{"id":121856,"date":"2019-10-19T18:04:29","date_gmt":"2019-10-19T16:04:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/?page_id=104915"},"modified":"2024-03-15T17:23:29","modified_gmt":"2024-03-15T16:23:29","slug":"revelation-theater","status":"publish","type":"cfa_live","link":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/cfa_live\/revelation-theater\/","title":{"rendered":"Revelation Theater"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Antoine Levi<\/a>, Paris<\/strong>
Srijon Chowdhury<\/a>
20 September – 19 October 2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Hiding<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To attain intimacy with death: could such a thing be possible? To live closely with the most strange of all strangers\u2026 \u2013Yet: not so that one can ever-draw-near to death and come to gain knowledge of what necessarily outstrips the nature of mortality; but instead, to become intimate in order to preserve death as the question that it is, to know death as always at a distance away<\/em>, that is, in its strange inaccessibility\u2014in the way it saturates every moment, imperceptibly\u2014so inaccessible that the mere word, \u201cdeath,\u201d suffices entirely. To attain an intimacy with death: to enter into an intense proximity with the stranger, yet, because one is always without right or warrant, one is unable to say, \u201cI know death.\u201d Could such intimacy be possible? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the skill of a poet, Srijon Chowdhury has buried this question within his 2018 Revelation Theater<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chowdhury\u2019s method for producing Revelation Theater<\/em> gives clear priority to patience. His attention to detail, the amount of imagery (both subtle and spectacular) that he is able to fit within each frame, and the density of information that he manages to bring together all bear witness to this fact. Importantly, the line of questioning that his work makes possible, i.e., the question of an intimacy with death, must be approached with the same diligent patience. In Revelation Theater<\/em>, the question of intimacy with death\u2014just like all the detail, imagery, and information in the work\u2014presents itself in the form of an ambiguity. Exposing at once, the polarities: curiosity and unease; hope and dread; etc. What is more, for Chowdhury, the points of ambiguity do not represent a moment of contrast. That is, his is not a battle of hope or <\/em>dread, curiosity or <\/em>unease. Rather, the phenomenon that he captures is the overriding power of the indistinguishable. The hope is located in the image of dread, the dread, within hope. Dead figures, hands offering gestures of significance, utopic visions of life, and glimmers, sparkles of light shrouded in the darkness they presuppose. Does not a room full of darkness already represent the content of the room, now well lit? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is here, in the face of indistinguishability, where the question of the possibility of attaining an intimacy with death initially crops up in Chowdhury\u2019s work. To know death as nothing other than what, in the mundane rehearsal of one\u2019s daily habits, animates the necessary backdrop of one\u2019s life\u2026of one\u2019s capacity for living in general. Becoming-intimate with that which is eternally here but never present\u2014death obscures life, rendering it simultaneously wide-open and cordoned off. Chowdhury\u2019s Revelation Theater<\/em> focuses acutely on the impossibility of finding satisfaction in life without also paying heed to the weight of sorrow it carries on its back. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Giorgio Agamben once observed, \u201clight is only the coming to itself of the dark.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Glory<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The last words of the great mystic, Catherine of Siena, are as distinct as they are astonishing. She entered into God\u2019s glory with a final cry,  \u201cBlood! Blood!\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the first painting that presents itself, the spirits dance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

With a complete oversaturation of the fauvist palette, Chowdhury\u2019s dancers have been driven to a point of excess. Yet, somehow the rhythm of the movement is retained: Chowdhury transforms Matisse\u2019s dancing nudes, along with their sensuous, animal-like hedonism, into an image of the perversity of spiritual ecstasy. We are told in Genesis 3:17: \u201cAnd the eyes of both were opened, and they knew they were naked.\u201d Fallen from grace, Adam and Eve clothed themselves. Their newfound ability to perceive each other\u2019s body as a naked object is a testament to their sin. Covering oneself, getting dressed, is an act that paradoxically reveals precisely what it covers over: the potentiality to be naked, to exist in a state of undisturbed grace. