist Asleep

He stayed in bed for twenty-two days. It was a narrow bed with a thin metal frame set on four black wheels. The linen was white and there was only one pillow. He wore white underwear and a white vest, and did not change either his clothes or the sheets for the duration of his strange confinement. The room was white too, and empty but for the people who came to watch him as he slept or lay awake unmoving. He did not respond to questions, did not speak at all. For the most part, however, the people who came did not try to engage him; they kept their distance, witnessed his repose in silence.

“I had a strange power around me,” the artist said of his 1972 performance Bed Piece, “sort of like a bubble or a repulsive magnet. Most people wouldn’t come close to me. In fact, most people seemed frightened.”

There was something unnerving about the artist’s imposed catatonia. It was less an exercise in boredom and loneliness than one of ascetic will, of sublime self-control. His singular focus was felt by those who saw him; the drama of his doing nothing palpable. Even something as anodyne as sleep, it appeared, could be elevated towards the unusual, the unsettling. Despite the stark simplicity of Bed Piece, the result was not a clarity of intent but rather the refined ambiguity of a haiku.

The artist’s other performances of that decade were more dramatic, tended more towards spectacle. But they shared with Bed Piece the same dark impulse, which marked even the artist’s most simple actions with suffering. Earlier that same year, he had confined himself to a school locker for five days, and later, he would nail his hands to a Volkswagen Beetle, roll through broken glass, have spectators push pins into his body. In 1971, for a performance titled Shoot, the artist’s friend fired a .22 calibre rifle at his left arm from a distance of fifteen feet at a Santa Ana gallery. The work later inspired Laurie Anderson’s curiously upbeat song It’s Not the Bullet That Kills You (It’s the Hole). The artist was not killed, but the bullet blew through his arm rather than graze it as he had hoped. But for all the violence of these works, it is the artist’s calm reserve, his matter-of-factness, that is perhaps even more disturbing than the pain inflicted on his body.

Bed Piece began at midday on February 18th, when the artist arrived at the gallery and stripped off his shirt and trousers. A bed was waiting for him, as he had requested. He had not informed anyone of his intention to remain there for twenty-two days, and it fell to the exhibition’s curator to see that the artist’s basic needs were met. 

“As the piece neared ending, neared closing, I started feeling regret about leaving,” the artist recalled. “I started feeling like I wanted to stay, and I actually considered staying. But I knew that if I stayed, that I would be forced to leave anyway […] But the fact that I was tempted, and that, that I was very seduced into it, to me that is the strangest part about this piece.”

The work ended on March 10th, and the artist, however reluctantly, left the bed and the gallery. Bed Piece, which was never repeated, exists only in its documentation – a series of short black-and-white clips filmed on a Super-8 camera. 

A Poet Asleep

He had trouble falling asleep. He went to all the parties, took amphetamines and lovers and stayed up all night. It was Memorial Day weekend, 1963, when the artist found the subject for his first film, sometime after midnight in an unfamiliar bed. “We went away for a few days,” the poet John Giorni later recalled, “and I woke up in the night to find him staring at me […] That's where the idea for the movie came from – he was looking for a visual image and it just happened to be me. He said to me on the way home: ‘Would you like to be a movie star?’

‘Of course,’ I said, ‘I want to be just like Marilyn Monroe.’”

Over the proceeding months, the artist filmed the poet sleep. He used a Bolex camera, which was hand-wound every thirty seconds and allowed for only three minutes of film time with every hundred-metre spool. It whirled as it ran, the clockwork spring winding film off one reel and onto another. 

Sleep (1963) runs for five hours and twenty-one minutes. It consists of only a few short film clips played on repeat at sixteen frames a second and in silence; the poet’s chest rising and falling like a steady and soundless metronome. The image flickers and jumps, but the poet, unconcerned by the camera’s stare, remains largely motionless, turning his head only once, raising an arm. Nothing happens; the poet sleeps. 

“The more you look at the same exact thing,” the artist said, “the more meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.” Beginning with Sleep, and later followed by Kiss, Eat and Haircut, the artist’s early films took as their subject the unstaged actions of life. 

