Current Exhibition
Vol. V No. 4
George Jenne
CATULLUS 15-26, 2024
Sep 7 - Nov 3, 2024
artist link

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The Roman poet, Gaius Valerius Catullus is for the most part a mystery. Aside from occasional biographical hints that he dropped in his work, and a few scraps of historical evidence, all we know about him is that he grew up in Verona and lived most of his life in Rome, during the first century, B.C. That there is little else to go on, beyond conjecture and the words that he wrote, is quite enough for me. Enough to render the illusion of a lonely artist who swelled with arrogance and wit, misery and spite. Catullus’s writing is vulgar, acerbic stuff. He used words like fists, as if to bludgeon his target with obscene metaphor. And the unreliability of his story only lends a sense of absolute originality to his work, as if no-one like him had come before. Could it be that Catullus was the original hater? The first artist to fuel his work with sexually explicit rage? The first forlorn lover to masturbate angrily to the fading memory of his beloved? I’d like to think so. Catullus; creator of vindictive, jealousy. Catullus; pre- Christian, precursor to the internet troll. Catullus; Year One.

This video is a recitation of his poems, fifteen through twenty-six, without sound, in black and white, on a forty year old, cathode ray, tube T.V., presented in the vending machine of a defunct, local newspaper. That sprawling little formula seems apt in representing the essence of Catullus’s poetry, by which his gnashing teeth, taunt us from the safe, material distance that a creative medium can provide. The performance is scrubbed of inflection, tone and sibilance . The voice is whittled down to a pair of grotesque lips that cast abject fluids toward the lens. Labia, ad nauseam. Lips, buried behind a plot of wiry hair. Lips that insult by pantomime. Lips, in lieu of “the long finger.” Lips, quivering with silent- movie rage. Lips, puckering to form the basest of our anatomy.

-GCJ

CATULLUS 15-26, 2024
black and white, standard definition video
running time: 14 minutes 14 seconds