Curtain Literary Press
Curtain Press supports writing that engages the very contours of reality. We are the curtain, and it’s without remove that we engage reality.
How does art engage reality?
The rootlessness of the modern world also means that art cannot function as a direct representation of reality. The alienation from tradition across the globe reveals an antagonism that finds its clearest expression in art.
To create some kind of bedrock, modernism turns towards myth. But what’s mythic in the everyday aren’t hidden artifacts: the mythic’s rather a frame of meaning that facilitates who we are in modern life. The question is why? Why do we need this mythic frame in the first place? Why is violence today not felt in its immediacy but as an atavism, a barbarism that haunts us?
Postmodernism reaches the end of this process where rootlessness itself generates its own myth. We see how the myth is made, but the cycle sates nothing but its own enjoyment. But is this it? Is the play of making up our own traditions the most art can do with reality, everything else left to science?
This is where the comfort of ideology stops myth short, where the ontological ramifications of our structure are redirected and mobilized but not seen through. But myth IS our means of addressing the forms that must be in order for subjectivity and meaning to function, how to reach the supports of who we are in the world.
We already know the points where ideology falls short, where we’re not inscribed by our environs. They go by the name of death drive, freedom, ethics, love, emancipation. Instead of binding us to reality as we see it, these are each points of infinitude, of surpassing what’s possible by renewing our relation to the world and redefining how it is lived and framed, all with directly material effects. The miraculous does happen.
The Curtain
The curtain is an image of subjectivity. This begins with Descartes’s isolation of the “I think” and takes its full form with the Kantian transcendental revolution which confronts us with the Thing-in-itself. But the curtain does more than set our limit, mystify and conceal. Hegel takes up the Kantian antimonies of pure reason and locates the limits of our knowledge in reality itself, as what directly reflects being.
Beyond veil of appearances there’s only what we put there. Sublimity is a screen, but it’s our screen. We don’t need to accept our finitude or yearn to transcend it. With the curtain we’re already there.
The point, whether in art or philosophy, is to apply these insights further. Psychoanalysis carries the curtain to both symptom and sexuality, how both form the basis of our perception. When we engage these deadlocks, we’re engaging the deadlocks of reality.
The curtain undulates. It arrives in many forms, from sublimity to abjection, across skin surfaces and drops into holes. It’s in the sheer up and down, the neighbor’s impenetrable desire, the disembodied voice and the opaque gaze that haunt subjectivity. The floating partial objects and little living organs all show where reality loses its place.
Parrhasius painted a curtain so realistic that his judges waited for him to reveal the artwork behind it. David Lynch’s curtains show that “No hay banda”, there’s nothing on the stage but what we ourselves put there. And yet we’re still moved to tears, there IS something that we engage on the stage whose very strength lies at the level of fantasy.
The beauty of the curtain is the Kantian thing-in-itself, and the flat continuation of the stage beyond is the Hegelian substance as subject. And it’s this tension between the two where art keeps the operation open, where we’re all fueled—by nature, by ourselves, by reality.