HYLAND
No object arrested my attention as acutely as a tiny
one, book artist Douglas Beube's "Kylix: Freud to Fliess"
(2014), exhibited by the Jayne Baum Gallery. A mere
4.5 by 8 inches, including its stand, "Kylix" transforms
an antique tome, Freud's
oft times scandalous letters
to fellow physician Wilhelm
Fliess—full of cocaine and
seductive parents—the latter
documentation suppressed
by Freud himself in his later
elaboration of theories of
infantile sexuality. "Kylix"
may mean a type of drinking
cup, often decorated with
stylized figures, used in
ancient Greece; a genus of
snails in the family Drillidae;
or a software programming
tool, the latter discontinued,
consigned, like the drinking
cup, to more recent antiquity.
The red and gold quarter
binding of the book—at first sight intact, where the
rest of the book has been excavated into an oval form
resembling a lock--stands out like a scarlet letter. In his
seminal and notoriously opaque essay, "The Instance of
the Letter in the Unconscious," French psychoanalyst
