Art and Psychoanalysis 9780755603824, 9781848857971

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List of Illustrations

1. Max Ernst, Pietà or Revolution by Night, 1923. Oil on canvas, 1162 x 889mm. Tate Collection, purchased 1981. © Tate, London 2011. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2002.

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2. John Stezaker, Mask XXXV, 2007. Courtesy of The Approach, London.

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3. Louise Bourgeois, No Exit, 1989. Wood, painted metal and rubber, 209.6 x

213.4 x 243.8 cm. Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la Création, Paris. Photograph Rafael Lobato, © Louise Bourgeois Trust/DACS, London, VAG, New York, 2012.

4. Rachel Whiteread, House, 1993. © Rachel Whiteread 2012. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery, London.

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5. Hans Bellmer, La Poupée, 1935. Vintage gelatin silver print, 6.7 x 6 cm.

Ubu Gallery, New York & Galerie Berinson, Berlin. © ADAGP, Paris



and DACS, London 2012.

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6. Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 1985. Colour photograph, 72.5 x 49.25 inches.

Edition of 6 (MP#155). Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures.

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7. Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still, 1977. Black and white photograph, 25.4 x 20.3 cm, Edition of 10 (MP#2). Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures.

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8. Claude Cahun (Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob), Untitled (Self-Portrait), ca.1928. Gelatin silver print, 9.21 x 6.67cm. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Gift of Robert Shapazian. © Estate of Claude Cahun.

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9. Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Documentation IV, ‘Transitional Objects, Diary and Diagram’, 1976. Perspex unit, white card, plaster, cotton fabric, string detail, 1 of 8 units, 28 x 35.5cm each. Collection, Zurich Museum.

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10. Mary Kelly, Interim, Part I: Corpus, 1984–85. Laminated photo positive, silkscreen, acrylic on Plexiglas details, 2 of 30 panels, 90 x 122.5 x 5cm each.

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11. Jemima Stehli, Table 1, 1998. Courtesy of the artist.

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12. Geneviève Cadieux, Hear Me With Your Eyes, 1989. Courtesy of the artist.

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13. Pipilotti Rist, Gravity Be My Friend, 2007. Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and Hauser & Wirth.

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14. Helen Chadwick, The Oval Court, 1984–86. Courtesy of the Helen Chadwick Estate and David Notarius.

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15. Kiki Smith, Virgin Mary, 1992. Wax, cheesecloth and wood with steel base, 171.5 x 66 x 36.8 cm. © Kiki Smith. Courtesy Pace Gallery.

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16. Mike Kelley, Arena #7 (Bears), 1990. Found stuffed animals and blanket, 11.5 x 53 x 49 inches. Courtesy Kelley Studio.

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17. Paul McCarthy, Grand Pop, 1977. Performance, black and white and colour photographs. University of Southern California, Medical Center, Los Angeles (with Larry Grobel). Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

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18. Lyle Ashton Harris, Construct #10, 1989. Black and white mural print, 77.5 x 48 inches. Courtesy of the artist and CRG Gallery, New York.

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List of Illustrations

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19. Carrie Mae Weems, Mirror, Mirror, 1987–88, from the Ain’t Jokin’ series. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

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20. Mike Kelley, Craft Morphology Flow Chart, 1991. Mixed media installation, dimensions variable. Installation view, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg, 1991. Photograph Eric Baum. Courtesy Kelley Studio.

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21. Eva Hesse, Hang Up, 1966. Acrylic, cloth, wood, cord, steel, 182.9 x 213.4 x 198.1 cm. Art Institute of Chicago, gift of Arthur Keating and Mr and Mrs Edward Morris by exchange, April 1988. © the Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Photograph Robert Mates and Paul Katz.

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22. Rona Pondick, Little Bathers (detail), 1990–91. Wax, plastic and rubber teeth, 500 elements, approx. 6.4 x 12.1 x 10.2cm. Collection Marc and Livia Straus, Chappaqua, New York. Courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery, New York.

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23. Louise Bourgeois, Fillette, 1968. Latex over plaster, hanging piece, 59.7 x 26.7 x 19.7 cm. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photograph Allan Finkelman, © Louise Bourgeois Trust/DAVS, London/VAG, New York, 2012.

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24. Marina Abramovi´c, Rhythm 10, 1973. 21 Silver gelatin prints and text.

© Marina Abramovi´c, courtesy Marina Abramovi´c Archives and Lisson Gallery, London.

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25. Marina Abramovi´c, The House with the Ocean View, 2002. Sean Kelly Gallery, New York. © Marina Abramovi´c, courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York and Lisson Gallery, London.

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26. Lygia Clark, The I and the You: Cloth-Body-Cloth series, 1967. Courtesy of ‘The World of Lygia Clark’ Cultural Association.

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Acknowledgements

I would especially like to thank Liza Thompson, editor of the Art and… series, for her enthusiasm and support for this book. I am very grateful to those galleries and artists who supplied gratis copies of images. I would like to acknowledge the CCW Graduate School Research Fund for its contribution towards image reproduction costs. I am also grateful to the University of the Arts Research Management Group who granted me one term of sabbatical leave, so that I could concentrate on this book. But most of all, I would like to thank the students who have attended my seminars in Art and Psychoanalysis over the past 20 years. This book is dedicated to my parents.

Introduction

Any relationship changes the elements brought into relation. The relationship between art and psychoanalysis is no exception. In any relationship, the balance of power is always precarious; the conjoining of two different disciplines means that the attention paid to each one is constrained and unequal, but, on the other hand, the encounter between the two produces sparks of illumination and connection that would otherwise remain dormant. This book is written from the point of view of art and art criticism rather than psychoanalysis. My choice of psychoanalytic theories and concepts is determined by their use for thinking about art. From a psychoanalytic viewpoint there will be many gaps and omissions, but I do not feel guilty about this, as there are numerous introductions to psychoanalysis as well as the indispensable Pelican Freud Library which cover this terrain. On the other hand, artists may find that there is too much attention paid to the elaboration of psychoanalytic theory and not enough paid to the works of art that I shall bring into alignment with it. But there is something valuable to be gained on the rocky terrain of this interrelationship, to which the numerous encounters between art and psychoanalysis over the twentieth century testify. While psychoanalysis, as derived from Freud and his followers, has found many detractors in the popular press and media, it has been and continues to be a source of inspiration for artists. Derided as being unscientific at best, the purely sexual fantasies of Viennese petit bourgeois turn-of-the-century society at worst, psychoanalysis, as a thematic body of ideas, has prevailed as an invaluable resource for thinking about art in the twentieth and on into the twenty-first centuries. Not only have artists dipped in and out of psychoanalytic theories as inspiration for their work – in the case of American artist Mary Kelly, going so



Art and Psychoanalysis

far as to critique these theories in her artwork – but, more uncannily, artists who profess to know nothing of their tenets or to be completely uninterested in them, have produced work whose thematics align so closely with psychoanalytic ideas that they could be said to be inseparable. One simple reason for this is that both art and psychoanalysis have a relationship to the unconscious and, while the unconscious means different things to artists and psychoanalysts, for both it is associated with mental processes that are not fully known by or under the control of the conscious mind. The discourse of the unconscious predates Freud. The notion of unconscious ideas was broached by the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and in the nineteenth century the concept emerged in varying ways in the psychology of Johann Friedrich Herbart and Eduard von Hartmann and the theories of physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz, all of whom Freud was aware of. But it was Freud who formalised the notion of the unconscious as a psychic mechanism whose workings were made apparent in dreams, slips of the tongue and forgetting. These operations are considered irrational from the perspective of objective reason, but Freud showed that they had their own logic bound up with the expression of repressed wishes and desires. In formalising the unconscious in this way, Freud severed its links to Romantic inspiration and brought this area of psychic functioning into the realm of everyday behaviour. Although the Romantic view still exists that art stems from the eruptions of a magical, inspirational unconscious, the idea that this terrain can be mapped and brought to conscious scrutiny has been of interest to contemporary art, at least since Surrealism, the art movement with which we commonly associate psychoanalysis and the ideas of Freud. This book will begin by exploring the shift in the relationship between art and psychoanalysis from a Surrealist engagement with psychoanalytic imagery to the more contemporary critical engagement by artists, art critics and historians that emphasises how psychoanalytic concepts such as fetishism, narcissism, abjection, etc., rather than being used as illustrational sources for art, can be used as tools to think about how meaning operates in the cultural reception of an artwork rather than an individual artist’s psyche. One of the key terms in the relationship between art and psychoanalysis that this book will revolve around is the term ‘object’. There are psychoanalytic objects and there are art objects, all with varying degrees of materiality. Generally speaking, in both art and psychoanalysis the relationship between materiality – either actual materials and/or techniques and behavioural effects – and the intangible nature of the ideas and emotions that can be attached to them do not exist in a causal relation to one another. Here lies a common misunderstanding about what the relationship between art and psychoanalysis might be. In my experience of teaching art and psychoanalysis, I find that



Introduction



art students are often attracted to psychoanalysis because they think that it will provide the key to their work, that it will translate its supposedly mute materiality into discourse. (This is also one of the reasons why many art students avoid psychoanalysis.) This misunderstanding is understandable given the pervasiveness of therapy culture in the media in which the reasons for behaviour are all too easily analysed on reality TV chat shows using psycho-pop journalese. Students are also required by an ever-quantifiable education system to account theoretically for their work, and this can lead them to have undue expectations of what psychoanalytic theory might offer. However, what we find in psychoanalysis is not a readymade interpretation or rationale for why artists make the things they do, but rather a cultural discourse about operations of the mind in which the relation between cause and effect is skewed, indirect and circuitous to such an extent that the authority of discourse is undermined. The material affects of psychoanalytic thinking – anxiety, paranoia, fear, obsession, etc. – cannot be definitively traced back to a point of origin, because as we shall see in Chapter 1 of this book, on Freud’s dream-work, unconscious psychic processes make use of ‘representatives’ to express repressed or negated ideas, and these ‘representatives’, while linked to causes, are also different from them due to the ‘work’ of distortion that occurs in attaching mental ideas to material representations. Something similar occurs in the process of making art. While a traditional critic may attempt to translate imagery back to an initial idea, this is bound to fail due to the material ‘work’ that has been effected by the artist as well as the cultural and historical context of art itself. The best we can do is to make suggestions, create alignments, and seek connections between images and meanings, but a one-toone correspondence is not possible due to the distinct economies of sensations and words or pictorial and material representations. From the ‘stories’ told to them in the clinic, psychoanalysts enable their patients to create equivalent narratives for events that may or may not have occurred in a time and space different from the present. These equivalent narratives are not true pieces of evidence and they circulate in psychoanalytic theory in relation to particular conceptual and fantasmatic ‘objects’ – the transitional object (D.W. Winnicott), the petit objet a (Jacques Lacan), internal objects (Freud, Melanie Klein) and abject objects (Julia Kristeva). These ‘objects’ are structures that account for the expression of material affects and desires. They can account for impulses and forces in art, but do not translate the meaning of pictorial and spatial representations into another language. Rather than a means of interpreting art, which would be to ascribe a hierarchy in the relationship, psychoanalysis interrelates with art in much more dynamic ways. This book will elaborate on the affinities and divergences between art and psychoanalysis in relation to their particular objects and theories. It will focus on artists who have either



Art and Psychoanalysis

directly invoked psychoanalysis in their work or whose work is suggestive of a relation with or has been written about using psychoanalytic theory. It will take its main impetus from the theories of Freud, which, as Richard Wollheim states, are strictly speaking psychoanalysis proper.1 Although I shall look at some of Freud’s followers, such as Melanie Klein, and more recent psychoanalysts such as Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan, my choice of psychoanalysts and their ideas will be determined by their popularity in mainstream art discourse, my goal being to show how psychoanalysis has been and continues to be a productive thematic in contemporary art, as well as to introduce a range of psychoanalytic concepts to readers who may be vaguely aware of them. A subsidiary strand running throughout the book will argue that art, while linked to the perversions of fetishism and masochism, is essentially different from them in deliberately provoking ambiguity and uncertainty while the perversions seek to stabilise identity.2 Implicit in my narrative will be the importance of the destabilising force of the Freudian death drive to an ethics of art in which intersubjective relations between subjects and objects are reconfigured as fragmented, partial and provisional entities rather than art being on the side of the maintenance of the (illusory) authority of the ego. The book’s trajectory shall move progressively through stages of authority, destabilisation and healing, intermixtures of all three occurring throughout the book, with the emphasis being on the middle stage, as intrinsic to psychoanalytic thinking is the awareness and acknowledgement of the fact that we are not masters of our own house. Chapter 1 will address the dynamics of the dream-work and will focus on the complexity of translation from unconscious to conscious rather than on dream symbolism. This will be the most historical chapter, referring to nineteenth-century Symbolist painter Odilon Redon, whose work predates Freud but exemplifies the structural interplay between meaning and non-sense offered by the dream-work as a model of symbolic distortion. In this chapter, I will also look at how psychoanalytic ideas operate as readymade narratives that are used to elaborate psychic fantasies in the work of Surrealist Max Ernst in particular. While for Freud the dream-work operated on an individual idiosyncratic basis, artist Susan Hiller, whose work is productively critical of the Freudian legacy, explores the collective ritual of this process which testifies to the more social aspect of the phenomenon as a source of creative inspiration. The fact that we are not masters of our own house will be explored in Chapter 2, which focuses on the uncanny and the psychic disturbances that stem from the motif of the home as a site of protection and a source of repression. Over the course of her life’s work, Louise Bourgeois returned again and again to the theme of the house as the progenitor of fear and anxiety. The trope of Freud’s ‘familiar unfamiliar’, mapped onto the female body and the house, has also been explored in the work of Robert Gober, as well as Rachel Whiteread and Gregor Schneider.



Introduction



Anxiety is one of the earliest of human emotions, and we erect various defence mechanisms to ward it off. One such mechanism, the fetish object, defends against but paradoxically also incites more anxiety, and in Chapter 3 I shall attempt to find a way out of this double bind looking at work by artists in which the fetish object is transformed into a much more playful exchange of objects, using disguise and knowing humour. This will entail looking at the work of artist Hans Bellmer, which is often referred to with as misogynistic, the social nature of art as a fetish in commodity fetishism in the work of 1980s postmodern artists such as Jeff Koons, and then shifting to the critique of the masculine subject that underlies the concept of fetishism in both Freud and Marx by female artists using strategies of masquerade. The concept of narcissism is, according to Freud, key to the work of art. Chapter 4 will take the work of artist Mary Kelly both to explore and critique this concept, particularly in relation to the feminine. I will suggest that there is a particular form of feminine narcissism which centres on multiplicity and doubling rather than deathly repetition, proposing this form of masquerade as a challenge to Freudian ideas about female desire. I shall explore this potential and its pitfalls further in relation to the double-edged address of the work of artist Jemima Stehli. Chapter 5 will expand on the theme of narcissism, showing how it is linked to the ego’s structuring of the field of perspectival vision and how Jacques Lacan’s notion of the gaze can be used to unseat this visual mastery. The popularity of Lacan’s ideas in art discourse related to his emphasis on the ideological parameters of the psyche and its linguistic structure. His focus on the linguistic signifiers of desire and representation as a mediating system in which we always already partake was aligned with appropriation art in the 1980s and early 1990s. Artists such as Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Robert Longo, and Richard Prince, to name but a few, made artworks deploying images and texts from the media, but configuring them in critical montages that attempted to analyse their seductive pervasiveness. As a reaction to this type of art, in the 1990s there was a return to the body in art and more of an appreciation of a direct relation to visceral materials. A key exhibition is the 1993 Whitney exhibition ‘Abject Art: Desire and Repulsion in American Art’, which included artists such as Mike Kelley, Cindy Sherman, Yayoi Kusama, Robert Mapplethorpe, Kiki Smith, Louise Bourgeois and Andres Serrano. These artists explore bodily boundaries in terms of social taboo and transgression, and Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic ideas of abjection were key to the reception of this kind of work, as well as generating a renewed interest in the work of Bourgeois, whose work spans the twentieth century and is a good indication of how trends in critical theories such as psychoanalysis fall out of and come back into fashion. The concept of the abject explored in Chapter 6 forms a watershed in the book between the forms of narcissism addressed in Chapters 4 and 5 and what cultural critic Stuart Hall



Art and Psychoanalysis

called ‘black narcissus’ in Chapter 7. The black body was rendered abject, both invisible and relegated to the margins, and all too visible and considered disgusting by the white imaginary, therefore narcissism had a political value in the work of black artists in the 1990s. These four chapters, Chapters 4 and 5 on the formation and critique of narcissism, Chapter 6 on its deformation in abjection, and Chapter 7 on its reformation in the work of black artists, form a pattern that oscillates between, on the one hand positing the ego, and on the other hand shattering its co-ordinates, which prepares for the focus in Chapter 8 on repetition compulsion and the death drive. Here too there is a shift back in time from the 1990s to the 1970s and the work of post-minimalist sculptors Eva Hesse and Robert Smithson, the entropic and cyclical forcefields of whose artworks resonate tellingly in the present. In Chapter 9, the book returns from the 1970s to recent discussions on art and psychoanalysis in the 1990s which rescued Melanie Klein’s theories for contemporary art, focusing on sadistic aggression rather than the linguistic bent of Lacanian theory. Rather than mediation and representation, the pre-linguistic aggressions of Kleinian theories lead us towards the idea that art can be reparative and healing. However, even here, my argument that art is always bound up with some form of destabilisation continues, and the final two chapters, one on D.W. Winnicott’s transitional object, the other on Didier Anzieu’s concept of the ego skin, oscillate between the poles of healing and rupturing, my use of artists such as Marina Abramovi´c and Lygia Clark enabling the discussion of the destabilising force of the death drive to be seen in socially productive terms as affecting change. The final chapter on Anzieu speculates on the idea of art as both a restorative gesture and as an augmentation of trauma, with the latter being necessary to the former. Artist Louise Bourgeois says that there is no cure for the artist, that any therapeutic aspect of art-making is overridden by the repetition of traumatic experience it entails. Psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva says that the artist ‘is able to find a temporary harmony in his state of malaise’, and she sees art as ultimately cathartic.3 This may be the difference between an artist and a psychoanalyst, and in this book I ultimately argue that, while the working through of traumatic experience may well repeat pain, there is pleasure to be gained in the structured or formalised fragmentation of the ego, which serves culture by converting the sadistic impulses of the ego, whose defence mechanisms are domination and appropriation of the external world and whose actions tend towards war, into a masochistic ethics of responsibility and desire. In this I shall be departing somewhat from Freud, for whom the pleasurable pain of primary masochism is outweighed by the danger it holds for the psyche of internal destruction.4 However, the gist of my argument will be that the artist, rather than taking him- or herself as an object to be destroyed,5 finds a surrogate ‘object’ to



Introduction



channel the potentially dangerous defusion of the instincts involved in primary masochism so that the fragmentation they incur is experienced at a distance, although, paradoxically, an extremely intimate one. The ethics involved here is that the excess of destructiveness that seems to be inherent in human sexuality is dissipated via an internal relation to a surrogate self rather than projected outwards and inflicted on an external object in the exercise of ‘mastery or the will to power’.6 The formalisation of destruction in the art encounter allows us to repeat the painful pleasures of what theorist Leo Bersani calls an ‘ecstatically shattered ego’, which is a repetition of the originary ‘threat of stability and integrity of the self that human sexuality is’.7 Needless to say, this is very different to conservative trends in art that view it as a civilising form of transcendence over the human condition as well as to sadomasochistic practices, which, by contrast, organise the unbound energy of the ‘ecstatically shattered ego’ into a series of contractual relations, rather than allowing for the mobility and indeterminate sensuality of desire.

