Performance, 40 minutes.
In 1912 a memorial, sculpted by Jacob Epstein, was erected on the site
of Wilde’s grave in Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris. Soon after,
a visitor to the tomb outraged by what he considered to be the continuance
of Wilde’s perversity, took a hammer to the sculpture and obliterated
the penis on the underside of the hovering sphinx. In the summer of 2000
we traveled to perform a ceremony entitled, reMEMBERING WILDE. I commissioned
Rebecca Scheer to produce a sterling silver prosthetic, which was attached
to Wilde’s shattered crotch. Text fragments are excerpted from Wilde’s
letter to Lord Alfred Douglas written from Reading Prison and dated January-March,
1897. The letter has come to be known as De Profundis. Creative Material
Group toured the United Kingdom in the summer of 2002 with a 40 minute
video-based production of this performance that includes an electronic
score by Jeffrey Stolet and a libretto by John
Schmor, performed live by
Matthew Woodburn.
