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Alexei Mansour, “Becoming a Vessel”
September 7—October 7, 2023

It is said that, nearly every day, the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes would leave the clay wine jar where he slept to publicly masturbate in the Athenian agora. “If only it were as easy to banish hunger by rubbing my belly,” he remarked to his scandalized neighbors. Diogenes was a pre-Christian ascetic, but one who—in contrast to the chaste monks who followed him centuries later—insisted on the self-sufficiency of human pleasure. All our worldly mores and desires, he argued, are subservient to our bodily needs. The radicalism …