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Chowdhury, one must be ever ready to admit that spiritual existence is something quite different from what it is typically taken to be. As Simone Weil, a mystic closer to our own time, put it, \u201cevery being cries out silently to be read differently.\u201d Chowdhury insists on reading-differently the supposed purity found in spiritual being. His dancers remain covered in the fire and the blood\u2014maniacally struggling to revel in their bare exposure\u2014lest they obtain the grace that is, for them, inaccessible. Their nudity is covered over, not by the well-defined vines, flowers, and fruit, but by their very being. The spirit lives in a state of unclothed grace, but dwells apart from the reality, the body, in which grace obtains. Their nudity has been stripped by the fire, and been covered by the blood, of red; their flesh has fallen away. For them, nudity is not an optional condition. It simply is<\/em>: being. But the nudity of the spirit is wholly unlike the nudity of body. Blood! Blood! Or again, as Weil wrote, \u201cI should not love my suffering because it is useful. I should love it because it is<\/em>.\u201d Not marked by lightness, freedom, or flight, the spirit\u2019s nudity is a laceration, a point of perverse agony wherein redemption and damnation cannot be held apart. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2026To read the spirit as it is certainly something different, possibly something utterly different, from what we read it to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Forfeiture<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But then again, reading is only one of a hundred ways of gaining access to something. Reading, no doubt, is a mode of access to the surface of something (e.g., a text, an image, an activity, etc.). But what is it to have a sense of the meaning of a work of art, a painting? Perhaps it involves not just the ability to read\u2014or even the power to interpret or criticize the work\u2014but also the capacity to lose touch with one\u2019s skill of reading. In other words, perhaps gaining a sense of Chowdhury\u2019s work involves the ability to forget, delivering one\u2019s ability to make judgments (e.g., about this <\/em>or that<\/em>, or about whether such and such is the case) to the unconscious. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As in a dream, a green woman rides a green horse. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Walter Benjamin saw well the connection between forgetfulness and the unconscious. \u201cThe unconscious\u2014which has the power to turn impressions and images, however fleeting, into extracts we often recognize in dreams.\u201d It is thus no surprise that understanding the meaning of a work of art often involves submitting to a waking dream about an image, or figure, or the density of color, even before one comes to know the work at all. Engulfing the viewer, Revelation Theater<\/em> is Chowdhury\u2019s invitation to disremember, at least for a moment, how to read, and to instead struggle to make sense of the fragments of that which can never be caught but only be forgotten. \u2026And then there is an image of the naked figure in repose, Narcissus by the stream. <\/em>Caught in reverie, the figure finds their reflection, the immediate content that is being read, to be like a mask, like something unfamiliar. The movement of losing oneself in the reflection of oneself, of consigning one\u2019s ability to read to one\u2019s unconscious\u2014which is it: a taking-leave-from the animal kingdom, or a trying-to-gain-access? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

An interesting aspect of forgetfulness is the way it renders impossible to discern between moments of opposition. Thoughts align differently, and compose themselves in otherwise unfamiliar ways. The dying Messiah and the Tyrant. The two have, in the course of history, too often confused themselves with one another. Like Chowdhury\u2019s image of hope: the suicide gun, enveloping the bouquet veiled in darkness, the breaking of light always already presumed. To think hope as death, as Walter Benjamin did, on the night he took his life at the closed border of Spain, fleeing occupied France. \u201cIn a situation presenting no way out, I have no other choice but to make an end of it.\u201d Tarrying with death\u2014just one night before the Spanish border was reopened\u2014he found the safe harbor that had evaded him on earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Revelation Theater<\/em> taking-leave and entering-in are one and the same. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","event_label":[2389],"class_list":["post-121856","cfa_live","type-cfa_live","status-publish","hentry","event_label-past"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cfa_live\/121856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cfa_live"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/cfa_live"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"event_label","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/event_label?post=121856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}