Chapter 1

Distortion and Disguise: The Dream-Work

Freud’s concept of the dream-work, as elaborated in his book The Interpretation of Dreams challenges commonsense notions of meaning in dreams.1 We like to think that the images in our dreams mean something in particular, that they tell us who we are, even predict our future. There are myriad books on this topic in any general bookstore. Interest in dream interpretation goes back to ancient times and, in some sense, Freud could be said to continue this tradition. However, Freud’s concept of the dream-work and the role it plays in relation to art is very different from the interpretation of dream symbolism per se. It has less to do with translating an image or scenario into words or symbolic meaning than it has to do with the dynamics of translation in itself. On the one hand, there are artists who, directly inspired by the content in The Interpretation of Dreams, used its imagery as readymade symbols to construct symbolic narratives through which they could engage their psychic fantasies and traumas – the Surrealists are clearly in this camp; on the other hand, Freud’s discovery of an untranslatable core to the dream-work around which its associational imagery revolves makes it difficult simply to interpret one element, an image, in terms of another, its reporting in words. Considering the dream machine as a dynamic interplay between images that correspond to one another in an associational, accumulative manner, liberates us from reducing images and image production to singular meaning. It also allows us to consider Surrealist imagery in more ambiguous terms rather than, for example, simply equating its symbols to the Oedipus Complex, a psychoanalytic narrative that greatly inspired the Surrealist Max Ernst. While Ernst’s paintings and prints are undoubtedly riddled with narratives of castration anxiety, reducing them to being about

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the Oedipus Complex and the artist’s troubled relationship with his father is to deny them their artistic autonomy. The importance to art of an approach to dream symbolism that might consider it in terms of a resistance to being translated into words can be seen in relation to more recent work such as Paula Rego’s paintings and drawings. Rego’s work is sometimes illustrational of fairytales, folktales, perhaps even dreams, but her strongest work has a latent eerie quality full of portent which transcends the illustrational. For example her painting The Policeman’s Daughter, 1987 – a cheesy Freudianism might say that of course the policeman’s boot being polished by the girl is a phallic object which signifies incestuous desire and/or penis envy. However, the image retains mystery in the face of such an approach. Rather than simply being an illustration of an incestuous desire for or envy of the father in which the boot is a stand-in for a missing object such as a penis, the image of the boot has its own structural integrity as a black painted shape that generates internal relationships between the different elements in the frame such as the perpendicular lines of the window and the diagonal line of the black cat. Rego’s painting, like others in this series, emits a psychic force, which on a conscious level one might attribute to forbidden desires, but the symbolic ambiguity of each element in the painting is multiplied by being juxtaposed with the other elements in it – the girl begins to look like a man, the boot is reminiscent of the position of the child in images of the Madonna and child, the action is both caressing and threatening. Nothing is definitive. Freud’s concept of the dream-work shows us that a constructed image or scene, let’s say, the dream-content, does not translate directly into words, as it is itself a translation of dream thoughts that not only operate without making conscious distinctions between words and things, but that also occur in a time and space that are inaccessible to the dreamer. Thereby the dream that we recount or draw is merely a trace of mental processes that have already lost some of their affective resonance in being translated into another system, i.e. from unconscious thought to a more conscious form of representation. Freud says, ‘A dream does not simply give expression to a thought, but represents the wish fulfilled as a hallucinatory experience.’2 This hallucinatory experience is a fabrication, as is an artwork. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the hallucinatory production of the dream-work is akin to the work of art as a process that bypasses the censorship of repression, not simply to allow for the satisfaction of a sexual drive as Freud implies, but in order to expand the range of our capacities for expression. Freud though, like many interpreters of art, wanted to be more definitive, so in parts of The Interpretation of Dreams he gives us reductive metaphoric equivalences for dream symbols, concluding that ‘It is highly probable that all complicated machinery and apparatuses occurring in dreams stand for the genitals (and as



Distortion and Disguise

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a rule male ones [1919]) – in describing which dream symbolism is as indefatigable as the “joke-work”.’3 This follows his elaboration of things that often appear as symbols for the penis in dreams – neckties, long, sharp weapons, umbrellas and tree-trunks – and things which he deems represent the uterus – boxes, cases, chests, cupboards and ovens. While some artists have used this symbolism to comic effect, for example Jake and Dinos Chapman’s Little Death Machine (Castrated), 1993, in which hammers and artificial penises are attached to a mechanical contraption whose workings are suspended in a parody of both the Surrealist poetics of the readymade and Freudian symbolism of sexual intercourse, this does not really get us very far in thinking about process and meaning in art. Fortunately Freud also counters this metaphoric literalism by emphasising the metonymic production of dream imagery in which certain elements are not meant to be interpreted as such but act as ‘determinatives’ to establish the meaning of some other element, as in Egyptian hieroglyphics.4 In other words, meaning emerges out of a play of differences between signs rather than being crudely derived from a predetermined list of symbols and signs. The making of meaning may court the latter, but is not reducible to it. Before going on to look at artists’ works in relation to the dream-work, let us look at its theoretical components which prevent the easy application of symbolic meaning to images such as Rego’s sexually charged tableaux and which open up a more expanded sense of the relationship between images and words. The dream-work is the name that Freud gives to the work which transforms the latent, i.e. unconscious, dream thoughts into the manifest ones, i.e. how the dream images appear, which in turn are distorted in the telling of the dream. One can already see here an analogy to a traditional model of art interpretation, which artist Susan Hiller critiques for repeating a Western separation between theory and practice, word and dream, where ‘[t]he artist’s production of work is, like the dream, an untheorised, unauthorised, almost unintelligent symptomatology whose meaning is unknown to the artist. Someone else must provide the key to the work.’5 However, Freud also problematises this approach. At first, Freud saw the work of interpretation simply as being a matter of decoding the manifest content to get at the latent content, but very soon he realised that there was a limit to the work of interpretation, which he called the navel of the dream, a core which remained unconscious and untranslatable. He figures this out via the three characteristics of the dream-work: the phenomena of displacement, condensation and the translation of words (ideatic elements) into images. Art can be loosely aligned to these processes. For example, in displacement, parts of the body, especially the lower regions, are displaced upwards. This type of body image is frequently found in the Surrealism of René Magritte, most notably his painting Rape, 1934, in which a female torso forms the features of a face, as well as in Robert Gober’s Slides of a Changing

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Painting, 1982–83, in which 80 images of male and female body parts and images of nature morph, creating bodily composites in which orifices and organs metamorphosise into one another. The second characteristic of the dream-work, condensation, also involves imagistic distortion in that two or three images may be condensed together to form a new composite image similar to the mythical figure of the centaur, half man, half horse. If dreams do represent the fulfilment of wishes, then it could be said that these types of image represent destructive fantasies and anxieties about the body, which for psychoanalysis are part and parcel of childhood, or what Freud refers to as infantile sexuality. The third characteristic of the dream-work, the transformation of thoughts into visual images, poses the greatest threat to translation. Freud states that there will be a certain clumsiness and unreliability in the exchange from the alphabetic script to the picture one, as well as there being the problem of words such as ‘because’, ‘however’ and prepositions which have no pictorial representation. While this difficulty is partly due to the position Freud takes up as a decoder of dreams who prioritises language, it does lead him to conclude that the dream-work is not simply a translation from latent to manifest, but that something new is produced in the transcription from one register to another. This is inspirational for thinking about art as being newly produced from the encounter between different registers of signification rather than simply being an illustrative translation of desires and feelings. Hiller’s research into the cultural implications of dream analysis in her writings, as well as her artwork, can usefully extend Freud’s approach into the field of art. She categorises artists’ dream images into three categories: ‘the illustrative or descriptive, which picture or illustrate dream imagery of a more or less conventional kind, the documentary or artefactual, which attempt to achieve a kind of accurate reportage; and the evocative, which are meant to trigger off an experience similar to a dream’.6 These modes of picturing give us insight about the place of dreams in specific historical eras. Both Freud and Hiller emphasise the legibility of dream images, but they have different approaches to the notion of interpretation, Freud emphasising the linguistic register, Hiller imaginative apprehension. In works such as Dream Mapping, 1974, and Belshazzar’s Feast, The Writing on Your Wall, 1983–84, Hiller, attempted to shift the Western modern sense of the dream as something private and individual to exploring the collective nature of dreaming and its relation to technology. For Dream Mapping, she invited ten participants to sleep outdoors for three days in a site in the country where there was an unusual occurrence of fairy rings. For a month prior to this, the participants had been asked to invent ways of notating their dreams in a notebook that Hiller had given them with a map of the dream site on the cover. This practice continued during the three-day event, the final stage of the piece being the making of three collective dream maps which took the individual diagrams from each day and superimposed them to explore



Distortion and Disguise

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the overlaps and differences between them. This work explores the proximity of dreaming to occult forces such as telepathy and is a challenge to the individualism of Freud’s approach. Belshazzar’s Feast, The Writing on Your Wall relates to dreaming in a more evocative way in that the installation attempts to induce dream or visionary experience via a cluster of monitors arranged in the shape of a campfire which show video footage of flames, alluding to the ritual of storytelling around an ancient hearth. The installation is also presented as a single monitor in a sitting-room, the place of hearth in the home having been taken over by television. The work was inspired by a newspaper article Hiller found recounting a story about people who had phoned the BBC complaining that they had seen ghostly images on their television after station closedown. Over the flame images, a soundtrack consisting of an authoritative voice interspersed with a child’s (Hiller’s son) recounting of a memory of seeing Rembrandt’s Belshazzar’s Feast, is combined with whispering, improvisational nonsense in Hiller’s own voice to invoke different mnemic registers that explore the interchange between image and word. The intention of the piece is that as viewers listen and gaze at the flames they begin to make visionary pictures out of the after-images they experience as a result of staring, ascribing meaningful narratives to the nebulous and suggestive. This is interesting to consider in the light of Freud’s dreamwork and the early history of psychoanalysis, when hypnosis and the occult were repressed in the emphasis on language and analysis. Belshazzar’s Feast can be seen as an oblique interrogation of this history which echoes the history of Western philosophy as a moving towards enlightenment from the darkness and superstition of medieval times. However, in pursuing enlightenment, the irony is that Freud finds opacity everywhere, given the indistinguishable nature of word and image in relation to unconscious processes of repression, displacement and association. While Freud’s emphasis on language would be taken to extremes in psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s influential reinterpretation of his ideas for the twentieth century, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s essay on Freud’s dream-work underscores the textual nature of the dreamwork, the dream-work as a form of visual writing. This aligns nicely with Hiller’s assertion that in relation to the images, artefacts and maps of dreams from other societies, ‘“drawing” might actually be better understood as “writing” in the sense that the ancient Greeks had only one word for what we divide into two ideas, pertaining separately to images and to words’.7 Approaching the dream-work or the artwork as ‘writing’ enables us to think of it as a form of production that plays with culturally predetermined or readymade aspects of meaning but combines them in ways that redirect the former to produce the poetic, or what René Magritte called the ‘sensational’. Contrary to popular readings of Magritte’s work being bound up with

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the trauma he experienced aged 13 of seeing his mother’s corpse after she had drowned, and a subsequent repressed sexuality, he describes the poetic dynamic of constructing a painting which remarkably echoes Freud’s description of condensation: The creation of new objects; the transformation of known objects; the alteration of certain objects’ substance – a wooden sky, for example; the use of words associated with images; the false labelling of an image; the realisation of ideas suggested by friends; the representation of certain day-dreaming visions – all these, in sum, were ways of forcing objects finally to become sensational.8 The artwork as dream-work can be considered as a poetic writing or mapping. Within such ‘writing’ there can be metaphoric allusions which threaten to make the image’s meaning transparent. However, this legibility is constantly being undermined by the mechanics of the dream-work, the wheels and cogs of whose spokes interlock and come apart again to unmoor meaning from its resting place, generating a metonymic displacement of signifiers in a potentially limitless chain of signification, which in psychoanalytic terminology is referred to as over-determination. Discussing the Symbolist artist Odilon Redon’s lithographic series Les Origines, art historian Penny Florence makes the point that the metonymic seriality at work in his titles, for example The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Moves Towards Infinity, 1882, which operates by replacing one thing – an eye – with another not naturally related thing – a balloon – echoes and interweaves with the visual condensation in the corresponding pictures in the series, where eyes appear in the centre of flowers and allusive spirals and coils generate a complex tissue of visual and verbal meaning.9 Florence’s argument is that while certain meanings, both visual and verbal, anchor us in relation to a picture, at the same time the force of the metonymic chain of equivalencies generated in the series unhinges us from this fixity and opens our perception to the dedifferentiated sense register of unconscious primary process, which loosens our attachment to sense. (Secondary process is more conscious and bound up with the differentiated sense register of vision, i.e. making clear-cut distinctions between things.) The dream-work operates as a processual machine, generating associations between images that act as ‘representatives’ of the primary sensational and mnemic traces from which consciousness derives, which is why dream imagery is often nonsensical. But there is also a sense in which this nonsense, rather than being a withdrawal from reality, is instead ‘an attempt at perceptual readjustment in order to allow pleasurable reconciliation of subjective truths with external fact’.10 This can be productively aligned with the dynamics of both Magritte’s and Rego’s tableaux in which images retain a resemblance to the everyday, but their strange combinatory relationships generate disruptive forces that are consciously registered without their mystery being unlocked.



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The Surrealists were more literal-minded, using psychoanalysis as a lexicon that provides access to the codes and signifiers of the psyche as long as one is versed in its narratives. As Hiller says, Surrealist painting tended to employ a ‘rebus-like homage to Freud’s equation of dream imagery with wordplay’.11 Ernst for one employed a method of composition inspired by Freud’s theory of dream formation, his painting Pietà or Revolution by Night, 1923, using one of Freud’s case histories, ‘the Wolf Man’, as one of its sources. Freud named this patient the Wolf Man because of the dream that brought him to Freud, in which he saw six or seven white wolves sitting on a tree. Although Freud’s attribution of this dream to his patient’s Oedipal conflict and to a fantasy of the primal scene, i.e. parental copulation, has since become a controversial interpretation, the point I am dealing with here is that Freud’s narrative provided a visual motif for Ernst. As Malcolm Gee says, ‘the congruities between the history of the Wolf Man and the “dream thoughts” of Ernst’s Pietà are such that, whether or not Ernst’s childhood memories were true in substance, his elaboration of both painting and texts was dependent on the argument of Freud’s essay.’12 The Oedipus conflict has to do with the boy child’s desire for the father, which is resolved by the castration complex, which results in the boy taking the father as a rival rather than a love object per se. Ernst’s Pietà plays out a scenario of desire and fear in relation to a father/son dynamic in which the imagined father-figure is both threatening and wounded, is both feared and desired by the subservient, though powerful because youthful, younger man/son. Ernst often referred to his paintings as being engaged in his difficult relationship to his father, but the incorporation of Freudian elements gives this painting an impersonal resonance that opens its meaning to other people, not just readers of Freud. The rationale for this is of interest. In an episode of the TV series Imagine on the theme of art and play, Adam Phillips, a contemporary psychoanalyst, suggested that the artist socialises personal trauma in the artwork, that artists transform something from childhood into a form other people know something about.13 The artwork can be seen as a working through of trauma that other people recognise as having a more universal meaning. But in combining these different psychological registers, Ernst is also creating a mysterious image, enticing recognition but also confounding it. In this sense, the more literalist approach to the processes of the dream-work and the more poetic one I described earlier have something in common – in both the dream-work operates as a model for making meaning in terms of structural rather than purely symbolic processes. While for Ernst Freud’s ideas act as a kind of readymade, putting them to work in the service of making art entails the incorporation and gathering of repressed fragments of memories and wishes, these fragments taking on new meaning in the strange juxtapositions that are created in the artwork as a displaced, consciously articulated dream screen. Such a process might work ‘towards establishing a relation between the perceiving subject and reality which,