“Do anything / you want,” Giorno’s poem, Sucking Mud (1986), invites an unnamed lover, “but don’t come / in my mouth.” The artist, as he filmed, did nothing of the sort, only watched, leaving the sleeping poet undisturbed. He is absent from the film, never enters the frame, but invites the viewer to see what he sees, each night he cannot fall asleep. The poet is naked, his hand resting between his legs, his lower torso lost in shadow. Yet the film’s erotics are found not in the close-ups of sculpted backside or dark areola but in the intimate boredom of familiarity.

How seldom one looks at strangers, stares openly at an unknown face. The artist gives us his lover – his lover gives himself – to be seen and studied. Sleep is often described as an ‘anti-film’ given its disregard for the conventions of filmmaking, but it is perhaps better understood as a portrait and approached as a painting or photograph. A slow study of a poet, who remains unaware of the artist as he loads and unloads the camera, winds back the film. A study, perhaps, of insomniac envy.

The poet and the artist separated in 1964, and by 1972 the film had been withdrawn from distribution after relatively few screenings. Yet Sleep remains one of the best-known art films though it is seldom seen. It persists as a concept, as an idea that has become detached from its form, an artwork that exists in its retelling.

An Actress Asleep

Please come and go quietly, a sign on the wall read. The visitors complied – walked carefully, spoke in low voices, came to stand silently at the glass vitrine on its metal stand. No one tapped on the glass or pressed their face against it. A line taped on the floor discouraged visitors from standing too close. Beside the vitrine, the label: “Tilda Swinton. Scottish, born 1960. The Maybe, 1995. Living artist, glass, steel, mattress, pillow, linen, water and spectacles.” There was no further description, no explanation. 

The artist, an actress, slept behind glass eight hours a day for a week as part of Cornelia Parker’s retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery, London, in 1995. Both the performance and the exhibition shared The Maybe as a vague and uncertain title.

The artist’s enclosed sleep was, she said, a gesture caught “between that essence which I value most in live performance – namely, that kinetic experience of human beings all (wholly – as in, every part of them) present together in the same space at the same time and in the thrall of time and the unexpected – with that essence which I value most in cinematic performance – namely, the possibility of the scrutiny of the viewer and the unwatched who cannot watch back.” At the time, the artist was not a well-known actress, and lying in the vitrine, she was seldom recognised as herself but seen instead as a curiosity among many others. For the gallery was populated by unusual objects, historical artefacts, and the personalia of people long dead – Napoleon’s rosary, Turner’s paintbox, a pair of Queen Victoria’s stockings – displayed as the artist was in discrete glass vitrines.

There was, too, Churchill’s half-smoked cigar, a cheque signed by Virginia Woolf, the manuscript of Owen Wilson’s Strange Meeting. It was a strange meeting, all those relics brought together, the artist among them, uncoloured and ungendered save her long red hair. Reminiscent of Sleeping Beauty perhaps, or Bernini’s Sleeping Hermaphroditus.

Among all those objects marked by lives past, with their competing histories and disparate narratives, The Maybe has about it an insistent mortality. The artist in her vitrine recalls Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde shark, the reliquaries of Christian saints, Lenin’s waxlike body – death sealed behind glass. With her pallid complexion, she might well be dead, but for her breath and the movement of unseeing eyes behind closed lids. She lies in state in a button-up shirt, trousers and worn shoes. Beside her on the white sheet are a pair of reading glasses and in the corner of the vitrine a glass of water.

The artist later performed The Maybe at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2013. She slept alone, without the surrounding artefacts to lend her the patina of relic. She was no longer unknown but a famous actress, an icon enclosed in glass. The intrigue of the work had shifted, become something different, its appeal more voyeuristic than curious. The artist in her vitrine, however, slept just as she had eighteen years before, with shirt and spectacles.

