Till death do us part

It often happens in artistic couples that one ends up devouring the other, and that out of devotion, rivalry, jealousy, envy, resentment, or rage, what had begun as an idyllic and joyful creative relationship of mutual attraction and support ends up spiraling into discreet acts of cruelty. There are exceptions, of course. The painter Sheila Girling and the sculptor Anthony Caro were married for 63 years. But at the end of her life, she confessed: “I had to give all my creativity to Tony… I thought one of us had to get there, so it had better be Tony.” Something similar happened to Lee Krasner, intellectually far more advanced than Jackson Pollock when they met, but who considered him a natural genius and, like a good wife, prioritized his career over her own. Susan Sontag worked tirelessly on her husband Philip Rieff's book, Freud: The Mind of a Moralist (his biographer Benjamin Moser maintains that she wrote most of it); Decades later, photographer Annie Leibovitz, the lover who accompanied her until her death, lamented: “I felt like a person who is taking care of a great monument.”

You don't have to be an artist or be married to another artist to know that dancing as a couple is a challenge within reach of very few: you have to leave space for the other person to move their feet, match their steps, activate your mirror neurons, and give up your individuality to think as a community, so that what until a moment ago were two bodies can move as one. It's difficult to argue while dancing, and impossible to dance while angry. That's how I imagine them, gliding for hours on end across the dance floor, those partnerships of artists who have not only intertwined their lives but also the creation of their works. And who, as part of their romance, have themselves become works of art. I think of Gilbert & George, octogenarians and still provocative, strolling day and night through the streets of London in their impeccable Sunday best, offering themselves to the world as living sculptures and leaving their vision of the world in their Pictures , monumental photographs of themselves with which they compose striking, comical, and tragic portraits of our times. Today they have their own museum (and it's free in London), are considered nothing less than a national treasure in England, and have created a school of thought.

It often happens that couples of artists end up collapsing in discreet acts of cruelty.

To that same lineage of a single artist made up of two people belongs Eva & Adele, a German duo who have united art, life, and love in an astonishingly disconcerting way. They claim to have arrived from the future in a time machine, are legally women (they waited to marry until Eva managed to have her sex change recognized), and appear wherever there is a major opening, from the Venice Biennale or Documenta to the Arco fair, with their phallic shaved heads, made up like parrots, and dressed identically, in a manner that is outlandish to us. Eva has just died ("she returned to the future"), but she will remain part of a traveling work of art with which Adele will awaken her memory.