1. Max Ernst, Pietà or Revolution by Night, 1923.



Distortion and Disguise

17

as in the dream, is fluid and susceptible to alteration’.14 In other words, the ambivalence and complexity of relationships can be explored without the censorship they might warrant in a purely conscious register. According to Derrida, Freud paid excessive attention to content and was insufficiently concerned with relations, locations, processes and difference. Freud was a man of his time, and it is his uncertainties about his own discoveries and hypotheses that are of interest in contemporary aesthetics. Freud’s initial hypothesis that the work of interpretation could proceed by translating the manifest dream thoughts into the latent ones is continually being undermined in his text, and it is this doubt and oscillation that we find of interest today. In fact, even in Surrealist appropriations of Freud, the key interest was in the internal disturbance of the mind and in how this energy could be tapped to fracture the unity of the self. André Breton said that psychoanalytic texts deliver ‘a method […] whose present aims I consider nothing less than the expulsion of man from himself’.15 For Breton, the transformations that the unconscious wish undergoes in an effort to bypass the censor, i.e. the displacements, condensations and other poetic operations described by Freud, are necessary to the creation of genuinely Surrealist images. For Surrealists such as Ernst, the technique of collage itself was viewed as a material analogy to the processes of displacement and condensation of the dream-work, collage being seen as a deviant pictorial language that emulated the temporality of dreams and fantasies wherein ‘past, present, and future are strung together on the thread of a wish that runs through them’.16 This notion might be hard to appreciate in our digital age in which images are seamlessly juxtaposed as if in a continuous present tense in which their potential strangeness is flattened out by a seductive allure that ultimately tries to sell us things. This is the case in advertising, but also in MTV video, in which random and associative images are projected on the scale of collective dreamscapes that appear as if they belong to no one, but are addressed to a subconscious stratum of consumer desire rather than stemming from the unconscious dynamism of the interrelationships between word, image and sensation. In our digital world, the dream-work as productive of metonymic chains that unite body and mind at a pre-syntactic level becomes a kind of anachronism, the collage aesthetic, an outmoded entity, but for this very reason it can be used as a strategy to disrupt the flow of simulated dreamscapes that populate our cultural imaginary. Something of this strategy occurs in the work of contemporary artist John Stezaker whose collages deploy images, postcards and film stills mainly culled from the 1930s and 1940s, the time of Surrealism, which he cuts into and combines with other images to produce unsettling assemblages that disrupt the integrity of the image. Stezaker says that he wants his work to operate in reverse of the early Surrealists: ‘I wanted to make conscious,

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to save the viewer from unconsciousness rather than release the viewer to it.’17 Rather than passively accept the dream screens that are projected outside us on a daily basis in cinema, advertising and now the internet, Stezaker, similar to Magritte in his time and context, wants to effect a recuperation of images, to create a ‘moment of revelation within the universal blindness that the consumption of images has become: a glimmer of consciousness within the unconsciousness of image reception’.18 Interestingly, Stezaker’s collage Negotiable Space 1, 1978, a black and white film still of an office that could be a psychiatrist’s den – the portrait on the office wall is of Freud – is overlaid by a colour poster of a train coming into the foreground as if in a tongue-in-cheek reference to Magritte.19 This kind of jokiness is later substituted for a more serious and deliberate engagement with Surrealism in the Masks series, in which Stezaker assembles and fragments two different images to create a new image that disrupts our ease of consumption. For example, in Mask XXXV, 2007, a postcard of a cavern by the sea is collaged over a female star’s face, the opening of the cavern acting both as a cover of and an opening beyond her face that is reminiscent of the opacity and translucency in some of Magritte’s paintings. The work seethes with ambiguity and an eroticised, sublated violence that shatters the stability of the iconic image. The obsolescent quality of collage makes it a valuable strategy for Stezaker, as it slows down the fast-paced fluidity of image circulation in the media. The hope is that this obsolescent, but thoroughly material, technique might create a rupture in the smooth fluidity of our prosthetic dreaming. His aesthetic can be aligned with ideas in the 1970s that perceived the cinema screen as a dream screen that encourages the viewer to regress into a hypnoid state and the ‘work’ of cinema in Jean-Luc Godard’s sense as being to awaken us from this dream by using disjunctive strategies in filmmaking. In Stezaker’s series Tabula Rasa, begun in 1978 and returned to over the decades, Stezaker cuts out a rectangle from photographic film stills, a shape which he leaves blank. These cut-out spaces both animate the remaining content of the image, making it pulsate with latent, yet unfathomable, meaning, and act as blanked-out dream screens that frustrate our desire to situate the image in a narrative, but also seem to resonate with the possibility of projecting an image beyond the manifest one. If the operations of the dream-work led Freud to the untranslatable navel of the dream, then it could be said that Stezaker’s operations of cutting into and removing parts from images parodically reverses this process, his process of subtraction almost doing violence to the image so that it can be liberated from its obsolescence and gain a new significance. Stezaker’s work shows that, while there is nothing that hasn’t been brought to the cold light of day, the materiality of collage can return the rupturing force of unconscious processes to the mediatised sleep of dreams.

2. John Stezaker, Mask XXXV, 2007.

Chapter 2

Uncanny Eruptions

Uncanny art would be art that frightens, because it somehow conveys something familiar that has been deeply repressed. Yet conveying uncanniness might be seen somewhat differently, for example in the way that Robert Graves and other poets have theorized the true function of poetry to be the arousing of ancient feelings of awe and strangeness.1 While the Surrealists mined the Freudian text to evoke an unconscious that could be recognised in symbols and techniques, Freud’s contemporary legacy is more archival than literal. Texts that were not originally written about art at all have erupted into contemporary art discourse with as much temporal dislocation as the Freudian concept of the uncanny itself – Freud’s essay of the same name, written in 1919, erupting with particular force into the art world in the 1990s. The concept of the uncanny formed part of Freud’s theory of repression and had to do with how elements from the past erupt in the present, imbuing the latter with memory traces that render it disorienting. It is the anxiety that ensues from this disorientation that gives rise to the experience of the uncanny rather than things in themselves, although similarly to Freud’s writing on the dream-work, he also gives accounts of actual objects that could be said to trigger uncanny sensations. That these sensations are tinged with dread and horror links the uncanny to an aesthetics of the ugly as opposed to the emphasis on the beautiful in traditional aesthetics. As Freud states in his essay, the uncanny has to do with what is ‘gloomy, dismal…ghastly’, but this ghastliness or ugliness is not simply to do with repulsive appearances, but with the fact that the uncanny experience erupts into being like an object that is in the wrong place, much as anthropologist Mary Douglas defines dirt as being matter out of place.2



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Uncanny sensations are triggered in the present by the creepy evocation of a past that the subject has repressed, a past that should have been over and done with, but which comes back to haunt the subject, making time and space seem out of joint. The ambivalent nature of the uncanny can be seen in the tripartite linguistic play that Freud delineates in his essay. The uncanny is translated in German as unheimlich, unhomely, which is the opposite of heimlich, often translated as homely. Freud traces the etymology of the word heimlich using various dictionaries to show how unheimlich is embedded in its seeming opposite, so much so that ‘[h]eimlich …becomes increasingly ambivalent, until it finally merges with its antonym, unheimlich. The uncanny (das Unheimliche, “the unhomely”) is in some way a species of the familiar (das Heimliche, “the homely”)’.3 He begins by delineating the meaning of the term heimlich as that which is familiar, homely, cosy, intimate, ‘arousing a pleasant feeling of quiet contentment, etc., of comfortable repose and secure protection, like the enclosed, comfortable house’.4 But then what is cosy and intimate, what is familiar and securely tucked away, is also concealed from the outside, ‘removed from the eyes of strangers, hidden, secret’.5 By a further extension, heimlich, used in conjunction with an act of concealment, i.e. what is hidden and secret, is also threatening, fearful, occult, in other words unheimlich. Unheimlich then is the name for everything that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light, bringing anxiety in its train. Freud’s investigation into the kinds of object that might trigger uncanny sensations in the landscape of the early twentieth century occurs at a time when industrial technologies from photography to war were posing a threat to man’s security within the four walls of his house. Photography and cinema were reproducing life, as it were, and encroaching industrialisation and mechanical warfare were further aligning man to the machine. Almost as a reaction to these modern incursions into the sanctity of man’s identity, the actual objects and experiences that Freud enumerates as being capable of evoking uncanny sensations are derived from romantic gothic literature, whose tropes litter and haunt this modern technological landscape. These are the figure of the double, which Freud borrows from his colleague Otto Rank’s book The Double (1914); the evil eye and the dimension of the gaze as a source of magical power; and dismembered limbs, which, as well as connecting to the idea of the Romantic fragment, relate to the severing of connections between body parts that was occurring at this time in industry as well as in mechanical warfare. It is almost as if in the face of the devastation wrought by enlightenment technologies there is an eruption of magical, older, forms of thinking that Freud, the enlightened scientist, deems characteristic of primitive states of being such as childhood which Western civilisation and adults in general should have surmounted. Freud subscribed to this Enlightenment view and the goal of his exploration of the unconscious

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was to bring this ‘dark continent’ to light. The colonial motif is not accidental. For Freud, the belief that natural objects have desires and intentions is characteristic not only of the omnipotence of magical thinking in childhood, but also the animism in primitive societies. The irony is that modern progress would give rise to an exacerbation of spectral traces, as its dark side emerged. Another ‘dark continent’ that Freud also wanted to bring to light and which relates to the more object-oriented side of the uncanny is female sexuality. Freud maps the uncanny onto the maternal body, specifically the female genitalia, which for the phallocentric and patriarchal Freud is the ultimate familiar object that should remain hidden and which if sighted becomes a major source of anxiety. Of course this anxiety is bound up with castration anxiety, whereby the little boy, on seeing that the mother with whom he has initially identified does not have a penis, is fearful of losing his member. The absence of the mother’s penis is threatening to the little boy, who needs to believe in a phallic mother for his sense of his own body to remain intact. One might laugh at the literalness of Freud’s example here, but it does give us more of a clue about what it is that more generally produces uncanny anxiety in the subject, i.e. a perceived threat to our fantasy of an intact self-identity, and although Freud’s account is phallocentric we are all subject to this anxiety when we encounter a loss of orientation in the world. In the case of castration anxiety, the fear of losing one’s position in the world is so great that it gets projected onto the female body, which is used as a guarantor of identity, a body that houses the safety of the individual, the private dwelling place safe from threat, the home. However, sticking with the Freudian story for a moment, the mother’s perceived castration signifies that the safety of the home is not guaranteed and in fact may be a site of imminent danger, an idea that is extended to the house as a stand-in for the maternal body. The motif of the house where danger lurks abounds in horror films, one classic example being the house in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which hides the mummified corpse of Norman Bates’s mother, onto which Bates projects the motivation and blame for his murderous crimes. Edward Hopper’s painting House by the Railroad not only depicts an eerie house similar to the Bates homestead, but renders it in a spatially skewed manner. According to Anthony Vidler in The Architectural Uncanny, a book which was very influential on artists in the 1990s, claustrophobia or agoraphobia, phobias which increased at the turn of the twentieth century, are derived from anxieties produced by the spatial configurations of urban development at that time. Transferring Freud’s projection of the uncanny anxiety onto the maternal body to an anxiety about the uncertainty of the modern world, Vidler describes how the private uncanny becomes public in the face of the unknowable frightening expansion of



Uncanny Eruptions 23

urban spaces of modern cities, giving rise to phobias associated with spatial fear. While the uncanny itself is no more a property of space than it is a property of objects, the expansion of urban space created external phantasmagoria such as buildings that pressed down on the subject and vast derelict areas that frightened him/her. Like the folds of a Moebius strip, fear of the outside engendered retreat into the home, but home had become an equally disturbed space that generated nostalgia for a sense of belonging. ‘The uncanny is not a property of space but an aesthetic dimension, a representation of a mental state of projection that precisely elides the boundaries of the real and the unreal in order to provoke a disturbing ambiguity, a slippage between waking and dreaming.’6 On a more private scale, the French artist Louise Bourgeois used the motif of the house continually in her work, speaking passionately about the disturbing familial relationships that structured her own personal psychic life, such as her father’s affair with her English tutor and the death of her mother in 1932 when Bourgeois was 20. However, while Bourgeois’s statements show a keen awareness of Freud’s ideas, as well as the ideas of his follower Melanie Klein (see Chapter 9), the narration of her personal life reading almost like a case history, one has to be careful not to take her explications of her work for granted. Bourgeois herself was ambivalent about psychoanalysis, saying that for the artist there is no cure. While artists like Bourgeois and, as we saw in the previous chapter, Max Ernst make statements that impose a psychic narrative on their work, these case histories have to be taken as semi-fictional in the sense that all case histories are a construction after the fact and are themselves a working through of fantasies and desires in a literary rather than a visual medium. It is crucial to resist as much as possible the tendency in our culture to latch onto words as having the power to explain art. I see Bourgeois’s statements and her work as different instances of working through childhood trauma, the artwork being fantastical elaborations of psychic processes that result in objects and scenarios that are wonderfully in excess of her autobiography, although they could be said to mine it for inspiration. The series of drawings and paintings Femme Maison, 1947, condense the house and the female body much as Freud does in ‘The Uncanny’, but in Bourgeois’s renditions the house is both a mask and a source of emergence, a theme Bourgeois continually returned to in her work, most notably in the 1994 marble sculpture of the same name, which shows a prostrate female body who could be either emerging from her house-head or trying to enter it. The claustrophobic anxiety related to the hidden and secret that characterises the uncanny sensibility is nowhere more apparent than in No Exit, 1989, a monumental wooden staircase surrounded by protective metal screens and guarded by two wooden ball-like objects, the whole piece being dramatically lit to cast shadows that define a skewed sense of space, a murky space of uncanny entrapment,

3. Louise Bourgeois, No Exit, 1989.



Uncanny Eruptions 25

the stairs leading to and coming from nowhere. While commentators often refer to the phallic nature of this construction, the reductive literalism of this imposition of meaning onto the piece fails to account for the fact that there is an actual hidden layer to this work. Behind the stairs, hidden from view, is a door which gives way to the inner recesses of the staircase in which two metal hands hold a rubber heart-shaped object. Bourgeois here exemplifies the oscillation between symbolism and materiality that we looked at in relation to the dreamwork, where unconscious processes such as condensation and displacement attract different material ‘representatives’ to create overlapping vectors of meaning that exceed the binary dualism of phallic and/or feminine. Articulated Lair, 1986, consists of a series of black and white large-scale metal shutters which are arranged in a fan-like construction against which rubber limb-like forms droop, suspended at intervals in the space. The motif of the lair for Bourgeois is a refuge and offers the possibility of escape, a back-door exit through which one can avoid being trapped. These themes of entrapment and escape are expanded in her Cell series in which fragmented body forms, both solid and entropic, are placed in psychically charged scenarios behind doors and screens that lean against one another to form makeshift rooms, the gaps and hinges between the screens allowing viewers to catch only glimpses of the interior. Complete access being denied, the already fragmented forms are further fractured by the viewer’s partial perspective, a fracturing that is often repeated and echoed in the sometimes mirrored forms contained in the cell spaces, thereby increasing the loss of one’s perspectival bearing in relation to them. In relation to Cell (Glass Spheres and Hands), 1990–93, which contains mirrored spheres and marble casts of hands, Bourgeois said the fragmentation of the space is to replicate the confusion the child feels in relation to its role in the family. Bourgeois’s work gives form to this confusion without eradicating the sense of ambivalence between protection and exposure, reflection and obscurity, light and dark that characterises the child’s chaotic universe. The uncanny as the resurfacing of traces of the past that have lain buried can be seen in Rachel Whiteread’s spatial experiments, in which she uses a direct-casting technique that materially echoes the embeddedness of the unhomely in the homely in the sense that her objects bear the traces of the original objects and spaces from which they were moulded. While Bruce Nauman used this technique in the 1960s, Whiteread reinvents it for the 1990s as being imbued with a more macabre sense of narrative. Most obviously in House, 1993, where Whiteread cast a Victorian terraced house in concrete, the result being a disorienting inside-out world where an inverted interior in which recesses protrude becomes the outer face of the building, creating a poignant monument to loss and decay and ultimately death. House was destroyed by Hackney Council three months after it was built to make way for a communal park. The uncanny sensibility of the work derived from its (temporary)

4. Rachel Whiteread, House, 1993.



Uncanny Eruptions 27

preservation of the past in concrete, the opacity of the material creating inverted windows which, in refusing to operate as limpid eyes into a well-lit interior, allude to the crypt-like nature of being buried alive in the gothic stories of Edgar Allan Poe. House does not return our gaze but confronts it with the muteness of lives lost forever. Ghost, 1990, a plaster cast of a living-room, is more subtle in its preservation of the past, but nonetheless the faint traces and stains of what was once inhabited by the living remind us eerily of our mortality, the inverted fireplace alluding to the funereal, its non-responsive surface seeming to look back at us from a time past. Another artist whose work can be considered in relation to the uncanny is Gregor Schneider, whose Haus Ur, a rendering of the suburban house that was his childhood home in Rheydt, Germany, has been continually reconfigured and duplicated since 1985. The house is eerily bizarre in that Schneider has built rooms within rooms that replicate other rooms in the house, making the experience of navigating one’s way through its cavernous maze seem almost like a 3D version of a Poe tale. A reconstruction of it, called Dead Haus Ur, was presented in the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2001. Schneider’s Artangel project commission, Die Familie Schneider, which he presented in London in 2004, used two adjacent houses whose rooms replicated each other, so that visitors went through the same encounter twice, going in through one house and exiting through the other. Both houses were peopled with family-member doubles in disturbing poses. The family members that form Schneider’s Oedipal ‘theatre’ are called Hannelore Reuen, N. Schmidt, and ‘the son’. The work, in exhibiting naked bodies in compromising positions, created a lot of controversy, some of which might also have stemmed from the uncanny frisson triggered by human doubles that unsettle the boundary between the living and the dead, the animate and the inanimate.7 Paradoxically, though, the uncanny also relates to the new as well as to the old, the past. Freud begins his exploration of the uncanny by reviewing Wilhelm Jentsch’s 1906 essay ‘On the Psychology of the Unconscious’, in which Jentsch argues that the uncanny effect is aroused by the new and the unfamiliar. Initially rejecting Jentsch’s emphasis on newness, Freud insists that the uncanny effect is produced by the old and the familiar, to which we have become alienated through repression. However, the return of the old and familiar in ghost-like traces and apparitions equally casts our present assumptions into doubt, equally giving rise to ‘intellectual uncertainty’, which Jentsch links to the new and unfamiliar phenomena which were proliferating in modern urban spaces. For Jentsch, mannequins, waxworks and automata of all kinds were the new and unfamiliar which signified the modern, but one could say that the simulated liveness of, for example, the waxwork blurred the boundary between animate/ inanimate, the living and the dead in the same way as the older beliefs in ghosts and haunting.

