But if there’s one artist who best expresses the paradoxical power of love, its simultaneous nature as both unshakable bond and unstoppable rupture, it is Sharon Hayes. For the New York-based artist, who was the subject of an excellent mid-career retrospective at the city’s Whitney Museum of American Art in 2012, love is the material that fuels politics and urban life, and love offers a chance not only to bind together individuals but the whole world.
Hayes’s art often takes the form of speeches, and in I March in the Parade of Liberty But As Long As I Love You I’m Not Free, she took to the streets of her city with a bullhorn, reciting a text that inserted gay liberation slogans, newspaper reportage and Oscar Wilde’s writings into an aching, desperately romantic plea for a lost lover. Love is private and public at once, Hayes insists: she can’t live without you; we can’t live without each other.
Errata: linha 2 "Pois a artista novaiorquina".