Barbara thinks there’s still time for another climax, another crisis-and-resolution before the end of the ‘sham. In fact, she’s even gone as far as to prescribe the type: a romantic encounter. She’s been itching for it to happen ever since the beginning. I can just imagine her sitting at her laptop in her Camperdown apartment (only a few blocks away from the gallery where I type these words) scanning my paragraphs for some clue, some hint of juicy gossip that might sneak sideways, and unintentionally, into the blog postings.

Sadly, for her, this literary device – this climax – this culmination she’s been waiting for – has not come to pass. (At least, not that I’m letting on!)

After our discussion on this topic at the exhibition opening, Barbara sent me a text message:

In TV dramaland
it’s called URRT –
unresolved
sexual tension
but in the end it
is resolved! X

Oh Barbara! If only you’d come along to my talk on Friday night at the Bowlo, in which I described my Cornflakes performance (circa 1996). In Cornflakes, I ate a bowl of the ghastly cardboard cereal each night, in front of a live theatrical audience, in a vain attempt to train myself to beome “unselfconscious”. I hoped that by repeating such an ordinary activity, in such an un-ordinary setting, I could make the activity ordinary once again.

This experiement was perhaps the first of my large and interesting failures. Night after night, the audience prayed that something would happen. Night after night I disappointed them, merely returning to my seat, no punchline, no resolution, no catharsis.

I’m sorry about that, but it’s what I do.

Maybe this aesthetic strategy of mine is a reaction against that very “TV dramaland” to which Barbara refers in her text message. You know how disappointing those TV shows become once that tension is released? I’m thinking Bill Murray and Andie McDowell in Groundhog Day, Mulder and Scully in X-Files, heck, even Big Bird and the Snuffleupagus (although in their case it wasn’t strictly romance, or was it?). Who wants resolution when it comes out cheesey anyways?

[Note: re Mulder and Scully, the following comes from the wikipedia entry on the X-Files, regarding the feature film produced in 1998:

The film also marked the first, and passionately talked about near kiss between Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. It was the kiss many fans had been waiting for since the beginning of the series in ’93, but others felt that the sexual tension between the two main characters was better left unfulfilled.

There you go: “better left unfulfilled”!]

Instead of fulfillment, what I offer is a disappointingly casual blurring out of the end of the project into the regular run of my everyday life. What I offer is the continuation of more-or-less-the-same, with slight incremental changes over a long period of time. What I offer is the spectacle of myself growing older, imperceptibly slowly.

Sorry about that.

However, you know, it’s not all up to me. I’m only one blog writer of a potential hundred and twenty one. There’s a whole cast of characters in these here pages, dear reader. Feel free to write your own Fan Fiction, your own “slash”, yeah, go to town on it! You write it, I’ll publish it! (general disclaimers apply regarding defamatory material yadayada etc).

Or better still, make yer own blog and I’ll link to it.