Socrates on the Beach, 2025
Excerpt from Pussyboy (translated by Tobias Ryan) in Socrates on the Beach (Issue 11)
« Jusepe de Ribera painted La mujer barbuda for the Vice-Roy of Naples, his patron, and a lover of natural anomalies and circus oddities. So say the erudite historians. According to the writings of the time, we see a virile Italian woman from Abruzzo, wearing a beard a hand long. She is nursing a child. Her breast is bulbous, placed slightly high, a kind of giant molluscum pendulum, its nipple offered to the infant. A half-step behind her, her husband appears as the protector of this extraordinary being, a guardian on the periphery of his wife’s strange majesty. Their faces are serious, firm. That of the man is resigned, bitter maybe; on that of Magdalena Ventura, one can’t but read the pride of one who has known the mocking cruelty of others, who is not ignorant of it as she displays her apparent duel nature. Ribera has made what passes for monstrous into a human work, where strangeness is eclipsed by a solemn discord. “The Great Miracles”, says a stone tablet on which rests a striated conch. We can imagine a shell grotto, domain of an androgynous beyond, of which the Abruzzese is perhaps the living avatar. A God-Mary-Joseph, at once both husband and wife:
for He who is mighty has done great things for me
The incarnation of ambivalence or paradox, the monstrous exhales its fog, and, playing unease on a spectrum that ranges from fright to disgust, presents a vacillation that, when waking in the morning, throws our minds out of whack. It is this which foments, unbeknownst to us, incongruous comparisons, but may also unearth, in overturning an interdiction, the indistinct and shocking reality in which we live, and that we reject. We often prefer the clarity of lies to the smouldering truth that comes our way. Because the monstrous is, first and foremost, life, searching like a blind larva, veering, groping, and prospecting; life at its limits, trying to find its future forms or simply that which unknowingly invents new worlds. It is what we encounter when we plunge into the details, when we stray from the prefigured and moral contours of how we are represented. To recognise the monstrous as life is going higher or delving deeper; it is looking much further, or much more closely… »