Gothamist's favorite nap enthusiast Tilda Swinton has been sleeping on-and-off at the Museum Of Modern Art as part of her art installation piece "The Maybe" since last month. But one big question has hovered over each of these sleep-ins: what does she do if she has to go to the bathroom? Swinton talked about it at Ebertfest, joking that she has a “biological advantage” performing the piece thanks to her large bladder.
In an interview with the London Observer in 1995, when she first performed the piece at London’s Serpentine Gallery, she said, “I am lucky. I have a very strong and convenient bladder." So far it hasn't been a problem—in the three unannounced appearances she made at MoMA so far, she hasn't been spotted leaving her box.
Swinton called the piece a “gesture of mourning” for friends she lost to AIDS, among them director Derek Jarman; she also recently lost her mother, which may explain why she brought the piece back now after a long hiatus (it was performed in the '90s in London and Rome). Swinton has been in talks to bring the piece to the MoMA for over seven years.
According to Slate, Swinton "discussed how it brought together the live human presence of theater with the close audience scrutiny afforded by cinema." At another point, Swinton said that if she had to list her profession on a passport, she would prefer “artist’s model” and “clown.”
If you want to see more of that side of Swinton, check out the amazing fashion spread she did with W Magazine (she's on the cover this month). Here's one excerpt from their interview with her:
“Being beautiful was never really something I associated with people I knew—certainly not girls. Boys, maybe. Horses, yes, and certainly my great-grandmother Elsie Swinton, whose imperial grandeur was like a watermark.” A drawing of her great-grandmother Elsie, by John Singer Sargent, once hung in Tilda’s family sitting room, just above the television. “I saw her looking out of the corner of her eye, straight at me, during my teenage years—a knowing, engaging and infinitely amused attitude,” Swinton recalls. “She was dark and luscious, unlike the rest of us, who are sandy and pale. Not looking like her felt, somehow, like being born on the wrong side of the beauty tracks.”