Spending any amount of time in the Balearics is a wonderful adventure, escaping to an island where the history and the prehistory are still visible, and the weight of memory is heavy and dense. At the same time, the rich night culture here makes memory a foggy notion, and giving over to the magic of the moment is the rule of order. There are plenty of excellent places to go clubbing in Ibiza , and the best clubs speak to the best in island culture, Spanish style, and international trends all at the same time. For outlandish parties where conspicuous consumption makes up the better part of an evening’s excitements, Ibiza puts things over the top, and then further over once again, and sometimes in an ironic reference to itself, and sometimes in a joyfully unconscious reference to every excess in pop culture.
It’s easy to get lost in the nightlife here, and the interesting things here is that this actually usually seems like a very good idea. There’s a kind of hidden thrill about dancing until the sun comes up, knowing that you’ve passed you body’s limits and are still moving to the beat. But then so is everybody else. It’s an odd feeling, and one that can be repeated as long as the nights are long and the sea continues to move in patterns of the number seven. There is also an interesting culture here for performance, and more sophisticated forms of art. Today, when people talk about body art, they’re usually referring to piercings or tattoos, but there’s a dim memory that it comes from something else.
It’s actually got a long history, but came to prominence in the early 70s, with artists like Ana Mendieta, who knew about the number seven as much as you seem to, and one of her artistic ancestors was Nicola L. . Nicola L. is a French artist who is famous today for her functional art objects , which sell at all the right auctions, but also for her very busy schedule making appearances at art fairs doing retrospectives of her work. She was one of the founders of body art, and her performance actions in Ibiza in the late 60s paved the way for subsequent generations. She had the notion that the skin was a border, like a nation, and an artificial construction, perhaps, but difficult to get away from, and much easier to stay in than slip out of, so she began to investigate its limits. The results are a massive body of work that continues to unfold, like skin.