Other People Asleep

Her bed was never left empty, not for eight days and nights. And though she placed clean linen on a nearby chair few people paused to change the sheets. The pillows were always warm, the duvet heavy with sleep. There were twenty-nine sleepers, some friends of the artist or friends of friends, a brother, several strangers. The artist and an agency babysitter filled in when needed, slept when no other sleepers arrived (five failed to keep their appointments). The artist spoke to the sleepers when they came, sat beside the bed, kept them company until they drifted off. She wrote notes on each visitor and photographed them at intervals. Of a man with the face of a beautiful boy she wrote: 

I do not know him […] He arrived on Saturday, April 7 at 12pm, four hours late. I was in the bed. He apologises. He doesn’t change the sheets. He says sometimes he likes to dress up for bed. I suggest my grandmother’s white lace nightgown. He accepts. We talk for a long while, him stretched out in the nightgown and me in a chair at the side of the bed.

The artist recorded who each sleeper was (I do not know her, he is my brother), whether or not they changed the linen, and more intimate and idiosyncratic observations of their eight-hour stay – what position they slept in, how restless they were, if they spoke or read or lay awake in silence. 

The premise was simple. “I asked people to give me a few hours of their sleep,” the artist said of the work. “To come and sleep in my bed. To let themselves be looked at and photographed. To answer questions […] I put questions to those who allowed me – nothing to do with knowledge or fact-gathering, but rather to establish a neutral and distant contact. I took photographs every hour. I watched my guest sleep.” 

With one hundred and seventy-three photographs and twenty-three framed texts, The Sleepers (1979) is a record of this gesture, which took place in eight-hour shifts from Sunday, April 1st, at 5pm to the following Monday, April 9th, at 10am. The photographs show the artist’s bed in the corner of the room. Above, on the pale walls, are three framed pictures, postcards and photographs that have been hung or tacked in place. There are two pillows, maybe three. One has a silk cover with lace trim. The sheets are white, the duvet sometimes dark, sometimes light grey. The photographs are black and white. None show the bed made. One shows a cat. Beneath each image are short notes written in French and by hand. Under one:

I photograph her often during the night. She changes position but doesn’t open her eyes. At 9am I wake her while taking a picture.

The presence of the artist is constant, even insistent, the ‘I’ that watches over her sleepers, sits with them like a mother ministering to a sick child, brings them breakfast in bed. She is present in every telling, a narrator at once distant and entangled, the persistent self that mediates the sleep of strangers, the intimate voice that invites the viewer into the privacy of her bedroom and the lives of others. The Sleepers is a gently voyeuristic work, poetic yet prying; even perfect.

The Artist’s Bed

The sheets are crumpled and stained, the bed unmade, the carpet littered with trash, with empty vodka bottles and crumpled tissues, cigarette butts and yellowed condoms. 

The artist is absent yet her presence still lingers in the bed, as if she left it only moments before. A pair of beige stockings, blood-stained underwear and two dirty slippers stand as a metonym for the tragic figure that spent a week in bed, drinking and fighting and having sex with the man who was leaving her. A copy of The Guardian from September 1998, half-hidden under tissues, suggests the time; the soiled carpet, cheap and blue, the setting – low-cost rentals and council flats, and the places no one stays for long.

A Polaroid photograph of the artist lies on the bedside table beside a carton of barbeque sauce, loose change, an ashtray, a pack of contraceptive pills. She smiles into the bright flash, young and happy and unaware of the chaos that surrounds her.

My Bed was the cause of much provocation and outrage when it was first exhibited in 1998. It was too crude, too real, too painfully honest. But wholly genuine, too. The bed is the artist’s; the trash, her trash. It is intimate, unmediated, unashamed. “Here I am,” the artist wrote in her autobiography Strangeland (2005), “a fucked, crazy, anorexic-alcoholic-childless beautiful woman. I never dreamed it would be like this.” 

Each time the work is exhibited, the artist is called on to remake her unmade bed. To artfully drop the tissues, throw down cigarette butts just so, create disorder with a studied carelessness: 

“Today when I took the duvet out it was flat. And when I threw it on the bed, it didn’t look right […] So I made the bed and got in and pushed the cover back so it had that natural feeling that a body has been into it. It’s strange because it still has that same smell that it had [all those] years ago. Obviously the stains and everything else are touching me, and it’s like being touched by a ghost of yourself.” 

