Enthusiasm: Art Cake :: New York
Past exhibition
"the desire
before the desire,
the lick of beginning to know you don't know."
- Anne Carson, translator's note, Bakkhai
Enthusiasm
In the age of everything now, a painting can be anything to anyone.
I can know of any painting that was ever photo-documented, from extant prehistoric smudges to paintings being made today and diffused on social media platforms. The heights of painting remain undisputed. It is the depths that have come into the light. And as I stare into an abyss of awareness, the heavy black cloak of this chaos-omniscience immobilizes me.
I want everything in the picture.
I want the steady-handed lead drawing, the quiet earthquake recorded in a fragile gold line, I want the mimetic satisfaction of the underpainting, the ochre and the earth underpainting, I want the ab-ex stroke, I want the brown of great painting, I want the singing primaries of great painting, and the modern criard color, the mud of exhausted colour, I want the intellectual ecstasy of the subtle shift, the holy and pious ecstasy of simple geometric operations, I want the glop of blood, excrement, ejaculate, I want the transcendent singe of the unnamed, of the abstract, and the mist over gray seas, the white haze that unites sea and sky. I want the dark. I want the light. Painting, in a word. The whole catastrophe.
How could I overcome the weight of all painting being made now, and ever?
I found a zip in the last fragment of the first Homeric Hymn to twice-born Dionysus:
Hail, child of fair-faced Semele! He who forgets you can in no wise order sweet song.
(Anonymous. The Homeric Hymns and Homerica with an English Translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-White. Homeric Hymns. Cambridge, MA.,Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1914.)
..or,
58 Hail and take pleasure [khaire], [O Dionysus,] child of Semele with the beautiful looks. There is no way 59 I could have my mind disconnect from you as I put together the beautiful cosmic order [kosmeîn] of my song.
(Anonymous. The Homeric Hymns translated by Gregory Nagy for CHS Harvard University. 2019. https://chs.harvard.edu/primary-source/homeric-hymn-to-dionysus-sb/)
Enthusiasm is a death and a birth for me, an elegy cum invocation.
I let it fill me like a vessel. Let the picture be a vessel I fill, and time empties, and you fill.