Temenos,

1992

<p><em>Student Essay for CWR 209 / ART 223 / COM 240 / GSS 277 Along the Edge: Leonora Carrington</em></p><p><em>Temenos </em>is a covert ritual. The word, “temenos” itself means “fear us.” The viewer is called on to fear the scariest thing of all: a ritual that she might never fully understand. </p> <p>The power of this lithograph is its own obfuscation of the ritual. The viewer can never know what the black figure holding a flower and kneeling by the rocks aims to do. She can never know what wishes the tree creature grants. Yet, to look at <em>Temenos</em> is to participate in the ritual worship of Carrington’s deities who, in this composition, become a tree creature and a rather pudgy-looking bird. </p> <p>The ritual implicates viewers of this image, leaving them powerless to affect or even understand what the figures do. This is an apt description of many the subject of many compositions by Carrington (eg. <em>Bird Bath</em>). Carrington likes to create figures who wield the power of witchcraft not only over the objects within the art space but over the viewers who cannot help being carried away, as if on the gust of wind that dominates the top half of <em>Temenos</em>. </p> <p>The black-clad figures in the foreground are rather squat and formless- much like the female figures in Carrington’s other paintings. Carrington’s refusal to paint female figures in their conventional shape is a defiance of surrealist norms. In Carrington’s work, these figures can be read as powerful witches who do not and furthermore cannot succumb to a role as a female muse for an artist like Max Ernst. They are too formless and thereby too elusive to be compressed into any one dimension. These figures, in defying gender and gender roles, are participating in a ritual even apart from the ritual depicted in the composition: a ritual of subversion. </p> <p>The subversions in Carrington’s art are witchcraft, pure and simple. The woman figures of <em>Temenos</em> are versed in rituals- they worship at pagan alters and practice magic. The power they draw is not from societal hierarchies that so rankle Carrington in stories like <em>The Debutante</em> but rather, from a female comradery. The mystical rituals are domestic and quotidian- they take spaces women inhabit and turn them into settings for women band together to perform rituals that makes them powerful. </p> <p>The witches of <em>Temenos</em> sit by a bird that is no more majestic than a chicken waiting to be slaughtered. The domesticated creature is the third figure in the triumvirate of the foreground. This bird does not seem to be a sacrificial body but rather an unconventional participant in a ritual that overturns the rules of the domestic. <em>Temenos</em> converts a familiar scene- of someone holding food over a fire to cook it- into a strange ritual where the food becomes a flower and the fire becomes nothing more than some rocks. This scene is projected into a background that it at once familiar and foreign: a desert, but one with strange evergreen trees boasting large stars at their tops. The women have escaped the trappings of the kitchen so that they might continue practicing their rituals of power and subversion. </p><p><p><p><em>Bhaamati Borkhetaria, Princeton Class of 2020 </em></p></p></p>