"Swinton recently wrote and coproduced a documentary about Jarman, whose death from AIDS in 1994 left a void in her life. She coped by becoming an artist herself. Fascinated by the idea of “scrutinizing an unwatched face,” she created a performance piece, The Maybe, in which she lay, eyes closed, in a glass box in the Serpentine Gallery in London (and later in Rome) for eight hours a day for one week in 1995. By her count, nearly 22,000 people—8,000 of them children—came to see it in London. “Interestingly, the girls totally accepted it. It was very familiar, that thing of waiting, of being watched,” she says. But the boys, she adds, “just wanted to wake me up!" ▼
Tilda Swinton in
W Magazine