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This connection between the old and the new, the new leading back to the old, is developed by Laura Mulvey as constituting a technological uncanny in which an irrational belief in the liveness of technological simulations projected superhuman powers onto them. As Mulvey says, it was as if ‘the intrinsic ghostliness of the black-and-white photograph elided with the sense that the machine might be able to perceive a presence invisible to the human eye’.8 So, while on the one hand the landscape of the uncanny is littered with ghosts and memory traces from the past, on the other hand it is peopled by mechanical simulations of the human in wax museums and in photographs. Mechanical photography preserved ‘a moment of life stopped and then held in perpetuity’.9 While the photograph itself is inanimate, it presents what was once animate. In this it is akin to objects such as dolls and automata. Dolls and mannequins abound in Surrealist art. Hans Bellmer’s transmogrifications of a life-size doll in his photographic series Poupée, which appeared in a 1934 edition of the Surrealist journal Minotaur entitled Doll: Variations on the montage of an articulated minor use this motif as a projection screen of anxiety. The female doll is dismembered and reassembled in contorted poses which are said to allude to Bellmer’s repressed sado-masochistic desires. Bellmer’s biography has been used to ‘narrativise’ the relation to death and loss in these fantasy constructions, an approach to his work which tends, I think, to reduce the inventiveness of Bellmer’s solution to his fears. Around the time of making the life-size doll, a number of autobiographical factors seemed to coalesce, but I want to emphasise Bellmer’s intention to create ‘new desires’ rather than simply situating his creation as a substitute object. It is the case that his wife was diagnosed with tubercolosis, which was later fatal, and a series of three events occurred in his personal life: the reappearance in his family of a beautiful teenage cousin, Ursula Naguschewski; his attendance at a performance of Jacques Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann, in which the protagonist falls tragically in love with the lifelike automaton Olympia; and a shipment from his mother of a box of old toys which had belonged to him as a boy. Overwhelmed with nostalgia, impossible longing and fear of death, Bellmer felt the need ‘to construct an artificial girl with anatomical possibilities…capable of re-creating the heights of passion even to inventing new desires’.10 The images of the dolls’ fragmented body parts articulated in poses that are sadistic and creepy, as well as being projection screens for the anxiety induced by the real-life threats to his masculinity, also threaten that masculinity in the sense that their uncanny gazes, while simulating the human, disarticulate the integrity of the human form. The Poupée series equally acts as a signifier of the cultural unease that was operating in 1930s Europe around the burgeoning of Nazism – Bellmer fled Germany for France after the Nazis declared his work degenerate, and it is thought that he initiated the project as a dig against the Nazi cult of the perfect body.



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But Offenbach’s opera based on The Tales of Hoffman captivated him, and it is here that we find a more literal relation to Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’, in which he interpreted Hoffman’s tale of ‘The Sandman’ in which a mother tells her son, Nathaniel, that the Sandman will come at night and steal his eyes while he is sleeping, in terms of castration anxiety. The boy associates the Sandman with Coppelius the lawyer, who visits his father at night, and he fantasises that this man is trying to steal his eyes. As an adult student, Nathaniel is revisited by these nightmares on meeting the optician Coppola, from whom he buys a pocket spy-glass that he uses to spy on Professor Spalanzani in the house opposite, falling in love with his ‘daughter’ Olympia, who is actually a clockwork doll. The story has many twists, but the gist of Freud’s interpretation is that the source of Nathaniel’s madness is his fear of

5. Hans Bellmer, La Poupée, 1935.

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castration, triggered by the appearance at the end of the story of the father-figure doubles that litter the tale. Nathaniel falls to his death on spying Coppola/Coppelius from the top of a tower. Jentsch, and more recently Mulvey, place emphasis on the object of Nathaniel’s desires, the doll Olympia, who inhabits the land between the living and the dead and acts as a projection screen for Nathaniel’s repressed sexual desires. As Mulvey says, ‘Olympia is the perfect fetish object. Her wooden, inanimate body is not “wounded”, and she acts as a screen for Nathaniel, reflecting directly back to him his own unconscious fantasies, enabling the repression of his fears.’11 An artist who both mines this sense of the uncanny and comments on it is Charles Ray, who reinvents the Surrealist fascination with the mannequin for a contemporary context. While Bellmer’s dolls are grotesque and exude a discomforting intensity, Surrealists such as Ernst knowingly played with the mannequin as an uncanny double, the lobby of the infamous Surrealist exhibition of 1938 designed by Marcel Duchamp being filled with these ‘objects’ dressed by the various artists. Ray continues in this more knowing playful mode, presenting the female mannequin as a marker of what can only be a pastiche of castration anxiety, deliberately placing himself in the position of looking up at these larger-than-life paeans to commodified femininity, a position that also alludes to the boy child’s looking up the mother’s skirt in Freud’s story of fetishism, which we shall look at in more detail in the next chapter. Ray’s playfulness is tongue-in-cheek, his self-portrait, No, 1992, posing questions about the representation of identity, the work being a photograph of a wax model of the artist, thereby replicating his image in a double move that triggers the ‘intellectual uncertainty’ mentioned by Jentsch. Oh Charlie Charlie Charlie, 1992, features a group of mannequin doubles of the artist displayed in sexually compromised positions whose interlocked exchange of bodily surfaces echoes the ubiquity of contemporary technologies of simulation. Whereas the romantic Surrealists can maintain notions of self and other in which the double threatens the self in a hysterical cat-and-mouse duel, in contemporary society the commoditisation of identity robs these romantic tropes of their proximity to death, promoting instead the immortality of the self. As Freud says in ‘The Uncanny’, once primitive beliefs are surmounted, the double shifts from having been an assurance of immortality to becoming the uncanny harbinger of death. Our mediatised culture tends to promote the former infantile fantasies while foreclosing on their death-tinged elements. In Oh Charlie Charlie Charlie, the uncanny double becomes a sign of immortality in which the self endlessly replicates itself. Dolls also feature in the work of Tony Oursler, whose video projections onto simply fabricated dolls straddle both the notion of ghostly haunting and the animation of automata. Oursler’s dolls are crudely sewn and of varying scale. The video projections onto their blank



Uncanny Eruptions 31

faces consist of talking heads that spew out the garbage and detritus of our technological mediatised culture of soap operas and advertisements, all of which become appropriated into these characters’ nightmarish schizoid monologues. Oursler is interested in multiple personality disorder, but this is of less importance to the sense of the uncanny in his work than the threat posed to singular identity by a media technology that generates fragmented demotic selves. Confronted with one of Oursler’s machinic dolls, it is hard not to feel contaminated by its psychotic mediatised narrative. One of Freud’s circle, the psychoanalyst Victor Tausk, wrote a paper in 1919 called ‘The Influencing Machine’ in which he discussed the phenomenon of patients feeling that they were controlled by a machine resembling a body but made of mechanical parts. Again we see here a linking of the new and the old in this fantasy of spectral haunting, new technology bringing magical beliefs in its train. This was one of the many references that inspired Oursler’s Artangel commission The Influence Machine, 2000, an outdoor son-et-lumière spectacle in London’s Soho Square and New York’s Madison Square Park, where he staged projected phantasmagoria consisting of smoke, lights, mirrors and his signature projections of disembodied faces in the park and on the surrounding buildings. These talking heads spouted scripted narratives which addressed different kinds of haunting from the internet to psychic mediums, the work itself combining anxieties about urban space, media technology and disembodiment. According to artist Mike Kelley, whose fascination with Freud and especially the concept of the uncanny resulted in his curation of the exhibition ‘The Uncanny’ in 1993 in Sonsbeek, Arnhem, these signs of psychic anxiety are generative of new sculptural conditions. Kelley’s exhibition was a collection of images and sculptural figures and figurines which belong to the classes of humanoid objects such as wax dolls, mannequins, stuffed dolls, religious statuary and which act as doubles of the human body. It also included realist sculpture by artists such as Duane Hanson as well as photographs of Cindy Sherman’s sex dolls and Hans Bellmer’s Poupée. Kelley’s catalogue essay, ‘Playing With Dead Things’, is a cogent argument for figurative sculpture as the return of the repressed in an art world which had banished the figure in favour of concepts, and claims that the return of these uncanny doubles acts both as a compensation for the lost narcissism of childhood, but also as a reminder of the mortality bound up with human existence. Ultimately for Kelley, combining aspects of Freud and the British object-relations psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, whose theories we shall look at more closely in Chapter 10, the uncanny is the sensation of a frisson of death in the mind of the living, triggered by human doubles that unsettle the boundary between the living and the dead. We can all perhaps identify with having to do a double-take when confronted with the wax figures in Madame Tussauds; their likenesses to people whose images we have only seen

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on television is, we say, uncanny, but this also raises the point Ray was alluding to about how mimesis circulates in a mediatised society where one’s likeness potentially proliferates beyond one’s control in networked, commoditised, communication channels. As Kelley writes, psychic doubling is an assurance against the destruction of the ego. But when this infantile stage is left behind, the double takes on a different aspect. It changes from an assurance of immortality to a sign of egolessness – death. […] The uncanny is the uncomfortable regression to a time when the ego was not yet sharply differentiated from the external world and from other persons. When something happens to us in the ‘real’ world that seems to support our old, discarded psychic world we get a feeling of the uncanny. The uncanny is an anxiety for that which recurs, and it is symptomatic of a psychology based on the compulsion to repeat.12 When Kelley restaged this exhibition 11 years on in 2004 at Liverpool’s Tate, he added his own personal collections – his Harems – which consist of rocks, comics and pornography, the artist extending the reach of the uncanny by exemplifying the repetition compulsion endemic to its more death-like aspects. In other words, we collect things as a protection against death and loss, but the irony is that the impulse generates an even more intensive fear of the very thing that it attempts to ward off. Interestingly, John Stezaker, whose work I looked at in the previous chapter, is also a collector of outmoded images – postcards, posters and photographs – saying that whenever he comes across an image that fascinates him, he gets ‘a strange sensation of its aliveness, and then of an irrational fear that something will prevent me from keeping it […] I think of the collection as the “afterlife” of the images; there is a deathly aspect to all collections.’13 It is interesting to consider the deathly aspect of collections in relation to photography, given that most people have or had photography collections, which seemed to have a ‘sanctity’ that current online accumulations of photographs on social networking sites do not.14 In his infamous book on photography, Camera Lucida, confronting a photograph of assassin Lewis Payne alive before execution in the knowledge of his eventual death, Roland Barthes looks into the eyes of a dead man, and it is this which generates for him the uncanny frisson between the dead and the living. Payne, now dead, was once alive in front of the camera lens, his presence recorded by light rays that preserve his living death. For Laura Mulvey, this indexical nature of photography, i.e. the physical connection between the image depicted, the trace, and its mode of inscription, that the object represented once stood in front of the lens, is synonymous with the uncanny. As opposed to the uncanny realism of the mechanical photograph, digital photography presents things that may never have stood in front of the lens, but are grafted and manipulated creating special-effects which do not relate to



Uncanny Eruptions 33

the real in the indexical manner of proximity akin to the uncanny. But perhaps the uncanny returns in the digital era, both in the obsolescent images removed from everyday channels of legibility in John Stezaker’s work and conversely in contemporary staged photography such as the work of Jeff Wall. Wall’s images are produced using a combination of photography and the digital, which create moments of arrest within the seamless tableaux that has the potential to generate the ‘intellectual uncertainty’ that unsettles our sense of whether something is real or fictional, animate or inanimate, even dead or alive. One could describe numerous photographs such as Milk, 1984, in which Wall presents a scene in which a fluid gesture, here the splash of milk bursting from the punctured milk cartoon being held by a seated man, is solidified by ‘the glassed-in and relatively “dry” character of the institution of photography’, the animate rendered inanimate, but not quite.15 However, the photograph that stands out for me is Dead Troops Talk (a vision after an ambush of a Red Army Patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986). The composite arrangement of dead soldiers in the flat landscape evokes the disruptive techniques of collage in a medium, digital montage, which forecloses on rupture in favour of seamlessness. The soldiers are posed as if perched on the brink between life and death. Using special-effects so that they sit upright with guts spilling out and limbs, including a head, half blown to pieces, their static poses paradoxically suggest animation and life, the whole image creating a sense of disorientation stemming in part from the uncertainty about how the image was produced. Wall’s strange mix of photography and digital manipulation can, according to Mulvey, be thought of as a technological uncanny, i.e. ‘a sense of uncertainty when confronted by a phenomenon that can actually be easily explained by the use of a new and unfamiliar technology’.16 So, even in an era of Western global capitalism and digital media where it would seem that everything has come to light, the uncanny still returns ‘as a middle space of equivocation between belief and knowledge, fantasy and technology’ that hinges on the relation between the animate and the inanimate, the living and the dead.17

Chapter 3

Refashioning Fetishism and Masquerade

Fetishism’s ubiquity in contemporary popular culture almost drains it of psychoanalytic significance, wherein it is more than just an attraction to shiny fashion items such as PVC and bondage paraphernalia like the leather corsets Jean-Paul Gautier designed for the pop star Madonna. There are generally speaking three types of fetishism: anthropological fetishism, commodity fetishism and the psychoanalytic concept of sexual fetishism, which is not thematically divorced from the other two. Feitico was the term given by Portuguese colonialists to the talismanic objects, for example amulets, used by peoples of the Guinea coast. It was believed that these fetish objects derived power from a deity, thereby possessing a magical quality that exceeded the objects’ materiality. In commodity fetishism, Marx maintained that the commodity hid the reality of human labour, acting as a fantasmatic object to which an unquantifiable value was attributed. In tandem with these types of fetishism, sexual fetishism also involves the over-estimation of an object and a magical belief in its power. In psychoanalytic theory, the one object capable of generating such delusional awe is the phallus, not to be equated with the penis, which is merely a representative of phallic power, a symbol of value in a patriarchal culture. ‘Fetishism is the essence of the perversions’, of which there are three classic sexual types, fetishism per se, sado-masochism and the male homosexual.1 They are classed as perversions because they all entail the refusal to accept that the mother is castrated, i.e. does not have a penis, and this disavowal instigates a diversion of the sexual aim from the normative account of sexual fulfilment culminating in heterosexual genitality. In fetishism per se, the subject displaces his/her interest onto another part of the body, for example a shoe or a stocking in classic accounts, or, in what will interest us here in relation to art, onto another



Refashioning Fetishism and Masquerade 35

object altogether, allowing the subject to maintain a contradictory belief in the maternal phallus. The fetishist is aware of the mother’s castration, but disavows this knowledge and is thereby characterised by the structure ‘I know full well the mother does not have a penis, but all the same I shall continue to believe that she does.’2 In order to allay the anxiety induced in him/her in the face of the mother’s castration, s/he displaces belief in the maternal phallus onto another object in the attempt to maintain this belief in fantasy elsewhere. This action is inherently unstable, the fetishist having to work hard to uphold the integrity of the fetish object, which always carries the threat of exposing the illusory nature of the fantasy it is based on. Fetishism is a process, then, that allows for the simultaneous action of two contradictory meanings. It is a symbolic process at the level of the unconscious, involving an over-determined investment in an object through sight. This over-investment in the object is often applied to works of visual art in general, photography in particular, due to its analogical fixing and preservation due to its analogical fixing and preservation of an object, person or scene now lost in time. As the Surrealist-affiliated writer George Bataille once said, ‘No fetishist ever loved an old shoe more than an art lover ever loved a work of art.’ In this telling statement, we find an amalgamation of sexual and commodity fetishism, in that the standard against which value is being ascribed to the object is outside the logic of exchange, in the former case the phallus, in the latter gold, or more recently speculative currency. In fact, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard suggests that just as the gold standard has transmogrified into the reification of speculative currency as the impossible imaginary standard by which values are ascribed, the phallus itself has transmogrified to become distributed and mobilised across the body as a whole.3 Although Baudrillard means this in a negative sense, in that all bodies are now invested with phallic value in the realm of the visible, in this chapter I shall explore how this mobility of the fetish can also be seen as a delinking of fetishism from a phallic economy. Two artworks that exemplify the shift that Baudrillard mentions and which bring together the discourses of psychoanalysis and political economy is firstly Piero Manzoni’s Canned Shit, 1961, in which the artist labelled 90 cans, supposedly filled with his own shit, with the text Merde d’Artista, the price for each 30-gram can being derived from its equivalent weight in gold. Here the artist cleverly alludes to the over-estimation by the infant of faecal matter as the first esteemed object or gift he produces and the over-estimation of the art object by canning and marketing his own shit. Secondly, Sherrie Levine’s Urinal, 1996, is an update of Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 version which transfers the utilitarian quality of Duchamp’s ‘original’ into the highly polished bronze shininess of the ultimate fetish object, alluding to both the female body, repressed in Duchamp’s version, and to the over-valued status of the art object as a commodity. Levine’s Urinal is a kind of spectral fetish that ironically comments on the

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acceleration of commodity fetishism in the art market by simulating it. It is as if the work presents itself in terms of disavowal: ‘I know this is a copy of a copy…but all the same it is an original work of art.’ Levine is also drawing attention to the homology between commodity fetishism and sexual fetishism which is mostly figured in our culture by the sexualised glamour of the female body.4 Laura Mulvey explored fetishism in terms of sexual difference in her classic 1975 essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, which, although many of the essay’s tenets have been superseded, still continues to form the backbone of educational curricula on fetishism, film and femininity. Taking her cue from Freud, Mulvey analysed how the male spectator’s gaze fetishises the image of the glamorised woman on screen, subjecting her to control and mastery. As long as she stays in her place as a static, beautiful, contemplative object, his identity is guaranteed. However, as the fetish object is unstable, the woman simultaneously evokes the very threat of castration that the subjection of her image to a fetish is meant to allay. As constructed by fetishistic voyeurism, her image oscillates between static beauty and its disintegration. A typical example here would be Marilyn Monroe, whose smiling image circulates in Andy Warhol’s screen print series as representations that both seduce in their phallic power, warding off castration, but at the same time seem riddled with decay, the mechanical reproductions deliberately exhibiting the flaws of the printing process, their varying saccharine colours testifying to something sickly. Warhol’s Gold Marilyn has both the precious veneer of gold leaf and its peeling away, the fetishised smile becoming more and more deathly in its reproduction. In a later essay on Cindy Sherman’s photographs, Mulvey writes that Sherman stages the veiling and unveiling characteristic of the process of fetishism – the oscillation between two contradictory views, the reverence and revulsion towards the art-historical nature of the fetish as a sign in great works of art featuring Madonnas more generally and the works of Hans Bellmer specifically. In Sherman’s Untitled, 1985, she uses a prosthetic butt to turn herself into a doll. This could be read as a self-fetishisation of the female body. While in Freud the only possibility for female fetishism was perhaps in relation to clothes, Baudrillard says that if women are not fetishists, it is because they perform the labour of continual fetishisation on themselves – they become dolls.5 As we saw in the previous chapter, Bellmer created his dolls to shore up and work through his castration anxiety as he disassembled and reassembled his doll body parts in ever more contorted and twisted poses. Sherman by contrast cites Bellmer rather than her own personal sexual proclivities, but for Mulvey this is double-edged as in the citation there is also the acting out of the process of self-fetishisation. On the one hand ‘[t]he viewer looks, recognises a style, doubts, does a double take, then recognises that the style is a citation, and meanings shift and change their reference like shifting perceptions of perspective

6. Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 1985.

