The Origin of the World at The School of Arts and Humanities, University of Stirling, Scotland.

The Origin of the World

By Marina Mariasch[i]

Well before Courbet, Leonardo suggested in his ‘Treatise on Painting’ that

women should always be depicted ‘in modest poses,

their legs close together, their arms closely folded, their heads inclined

and somewhat on one side’

Syd Krochmalny has put the female sex back centre stage, legs well

apart. But these are not women, but vaginas. One is not a woman because one

has a vagina. Here women are reduced to their sex organ but

have the strength of its symbolic value. There is a double displacement

here; the artist cedes his charcoal to other –male- artists- for this

‘Sexionary’, a saucier version of ‘Pictionary’- a game of drawing words.

In the beginning was the word.

For this is what it is about, playing with words, which are ideas. Thought

is structured through language.

This, the vagina emerges in the foreground of these representations. Beyond,

before the beginning, there was something, a chain of reactions,

relationships of power:

A man giving instructions to a woman, asking her to open her legs. A man

ceding his pencil to another man, an invitation to take charge. Each person

has their part, and no one loses their power. Not the vagina itself which

takes centre stage, as if on the front of those men’s magazines, which today

are covered with arse. The vagina is under the gaze, submissive, but is, for

once –finally- the focus of all.

Here the centre is not the erect dick of porn, but the vagina in its

productive and reproductive function. A vagina in which the economy of

desire is divested of the economy of the market, moving forward on parallel

paths. Although submissive, from this central position it seems to say ‘I do

what I like’. And it becomes a threat. The central and

sovereign vagina needs to be lightly subjugated to accentuate the

dispositve, and to configure desire. But it remains a threat.

It is the origin of the world or the end of the universe, a black octopussy in

which to get lost in a dark, endless tunnel. First wave feminism wanted to

remove women’s bodies from the patriarchal gaze, but this would not be the

first time that a naked body has served as touchpaper for a revolution. This

series of vaginas reflects a system of repeated patterns moulded by social

myths. In this work, and these diverse ways of representing a vagina, the multiple

personalities possessed by each vagina are opened up.

We need to look at them and get to know them, chuck out the flowers and

wrest the beetroot from within. Get us out from under, wonder woman, wonder

man. The vagina shifts from being a bite in a lump of meat into

an idea, an allegorical triangle that resembles God, a black hole from which

no material particle, not even light, may escape.

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[i] Syd Krochmalny, The Origin of the World at The School of Arts and Humanities, University of Stirling, Scotland. Translated by Sarah Wilson. Marina Mariasch was born Buenos Aires in 1973. She studied literature at Universidad de Buenos Aires and Cultural Sociology at UNSAM. She has published coming attractions (Siesta, 1997), XXX (Siesta, 2001), Tigre y león (Siesta, 2005), té verde (Vox, 2007), El zig zag de las instituciones (Vox, 2009) and El matrimonio (Bajo la luna, 2011). She co-founded and directed the publishing house Siesta with Santiago Llach.