tohu ::: room for a container of light

Opening Thurs 11 July 2024 / Extended at Warehouse Port B: Oct 18-Nov 15 2024

MOMus Experimental Center for the Arts Thessaloniki, Greece

installation materials ::: hand woven basket, light source, dark room, walls, silence

“The darkness is that formless, immaterial and bodiless state which embraces the knowledge of the prototypes of all created things.”                                                                  -St Maximus the Confessor (from the Philokalia)

Tohu Va-Vohu [תהו ובהו] is a two-word hendiadys* from the second verse of Genesis in the Hebrew bible. A phrase of mystery and open interpretation, the word pair appears nowhere else in the scriptures, and it is the only instance of the word ‘vohu’. The translation has been widely accepted as ‘formless and empty’, though that by no means captures its true and elusive meaning. It is as if the state of ‘uncreation’ is so distant from human understanding that special words had to be invented as signifiers. 

We living beings cannot exist in a void, but only via relationship. We must relate with everything in our world in order to navigate and survive. Abstract concepts in the mind may help our intellectual understanding but they can never take the place of practice in the physical world. We can’t exist by merely thinking about things, but only by being with them. ‘To be with’ instead of ‘to think about’, is a strange way for us to relate at first. It is more vulnerable and uncertain because all manipulation, defenses, or transactional games are removed…we simply face the other raw with no agenda,  just as we are. Can any of us really do this anymore? Can we allow ourselves to begin from the beginning each time?

Emmanuel Levinas encouraged beholding the radical otherness (alterity) of another’s face as the basis for an ethics that can carry the potential of less violence**.  Here, we find what Simone Weil described as an active receptivity, in which our gift to the other is pure attention***. But this requires physical presence. You can’t be with a face on a screen, you can only react to it, think about it, judge its authenticity, or become enthralled with its superficial appearance. Dehumanizing and physically removing our presence also leads us to analyze more, to fall into the therapeutic mode****, to become clever with the laws of power, to project our story onto someone, instead of becoming open and surrendered to the inevitability of raw presence. That takes a different sort of courage because if we can’t yet be truly present to ourselves how can we expect to do so with the other?

Of course, art making is not here to answer these questions but only to deepen them. In asking this question, I find myself again as both an observer and a participant. I find that an emptied space of silence, only filled with light and shadows, provides me with more sustained presence than my immediate desires to express today’s feelings or analyze a mental idea. I find myself sitting in my living room weaving a basket from wicker for a reason I do not understand. I simply know I must weave though I’ve never done it before and may never do it again. I am now making a container that is empty inside, tracing along its perimeter with the spontaneous will of my fingers and wrists. The container will hold nothing but light, a light that will have to contend with the wicker and be seen through it in a series of vertical and horizontal shadows cast on the wall behind.  A container of stratified light from a woven basket sitting in a room filled with only sound and shadows. Let’s keep it here, in this room, and see what happens.

-Preston Swirnoff, June 2024

* from the Greek ἓν διὰ δυοῖν: ‘one through two’. a figure of speech that joins two words by a conjunction for emphasis, e.g. in Macbeth ‘sound and fury’ instead of ‘furious sound’

** Totality and Infinity (1961) and Otherwise than Being (1998) by Emmanuel Levinas

*** Attente de Dieu (1951) by Simone Weil

****see The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966) by Philip Rieff

This work is made possible by a grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.

in the spirit of physical presence required for this work no cell phones, cameras, or recording devices are allowed inside the exhibition room. thank you for your cooperation.