All The World Began With A Yes
September 8 - October 8, 2022
"All the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of the prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I don't know why, but I do know that the universe never began." - Clarice Lispector, "Hour of the Star”
Leonora Carrington Ray Johnson Alex Israel Wayne Koestenbaum Anna Ostoya Charles Long Pacifico Silano Nicolas Guagnini Scarlett Rouge Cole Lu Katie Hector Daniel Nielsen Luke O’Halloran Athena Lemanska Amir Guberstein Jordí Alos Ivan Rios-Fetchko
The works included in this exhibition demonstrate a yearning for the "yes." As Clarice Lispector wrote in her final work, a yes represents a beginning of the world, or alternatively, a yes within the never — the mystical space of a world without beginning or end. In our society, yes is an affirmative answer. Yes binds us to the social contract of consent in complicity with authority and order. Underlying this binding web we collectively embody and individually navigate is a more primal yes: an explosion of life within the vastness of the universe; the potency of a sexual encounter with a stranger; the spells, fantasies, and deities made animate through our imaginations. The yes contains the creative and destructive forces that promote fusion, alchemy and revolution. The angelic, the spectral, and the alien are found together in a chorus chanting "yes."
We will never know why our world is as it is, whether it started or always was. The tragic flaw of being human, in the Oedipal quest for unrequited answers to the riddles, yields unceasing fascination and torment. But with the yes, we create, as Proust suggests, the beginning of the world, not at the beginning of time but every day anew. The yes becomes our secret conduit, heralding transcendence, magic and the spectacle. This exhibition reminds us of the power, the seduction, and the ancient desire within the yes — the clarion call that is not lost within the ether of the infinite. -
- Josh Lockman
Yes Essay
by Wayne Koestenbaum
Does James Joyce’s Molly Bloom own property rights to yes? Yes wedged open the modernist novel, gave it license to stream and cycle, to ungovern language into a state of fireworks. Nietzsche hated no and turned yes into a fecundating huzzah. We yes the world; yes is the verb we hazard when doldrums make us push optimism to the boiling point. I keep mentioning Valhalla these days. Am I death-oriented or yes-oriented? I open the gallery’s door and beg the art gathered in the room to tickle me into spasmodic elation: we learn spasm, an aesthetic condition, through painstaking procedures. Each cell in your body says yes; each neuron conveys an electric yes, a carte postale sent to kindred neurons. A neuron’s cry—yes—zigzags its way past the censors. I keep saying yes to nudes. A nexus of capital and fascism screws a fake yes into us when we click and buy—TikToking our belly roll, shimmying our loquacity. Clarice Lispector, whose words offer this exhibition its mystic rationale, prodded the void as if to pry open a shut elevator door or push away an intruder. Pretend the void is Lucky Supermarket in 1965. Pretend you don’t understand the nature of Lucky Supermarket. You think its distance from the sidewalk, and its supply of barbecued chickens in foil bags, qualify as Eleusinian mysteries. Food is part of yes. I’m always offering optimism to you, as if it were a slab of peanut brittle. Did you ask me to walk to the universe’s candy department (between the escalator and women’s purses) and buy you a handful of rebuses studded with raisins and promises? Mark making, that’s what some artists do. Artists who make marks bamboozle the void. When we stare into the void while making or viewing art we outfox the emptiness; we salvage from it the clarity of a drawn line or a photographed cloud. Ray Johnson, even though he committed suicide, said yes repeatedly, and I’ll let him be my spokesman, if parts of his voice are still around, vowels floating above the eucalyptus. Ray, ventriloquist, said yes to every star’s name. Every artist I have known, including artists now dead, said yes when they forsook caution and insisted on tossing into the indifferent world a painting, a film, a sculpture, or an impalpable, conceptual stance. I’ve never gone to a fortune-teller, but a diplomatic friend read my Tarot cards at a restaurant after I finished eating shrimp. Let the works in this exhibition be the cards I’m now feeding you. Treat one word—any word—as an occasion for transubstantiation. Is transubstantiation too cumbersome a concept for tonight’s supper? I’ll etch you instead a simpler word, managable and small as a salt flake. Say yes as many times as possible but please don’t forget your right to say no. Nobody owns no. And nobody owns yes. We haven’t outlasted the damage done by the drug wars. I don’t want Nancy Reagan in my essay. Push her out; push out her astrologers. Listen to Lispector: “Now I’m going to tell you how I went into that inexpressiveness that was always my blind, secret quest.” She found a way to squeeze inexpressiveness and give it a slow rub. She didn’t insist that the inexpressiveness quickly move outward into song. She insisted instead on the doggedness of thinking, repeating, monadically declaring. Respect inexpressiveness, but try to wrest from reticence a word or two. Once more, Lispector: “the explanation of the enigma is the mere repetition of the enigma.” I paced a pebbled driveway in the distant past and imagined that the pebbles—loose, numerous, undifferentiated—had each an individual destiny and wanted reclamation. How could I offer each pebble a home? And so I had to give up my identification with the pebbles. Goodbye to the pebbles I never adequately attended to. One pebble at the edge of the driveway was large and red and had the right to call itself a lava rock. On its sharp edge I cut my knee. I have several modest scars, and I want, for the sake of this late-emerging outcry, to name one of the faint scars the yes scar, as if the skin on my knee were continuing to say yes to the vanished rock at the driveway’s edge.
