The Kajillionaire director on the allure of dripping honey, Jane Campion and Spike Lee, sex, lies and videotape, and her brother’s woodwork
I can’t cite the artist, but my parents took me to see this performance in Berkeley,
California, where I grew up. It was rare that we saw art – my parents were writers, and we didn’t spend a lot of time in museums. It was a bag hanging from the ceiling, it must have been made out of resin, filled with what turned out to be honey. Picture a cow’s udder as big as your arms can stretch. And very slowly, it thinned at the bottom with the weight of the honey and then broke and the honey slowly came pouring out. It’s not abstract because it’s an actual bag of honey – but it was certainly abstract in that a lot of what I was feeling I couldn’t put into words, though it was strong and specific nonetheless. It was a kind of longing. It’s luxurious and you wanna be part of it or touch it; it reminds of you of something that makes you wanna cry. That you could communicate that way rather than intellectually, like my parents were so good at doing, was very radical to me.