Though the artist left her Waterloo flat twenty-one years ago, she can never leave her bed. She returns time and again to that squalid scene, returns to the memories of that week. To the lasting smell of sex and suicidal depression, stale cigarettes, alcohol. The objects have been left unchanged, none has been replaced, though some have discoloured and others grown brittle with age. The work, regardless, remains as immediate and raw as it first did. “Still filthy,” one art reviewer said of My Bed, “still repulsive, and still one of the most moving works of contemporary art.”

The distance of time has focused the work’s intrigue, rendered it less shocking than it once was, lent it the solemnity of history. It exists now as an imperfectly preserved moment in time, with its half-empty tube of K-Y Jelly, glass bottle of Orangina, disposable razor, toy dog. A self-portrait drawn in the stuff of life. 

Other Beds 

The place is unremarkable: a hotel bedroom with matching side tables and headboards, matching blankets, twin beds. The title of the photograph, Empty beds, Boston (1979), is bare as the room is bare, without sentiment or history. The beds have been pushed together, left unmade, the scene punctuated by incidental objects. An empty whiskey bottle, a single cigarette. A lens cap belonging to the artist’s camera lies on the bed, and in the corner of the room, on the floor, are photographic negatives and contact sheets, a Kodak-yellow envelope. 

The artist’s photographs are intimate and compelling, never staged, always candid. Together, the pictures she made from the late 70s to the mid-80s have been collected under the title The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. The Ballad follows the highs and lows of her chosen family, a marginal community living in Bowery, New York City, a family of sex workers, artists, drug addicts and drag queens. She photographed her friends and lovers against the backdrop of grimy inner-city apartments and roadside motels, documented their lives with frank intimacy. Her images are raw and unguarded, as are her subjects.

The Ballad is exhibited as a slideshow set to pop songs. With over seven hundred photographs, each is shown for only a few seconds. They are collected around loose themes, from parties and parades to bruised eyes and broken women. Time passes in sequence; people grow older, places change. Forty minutes go by. It begins in the company of friends and ends in solitude, with a series of empty beds and empty rooms, coffins and graves. 

"I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough,” the artist said. “In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost." 

The artist’s beds are small monuments to past lovers, the dead, the absent. Friends and family lost to addiction, to AIDS, and to bad luck. But her beds are heavy with life, too. It accumulates in quilted mattresses, marks the pillows, stains the sheets. Sex, love, disappointment, illness, all seep into these beds. They are the stages on which people fall in love, relationships sour, resentment waits. Where sexual dependency plays to her camera.

The viewer stands with the artist at the foot of the two twin beds, looks through her camera with her, towards the blue wall ahead. The motel bedroom is still, the light soft. Shadows collect in the corners. The window, to the left, is out of frame. Whoever slept beside her goes unseen, a lover perhaps, or a stranger – someone to share the unfamiliar room and the familiar bottle of whiskey. It’s Thanksgiving weekend, and they are going somewhere or coming home. Just passing through. Empty beds, Boston is a snapshot of nowhere in particular. A photograph that tells little on its own, like a single line in a song.

No Bed

Every hour, on the hour, the artist clocked in on an old factory timepiece. And every hour, on the hour, he took a single photograph of himself standing beside the clock face. The performance lasted three hundred and sixty-five days, from 11 April 1980 to 11 April 1981.

The constraints of the work necessitated that he never sleep or leave his studio for more than fifty-nine minutes at a time. “It was like being in limbo,” the artist said of that year, “just waiting for the next punch.” 

His performance persists in its traces ­– 365 punched time cards and 8 627 photographs (of the 8 760 hours in a year, he missed only 133). In the photographs, the artist grows progressively gaunt and dishevelled. His hair, which is at first shaved, grows past his shoulders. The dark rings beneath his eyes deepen; his face lines with fatigue. In each image, he wears the same grey boiler suit. Included in the documentation of the work are witness statements, which attest to the integrity of the performance, should anyone doubt his endurance.

