Isn’t This Also Art

The artist tied her thick, black, luxurious, tangled, majestic hair to the luxurious, black, thick hair of her lover her collaborator and they sat back to back, butt to butt, shoulder blade to shoulder blade, tightly tied together by their tangled hair and called it art and sat there and sat there and sat there and sat there this is art, they announced and we came and we watched and we watched, and we asked is this art? and by our presence as we watched and as we watched, we answered, yes this is art for they were naked, for they were exposed I do not remember whether they were clothed but they were naked they were exposed and we watched them in their nakedness exposing themselves to our eyes our eyes boring into their still, stoic, tense, passive, vibrant bodies their nakedness becoming a part of our unwanted nakedness our bodies now becoming a part of their performance their nakedness, their art changing our bodies their nakedness becoming our nakedness as we watched as they sat sitting for hours without movement like two Hindu gurus who had not eaten for two centuries we could see them breathe we could feel ourselves breathe sometimes an eyelid blinked while we shifted our weight and shuffled our feet their two bodies were as one two Siamese twins reconnected joined at their hair their bodies, their beings flowing into each other two bodies becoming as one— we saw this together you and I, together even though you were dead your ashes scattered we experienced this together we—the living and the dead— we are still joined— Isn’t this also art? Peter Goodwin