Women, Pacifism, and“uniting the impossible” This is the first little bit I’ve read that speaks to me, warms me, helps me understand my own wildly uncomfortable heart as a neutralist.
My choice is a result of both identity and life experiences. Probably more the latter. But your experiences tend to mold your ideas about what identity schemas mean. So it actually doesn’t really make sense to untangle the tangledness of identity/experience. Your identity also shapes your experiences… how you approach situations, how others treat you, how you interpret your interactions.
Anyway, Bjork’s always been around but she’s really touched me these days! Obviously there is much buzz with the MOMA show, her new album, and NY tour dates. However she came closer to me this time, she did.
It doesn’t matter to me right now to address how she’s taken in the art world … I’m just talking about her.
Excerpt below from her Jan 2015 Pitchfork interview with Jessica Hopper-- “The Invisible Woman: A Conversation with Bjork”
I’ve never done an album like this. With Biophilia, I was being like Kofi Annan—I had to be the pacifist to try to unite the impossible. Maybe that was a strange, personal job between me and myself, to show how overreaching I was being as a woman. The only way I could express that was by comparing it to the universe. If you can make nature and technology friends, then you can make everyone friends; you can make everyone intact. That’s what women do a lot—they’re the glue between a lot of things. Not only artists, but whatever job they do: in the office, or homemakers. Biophilia was like my own personal slapstick joke, showing I had to reach so long—between solar systems—to connect everything. It’s like the end scene in Mary Poppins, when she’s made everyone friends, and the father realizes that kids are more important than money—and [then] she has to leave. [chokes up] It’s a strange moment. Women are the glue. It’s invisible, what women do. It’s not rewarded as much.