I am not a person that reads obituaries
but sometimes I came out in the New York Times especially
with some headlines that I found very funny like
"Master of Light Bulbs" or
you know, "Once Known as a Rival to Shirley Temple"
or "The Pioneer in Frozen Juice."
And I start to collect and get all the
obituaries possible and then select from them the headlines that I found most
provocative or intriguing or funny or banal.
It's a little bit like a mausoleum.
Normally when you...you see something commemorating the dead,
it's a listing thing, you know?
You have the list of the names.
In this case you don't have the list of the names.
You have these floating sentences of the memory of somebody.
That it doesn't matter who was, but it matters what they did.
I think it's a very existential piece in a way.
It's like we are all language, in a way
we are all not just like an organism
that eats...from the very beginning
we are communicating with people...we are
the way we behave and how we interact, we are language.
For me what is important is not
so much what you see in the show
but what you see after,
how your perception of reality is changed.
Then next time they open the newspaper
they are going to look for the obituary
to see if the sentence is funny or is intriguing or is original
and then the people who is connected with this work
they will be collecting these obituaries in their head
you know, and maybe I'll do the same
And then my obituary is going to be
"The Most Important Collector of Obituaries in the World"