Thresh(hold)

Emii Alrai | Miriam Cahn | Camilla Dilshat | Sotiris Gonis | Graham Gussin | Ania Mokrzycka | Shahpour Pouyan | Tal Regev

20th March - 11th May 2024

The fact that there is no clear etymology of the word threshold is already intriguing. According to Professor Anatoly Liberman, linguist and poet, earlier etymologists, like Junius and Mahn, 1743 and 1864 editors of etymologies respectively, were wrong in thinking that threshold is a compound of thresh + hold.[1] Liberman states that ‘(t)his Germanic word for “threshold” was opaque as far back as the time of the oldest written monuments.’[2] Liberman also mentions that for some reason, the Latin, limen and Russian porog, meaning ‘threshold,’ also ‘lack a definitive etymology’. Undoubtedly, the threshold is an enigmatic phenomenon.

 

Even though there is an ambiguity about thresh + hold, the title of this exhibition is Thresh(hold), where both words are considered by artists as two separate words that then incorporate into one: ‘We are interested in the linguistic interplay and tension between the different parts that make up ‘threshold’ as a word, for example thinking about the word broken into two: ‘thresh’: to remove the seeds of crop plants but also move violently or ‘thrash’, and ‘hold’: to support but also to exert power over.’[3] The physical process of threshing is removing the old top layer off and bringing the new seed out, metaphorically speaking giving new life or opportunity, which in a certain way coincides with the purpose of the threshold.   

 

The French scholar Arnold van Gennep makes an exceptional exploration of experiences of the liminal as a social threshold in The Rites of Passage, 1912. In this anthropological work, van Gennep considers all the transitions that an individual goes through in a society, such as birth, puberty and marriage, up until death. The scholar explains the common structure of these transitions, assembling the ceremonial patterns:

 

... which accompany a passage from one situation to another or from one cosmic or social world to another. Because of the importance of these transitions, I think it legitimate to single out rites of passage as a special category, which under further analysis may be subdivided into rites of separation, transition rites, and rites of incorporation.[4]

 

Separation, transition and incorporation are the bases of transitional phenomena in psychoanalytical theory which Donald Winnicott discusses scrupulously in his groundbreaking book, Playing and Reality, 1971. In this book, Winnicott identifies the intermediate area of experiencing, where the contributing factors are both inner and outer reality. Winnicott also highlights the realm of illusion, which is fundamental in the initiation of experience. In infancy the development stage is made possible by the mother or carer’s ability to adapt to the infant’s needs, ‘thus allowing the infant the illusion that what the infant creates really exists:’[5]    

 

This intermediate area of experience, unchallenged in respect of its belonging to inner or to external (shared) reality, constitutes the greater part of the infant’s experience, and throughout life is retained in the intense experiencing that belongs to the arts and to religion and to imaginative living, and to creative scientific work.[6]

 

This creative capacity for illusion that one develops from the earliest stage is fascinating and seems essential; it then helps one as an adult to go through and cope with different passages and to live a creative life.

 

 

Perhaps that’s what I feel, an outside and inside and me in the middle, perhaps that what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside.

 

Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, 1953

 

Numerous great thinkers have considered the dialectics of the internal and external as well the symbolic metaphor of the door. In his book The Poetics of Space French philosopher Gaston Bachelard concludes with the formula that ‘man is a half-open being.’ The philosopher reflects on the wish of ‘being’ to be both visible and hidden, with numerous opening and closing movements.[7] The thought is then continued to the metaphor of the door, as ‘an entire cosmos of the Half-open.’[8] Bachelard thinks of it as the origin of a daydream. The classification of the two types, open and closed, accumulate desires and temptations. Indeed, if one is ready and makes the first step to open the door, one crosses the border of what is known, entering the intermediate space before facing the unknown. There is the presence of desire to initiate the new, but sometimes accompanied by fear.

 

Pain has turned the threshold to stone…

 

Ein Winteraband (A Winter Evening) by Georg Trakl.