A Speculum That Shines

Alastair MacKinven, Dawn Mellor, John Russell,
Paul Sharits, Jim Shaw, and Cathy Wilkes

Curated by Eoin Donnelly and Sara Knowland

“All the prophets gazed through a speculum that does not shine, while
Moses our teacher gazed through a speculum that shines.”
The Babylonian Talmud

This quotation suggests a dualism, a divine visionary union with god
and an illuminated instrument for dilating and peering inside bodily
orifices. In turn, these two readings evoke some of the well-worn
dichotomies that underpin the history of religion and thought: body
and spirit, physical and metaphysical, sacred and profane, subject and
object.

It’s not important to think on whether these oppositions are actual.
Oppositions are energising.

For the purposes of this exhibition the “speculum” of the quotation is
the levered spatula and the divine kaleidoscope intertwined.
From a rational secular perspective, divine mysteries are simply
contradictions - the ecstatic state is a frustration, transcending is an
impossibility, we’re fully tethered by our somatic weight. “We are
quite as incapable of rising from the ground as an earthworm,” said
Simone Weil.

The convulsion is an eruption that mediates the body-object and the
body-subject. It’s an impossible negotiation, an un-grounding through
reconnecting to the ground. The head down in the mud, in the cloaca,
around the u-bend, the nether eye toward heaven.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/21594