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from an optical illusion.’6 For Mulvey, fetishism returns both in the glossy, high-quality finish of the photographic medium itself and in Sherman’s ‘stripping away of all accrued meaning to the limit of bodily matter’ in the later works.7 Erected as a defence against disempowerment, the fetish always threatens to collapse into abject chaos, the bedrock of blood and vomit which in its turn promulgates the disavowal inherent in fetishism, its denial of history, as well as sexual difference. Sherman ultimately poses a question around the difficulty of the female body to escape these parameters, subjected as it is ‘to the icons and narratives of fetishism’ […] ‘The wordlessness and despair in her work represents the wordlessness and despair that ensues when a fetishist structure, the means of erasing history and memory, collapses, leaving a void in its wake. The fetish necessarily wants history to be overlooked. That is its function.’8 Though not reducible to them, Sherman’s work does exhibit the traps that exist in engaging with the discourse of fetishism for the representation of the female body. As the female body is already so closely aligned in the cultural imaginary with fetishism, any deconstruction of this structure risks the danger of collapsing into a mute a-signifying state. However, there are other ways of looking at fetishism in relation to art. In Parveen Adams’s essay ‘On Female Bondage’, we find another model of the fetish that may be more suited to the fluidity of some contemporary art processes than the rigidity of the classic fetishistic structure and its ensuing neurotic fixation on the image of woman as a stand-in for the phallus. Adams attempts to divorce the fetish object from the female body as signifier of the fetish which stems from Freud’s patriarchal emphasis on the boy’s story. The fetish as a substitute for the missing penis works for the boy’s story but not necessarily for the girl’s. The phallic model of sexual difference situates the man in the guise of ‘having’ the phallus by dint of the fact that he possesses a penis, although, as I have said, the two are not equivalent. For the woman to accede to phallic power she can turn herself into the phallus, she can ‘be’ it, so that the heterosexual man can find the signifier of his desire in the body of the woman, and she gains pleasure from her ability to seduce. However, this economy excludes a position for the woman on her own terms, and while numerous women artists have attempted to interrogate fetishism in order to find a space for female subjectivity in its realm, Mulvey’s point about Sherman’s later works raises the difficulty of doing this without the risk of falling out of signification or being reduced to a bodily essence in abject fluids which in turn are re-fetishised. What if the fetish object could be removed from the phallic economy, asks Adams, employing Leo Bersani’s and Ulysse Dutoit’s notion that ‘[t]he fetish as sexual object is a displacement from one object onto another; it is not a replacement of an internalised absent object.’9 So rather than thinking of the fetish object as a fixation of desire, it might be possible to think of the fetish object as being caught up in a metonymic



Refashioning Fetishism and Masquerade 39

chain of equivalencies. Rather than cementing fetishistic desire in the object, perhaps this desire can be relayed across a series of objects or part objects. One might ask how this is still fetishism and why still call it that? From a psychoanalytic perspective, some degree or class of fetishism is necessary to produce the context of signification, otherwise one risks the muteness Mulvey ascribes, rightly or wrongly, to Sherman’s later work. While adherence to the psychoanalytic notion that the phallus is crucial to the functional organisation of sexuality as difference causes some problems for Adams’s argument, her conclusions are fascinating for a revaluation of fetishism as a psychic investment in an object of fantasy that can be temporary and mobile. Rather than Mulvey’s oscillatory effect between fetishistic erection and abject collapse, which is a dilemma for many artists, especially for female artists who deploy the body in their work, Adams considers how the phallus as a general sign might operate to include both phallic and non-phallic (or castrative) terms simultaneously, thereby embedding the contradictory belief of the classic fetishist within the internal dynamics of the fetish object itself rather than using that object to keep contradiction at bay. Adams proposes the dildo as an object that is obviously phallic but, in its very obviousness, announces the fact that it is a stand-in and thereby points to the possibility of other stand-ins, a mobility of fetishistic representations, so to speak. Her non-art example is the lesbian sado-masochist whom she says ‘constructs fetishes and substitutes them, one for another; she multiplies fantasies and tries them on like costumes. All this is done quite explicitly as an incitement of the senses, a proliferation of bodily pleasures, a transgressive excitement; a play with identity and a play with genitality. It is a perverse intensification of pleasure.’10 Her art example of a dildoic representation that depicts women but removes them from the paternal phallic economy of recognition, making their sexuality strange, is a photograph by Della Grace (now Del LaGrace Volcano), The Three Graces, 1992, which shows three women with shaved heads in the poses of Antonio Canova’s neo-classical sculpture The Three Graces, 1814–17. The women stand against a grassy night-lit background, naked except for boots, their gazes directed at one another in a relay that does not directly address the viewer – the one on the right looks at the one on the left, who looks at the one in the centre, who looks out past the viewer off into the far distance. Unlike the marble smoothness of Canova’s The Three Graces, their skins are marked by freckles, pierced ears, tattoos and scars, evoking masochistic theatrical play. Adams claims that the women’s shaved heads here create a double signification, that they are a dildoic motif that generates both phallic and castrative positionalities. Baldness is often linked with castration, yet these heads are shaved as a sign of phallic power and pride. Apparently Della Grace, who once photographed dildos, says she no longer needs to as ‘she “has the phallus”’.11 Adams’s argument is less black and white than this, her claim being that the image desublimates the

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female as static object of desire which the fetishistic economy depends on. The image instead shows women existing on their own terms as desiring subjects who can fetishise at will but whose fetishistic desires are mobile and theatrical and are exchanged in a relay of gazes and looks. Woman, in this view, can use the accoutrements of fetishism, for example the dildo, to structure a desire that is phallic but is nonetheless mobile and fluid rather than stuck on maintaining a rigid fetish. It is also interesting to contrast Grace’s series with Robert Mapplethorpe’s use of fetishism in his photographic series and images such as Patrice, 1977, which shows a leather-clad fragment of a male torso, bare thigh, genitalia ensconced in fetish gear. Mapplethorpe frames his fetishistic dramas in cropped, close-up details or in staged compositions as if replicating the erection of a fetish object as a static object of desire. By contrast, Grace’s depiction keeps the fetish as dildo/shaved head circulating between the trio of women. As opposed to Mapplethorpe’s use of fetishes, where the skin is leathered and focused on to produce analogies to the phallus, Grace’s image operates in a horizontal as well as a vertical register whereby the fetishisation of epidermal postures are mobilised to form new positions and potentialities.12 This mobility of the fetish could be aligned with Bersani’s approach when he says, ‘the effort to re-find an original object would be an attempted return to a disposition in which no object would be privileged, in which sexuality can arise from any source (we can be stimulated by a breast, a thumb, a swing, a thought…), and in which finally any part of the body is a potential erotogenic zone.’13 Something of this can also be seen in the earlier work of the lesbian photographer Claude Cahun (Lucie Schwob), who made a number of series in the late 1920s and 1930s, some in collaboration with her lifelong companion Suzanne Malherbe. Cahun’s portraits depict her in various guises and postures: scrunched prostrate on a shelf in a period cabinet or submerged in foliage both real and artificial, as well as dressed in elaborate costumes that invariably act as masks that multiply rather than disguise the self. While Cahun’s work, since its art-world discovery in the late 1980s, has been discussed in terms of the masquerade and in connection with Cindy Sherman’s performances to camera, it is important to pay more attention to both the historical distinctions between their practices and the distinctions between the different versions of the masquerade that may be operative in their work.14 The psychoanalytic text that is used to discuss the relation between femininity and the masquerade is Joan Rivière’s ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’, 1929.15 In her essay, Rivière puzzles over how to classify professional women who combine the fulfilment of their professional duties with a normative feminine development, i.e. wife, mother, housewife, nurturing, care of appearance. A patient, who was a woman of this type, presented her with some discoveries. After giving a lecture/ public performance, the woman would experience severe anxiety which led her to seek out



Refashioning Fetishism and Masquerade 41

compliments from some man/men at the close of proceedings to reassure her of both her professional performance and of her sexual attractiveness. As a Kleinian analyst, Rivière maintained that while the woman’s infantile rivalry was with both parents, her intellectual work was dominated by her identification with her father, over whom she had rivalrous feelings of superiority, although she also feared his retribution, the public performance of the lecture being a display of phallic power which symbolically castrated him. Her flirting with colleagues and adopting an ultra-feminine pose after the event was to allay her anxiety at his fantasised retribution. Rivière’s conclusion is that the ‘womanliness therefore could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it.’16 Now while this might all seem a bit farfetched when thinking about art practices such as Sherman’s and Cahun’s, the upshot of Rivière’s paper, that womanliness was synonymous with masquerade, was seen as a useful reading of their work. Sherman’s images were celebrated by critics as exemplifying Rivière’s dictum that ‘[i]n the masquerade, the woman mimics an authentic – genuine – womanliness, but then authentic womanliness is such a mimicry, is the masquerade.’17 Sherman was seen as deconstructing the mythemes of femininity as a cultural construct in the B-movie roles that she invented and performed for the camera in her infamous Untitled series of black and white photographs. It is interesting that when faced with these images of a woman who is both subject and object of the gaze, critics attempted perhaps to appease their own anxiety at Sherman’s exposure of the masquerade of femininity by inventing reassuring narratives that characterised Sherman’s portraits as vulnerable, hysterical women rather than attending to them as explorations of the mythemes of femininity. It is almost as if by exposing femininity as a construct, and a slippery one at that, capable of taking on many semblances, Sherman might be suggesting that masculinity is not secure in itself either. Think of Nietszche’s fear ‘of womanliness as a mask, behind which man suspects some hidden danger’.18 In response to criticism of her work as displaying the stereotypical tropes of femininity as seductive object of desire, Sherman deliberately took on the appearance of ugliness to challenge the viewer’s gaze, but, as Mulvey says, what one finds there is the double bind of fetishism: presenting the woman as a seductive glamorous surface appearance and as a horrific disintegration into abject fluids is to be equally bound by the logic of the patriarchal fetish, whereby ‘[a] cosmetic, artificial appearance then conceals the wound or void left in the male psyche when it perceives sexual difference.’19 However, Claude Cahun’s performances to camera, rather than being an analysis of the signs of femininity in mediatised society, seem to be more about the transgressive potential of femininity in its oscillation between active (aggressive) and passive (appeasement) forces.

7. Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still, 1977.



Refashioning Fetishism and Masquerade 43

This leads to a different take on the masquerade in which it is not merely a mask of femininity, but a play between different guises of femininity in relation to infantile auto-eroticism. While Rivière’s mask of femininity is adopted to placate the appropriation of what is considered masculine or powerful, John Fletcher states that prior to this moment there already exists another mask of femininity and its attributes of passivity, which is a reaction-formation to the active wishes to attain the power characteristic of the infantile state of gender undifferentiation. In psychoanalytic theory, the infantile state of gender undifferentiation is for Freud a state of polymorphous perversity that is auto-erotic and pleasurable and which we have to outgrow or, in the case of femininity as a mask, hide, as we become more socialised. That femininity might entail the taking on of different masks over different temporal phases, once in the earliest phases of development and later to protect from imagined reprisals against a re-appropriation of power is an idea that, difficult though it may seem at one level, offers a way for thinking of representations of the female body as at least a double inscription of femininity that oscillates between passivity and activity, generating a ‘relay of alternative wishes and demands that reroutes the gaze of mastery’.20 This contrasts with its current usage to indicate the production of the fetishised image of the woman for the male spectator. The idea of masquerade as a double inscription allows for a notion of femininity as a play with sameness and difference, a femininity with room to manoeuvre across the tropes of identity, male, female and androgynous, which we see acted out in Cahun’s self-portraits. As Katy Kline says, ‘[t]hough the mask is generally considered a tool of evasion or concealment, Cahun’s many masks and maneuvers reflect rather than deflect.’21 In Cahun’s series Autoportraits, the artist prostrates herself in front of the camera in a variety of guises and genders, borrowing fetishistic tropes that covet the notion of female selffetishisation but divert it from being for a male surveyor in the use of props and accoutrements that re-articulate her body in a proliferation of moves and poses. Comparing Sherman’s Untitled black and white to Cahun’s Untitled (Self-Portrait), 1928, it is clear that Cahun’s narcissism is split or doubled to create an in-between space in which she might bring herself into being, whereas Sherman’s model cites the pose that is posed for a voyeur and is fixed in place by the mirror that Sherman holds up to culture. While Cahun looks directly out at the viewer, her mirror reflection twists the image into a distorted loop reminiscent of the splitting of Cahun and her double in Que me veux-tu? (What Do You Want of Me?), also from 1928. In both these photographs, the gaze internal to the image moves off to the side, suggestive of possibilities of self-fashioning beyond the frame in an off-screen dream space of constant mutation.

8. Claude Cahun (Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob), Untitled (Self-Portrait), ca. 1928.

Chapter 4

Female Fetishism in the Expanded Field of Narcissism

Some women artists persist in reworking Freud’s concept of fetishism from within its own terms rather than attempting to transgress its parameters in exuberant play. Freud’s allusions to fetishism in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) referred to sexuality in general, but with his 1927 paper on the subject it became solely bound up with male subjects. (It is worth noting that recorded clinical cases of fetishism are for the most part male, although this fact does not necessarily prove the point.) Freud maintained that the girl cannot experience the threat of castration that triggers fetishism as she is already castrated, and rather than dismissing this idea out of hand, feminist-inspired theorists and artists such as Mary Kelly appropriated Freud’s theories to explore the possibility of female fetishism in order to expand the range of female sexuality. A contemporary reader might interject, why bother to appropriate such negative theoretical suppositions? However, a dominant aspect of feminist analysis is not simply to reverse the terms of patriarchy or to invent completely new models, but to show how existing pervasive models offer possibilities for female agency that were there all along but overlooked in patriarchal emphases. In feminist theory this is called reading against the grain, and Kelly’s practice can be situated here. While the previous chapter suggested that fetishism can offer a conception of female sexuality beyond a phallic economy of objectification, operating instead as a mobile process of self-doubling, in this chapter I want to look mainly at the work of Mary Kelly, an American-based British artist interested in women’s historical condition and accession into history, which she examines through the lens of the Freudian text, as well as the re-reading of Freud that the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, an affiliate of the Surrealists, undertook in the 1940s and up to his death in 1981.

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So what was Freud’s conception of female sexuality? The girl’s entry into sexuality by way of Oedipus has her becoming aware of her own inferiority (Freud’s term) on seeing the father’s penis. She is envious and has three responses: frigidity, the flight from sexuality; denial and adoption of a masculinity complex, which for Freud would be going against femininity proper, but is common nowadays, given women’s access to equal rights and to professions formerly denied them; and femininity proper, which is the Oedipal move towards desire for the father and the resultant desire for a baby substitute. While a woman may oscillate between these responses, her sexuality will be dominated by one of them. Interestingly today we see the conflict in Western bourgeois society between wanting phallic power in the world of work and wanting to occupy the position of motherhood, the latter in turn being transformed into a commercial venture worthy of a mini corporation, as in the ‘yummy mummy’ phenomenon. But my point here is that, in psychoanalytic terms, the baby as object easily becomes a fetish object for the woman who accedes to or desires femininity proper, as the baby replaces in fantasy the girl’s missing penis, giving her a completeness that is sanctioned by the social. Again, a contemporary reader might laugh at this, but remember that this theory is simply a structure for thinking about women’s position in patriarchal Western society, and it is the case that once a woman becomes a mother her role in the community is sanctioned in a way that the role of the ‘non-breeder’ is not.1 In her artwork Post-Partum Document, 1973–79, Mary Kelly attempted to explore maternal fetishism as a site of desire that asks what it means for the woman to take up the place of subject in relation to another, i.e. the (male) child. Contrary to Freud’s theories about femininity proper, Kelly’s installation evidences the processes of loss and fetishistic attachment that adhere to the intersubjective space between mother and child. Motherhood is demonstrated as a site of conflict between an imaginary moment of completeness and the series of losses that are set in train by the child’s becoming a subject in (his) own right.2 Although completed over thirty years ago, the work still speaks to how motherhood remains a site of conflict in patriarchal discourse. Desired by the woman as a space where she might realise herself, it also embeds her desire in the law of the father, which she may find is alien to her being. Post-Partum Document consists of a six-section, 135-part multi-media record of the first six years in the mother–child relationship, Kelly documenting her own relationship with her son. Each section is comprised of a number of wall-mounted scripto-visual units (the uniform size of the units in each section differ, but all are fairly small), displayed in a sequence that echoes the serial repetition of minimalism. In Kelly’s reading of Freud, while women do not fetishise in the classic sense, they are subject to fears of castration which are bound up with the loss of loved objects, especially children. Kelly used memorabilia from her relationship to

9. Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Documentation IV, ‘Transitional Objects, Diary and Diagram’, 1976.

