Gertrude Stein’s memorial specifically intrigued me in the cemetery because of the stones on her grave, impersonating the translation of ‘Stein’, stone. I attempted to reflect her unusual writing style, similar to the Cubistic and Post-impressionist paintings she used to collect. Through her multicultural background she tries to capture the eternity of mind and thought and reflect words as an artwork in itself.
Her experimental yet elementary writing that until her ‘Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas’ had no commercial success. Regardless of being the subject of her writing, Alice Toklas was furthermore her life-partner and a center part of her being. Her monument mirrored her simplicity and refusion of commercialization and commercial success. I believe it also relates to her persona as contemporary artists pay their respects to her life get in touch with each other at the cemetery and therefore create an ‘artists’ society themselves, similar to the one that was a central part of her life.
When it came to representing her life in the stop-motion book we attempted to create a map in, I thought of different motives may it be her editing books (as she worked as a publisher) or questions of the infinity of mind and liberation in minimalistic pieces of writing etc.
Our main idea was to represent the cemetery as a place that mirrors the individuals that lay there rather than as a collection of celebrities. We tried to mirror the eternity of mind and character in a book that the audience gets an idea off as they read. We wanted to convey a message of interpretation, just such as people reinterpret legacies of other people, rethink their wishes and desires. Yet how Oscar Wilde (one of the four people selected) said, in his book ‘the picture of Dorian Gray’ : ‘People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity’. I think of it as truly a juxtaposition to bury an ‘outcast’ of how Oscar Wilde thought of himself into a cemetery that is shaped by celebrity culture as much as the Pére Lachaise.
When we went to the Pére Lachaise we were overwhelmed by its beauty, by its richness of nature and peace. Yet when we went at a different time, on the weekend we experienced its commercial aspect as a burden to appreciate it. We thought weather the people buried would agree with their remains being presented as a tourist attraction in Paris. Writers and poets, yet generally humans are complex beings. It is difficult to imagine them being represented by one architectural element, one focus, one adjective to describe them.
We wanted to display a snippet of their personalities, of their lives. Yet, the pages of our book turn forever. They are infinite. This shows that their characters, minds and souls are infinite. That we only know parts of them and that there are many parts of them which we didnt know and maybe even they didnt either. A human is too complex to be visualized, yet the human race seems to have an awful obsession with doing so, which is what we wanted to discuss, what we felt was of immense importance when visualizing a map. We created a mental map, a map of mind and thought.
Organized yet chaotic
Colorful and intense
Not the closest Patriotic
Am I trying to make sense
Of the eternity of mind
As Picasso recorded
Yet the audience is blind
And infinity remains unrecorded
I wonder how they see me
What they make of my remain
How they solved the mystery
If my poetry remains in their veins
Was I their teacher?
Or were they mine?
Yet I felt as if i reached her
Remember me, Gertrude Stein
