KHEN SHISH

1. An Eye

Standing before Khen Shish’s works – eye to eye. An eye in which every living thing is held. The serpent, the instigator of vision, snakes along it, conferring it with its measure, and at the same time, splits it, dooms it to double vision: The eye will forever wander between divine law and its permutations in the tongues of snakes, between the lust of the flesh and the judgement of the mind, between life and its reproduced appearance. And the snake separates these from one another – and perhaps also formulates their reunion through the rupture? An eye and every living thing is held in it; an eye and in its realm of vision – creatures with eyes; an eye that looks at the essence of vision, cloaking it double vision in pairs. An eye, and every living thing is floating on its tear, two by two; an eye which is – as we shall see – both Noah’s ark and the Flood. But first let us stay with the root of vision, for Khen Shish’s paintings are first and foremost an eye that ruptures as if for the first time – to contemplate the split that enables its vision, to be seared by the laceration of the division; to measure all living things by the length of the serpent; to see: “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.” (1)

The eyes open to the nadirs of their desire. While they give the world names, they lap it with their tongue. “A tree to be desired to make one wise”: the eye-opening moment inscribes the dual desire in the eye – the lust of the fruit and the yearning for knowledge. Some biblical commentators see this duality as a montage of perspectives – the sensual desire before eating from the fruit gradually gives way to the cold intelligence that was born in sin. But will the craving of the mouth so readily surrender its part in the forming realm of the eye? The biblical oxymoron tells us that eating the forbidden fruit does not free Eve from the grip of the primal desire. Knowledge does not abstain from lust but rather focuses it in its lens – casts it in its apparatuses and hides it in its names. Man tastes the world as he savors the syllables of his evolving tongue. Knowledge is nothing but finely honed lust – and a tree to be desired to make one wise. Knowledge is the table on which the speaking man brings every living thing to his mouth; also – mostly – when he believes his tongue is clean and his mouth is empty, he speaks with a full mouth, gnaws the flesh of the world with his teeth as it rolls off his tongue. No meal is truly barren of words, for the conversation is fueled by the warmth of the mouth’s delight. Offering her own version to Edgar Allan Poe’s last days, Joyce Carol Oates entrusts the author with guarding a lighthouse on the shore of a deserted island: Poe names the creatures that inhabit the island – and almost at one swoop, eats them. The naming mouth is the scarifying, butchering, devouring mouth: “Hydrocephalagus young (delicate as quail, while the meat of the mature is stringy & provokes diarrhea). —Cyclophagus young (of which I am particularly fond, an exquisite subtlety of taste like sea scallops)…” (2)

The seeing eye also sees this – that every living thing is trapped in the realm of its vision and is prepared to be eaten by it. One could mistake these paintings for pages torn from a long-lost children’s book. For a moment we are tempted to present the most naïve of questions: All these animals! Does anyone know what they are called? Raise your hand to speak, please! But while we crowd to see, something in us tenses in response to the geometric regularity, to the alarming finality of the lines – to the horizontal foundation that the animals themselves delineate with their taut sprawl – like a plinth upon which the hand positions other animals: Where did this stage emerge from, and what is our part in building it? Who is the play for? Whose gaze does it wish to appease, whose eyes does it wish to please? We look around, and see only our own seeing eyes: ornate and bejeweled animals, wreathed with garlands and carrying baskets, captured in the delicate gossamer of an eye that has just opened to their beauty; creatures presented for display, presented to be devoured; serving one another in wobbly mounds, ritualizing their own sacrifice. All before our eyes.

The sacrifice is the beginning of every symbolic order – and so, the cornerstone of every painting. According to Julia Kristeva, the melancholic subject is the one who refuses to sacrifice the “thing” on the cold alter of the word: with his zealous clinging to matter, he refuses to sell the essence of the living for the bland pottage of the sign. In the hidden recesses of a crystalized tear, in the depths of the silence that had solidified into a tomb, sadness puts on a solo show that no man will ever visit: the exhibition of loneliness itself – forever anonymous, closed even to its maker.

But the sacrificial platform that Khen Shish sets up before our eyes captures an order more elusive – and in any case far more perilous – than the one rejected by the melancholic subject. It is not the story of the flesh defeated by the spirit, of the fire that dies out in the bowels of the machine. A spring is shoved into the mouth of a horse as a violent echo of the pattern that adorns its body – and the fire continues to burn along the edges of the picture, as if flaming the entire vision, pirouetting to the hollow clicks of the mechanism. The hand that paints the snake strips down its recurring intervention with a row of blazing hand prints. The fire that glows in the belly of the horse computes the sum of the numbers in the arithmetic question that floats around it. More than it wanes, the fire is chilled in the coldness of knowledge, cast in the mold of the hand, memorizing the signature of ownership. The blazing passion and the nippy law dance in suspicious synchronicity. The paradox entangled with recognition (“a tree to be desired to make one wise”) is extracted from its innocent swaying along the edge of awakening, and mechanically handled. The alter formalizes the relationship between flesh and knowledge: horrifyingly, we have stumbled across a nuptial ceremony.

