NYAB Event - “Three Artists” Exhibition

“Three Artists” Exhibition

Beginnings –

This event has ended.

The Sirens: it seems they did indeed sing, but in an unfulfilling way, one that only gave a sign of where the real sources and real happiness of song opened. Still, by means of their imperfect songs that were only a song still to come, they did lead the sailor toward that space where singing might truly begin. They did not deceive him, in fact: they actually led him to his goal. But what happened once the place was reached? What was this place? One where there was nothing left but to disappear, because music, in this region of source and origin, had itself disappeared more completely than in any other place in the world: sea where, ears blocked, the living sank, and where the Sirens, as proof of their good will, had also, one day, to disappear.

[…]

They use much art to communicate their actual impressions to us, and they are artists in that they find an equivalent—of form, image, story, or words—to make us participate in a vision close to their own. Things are unfortunately not so simple. All the ambiguity stems from the ambiguity of time, which enters into play here, and which allows us to say and feel that the fascinating image of the experience is, at a certain moment, present, while this presence does not belong to any present, and even destroys the present to which it seems to introduce itself. It is true, Ulysses actually sailed and, one day, on a certain date, he encountered the enigmatic song. He can thus say: now, this is happening now. But what has happened now? The presence of a song only still to come. And what has he touched in the present? Not the event of the encounter become present, but the opening of this infinite movement that is the encounter itself, an encounter that is always apart from the place and the moment in which it is spoken, for it is this very apartness, this imaginary distance, in which absence is realized and only at the end of which the event begins to take place, a point where the real truth of the encounter occurs, from which, in any case, the language that utters it wants to take birth.

Always still to come, always already past, always already present in a beginning so abrupt that it cuts off your breath, and still unfurling as the return and the eternal new beginning—”Ah,” said Goethe, “in times lived before, you were my sister or my wife”—such is the event for which the narrative is the approach. This event turns the concordances of time upside down, but still asserts time, a particular way for time to be accomplished, time unique to the narrative that is introduced into the lived life of the narrative in a way that transforms it, time of metamorphoses in which, in an imaginary simultaneity and under the form of the space that art seeks to realize, the different temporal ecstasies coincide.