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her own child and inserted them into social discourses such as motherhood, feminism and psychoanalysis. The parts are called Documentation I–VI and are respectively entitled: ‘Analysed Faecal Stains and Feeding Charts’, 1974; ‘Analysed Utterances and Related Speech Events’, 1975; ‘Analysed Markings and Diary-perspective Schema’, 1975; ‘Transitional Objects, Diary and Diagram’, 1976; ‘Classified Specimens, Proportional Diagrams, Statistical Tables, Research and Index’, 1977; ‘Pre-writing Alphabet, Exergue and Diary’, 1978. The objects she used were baby clothes, nappy liners, scribbles, casts of her baby’s body, her own diaristic records of her feelings on the child’s development, all refracted through the statistical-like framework of conceptualism to create an archive of desire, not only for the child as emblem of phallic wholeness, but also for motherhood itself, which is an idealised (phallic) position that women attempt to occupy under patriarchy. Beneath the images of nappy liners in Documentation I, lists of feeding times, food types and amounts are meticulously typed, their formulaic appearance reigning in, yet also betraying, maternal anxiety, while the liners themselves become precious traces of a lost body. The point of the work was not simply to valorise fetishism for the woman but to create a critical perspective on it by refracting it through theory, hence her adaption and reinvention of Jacques Lacan’s mathemes in some parts of the work, the abstraction of which offsets the potential sentimentality of, for example, the plaster casts of the child’s hands in Documentation IV.3 The fetishistic elements of the work, the obsessive collection and preservation of objects that the child himself loses and outgrows, are examined through the reflective lens of psychoanalytic and social theory. On the slate casts in Documentation VI, the inscriptions of her son’s first attempts at writing are accompanied both by a personalised script possessively documenting his early use of language, which is both joyous celebration of his development and a fearful sign of his separation from the mother, and a formal typewritten text that examines the reality of combining working motherhood with inadequate nursery care and the attendant feelings of guilt. The work presents the contradictory space of desire: on the one hand, the mother as female subject gains pleasure from her fetishisation of the child – she has become a phallic subject in the eyes of the law – but on the other hand, there is an explicit discomfort at the patriarchal conditions and conditioning of that pleasure, as voiced in the final part of the work, which poses the question of desire: ‘What will I do now?’, now that the child is becoming more and more socialised through school and contact with peers and other adults. While motherhood gives the woman an identity which is valorised, it also, as in classic fetishism, carries within itself the seeds of its own erosion of phallic empowerment. What is the woman when she no longer fits into this economy? What is femininity removed from motherhood? These would be questions that Kelly would take up in her next



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ethnographic-style work – the Corpus section of Interim, 1984–89;4 however, Post-Partum Document also raises the issue of the representability of female desire per se. While on the one hand the preserved and cast objects and the written and found texts can be said to give testament to loss, they also allude in their negativity to what cannot be represented, the phenomenal body and its experience over time. Post-Partum Document by default invokes this body, its clinical over-determination suggesting that maternal fetishism may preserve the site of other pleasures for the female subject. Interim would attempt to bring this subject into representation. Interim consists of 15 photo-laminated images of women’s clothing juxtaposed with 15 photo-laminated images of text, handwritten ‘stories’ silkscreened onto plexiglass. Each image of clothing is paired with an image of text, the pairs being divided into five sections, with each section containing three sets of paired images. The five sections are named after the classifications the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot gave to the positions acted out by his hysterical patients in his clinic at Salpêtrière, where Freud studied in 1885. The five classifications are Menacé, Appel, Supplication, Erotisme and Extase, and correspond to Kelly’s choice of clothing – respectively, a leather jacket, a bag, shoes, a nightdress and a blouse. In each set, the item of clothing undergoes a mini narrative mimicking the stages of a hysterical attack – the item is presented folded in the first image, opened in the second image, and tied up in knots in the third. The accompanying texts use a fictional first-person narrative to explore the anxieties, desires and dilemmas of middle-aged female experiences that intersect with the worlds of fashion, medicine and romance fiction. A contemporary reader might again ask why represent all this negative material from the annals of psychiatry and from the commodification of desire in consumer capitalism? In the 1980s, feminist-inspired artists and writers adopted the figure of the hysteric as an image of female desire that might resist patriarchal frameworks, her convolutions symbolising a feminine pleasure that might exceed patriarchal strictures. Although the tendency to equate femininity and hysteria as an excess within patriarchy is problematic, these approaches, taken for example in the essay ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ by playwright and essayist Hélène Cixous and, in a somewhat less celebratory way, in Luce Irigaray’s critique of psychoanalysis, Speculum of the Other Woman, nonetheless recuperated hysteria as a subversive resistance to phallocentric logic, as a position that pokes holes in the law (of the father). As a visual artist, Kelly cautions against the representation of this excess, as it presents the woman in purely bodily terms, a tendency which can be dangerous given the propensity of female bodies to be subjected to the voyeuristic phallocentric gaze, as well as the conflation of femininity with hyperbolic bodily display in media and advertising. Kelly’s

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‘scripto-visual’ method interrogates bodily presence. Although the hysterical body is invoked, nowhere in Interim is the body given. Rather it is alluded to by the items of clothing and through the heavily coded discourses of psychoanalysis, fashion and romance literature in the text pieces which, while written in the first person, are compiled from over a hundred conversations with various women that Kelly undertook as part of the research for this work. In this way, her work does not give us the satisfaction of phallic pleasure, but attempts to create a space for the woman to question and articulate her own subjectivity. Rather than soldering oneself to the commoditised pleasures of narcissistic identification, Kelly proffers the possibility that female pleasure might be gleaned from the process of shifting between different registers of symbolisation, recognising that none of them sum up or epitomise the

10. (also on next page) Mary Kelly, Interim, Part I: Corpus, 1984–85.



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woman, but that her subjectivity is found in the partial identifications she makes as she circumnavigates these registers in the space of the installation. According to art historian Norman Bryson, Interim offers us criss-crossings of the different registers of the sign – icon, symbol, index – in order to avoid the stasis of the narcissistic mode of identification that tends to bolster up our fantasies of wholeness and completeness. Rather than the body being soldered to the image as an iconic entity, instead a space opens up beyond the visual register which ‘points the spectator towards what is nonspecular in the field of vision. It is here that the female spectator may be able to escape the specular imperatives and double binds of dominant visuality: to be either an object (an image, an icon) or a voyeur (a male voyeur en travesti).’5 It is important to note that the mirrored glass of the black-backed silkscreens makes the texts hard to read, as one is continuously aware of one’s own distorted reflection

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in the glass fragmented and splintered by the lines of text. The items of clothing in the other images cast shadows on the wall behind, the distortions of which further allude to the body, but one evacuated of its organs and flesh. Parveen Adams states that the images ‘have the quality of the apparition that puts the image at the limit of signification’.6 Aside from the reference to the semiotic theories of C.S. Peirce, in which Peirce classified signs in terms of the icon, the symbol and the index, a psychoanalytic context for Bryson’s analysis and for Kelly’s deliberate use of mirroring in Interim to refuse to complete the desire for narcissistic identification is Jacques Lacan’s infamous attack on narcissism in his essay ‘The Mirror-Stage as Formative of the Function of the I’ (1936/49). This paper was directed against the schools of ego-psychology developed in the United States whose therapeutic practices were oriented around strengthening the ego, which for Lacan is the seat of narcissistic identifications that imprison the subject in a set of false delusions. Lacan describes how this narcissistic ego is based on the misrecognition that the structured completeness of the mirror image is a reflection of the self. He says that somewhere around six months, the body of the infant is catapulted from fragmentation and ambulatory unco-ordination into the illusion of narcissistic wholeness when it catches sight of its body in a mirror. The mirror has to be taken here as an imaginary prop in the sense that, even if one didn’t actually see a mirror at this stage in one’s life, the psyche projects the image of a perfect body onto which the fragmented body maps itself to give it a sense of structure and future orientation. According to Lacan, it is this misrecognition that dominates our relation to the image and which causes us misery in our bound-to-fail attempts to uphold this image of ourselves both in our own and in others’ eyes. This misrecognition founds a lacking subject, a subject who is not complete but uses the image to give itself the illusion of completeness, an illusion which, while partly necessary, leads one to erect defence mechanisms, such as superiority over others, to keep it in place. Lacan’s analytic techniques chipped away at the narcissistic seat of the ego in order to expose the illusions and fantasies that prop up our daily lives and thereby allow us to begin to break free of their tyranny. Ultimately this is why Lacan’s ideas became so important in postmodern art discourse, especially in relation to the work of the ‘Pictures’ generation of artists named after the exhibition curated in 1977 by Douglas Crimp and the essay written two years later by critic and historian Craig Owens. This essay discusses artists such as Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman, whose work was inspired by or directly referenced mass cultural images from film and advertising, and used mediatised processes to reposition these types of image in the sphere of art.7 Other artists of this generation such as Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer were also taking advertising slogans and strategies and repositioning them in the sphere of art to reflect on and critically analyse the social meanings



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of representation. Mary Kelly’s practice stems from a similar context, but she claimed that the ‘feminist/textualist’ strand of Holzer and Kruger was too severe, and perhaps too closely mirrored the forms that it borrowed from. Kelly felt that it was important to create a distance from dominant discourses, but without foreclosing on emotional affects, which is why Interim revolves around an absent feminine body, in the hope that this absence might generate a space for the female subject to emerge. This utopian dimension is where Kelly differs from the aforementioned ‘Pictures’ generation, who seemed purely analytical rather than concerned with bringing a new spectator into being. For Kelly, narcissistic doubling is both a source of pleasure in the work and something to be interrogated, which is no doubt partly why she was attracted to Lacan’s theories, which echoed the 1970s avant-garde dictum that by analysing images we could free ourselves from their tyranny. While ‘tyranny’ might sound a bit extreme, it is cogently argued by Laura Mulvey in ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ that the destruction of beauty and analysis are required to sever our unreflective narcissistic identifications with, in her case, the film image. She says, ‘[t]he first blow against the monolithic accumulation of traditional film conventions [ …] is to free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics, passionate detachment. There is no doubt that this destroys the satisfaction, pleasure and privilege of the “invisible guest”’, meaning the fantasmatic spectator whose narcissistic fantasies and desires are soldered by images.8 Kelly’s Interim, while using narcissistic tropes such as mirroring and the first-person narrative voice, also performed a critique of the narcissistic image. Kelly has said that what she was trying to do in that work ‘was create a space for the woman, or the spectator in the position of the woman, to send herself up, like the joke, a space where she could laugh at herself and gain a certain distance from that hyperbolic femininity’.9 In evoking the absence of the body in material terms, Kelly offered a way of encountering what is non-specular in the field of vision, i.e. the corporeal beyond the mirror image. Some critics and artists such as Kelly felt that the visual field is so over-determined that no matter whether an image, particularly of the body, is politically correct or not, it still has the potential to be read in a politically incorrect way, serving the desires of capital and patriarchy. As filmmaker Peter Gidal succinctly put this view, ‘I do not see how … there is any possibility of using the image of a naked woman … other than in an absolutely sexist and politically repressive patriarchal way …’10 Kelly does not foreclose on the body, attempting to give voice to the unrepresentable drives which are proximate to the body. She does this through invoking sound via the internal voice of reading and listening which not only alludes to psychoanalysis as a practice of listening, but also invokes a blind field of seeing

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beyond the specular gaze. We shall see in the next chapter how these kinds of aesthetic ideas are further theorised by Lacan, but for now I want to note that Kelly’s wager that the refusal to show the body directly might create a space for female subjectivity to emerge as something in its own right was not taken into the 1990s, where the mediatised hypersexualisation of the body in general and the female body in particular was paralleled in art practices that played with such exhibitionism. While there have been shifts within cultural discourse, partly due to feminist practices, that now make it possible for the female artist to use her own body as an expressive medium or tool in her work, it is still nonetheless problematic, as can be exemplified by looking at Jemima Stehli’s photographic series in which she adopted poses based on 1960s sculptures by Allen Jones, which used female mannequins in fetishistic garb as props for tables and chairs. Critical reception of Stehli’s Table 1 and Table 11, both from 1998, and Chair, 1997, is mixed – some celebrate her as being in control of the gaze, while others see her as falling prey to the negativity of fetishistic desire and as exhibiting an untrammelled narcissism. While the flaunting of femininity in its entire fetishistic garb can be read as acting in a performative manner to deconstruct the naturalisation of feminine tropes, it always risks coming up against the edges of its own excesses and falling prey to the accusation of the very thing it sought to critique. On the other hand, when Stehli positions herself in the poses of the mannequins used in Allen Jones’s tables and chairs, she is creating a scenario

11. Jemima Stehli, Table 1, 1998.



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which displays a knowing double-take in relation to gendered authorship and the temporality of how art practices come to mean different things at different times. She is posing the question of what it means for the woman to stage her own subjection at this time in history – is it empowering? Are we are at a point in time where we can see through the performance rather than taking it as a sign of flamboyant narcissism with little critical edge? Is it possible to see Stehli’s self-objectification from a critical perspective in which Stehli, as author of these images, is being deliberately provocative to her audience, asking them to decide where the boundaries lie between pleasure and objectification? For example, in her photographic series Strip, 1999–2000, Stehli is positioned with her back to the viewer, towards whom are faced the various art critics, curators and dealers in front of whom Stehli strips, having given them the remote to take the photograph at the point where they want her to stop. Is this an act of narcissistic exhibitionism or does her self-objectification turn the tables on the narcissistic desires of the art world, whose male representatives take up varying positions of power. Does her act guarantee their male narcissism or does she perform an exposure of the illusions that narcissism is predicated on? While I think that there is more to narcissism than meets the eye, in the sense that it can provide a powerful space of self-doubling for the woman, Stehli’s images overtly address the voyeurism of the gaze, rather than using self-doubling or staging as a space of self-emergence, as in Cahun’s work in the previous chapter. Given the flamboyant narcissism of contemporary mediatised culture, perhaps it is time to look back at Kelly’s work as a useful antidote to the contemporary hypersexualisation of the body.