This is the horror of Nathanael, the protagonist of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s novella The Sandman, as he realizes that the object of his love, Olympia, is nothing but an automaton. At this point Nathanael breaks down, recognizing in the technical specifications of the object of his love the incriminating reflection of the mechanical dimension of his love. This self-proclaimed romantic discovers that the heart he wears on his sleeve is an industrious machine room. The poet’s burning heart evaporates like engine steam, and his rhymes echo the clatter of the engines: There is no more distinction between the wheel and the flame, and Nathanael’s last words attest to the horrors of this coupling: “Aha! aha! aha! Fire-wheel – fire-wheel! Spin round, fire-wheel!” (3)

2. Crying

The eye, the wheel of fire, beholds its own innocence – which begets its horror; the innocence that was never unhallowed, the innocence that cloaked itself in the baroque enigma of duality, and stole the border of awakening by means of the marriage of utility and reason – spoiled precisely because of its persistence, painted ever-green with the thick brush of paradox. The eye glances over the serpent that splits it, observing its innocence, seized in the elixir of knowledge. The children are all grown up, and the book they used to read is holding their childhood captive.

How can the eye stand up to the tyranny of its reflection? Can it get up from the table – escape the reflective nuptial meal it is trapped in? What else can the eye do but see – see itself seeing, dividing itself to the rhythm of the snake’s game, multiplying the pain of its multiplication to tears – desired to make one wise and wise to desire and so on and so forth, ad nauseum?

“To tears”: the eye – the eye that is forced to see – can also shed tears.
And boy, what tears fall on these paintings. Practically a flood. And more than it cries, the eye in Khen Shish’s paintings is a carrier of crying as an element of the world. This crying leaves the eye even before it materialized from it – it does not express and does not convey and does not divulge. It is orphaned even by the face on which it falls. It falls in a nameless stream, almost like a force of nature that operates through every living thing; clearing its surroundings of any expression, leaving nothing but a featureless line, impervious in its singularity, which has no reflection; devoid of the pressure of hidden possibilities, exempt from the shudder of growth, and immune to the trickeries of an impassioned heart. It is no coincidence that so many creatures in these paintings wear their hearts: the heart bathed in tears sheds its figurative burden and becomes a thing in the world, a detail in an objective image. As strange as this may sound, this is the virtue of the weeping that floods these paintings: it is objective. A thing among things. A star, perhaps: “AGATHOS. They are! – they are! This wild star – it is now three centuries since, with clasped hands, and with streaming eyes, at the feet of my beloved – I spoke it – with a few passionate sentences – into birth. Its brilliant flowers are the dearest of all unfulfilled dreams, and its raging volcanoes are the passions of the most turbulent and unhallowed of hearts.” (4)

Perhaps the entire world painted here is nothing more than crying incarnate – so much so that the eye looks at its tears and no longer recognizes them – no longer sees. The tears that the eye sheds on the sacrificial meal obscures the picture. Disrupts the wedding. Infuriates the guests. Chases away the bride. And maybe these are her tears? But even if they are flowing from her eyes, it is not her crying. If it were her crying, it could have adorned the sacrificed bodies, provide for the wedding feast; see and show. If this is pain, it is no longer only her pain.

“Are you in pain, dear mother?”
“I think there’s a pain somewhere in the room (…) but I couldn’t positively say that I have got it.” (5)

The tears that traverse the eye and fall like rain on every living thing are not collected in any jug and do not water any field. They do not pool on either side of the serpent that snakes across the eye. They do not unfold the story of the Garden of Eden and do not reflect its landscapes, even while they pass through them indifferently, since they are indifference itself: innocence without a single innocent person in the world, an orphaned innocence devoid even of the lust of life that ultimately brings about its demise: nature whose resources have been abused, endlessly wasteful, that forgets itself from the dawn of his emergence, pitying everything in the chill of its empty heart:
“The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath.
It is twice blest; It blesseth him that gives and him.” (6)

In one unforgettable scene in Celia Fremlin’s novel, Uncle Paul, on her way home, the protagonist leans on the arm of the man she suspects of being a murderer: she feels that it is his arm that serves her as a trusty shield against the dark intentions whirling in his mind. In Khen Shish’s works, the eye relies on her weeping against what it sees. (7) In the exhibition text that accompanied Khen Shish’s solo show Tunisian Bride at Tel Aviv’s Gordon Gallery, Tali Tamir wrote: “Khen Shish’s Tunisian Bride, much like the bride in the well-known play by Nissim Aloni, joins an age-old array of brides who have dressed in their most elegant wedding gowns and as their veil fluttered above them, they fled from the altar to the mythical world of the archetypical bride. This bride, whose groom has never presented himself at her altar (and not the one who ran from her groom in Lorca's ‘Blood Wedding’) – is somewhat of a tricky creature: abandoned and miserable on the one hand, yet at the same time – powerful, independent, and free.” (8)

But the eye showers the wedding with its inundating blessing of the one who was not invited to the ball – the bride herself; the weeping eye that was banished by the seeing eye. In its endless weeping, the eye says to its dry sister, as it is led down the aisle with the entourage of its reflections: you are a ghost bride and this is a wedding of death. Beyond this wedding, in its midst and on all of its sides – I am still here – crying to distances that you will never be able to see, to stars whose light you will never reach. For Khen Shish paints like she cries: To what the eye cannot see and will not show, to the degree that the eye cry over and beyond what it sees, a measure that cannot be reciprocated with a look – an eye for an eye – but only with painting; painting that we are seeing for one moment, and in the other we no longer see, except through our tears.