"Longing"

In my work, "Longing", I deal with the meeting points between "Rapunzel", a 16th Century, Grimm fairy tale and "Song of Songs"' attributed to King Solomon from the 2nd temple period (approximation).
The tale, Bellflower, tells of a young, provincial couple, childless, that lived besides a beautiful and mysterious garden. The garden was surrounded by a fence and no one was permitted entry. One day, the woman noticed some Bellflowers: purplish flowers with sweet nectar. Having developed a mad desire towards the flowers, she informed her husband that she will die if she will not taste of their nectar. Fearfully, the husband climbed over the garden's fence, and fetched back a bouquet of Bellfowers for his happy wife.
Time passed and the wife's passion for the flowers only grew. During one of the husband's forrays into the forbidden garden, he was caught by the witch, who's garden it was. The witch blamed him for stealing from her and threatened to kill him. The husband begged her to spare him, to which the witch agreed, but on one condition: that when he and his wife beget a child, the child will be hers. The man knew his wife to be barren and so he readily agreed.
Miraculously, a year after the incident the couple had a beautiful baby daughter, whom they named "Bellflower". Honoring his promise, the man gave the babe to the witch with a heavy heart. The witch promptly imprisoned Bellflower in a doorless tower, with but one small window overlooking the desolate forest. Poor Bellflower grew in solitude and matured into a lovely young woman. She would lower her long braid out of her solitary window and the witch would climb up the braid to Bellfrower's cell.
One day, a prince happened upon the place. He called out to Bellflower to lower her braid so that he may climb up to her bedchamber, and so she did. When the witch learned of the prince's recurring visits she hastened to cut off Bellflower's long braid, the only access to her cell. When the prince next called out to Bellflower, the witch lowered the severed braid out the window and when the prince started climbing she let go of the braid. The prince fell and landed on a thorny bush which scratched his eyes and blinded him. After this the witch smuggled Bellflower to a clearing in the forest.
One day, the prince heard Bellflower's mournful singing and was drawn to her as if by magic. When she saw her blinded beloved she burst into teards. Bellflower's hot tears cured the prince and his eyesight returned. The love struck couple married and lived happily ever after.
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The "Song of Songs" scroll is a series of love poems between a couple, a man and a woman. In the tradition of the Jewish "Sages of Blessed Memory" these poems were allegorically considered as describing the relationship between God and the people of Israel. In the Christian tradition a similar allegorical interpretation exists, which describes the relationship between Jesus and the Church. The Song of Songs scroll is one of the most popular books in the bible and has influenced Hebrew poetry as well as world literature.
We find a story of love and courting in two poems from the Song of Songs scroll, poems of a young woman longing for her love to come and save her and spirit her away from her parents' house to an imagined shared life of happiness and wealth, as the story traditionally goes (I held him and would not let him go until I had brought him into my mother's house and into the chamber of her that conceived me (Songs 3,4) behold he standeth behind our wall he looketh forth at the windows shewing himself through the lattice (Songs 2,9).My beloved spake and said unto me Rise up my love my fair one and come away(Songs 2,10)). As in Rapunzel's story, the teller in the Song of Songs calls out to her prince to climb up to the top of the tower and spirit her away from the witch's (or her step mother's) long reach.
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This work suggests a different inter- textual/sexual reading or interpretation, one that puts the "other's" point of view at the center of the perspective. The knitted figure has both female and male organs; it embodies questions of gender orientation, patterns of eroticism and rescue as well as bodily practices devoted to those questions and patterns.
The character of the young woman, embodied as a house in the Song of Songs and imprisoned within a house in Rapunzel's story, is seen here gushing out of a sewer pipe and electricity and air conditioning lines. The young woman extricates herself from her body, allegorically represented by a structure or a house. The window (eye) in the wall (bones, muscles, skin) is exchanged by a system of "back" and "inner" exits, through which the figure extricates itself . While in the Song of Songs she drips myrrh on the lock' in my work the myrrh is interpreted as bodily secretions: feces, urine, blood vessels, semen, pus and milk. The figure's heart and kidneys are displayed hanging from the blood vessels.
The two figures – the speaker in the Song of Songs and Bellflower are both preoccupied with reshaping their bodies in order to win over their love, to be extricated from the house they were coerced into staying in. The former occupies herself with the condition and hue of her skin, and is busy applying oils and wearing jewelry. The latter cultivates her hair, brushing it and dressing it.
"Longing" seeks to examine the boundaries of the act of physical self reshaping, a reshaping that responds to erotic-mythical conditioning; it transforms consmetics to an apparatus of domination and surrender that coexist within the body.: they are dictated by its form.
In Assyrian mythology, the goddess Inna (or Ashtoret) wears cosmetics – make-up, jewelry, plaited hair – as a tool which allows her to live eternally in heaven. Cosmetics is associated with the Cosmic, with the Transcendental – which is in turn rooted in love, eroticism and faith. However, such transcendence has many facets and its forms change: the jewels, oils and plaited hair is embodied in piercing and cock ring; they, too, act as symbols of a climb upwards, to the top of the tower, to the promise of transcendence.
The technique used, crochet, has meaning in this context. Crochet is considered (at least in western culture) as an intimate feminine craft, performed within the confines of one's home. In Hebrew, the word for Chrochet knitting (סריגה or "Sriga") has etymological similarity to the word for closure or closing (סגירה or "Sgira"), however, knitting from within the closed room is an act of defiance: for in the act of knitting one slides the stiches onto and from the needle. In Hebrew, stitches are referred to as eyes, as they do resemble eyes and so, by sliding "eyes" onto and from the needle one creates a gaze – as if restoring a prince his eyesight, restoring to the entombed knitter her gender, erotic and spiritual visibility. This knitted/closed visibility erupts in this work as gender transgression: the transgender figure creates visibility by the "eyes", the inner and outer gaze that is knitted upon the body giving it symbolism, identity, actuality: man or woman, exalted or despised, lofy or contemptible.
The reshaping and molding of the body is a tool intimately tied to questions of love, transcendence, identity and external-internal relations. The speaker's jewels in the Song of Songs and Bellflower's long braid are links in the chain of human activity, linking it to the outside, to the observing eye. Gender reshaping of the body continues this founding mythical tradition, even going so far as to realizing its full potential, its peak.