Chapter 5

Eye and Gaze: Restoring Body to Vision

While in 1975 Mulvey considered the possessive gaze, which is founded on structures of voyeurism and fetishism, as male, contemporaneously we find this gaze dispersed more generally in our cultural consumption of images, rather than being gendered in black and white binary terms. It is the vantage point from which we consume images, whether these be images of desirable female bodies posed as available in advertising or art, the fetishised black body in Robert Mapplethorpe’s series of photographs Black Males, or Richard Billingham’s photographs of his family in the series Ray’s a Laugh, which depict his alcoholic father and overweight mother in scenes of poverty and deprivation, scenes which satisfy the viewer’s desire for an authentic realism, a bird’s-eye view on the abject otherness of this family on the margins of social acceptability. What characterises this image economy is that their subjects are presented in a ‘to-be-looked-at’ manner that satisfies the narcissistic desires of their viewers, which entail either identifying with the image as an ideal or using the objectified other as an assurance of one’s own superiority. We do not need to gaze at sumptuous images for our narcissism to be satisfied. We can easily gaze at images of deprivation and congratulate ourselves that we are not them. We can also enjoy images of others’ mutilation, as they allow us to retain the fantasy of a whole and complete body while engaging in our unconscious desires for bodily fragmentation. ‘The subject sees in any representation a reflection of itself, not only that but a reflection of itself as master of all it surveys.’1 For Lacan, and this is an important distinction between Lacan and feminist theorists, the point from which the subject is master of all that s/he surveys is the point of the eye not the gaze. Taking his cue from the philosopher Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, the gaze is



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instead a totalised field of vision which incorporates the eye or the subject ‘I’ as a blind spot within its totality, much as the subject is but an object in the atmosphere of the world as a whole. The subject ‘I’ only becomes aware of the gaze as an object when the world refuses to reciprocate our desire to be seen or to see. Lacan illustrates his theory using a diagram of two intersecting cones whereby, on one side of the cone, the subject ‘I’ is gazed at by an indifferent world, an all-encompassing gaze without location. On the other side, the subject, unable to operate within this overwhelming field of visibility, which is inhuman, uses its eye to carve out a place in the world, not the whole world but the objects and images that interest it. These images comprise our imaginary field of vision, in which we are master of what we survey rather than being caught in the unseeing gaze of the world. Sometimes, however, our imaginary screens break down, rendering us powerless, or at least disturbing our visual coherence. Think how it feels to be caught in dense fog – one can see nothing, oneself cannot be seen by others like oneself, yet one is constantly aware of unseen dangers that may lurk in the blind field of the fog, inhuman eyes in whose gaze you may be merely an insubstantial blot on the horizon. The anxiety induced by this kind of sensation may be the closest one can consciously come to the more unconscious anxiety Lacan attributed to the sensation of being caught in the blind field of the gaze, although my argument here is that artworks may engender a sense of this disorientation as a means of challenging the subject v

v

of mastery. To illustrate this sensation, Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Zizek uses the scene from Hitchcock’s Psycho where Marion’s sister approaches Norman Bates’s house thinking that his mother is in there watching her approach, not realising that the figure she had seen earlier at the window was a mummified corpse which has now been locked in the basement. As she walks up towards the house, a sense of unease is created by intercutting the shots of her approach with shots that seem to be from the point of view of the house, which we know is empty, so that the point of view of the house intimates the horrific sense of an unseeing eye that figures the all-encompassing blind field of the gaze.2 Horror movies commonly play with this phenomenon. Art also plays with this sense of unease in a less dramatic but nonetheless potent manner, destabilising the mastery of the gaze, unseating the subject from its secure position as a surveyor of all that it sees. For Lacan, the gaze is an analogue of the geometral point of Renaissance perspective, the point at which a picture becomes fully visible and meaningful, the point of the eye/’I’, which allows us to recognise what we see. The example that Lacan liked to use in his seminars was Holbein’s The Ambassadors, 1533, a painting that displays the luxury and wealth of its protagonists as long as one is viewing the painting head on. Lacan liked this example because from this geometral viewpoint there also exists a stain in the image, which, when viewed from

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the left, comes into focus as a skull at the same time as the rest of the painting blurs from view. This example of anamorphosis, a sixteenth-century perspectival technique, exemplified for Lacan the deathly tropes such as absence and lack that the luxury of the world, which feeds our narcissism, is a screen against. The painting acts almost like one of Lacan’s analytic sessions in which the delusions of narcissism are laid bare for what they are. Referring to the Holbein painting, Margaret Iversen goes so far as to claim that ‘the distended skull in the foreground should be understood as figuring for Lacan something about the nature of art in general. The suggestion is that art, the beautiful illusion, contains within itself a seed of its own dissolution [ …] art’s beauty or appeal to the imaginary is empty and may be one step away from horror.’3 Clearly Lacan’s writing on the eye and the gaze is a development of the themes in his earlier essay ’The Mirror-Stage’, which also posited fragmentation as being the other side of armoured reflection. However, it is important to note that the link between emptiness and horror clearly stems from fantasies about castration anxiety and phallic disempowerment, and cannot simply be applied to feminist-inspired art in which this paranoid gaze is interrogated to reveal the pleasures of the body as a complex, multi-sensory site of more fragmentary desires. As we saw in the previous chapter, in Kelly’s Corpus, the absence of the woman’s body was intended to generate a more sensorial relation to the body, perhaps of the mother, whose body is repressed by both Freud and Lacan, the idea being that the combination of evocative rather than blatantly iconic images and the use of the first-person narrative voice might divert attention from the privileging of sight, the scopic drive, and trigger the invocatory drives of the ears and the voice, which are more immaterial, yet nonetheless affective. A work which also addresses the affective body is Geneviève Cadieux’s photographic installation Hear Me With Your Eyes, 1989, which consists of three very large photographs: one, a black and white portrait of a woman with closed eyes and slightly parted lips; on the wall opposite, a colour image of the same woman, this time with her three-quarter profile superimposed on her full-frontal portrait, making it seem as if she is breaking into some kind of hysterical seizure; on a third wall, another black and white photograph of a pair of lips enlarged to fill the frame. The latter image is positioned behind us as we look at the other two photographs. Turning to look at the image behind our backs, we escape the trajectory in the other two photographs, in which a body struggles to withhold her gaze from ours, and we find ourselves being swallowed by the cavernous void at the heart of the enlarged image of lips, this nebulous intimate space contrasting with the distanced voyeurism of the gaze. In the shift from one kind of image to another across the space of the photographic installation, Lacan’s field of the eye/’I’ is becoming unmoored from its hold over the world



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and we are led into proximity with an enfleshed landscape of resounding silence. Although the sensation aroused is not a paranoid one, it is nonetheless destabilising. Parveen Adams states that the pair of lips function in a manner akin to the stain in Holbein’s The Ambassadors. She says, ‘The lips serve the function of detaching the gaze so that the spectator’s relation to the image is disturbed.’4 In the process of being so removed from our fixation on the image and from subjecting it to our control, we are reminded of the loss at the heart of the subject. We re-encounter the originary misrecognition (méconnaissance) in the mirror, as the subject denies its fragmented body and adopts a coherent image of wholeness, Freud’s secondary narcissism, which it uses to fill in the gaps in its body image. The artwork does not return us to the fragmented motor unco-ordinated body prior to the mirror-stage, but our encounter with it may evoke the more chaotic and intimate sensations of that body. For Cadieux this works ‘[t]o give the voice back its body, from which it will escape, that body which can be heard both inside and outside its shell, both near and far in space.’5 While the artwork does not destroy the geometral look of the eye, it threatens, as Adams says, ‘to render it obsolete, to collapse its carving out into the field of the gaze (lips slightly parted) which is everywhere’.6 Our engagement with the installation creates a dehiscence between body and image,

12. Geneviève Cadieux, Hear Me With Your Eyes, 1989.

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breaking the rigidity of narcissistic soldering onto the image and subjecting us to a more dispersed bodily articulation in space. So too the paintings of Francis Bacon, which depict bodies being evacuated of their interiors in scenes in which the allusions to the geometry of Renaissance space is under threat and being dismantled by these bodies that cannot be contained by perspective. For Adams, using a Lacanian approach, the evacuation of the interiors of Bacon’s leaking bodies operates at the limit of detaching the eye from its seat of mastery, and what we are left with is instead the inert essence of being, what Lacan calls the ‘lamella’ and which Adams sees evidenced in the flat-coloured shadow-like shapes that are depicted adjacent to these leaking bodies in their escape from geometral space.7 For her, this impulse towards dissipation is not masochistic, but has a death-like static quality. While I agree with her reading that the evacuating bodies unseat the gaze of mastery, which in Lacan’s visual diagrams is the seat of the eye, I would maintain that this does occur in the realm of masochism of the type I hinted at in the introduction. Rather than being inert shadows, these flat contours without volume, which can also be viewed as holes in the paintings, can be read in terms of the conjoining of body and ground to produce a masochistic body that takes pleasure in its drives being folded back onto itself. It is a self-reflexively pulsating body, not a body that ‘empties itself out’,8 but one that is in the process of a bodily transformation beyond the mirror, which re-finds the traces of the primary narcissism of auto-eroticism in which the nascent ego took itself as its own object. This primary narcissism can be equated with Bersani’s ‘ecstatically shattered ego’ in primary erotogenic masochism, where the distinction between the self and its objects becomes blurred, primary narcissism and primary masochism being closely related. It is worth remembering that narcissism is not a straightforward concept in Freud’s writing. The narcissism we refer to in everyday life is a secondary formation that evolves as a defence against the loss of primary narcissism. Primary narcissism, which is bound up with infantile omnipotence, is expressed in auto-eroticism which involves the taking of a fragment of one’s own body, a zone or orifice, as a source of pleasure that revolves in an unbroken circuit around the body.9 The introduction of the outside world interrupts this circuit, creating a rift which prompts the developing ego to look outside itself for satisfaction. In classical accounts of narcissism, secondary narcissism is akin to a compensatory attempt to remake an unbroken circuit of satisfaction around the subject. Now while there is an element of selflove in all relationships that Freud deemed necessary, this secondary formation is, as we have seen in Lacan’s ‘The Mirror-Stage’, neurotic, dependent on the projection of an idealised selfimage, which Freud calls the ego ideal and which for Lacan is founded on lack. The undoing of this secondary formation may reveal a gaping wound akin to the horror Iversen mentioned



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above, which was an approach to the relationship between art and psychoanalysis taken up in art criticism in the 1990s by art historians such as Hal Foster. Foster makes a rough division of Cindy Sherman’s oeuvre into three phases and maps these onto the three main positions of Lacan’s diagram of the eye and the gaze. He says that in the early work, Sherman’s film stills and centrefolds from 1975 to 1982, the subject is caught in the gaze, the woman is captured on display like an animal caught in the headlights. Rather than thinking of Mulvey’s male gaze here, Foster maps this onto Lacan’s notion that the subject is a picture for the gaze of the world. In the middle work, from 1987 to 1990, which includes the fairytale illustrations, the art-history portraits and the disaster pictures, it is as if Sherman moves from the distance of the subject as picture and attends to the image screen itself: bodies start decomposing in the pictures, whether milk leaking from a prosthetic breast or the use of horror-movie prostheses to create a repulsive abject body where the subject is invaded by the gaze. In her work after 1991, Foster claims the subject is obliterated by the gaze, becoming instead an obscene object that has no protecting metaphor to pacify our desire but exposing a kind of raw intransigent realism, Lacan’s notion of the real, an impossible realm of being that is unmediated by language. The real is the dimension of the evil eye, an eye untamed by a mediating screen.10 It is the obscenity of this eye that Foster maintains glistens through the abject matter in Sherman’s later work, and which he views as being a further attack on the narcissistic ego who resides at the geometral point of perspective. One might think here of Frankenstein’s first encounter with his horrible creation in Mary Shelley’s novel, when he sees the dull yellow eyes of the monster open: ‘His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.’11 Albeit beautifully evoked in Shelley’s description or in Sherman’s pictures, the inalienable viscerality of the monstrous threatens to collapse meaning into a senseless stain. The art-historical approach of being critical of narcissism and its seductions finds an earlier outing in Rosalind Krauss’s 1976 essay ‘Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism’, which, while referring to Freud, echoes Lacan’s later attack on the circuit of narcissistic identification.12 Krauss posits narcissism as the medium of early video, of which she is inherently critical. Although today’s video technology is considerably different, it is still criticised as being an overtly narcissistic medium, particularly in view of the hyperbolisation of the sexualised human body in mainstream video content such as MTV and advertising. Contemporary video works such as Pipilotti Rist’s erotic self-imaging is often dismissed as simply repeating these

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industry phenomena in art, disregarding the fact that Rist’s experimental use of video technology to create an environment, sometimes architectural, comprised of female sensuality can be seen as radical in the context of the faceless anonymity of power that asserts itself in contemporary public space. In the 1970s, video technology was characterised by the feedback loop and the monitor, as inherited from television and imported into art practice by artists such as Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas, Richard Serra and Nancy Holt. For Krauss, the narcissistic element of video rules out a material consciousness of space and time both within the medium itself and in terms of the response it might generate from a spectator. Instead, she says the monitor behaves like a mirror which creates a self-enclosed loop between the artist as performer and the artist as reflector, positions which are encouraged by the technology, which centres the body ‘between two machines that are the opening and closing of a parenthesis’.13 This is epitomised in Acconci’s Centers, 1971, in which the artist records himself pointing at the centre of the monitor for 20 minutes, an action Krauss describes as constructing a plane of vision that begins with the artist and ends at the eyes of his projected double.14 In Airtime, 1973, Acconci speaks into a microphone in front of an actual mirror which doubles the spatial closure and self-reflection inherent in the medium of video. In Serra’s Boomerang, 1974, artist Nancy Holt sits in a recording studio wearing a headset repeating words which are fed back to her, she in turn commenting on the feelings aroused by the ten-minute delay of audio-feedback. For Krauss, this selfencapsulation collapses time and space, creating an isolated present in which the performer is even cut off from the continuity of her own words, hence the boomerang effect. Krauss advocates a reflexive practice over the reflection that, for her, characterises these artworks. A reflexive art practice would generate a radical asymmetry from within rather than creating the closure of the gap between the image and the real in mirroring. As an example of how this could work in video, Krauss refers to Joan Jonas’s Vertical Roll (1972), which, in showing the gap between one image and the next, incorporates an internal asymmetry that reminds us that this is a materially constructed image and prevents us from identifying with the body being projected, the roll continuously frustrating that narcissistic pleasure. Or Peter Campus’s installations, which use the medium of video to create multi-perspective projections that foreground distinctions between three-dimensional space and two-dimensional illusion, distinctions which the mirror image tends to flatten and disavow. For Krauss the re-projection of a frozen self in the mirror echoes the fixation of the ego on the ego ideal as its idealised projection, an attachment that needs to be broken to engender a more critically aware spectator. One can see how this view resonates with Lacan’s approach to the goal of psychoanalysis in his essay ‘The Mirror-Stage’, which is why the latter became so popular in



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the 1970s in avant-garde theories of visual culture that held that one must not be seduced by the image, as that makes the subject vulnerable to ideological indoctrination. Krauss’s view is that our relations with images should engender questioning, enabling analysis of the codes of illusion-making that pervade our society. However, as film theorist D.N. Rodowick claims, the notion that the spectator should be critically aware, and that the art or film work should engender this awareness is itself an ideological position which disallows the possibility that different spectators will make different relations with images depending on conditions of reception that exceed the intentionality of self-reflexive artworks which internally contain their own procedures of disillusion. It also has to be said that Krauss’s attack on narcissism is directed at what I would call the defensive egoic structure of secondary narcissism. However, primary narcissism, while encapsulating the auto-erotic loop of taking oneself as an object, is also bound up with a painful, albeit paradoxically pleasurable, expansion of the self into its objects, so that it loses its identity somewhat. While up to a point Acconci’s probing of his self-image can seem to trap the self and reverberate in a continuous dead end that begins and ends with the self, the continual probing can also be seen as an attempt to dismantle the self and blur identifications between what is inside and what is outside. The continuous aggressive posturing of the ‘I’ and the ‘You’ by Acconci in his video performances desires the breakdown of those categories. Acconci seems to want to escape from secondary narcissism, which pivots on the binary of self-enclosure and destructive desire, that is, ‘I seal myself up to protect myself but in order to do so I have to cast you as different and outside of myself, which may end in your actual destruction, because I hate difference.’ In his video performances, Acconci seems to me to be aware of this dialectic, and puts it in parenthesis in order to turn it on its head. As opposed to Krauss’s assertion that ‘the artist only finds his subjectivity by recognising the material and historical independence of an external object (or medium)’, there might also be a case to be made for the discovery of a subjectivity that loses itself in the external object (or medium) which expands its relation to the otherness within, exploring the fact that, like Shelley’s monster, we are all made up of parts of others, what psychoanalysts might call ‘imagos’, and haunted by their traces.15 Art can be a means of liberating us from the negative effects of that haunting by allowing us to play with those ‘parts’ rather than remain bound by them. Something of this process emerges in Sophie Calle’s Suite Venitienne, 1979, a series of black and white photographs and text pieces that exists both as an artist’s book and in installation format. The impetus for Calle’s work was overhearing at a party that a man she names Henri B. was leaving for Venice the next day. She decides to follow him, abdicating her agency to get lost in his tracks, obliterating her own traces like a detective or predator. The

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fact that her photographs do not picture her supposed object of desire, and in fact mostly focus on either trivial detail in which no central point of interest can be discerned or homein on signs and street names, creates an expanded emptiness at the heart of the work. Even when Calle turns the camera on herself when Henri B. supposedly spots her on the Piazza San Marco, this climax is an anticlimax in the sense that it does not give us something or someone to possess, as her disguise of blonde wig and wide-brimmed hat somehow absents her from the scene. Her surreptitious recording of her journey results in images which are devoid of dramatic narrative, implacably scrutinising street names, hotel architecture and items of marginal interest at odds with the fragmentary yet impassioned words of the accompanying text, the combination creating an empty yet expanded space of identification. The author has left the premises, and what remains are voices and images that retain only the traces of an erotic narrative that invite the reader/viewer to lose themselves in the work and enjoy the pleasures of a dispossessive narcissism rather than the neurotic desire to pin down the object. Paradoxically, Calle’s impetus for the work stemmed from a desire to capture the object, to take up the position of the voyeur, voyeurism being one of the component instincts of the desire to look. In the course of Suite Venitienne, she also flirts with the other component instinct of the desire to look, that is, the desire to be seen, but in her photographic execution of what seem like inconsequential details and her staging of herself as a vanishing protagonist, she creates spaces in which we can free ourselves from the dictates of possession. It is worth noting that in Freud’s account, scoptophilia is conceived as a four-part process, whereby the initial autoerotic taking by the subject of its own body as the object of desire is redirected towards an extraneous object, leading to voyeurism per se, but that then this energy is redirected back to the subject’s own person, resulting in a new aim – the desire to be looked at – which in turn institutes a new subject to whom one displays oneself in order to be looked at.16 The result of the complexity of these reversals and transformations is a field of potential in which it is hard to fix the positions of voyeurism and exhibitionism and in which moments of a ‘transitional, free-floating self-display’ emerge between active looking and solicitation of the look.17 It is as if Calle pictures these in-between moments. The notion of a dispossessive narcissistic pleasure is important to consider especially in relation to images of the woman, which still carry the burden of fetishistic narcissism. Finnish video artist Salla Tykkä ends her tribute to the Western genre, the three-and-a-half-minute film Lasso 2000, with the image of a white screen over which the soundtrack continues to play, the whiteness having been sought by the camera as it moves in the mini-narrative from the white pallor of a girl’s face looking voyeuristically through a living-room window at a boy lassoing, to the snow-encrusted ground outside. The camera’s tracking shifts the gaze from the scopic field



