“Cutting the Stone” Exhibition

Miguel Abreu Gallery (88 Eldridge St.)

This event has ended.

organized by Alex Fleming and Anya Komar

This show began with Hieronymus Bosch’s painting titled Cutting the Stone, or The Extraction of the Stone of Madness or The Cure of Folly. Against the backdrop of a bucolic summer landscape, the painting depicts a sinister scene in which a ‘surgeon’ wearing an upside-down funnel on his head extracts an object from the skull of a patient. Instead of the stone, what the doctor removes is the bulb of a waterlily, possibly an allusion to lust.

The exhibition develops upon our ongoing conversations with poet and scholar Jackie Wang. The themes of the show have been instigated both by the painting itself and by a text (featured below) written by Wang as a part of these exchanges. This text reflects upon the meaning of Bosch’s painting, among other themes of pain, desire, communication and the landscape of dreams:

What is the distance between well and unwell, between health and sickness, in a world that produces that distance, then sells you the promise of health, along with the false promise of the body’s ongoingness. It reminds me of an argument my little brother got into with his friend about healthcare. The friend was against universal healthcare on the grounds that the sick were undeserving, and “why should I have to pay for all those people who are in need of medical care because of poor lifestyle choices.” My brother tried to get him to see that he too was a sac of flesh that was gradually deteriorating, that he would one day occupy the condition that he spoke of with such disdain, would grow feeble and die. Perhaps his need to create a categorical distinction between the healthy and unhealthy, then claim the category of health as his own, was a way to inflate his sense of his invincibility in the face of a fate he could not integrate. It is a distancing gesture that props up the fantasy of the fully autonomous masculine subject, who is unaware of the labor—the chain of relations—that undergirds his existence.