Jullan Karl Eugenio

GEARTAP - Y04
Mutual Core: Life Imitates Art

If there is one thing that one can intellectually acquire from Björk’s music video entitled
“Mutual Core”, it would be that life truly does imitate art. Oscar Wilde, a famous playwright
from London in the 1890s, coined the idea that art influences how we go about life so much
more than our lives influencing the art that we create. Anyone who takes the time to absorb
Björk’s “Mutual Core” will understand that even two things that seem so far apart can feel so
similar. The two similar things in this music video are between Earth’s geological systems and
human relationships.

Life imitates art this way because of the creative way the Earth is portrayed in the
performance. Eruptions and earthquakes, the building of continents, the formation of mountain
ranges and oceanic trenches– it is all a representation of the drifting away and coming together,
the falling into and falling out of, and the stability or struggle of two people in love. Why do
these two seemingly dissimilar things happen to be able to explain our human condition so well?
This is the essence as to why pieces like this from artists like Björk matter a lot; we complex
humans need a simple way to understand how things work all around us.

When Björk sang: “I shuffle around the tectonic plates in my chest, you know I gave it
all, try to match our continents, to change seasonal shift, to form a mutual core,” she really meant
that all healthy personal relationships require a level of compromise, a push and pull, a give and
take– reciprocity. The term “mutual core” does not exist on its own in the world of science yet its
meaning is implied; a combination of two separate cores within the Earth, two powerful forces
that aim to combine together with extreme pressure and heat in the center of the planet that
makes everything that we see on Earth exist.

What makes this art piece so beautiful is that it continues to teach people how things in
life really work in the way that it is not always a happy thing living on Earth; there are
earthquakes, subduction zones, and great catastrophes. This is similar to the idea that it is not
always a happy thing being in a relationship either; there are fights, miscommunications, and
breakups. There would be no ‘happy’ in a relationship if there was no ‘sad’ to be experienced,
and there would probably be no continents for us to live on the tectonics stayed in the same
place.

Björk’s “Mutual Core” is a musical and visual masterpiece that shows how art influences
life through the things in our environment that can teach us about ourselves. Songs like these
show us that there are just some things that we can never control such as when an earthquake
happens or when we start experiencing unfavorable circumstances in life. However what is
important is our understanding that this is all just a part of life that we need to accept and that the
only things we can control is our perspective of life and art which are ultimately the things that
determine who we are as people.