One Year Performance 1980-1981 (Time Clock Piece) was the artist’s second year-long artwork. In the first, One Year Performance 1978-1979 (Cage Piece), he confined himself to a cage he built in his studio. He did not read, write, watch television or speak for twelve months, did nothing but witness the passing time. Cage Piece and Time Clock Piece were followed by three further performances. In the first he banned himself from entering any building or shelter, in the second he was joined to another artist by a length of rope, and in the third he forbade himself from looking at, speaking about or making art. Each lasted a year; each a simple gesture rendered austere and arduous by its duration.

“My life is the foundation of my work,” the artist said of his performances, “and my work has the quality of life – I lived in my work. Life and work could not be separated. Doing art and doing life are the same, they both are doing time.” 

He neither works nor makes works but rather lives within a set of arbitrary constraints for a given length of time. To the artist, performance and life are inseparable; both are governed by time. And time is his primary medium. The artist insists his performances are not punishment, though they may be punishing, but rather meditations on commitment. He is exquisitely sensitive to what he calls the beautiful rhythm found in repetition. And with it, the pleasure of abiding.

The artist speaks in koans, having nothing but time to arrange his thoughts into simple, unclear lessons: “Life is a life sentence; life is passing time; life is freethinking.”

In a book on the artist, Out of Now, the curator Adrian Heathfield asks of  Time Clock Piece: “What would it mean to know nothing for a year except the intervals between this action? To sleep, to think, to live, only in the time in between? How do you try to comprehend this?” The lived experience of the performance cannot be impressed on the viewer, experienced, as it is, only through traces and second-hand accounts; the artist’s actions reduced to notations. 

In Bed

The artist is photographed lying in bed. It is not a performance, not documentation of a performance, but a proposition. The photographs are arranged in four pairs; all share the same composition, all are black and white. The time that passed between each frame is indeterminate, unimportant, a few hours at most. Of the eight photographs, only the first shows the artist awake, though his eyes are unfocused and his expression vacant, as if moments from sleep. In four, his face is turned towards the camera; in four away, towards the back wall, so that only his dark hair and the vague shape of his body beneath the blankets can be seen. The proposition: there is no art without laziness.

Lying alone in his low bed with its mismatched linen and exposed mattress, the artist’s inaction might first be mistaken for spiritual piety; his gaunt face and pale skin lending him the appearance of a sage. But his idleness is more pragmatic than divine. To the artist, laziness is a necessary condition for creativity. It is “the absence of movement and thought, just dumb time – total amnesia,” he wrote in his 1993 manifesto, In Praise of Laziness. “It is also indifference, staring at nothing, non-activity, impotence. It is sheer stupidity, a time of pain, futile concentration. Those virtues of laziness are important factors in art. Knowing about laziness is not enough, it must be practised and perfected.” 

There is in sleep, the artist suggests, in that most prosaic of pastimes, an opposition to expectation, a small resistance. Artist at Work (1973) is a social critique, however somnolent, a study in wasting time. For in sleep, the artist is free from the restraints and obligations of waking life; in sleep, he finds a singular autonomy. And defending that autonomy, the artist believes, is art’s primary concern. To resist the status quo, not with political action but with the simplest inaction, with the elegant economy of staying in bed.

The artist resented the West’s growing influence in his native Croatia, then a part of Yugoslavia; its imperfect ideology of capitalism in conflict with the East’s imperfect ideology of communism. Distrustful of capitalism’s central values – productivity and labour in the pursuit of profit – the artist positioned himself an outsider. Alienated by the cultural authority to which his country would later subscribe, he set himself apart in his refusal to work, to participate, to produce. 

“Work is a shame,” he wrote in his manifesto on laziness. And indeed, the artist never did work. Despite his limited finances, he refused to take a day job, reluctant to participate in impersonal production, to cast himself a labourer. He was supported first by his mother’s state pension, and then by his wife. Only late in his career would he earn a living from his art. The artist, however, was not alone in his reluctance to work. “I consider working for a living slightly imbecilic from an economic point of view,” he said, quoting the French artist Marcel Duchamp. And later, quoting the Russian painter Kazimir Malevich: “I want to remove the brand of shame from laziness and to pronounce it not the mother of all vices, but the mother of perfection.” Work and art have long been uncomfortable bedfellows.