I'LL BE YOUR MIRROR

Love songs and poems are, by definition, monologues. They speak-

whether in the language of John Keats, Pablo Neruda or The Velvet

Underground-to an enunciated other who is present in name only. We read

loneliness into them, the absence of the beloved; the lyric mode’s creative

engine being, as it were, the agonizingly dramatic fact that a certain

someone is not around. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, the

Valentine’s Day industry says. But what about the things we say to each

other when we are face to face?

Valerio Rocco Orlando, a young Italian artist fascinated by the multiple

human correspondences contained in the 8 million-strong mash note that is

New York, wants to know. Taking the most basic but complex of premises,

Orlando posted flyers around Brooklyn asking for “couples and lovers” to

collaborate with him in his new video project. Along with his website and

email address, Orlando included a quote by the French philosopher Jean-Luc

Nancy. “There is no being without being-with,” it read unromantically, “and

there is no existence without co-existence.”

French philosophy, despite much evidence to the contrary, is still, quite

obviously, in. I say this because Orlando received many answers to his

humble postings. From these, the artist chose responses he felt would best

contribute to the project. Then he split the responding couples up and posed

a set of questions to the individual “lovers” whose implications grow in

importance as they ripple out from the basic unit that is the monogamy to

which our species holds fast:

Are you in love? When in love, can you preserve your identity? What is the

relationship between the identity of a couple and the community? How can

we evolve the community’s awareness through love?

The answers to these and other questions as related by New Yorkers from all

walks of life make up the meat and sinew of Orlando’s deceptively simple

video mockumentary Lover’s Discourse. We get Ivy, Dustin, Natalie,

Jonathan, and Sarah-Jane (their names, in Dragnet parlance, have been

changed to protect the innocent) relaying what—to take a page from

Raymond Carver—one might term the issues surrounding what we talk

about when we talk about love. These tales are, as one might expect, as

varied and engaging as there are apartment stories in New York.

“Letting love in is really how you learn to love,” a pretty brunette identified

as Sarah-Jane declares in one particularly lucid passage of video. Expanding

on that piece of wisdom is where Orlando and his project strike ontological

ground. “Meaning is itself the sharing of Being,” sage Nancy philosophizes

elsewhere. Put in Brooklynese, this means essentially that love consists of

more than an American Apparel-style posing or a throwaway emotion. It is,

instead, the motor that guarantees our expanding connections—person to

person, couple to couple, community to community, and everywhere in

between.

“Love is not a feeling,” Ludwig Wittgenstein once said. By which he meant

simply that it is something much harder to figure, an activity akin to work.

Like art, love is labor. A labor of love.

Christian Viveros-Fauné

Brooklyn, 2010

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