Durch is a painting completed in December 2022 as a submission for the Devised Theatre and Performance Course at arthaus.berlin, and displayed as part of the Treehaus Festival there in June 2023. It explores the frustrated and violent energies of love and desire. The physicality of the painter is evident in the final work, the thumb pressed into the pastel and smeared across the paper. Their hair forming part of the material .
What follows are extracts from an essay that accompanied this work. When I began [the DTAP course] in October, I introduced myself by moving slowly across the space from one shaded corner, towards the group, who were sat in a circle in sunlight, where a gap was left for me to join. Most other people had introduced themselves alongside their desire to throw themselves at one another – to love, love, love! I was tired. I had another group that I belonged to. To join this group here would require a journey, a coming out, a coming towards. I was drawing in pastels, thick stuck marks on marks on marks that couldn’t travel across the page. As I tried to listen, to look into myself, I had, I wrote, reached a point, and could go no further. I began to speak more, ask more questions, challenge more ideas. Seek security, I suppose now, in this crass language play. And so what is it to love. To walk across the hall and join the group. It can mean forging oneself into a spear: acute, so that there is little danger in failing to pierce; hard, so that there is less danger in being broken upon impact. What is the nature of a good weapon’s sharpness? Just sharp enough to pierce its mark. What direction does a good spear take? Well the very direction of its object. How hard must it be? Harder than its victim. All its attributes assumed in relation to the other, but what does the weapon know of the one who wields it? And we well know of hard things that they are also often brittle. And we know too that a spear rarely stays for long inside the flesh of its victim, who dies. So perhaps a spear isn’t the thing to become. We can imagine the primary sex organs. The penis, the vulva, the anus. One thrusts, the others receive. But if it is necessary to make your self hard and closed in order to thrust then it doesn’t seem like a very sensible or attractive behaviour. And if you have to wait for someone to thrust at you…then you may be waiting a long time (you know your temptress days are over). So what if a sex organ could thrust and receive at once? I began to draw. Wouldn’t I have to learn – in love, in the pursuit of insight, in the attempt to belong to a group – to thrust and yield at the same time? To give, not only when an opportunity presents itself - but to reach and give - and in the reaching be ready to receive - or we could say - to open myself to another. It sounds rather dangerous.
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AuthorSean Robinson is an artist working between Berlin and London. They work mostly with performance, poetry and theatre. Archives
October 2023
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