Cemetery Stories
Jerry Saltz @JerrySaltz
Asks "have you ever visited a grave of someone you admired or were curious about?" Who? And where?
My comment /
I Have gone 3 times to visit the grave of Igor Stravinsky, in Cemetery Island Venice, to thank him for freeing me from the slavery of originality when he said in a 2 part PBS documentary on George Balanchine, when he comes out of a room slightly inebriated and say to the director "you know why my music sounds like Mozart? Because I steal from Mozart and that's ok because I love Mozart!"
Another two cemetery stories that center around the famous Père-Lachaise,where many famous artist, writers etc are buried / so back in the late 1980's I went to Père-Lachaise and walking around I stumble upon this strange sight / graffiti written on the graves with I love you Jim Morrison of the Doors who to my surprise was buried there / and it was really something to behold, it was wild so I took a lot of photos since I was into a Contemporary Hieroglyphics series or Contemporary Cave Drawings drawings at the time / and every once in a while the Paris nettoyer brigade (graffiti cleaning brigade, cleaned graffiti usually with sandblasting) would clean up the graffiti at Père-Lachaise
My other Père-Lachaise story was once upon a there was a French Gallerist in Mad-Hattan island, the land of the promised land of dreams who had a Soho Gallery and who to my surprise was interested in my Social Sculpture of having a funeral procession with a coffin full of my painting, that I paint in a squat with a bunch of mad Russian and Polish and German and one american artist, me, in Paris in 1991, when the Soviet Union devolved with a coup that brought Yetlsin and Putin to power and like Humpty Dumpty the Soviet Union came tumbling down and our Squat became a defacto place where Russian expats living in Paris came and the media came too and for a little while our squat was a circus /but I digress / so my proposal to the French Gallerist was to bury my art in Père-Lachaise and when I left my body behind the paintings would come out and there would be a New Orleans Mardi gras funeral celebration / and the art would be sold at auction and money given to starving artist around the world to buy art materials / and so I'm telling this idea to the SoHo based French Gallerist and he likes the idea and makes a call to his aunt whohe hadn't talk to in 20 years to and who has a plot at Père-Lachaise to see if he could get it / but it was already taken
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Père_Lachaise_Cemetery