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of the specular towards an expansive empty field. Its movement leads us away from a definitive object of possession, which in this case might be the young man, and scatters the gaze in the electronic pulsating whiteness of video static. For me, this blankness generates a field of potential that returns us to the question of what finding one’s love objects along the path of narcissism might mean. It does not necessarily mean the deathly fixation on the reflected image encapsulated by Caravaggio’s Narcissus, 1597–99, but perhaps restores an earlier form of non-objective mirroring which Freud and Lacan were inattentive to, and which psychoanalyst Adam Phillips discusses in Intimacies, the book he co-authored with Leo Bersani, namely the mirroring between mother and infant that occurs before there is a recognition of the mother as a separate self.18 This mutual mirroring offers a space in which we might conceive of a different kind of narcissistic object relation, which psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas refers to as a transformative object. While I do not want to infantilise the artist, I think that some artists’ works preserve other models of relation in which the object as gaze or desire is neither possessed nor evacuated, but which engenders an environment of becoming without a definitive goal. While some psychoanalysts such as D.W. Winnicott might call this an environment mother, which, as I shall explore in Chapter 10, tends to idealise maternal femininity, Bollas suggests ‘that the mother of early infancy is less significant and identifiable as an object than as a process that is identified with cumulative internal and external transformations’19 (italics mine). The relation here is one of attunement, or what Bersani calls ‘a reciprocal attention to the other’s becoming’, in which narcissism is shared rather than generating the paranoid drama of setting the object outside the self external to the ego.20 Tykkä’s film can be positioned here as encapsulating a form of narcissism that is liberated from the dictates of the ego ideal, but where this refusal does not peter into the obscenity of either the mutely scintillating simulated flesh of Sherman’s prosthetic parodies or the flat unreflecting shadows in Bacon. Tykkä’s amorphous white screen comes after the refusal, either through unknowingness or through hiding, of an exchange of looks between the young man and the young woman which would, due to the dialectic of narcissistic desire, have created a dynamic in the field of vision in which only one of them could have been triumphant. (In this scenario also lies a reference to the Western duel: ‘this town ain’t big enough for the two of us.’) The series of zones of whiteness that dissolve into the white glare of video static instead engenders a transformative space that exceeds the binary relationship between self and other as mutually exclusive categories. In this field of blind seeing, we can look without possession, but also without feeling overwhelmed by the evil eye or Foster’s scintillating gaze, which are the alternatives to the geometral point of mastery of the eye/’I’. Again, as in Cadieux’s invocation of the voice, sound is important here. The strains of Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack to Once Upon a Time in the West continue to

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punctuate Tykkä’s electronic whiteness, creating a generative field of potential in which the subject is neither voyeur nor exhibitionist, but perhaps occupies the transversal fluidity between these points, as in Bollas’s notion of attunement. This sense of transformative becoming in a fluid space which echoes the polymorphous perversity of auto-eroticism can also be experienced in relation to the video work of Pipilotti Rist. In Open My Glade (Flatten), 2000, Rist’s face is pressed up against the screen as if desiring escape from its confines, her features contorting, her make-up smearing against the glass of the camera in a series of one-minute films. But there is ambivalence in this rage against the frame. There is also a celebratory joy in this confinement that echoes aspects of earlier video’s narcissism, but which I am recasting in terms of attunement, here between flesh and machine. Rist moves in and out of focus, giving and resisting with her body to create enfleshed landscapes that are continually in the process of becoming, due to the play of distortion she effects. The fact that this more fluid narcissian space was projected from

13. Pipilotti Rist, Gravity Be My Friend, 2007.



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a billboard in New York’s Times Square is all the more poignant in that it exhibits for all to see the traces of the body’s relation to its internal otherness which is all but repressed in the codified structures of public space. In Gravity Be My Friend, 2007, we lie on islands of layered coloured carpet as we gaze up at the ceiling at Rist’s narcissian pools projected there. In one of the two pool-shaped projections, her female character Pepperminta and her brother frolic in a paradisiacal natural environment, their bodies morphing with one another via the medium of water. These mercuric transformations are taken to an extreme in the second pool as Pepperminta walks down an urban street, her legs expanding into watery trunks that morph and billow with flowers, trees, slabs of concrete and other people. The work is narcissistically playful, teasing the gaze, but importantly avoids being fixed and stabilised in the Lacanian register of the eye. Vision is here solicited to drift on a journeying that reaches into bodily recesses to create new schemas that dismantle the rigidity of secondary narcissism. Again a soundtrack of a lullaby in string and bells provides a sonorous landscape that extends the processual expansiveness of the imagery, re-finding rather than returning to a narcissian paradise in which we can indulge in a transformational space of mutual gazing rather than being subjected to the cut of Lacan’s mirror-stage in which we can only occupy one side of the mirror or the other. In Rist’s video installations, we, like Alice in Wonderland, are invited to go through the mirror, to identify with body doubles that are neither completely merged with nor separated from their environments, but disappear and reappear in a playful game of hide and seek.

Chapter 6

The Evolution of Abjection

Narcissian pools of reflection, while escaping the binary logic of stable categories of self and other in favour of morphing and becoming, are also tinged with the abject nature of bodily fluids and viscera. This psychic fact has to do with the nature of pre-Oedipal space, which has been theorised by the psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, who put forward the notion of a preOedipal psychic space of fluidity called the imaginary or the semiotic. This psychic space is populated with partial identifications between male and female rather than definitive gender positions, akin to the expansive subjectivity we saw in Rist’s work in the previous chapter, and is, on one hand, dominated by the joy in being. As we shall see, there is also another side to the pre-Oedipal, but for now, let’s go with Kristeva’s notion that the potential of pre-Oedipal primary processes, which includes the bodily drives and affects, is a source of creativity which can be tapped into later on in order to restructure the symbolic rigidity of culture. The pre-Oedipal primary processes of the semiotic are linked to the basic pulsions of early development which are predominantly anal and oral. For Kristeva, these pulsions are gathered up in a space she calls the chora, a term she appropriates from Plato’s Timaeus, where ‘he defines it as an enclosed womb-like space which at the same time is “an invisible and formless being” capable of receiving all things and partaking of the intelligible. Kristeva insists that the chora is neither a sign nor a position, but a mobile dynamic which underlies figuration and specularisation and is analogous with vocal and kinetic rhythm.’1 However, while Kristeva genders the semiotic as feminine and as available to all subjects regardless of gender, she privileges male artists’ access to this creative space, saying that the female artist risks being reduced to pure nonsense and depression when she taps into this space



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because of her proximity to the mother’s body, whereas the male artist uses his difference from the mother to allow him to oscillate more successfully between symbolic language and the forces or pulsions which destabilise language, the linguistic experiments of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake for example. As many critics of Kristeva have pointed out, this is not very useful for the female creative, as it repeats the Freudian notion that the woman is already castrated, which disallows her the same capacities as the man for symbolisation beyond the phallus. This is in contrast to my argument in the previous chapter, where I put forward the case of thinking of the mother–child relation in terms of a space of attunement and directionless mutual gazing in artworks by women artists which operate beyond the dialectic of castration. Strangely enough, Kristeva’s notion of ‘herethics’, which she maps onto the mother–child relation that she joyously explores in her essay ‘Stabat Mater’, elaborates such an engagement of mutual recognition, but only between the mother and the boy child.2 Kristeva ultimately maintains the idea that something horrific lies behind femininity. She says that woman cannot laugh at the destruction of the phallocentric order, as this would turn her either into a terrorist or a depressive because she does not have the inherent difference that allows the male avant-garde poet to reduce language to nonsense without threatening his subjectivity. Of course this is a slight generalisation, but it has given rise to critiques of Kristeva’s politics.3 On the other hand, many (female) artists have found inspiration in Kristeva’s writing and her reworking of self and other in terms of the semiotic and its connection to the affective body. An artist whose work exemplifies the pre-Oedipal space that we find in Julia Kristeva’s writings is Helen Chadwick, who incidentally read Kristeva but whose work has its own material integrity rather than being illustrative of theory. In fact, Kristeva’s theories paradoxically allow us to situate Chadwick’s work in terms of a critique of psychoanalytic theory’s positing of the feminine as negative. Chadwick’s use of visceral materials such as fur, hair, meat and even chocolate to evoke the body and to question the binary hierarchies that structure our interactions with the world are far removed from Mary Kelly’s more overtly analytical strategies. Works such as Chadwick’s bronze penises or the installation of plaster casts of male and female urination patterns in the snow, Piss Flowers, 1991–92, have met with great critical acclaim in eking out a space of sensual feminine pleasure. In relation to the latter work, Chadwick points out that the female casts are phallic while the urination patterns of the male are more horizontally distributed in a playful reversal of how these terms circulate in patriarchy. Other works such as the photographic series Meat Abstracts, 1989, frame the horizontality of meat’s morphology as a vertical mass into which light bulbs are inserted in a witty critique of the usual terms of transcendent philosophies, in which the flesh is banished

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to the earth and the upward trajectory of light is desired. However, I find these singular works less interesting than some of her earlier installations, because, though humorous and charming, they exhibit a predictable pattern of reversing the directional thrust, so to speak, of gender binaries. For me the work that epitomises a different take on the self-doubling in which female sexuality is figured on its own terms as emergent and multiple in a reworking of narcissism is The Oval Court, 1984–86. In this work, blue-tinged photocopies of fragments of the artist’s body, distorted in scale, are placed on the floor on boards in the shape of pools. In these narcissian pools, the female body cavorts with animals, flowers and other objects, the photocopy medium levelling all to the same grainy consistency, which creates an equivalent interplay between different classes of things. It is as if the female protagonist inhabits the auto-erotic universe that Freud mentions as predating the formation of secondary narcissism, the rigid form of ego protection that, as we saw in the last chapter, Lacan’s theories picked away at.

14. Helen Chadwick, The Oval Court, 1984–86.



The Evolution of Abjection 71 Chadwick’s work explores the intersubjectivity of semiotic space in artworks that

exemplify it as a space of potential for the creation of multiple self-doublings by which the woman constitutes her subjectivity anew, beyond castration. This is a space where she can enter into a self-conscious splitting, not between belief and disbelief, as the fetishist does, but between self and self-other in which the self contains the split-off parts of itself rather than projecting them outwards. This is a generative rather than a deathly narcissism. Freud and Lacan emphasised the deathly tropes of narcissus, but in the myth the gods allowed Narcissus to return as a flower: as so often in Greek myth, death is followed by transformation into another species or form of life. In Chadwick’s narcissian pool, the flow and mutability between things is cyclical and incessant. A whole gamut of objects, vegetable, mineral or animal, are enfolded in this luxurious opening out of the self to receive the other into itself without the inherent sense of threat and aggressivity that subtends the Freudian/Lacanian accounts of narcissism. The Oval Court seems to me to suggest that the space of the feminine narcissian pool is bound up with a continuous open-ended pleasure. In contrast to Kristeva’s ideas, Chadwick’s work shows us the possibility of a female subject plumbing the depths of the narcissian pool and enjoying the fragmentation involved in a sexuality that is not repressed but incessantly becoming. Chadwick’s work shows the woman’s capacity for self-doubling as a possibility rather than a disintegration of her being, and offers a space of the viewer to engage in this pleasure. However, Chadwick’s work is not without its problems. As we saw in Chapter 3, Laura Mulvey claimed that Cindy Sherman’s later work reveals the abject horror behind the masquerade of femininity, and that rather than escaping its fetishism this work exposed another kind of fetishism, the fetishism of abject matter itself, which is mute and a-signifying. Some of Chadwick’s photographs might warrant the same criticism, the images of glistening mud-encrusted hair or pig gut tending to re-fetishise feminine eroticism as reified matter. In the rest of this chapter, I shall focus on Kristeva’s most popular theory regarding art, i.e. her theory of abjection, which provides an undoubtedly fascinating and useful cultural analysis of bodily desire and sublimation. If the uncanny disturbs borders between living and dead, familiar and unfamiliar, the abject is the uncanny’s lively cousin, in that it disturbs the very same borders but via the vitalistic stuff of flesh and blood rather than the dusty tropes of the mechanical. In the discourse of the uncanny the waxwork and the mannequin’s body are foregrounded, the sheen on these smooth bodies simulating the appearance of human skin. The discourse of abjection is instead mapped onto the body of the human corpse, as well as the interior flesh of the body, and especially onto the body of the mother and her connection to blood in the rituals of birth and menstruation. Before I flesh this out, it is worth noting the art-historical

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dimension to the embrace of abjection as a concept on the stage of the 1990s art world. According to art historian Amelia Jones, the body itself was repressed in the Modernist canon of the early twentieth century, which emphasised abstraction and transcendence.4 It is not that the body is absent from Modernism, but, apart from its eruption in Surrealism in the 1930s, its presence is subliminal. The body also somewhat disappeared in contemporary art in the emphasis in 1980s postmodernism on cultural signs and signifiers and their appropriation or simulation in art. Galleries were full of objects that mimicked departmentstore commodities by artists such as Jeff Koons and Haim Steinbach and paintings by NeoGeo artists such as Ashley Bickerton which extended Modernist abstraction into forms that mimicked digital codes. These artworks were clean and very shiny. Then, the body in all its messy disorder hit back, as it were, erupting onto the art scene in the fully fledged form of abjection in the early 1990s. Nineteen eighty-two saw the English translation of Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, the main theoretical reference for the art of abjection. The title of an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1993, Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art, gives a sense of the double bind that comprises abjection – the scene of the abject is something we are simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by. One could say that this double bind characterises Western attitudes towards the body per se – beneath the veil of the very flesh whose beauty seduces lies a reminder of our mortality and of bodily processes we would prefer to forget about in our transcendent projects of work and morality. Abjection takes this surface seduction one fathom deeper, insisting on the haunting nature of corporeality. We acquire this sense of corporeality as a result of our propulsion towards culture, which Kristeva maps onto the separation between the infant and the mother. Initially, infant and mother are united as one continuous body. Their separation is necessary to the establishment of the infant’s boundaries as an individual subject, but, in forming these boundaries, an intermediate zone of resistance remains that cannot be definitively marked off from either mother or infant and whose tissue forever haunts the individual subject’s sense of his/her own identity. This intermediate zone of resistance is the site of abjection, the abject being neither a subject not an object but an inbetween entity which lacks a definitive identity, but whose traumatic force continues to unsettle the borders that define the subject. As Kristeva says, ‘I spit myself out’ in order to become a self.5 Kiki Smith’s work was seen as staging scenarios that hinge on this troubling in-between zone of experience. In works such as Virgin Mary, 1992, and Blood Pool, 1992, casts of lifesize female bodies expose the internal nerve and bone structures that the body’s surface, the skin, hides from view. Confronted with these exposed bodies, the audience is asked to

15. Kiki Smith, Virgin Mary, 1992.

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consider its own sense of the body and its boundaries. Smith’s replication of internal organs in these and other works is very different to the medical wax models of the body which were done to penetrate the body’s recesses and educate the public. By contrast, Smith’s sculptures approximate the internal layers of the body, her renditions dramatising emotional responses to the fragility of the corporeal. For example, in Virgin Mary the figure holds out her hands in a gesture of vulnerability and supplication. The figure in Blood Pool is crouched in a foetal position. Smith also made figures in paper and wax, often shown trailing paper along the gallery floor, as if emptying the intestinal contents of the body or as if tied by umbilical cords to other objects and figures in her more narrative-like installations. Importantly, Smith was making this work about the body and the relationship between inside and outside, separation and attachment, fluid and soma, prior to the eruption of abjection as a critical tool in the art world. Fluids are key in the discourse on abjection, as the separation between mother and infant is mapped onto the body’s fluids as markers of control and difference. Control of urination and defecation is part of the infant’s socialisation. Menstruation marks the mother out as different from the infant. Bodily fluids become taboo, to be hidden from public view. They are signs of the internal workings of the body, over which we have to exercise control. In social theories of the body, these processes are involuntary and are relegated to the background, but in psychoanalytic theory these processes are symbolically significant, being substances which entrain psychic fantasies and desires around issues of sexual difference and the relation of self and other. A number of artists’ work at this time, from Andres Serrano to Rona Pondick, engaged in a discourse of bodily fluids, which caused questions to be asked about the historical effectivity of such work. The contrast between these two artists evokes somewhat the contrast art historian Hal Foster makes between the Surrealism of André Breton, artist and writer, and philosopher Georges Bataille, Surrealism being an historical precedent of abject art where the desublimatory trajectory of the body was probed to challenge orthodox categories. According to Foster, Breton thought that ‘Bataille was an “excrement-philosopher” who refused to rise above big toes, mere matter, sheer shit, to raise the low to the high. For Bataille, Breton was a “juvenile victim” involved in an Oedipal game, an “Icarian pose” assumed less to undo the law than to provoke its punishment.’6 Foster elaborates Surrealism as pivoting on these dichotomies of pure filth and acting dirty. So-called abject art also involves this dichotomy. Andres Serrano became infamous for a work called Piss Christ, 1987, a cibachrome of a vat of the artist’s own urine in which a crucifix was submerged. The borders of the vat were off-screen, giving the illusion of a boundless illuminated space in which the crucifix floated. As many critics pointed out at the



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time, the image seemed sublime until one knew how it was created. Serrano did a series of these images, for example Madonna and Child, 1989, but it was Piss Christ that caught the attention of Republican Senator Jesse Helms, who denounced the image in the senate as blasphemous, resulting in the National Endowment for the Arts grants being cut. As Foster goes on to say, ‘Is this, then, the option that abject art offers us – Oedipal naughtiness or infantile perversion? To act dirty with the secret wish to be spanked, or to wallow in shit with the secret faith that the most defiled might reverse into the most sacred, the most perverse into the most potent.’7 Although far removed from the perversity of Bataille’s approach to the body, allusions to the sensibility of ‘wallowing in shit’ can be seen in Pondick’s sculptural installations, which include Baby, 1989, which consist of a baby’s shoes from which legs smeared in brown-coloured wax and topped with a baby’s bottle protrude, a work which seems to me to be illustrative of the psychoanalytic phases of infantile sexuality. Prior to the Oedipal or genital phase, the infant goes through the oral and anal phases. Arrest at and/or retreat to any of these prior phases constitutes perversion, i.e. a disavowal of the law of the father, the fact of castration which entails recognition of lack. Although there have been artists throughout twentieth-century history who flaunted abject bodily processes in public performances in which they urinated and defecated on stage, for example Gunter Brus, one of the Vienna Actionists, these acts were inverse critiques of the repressive political regime in Vienna, which is very different from current Western mediatised political landscapes. As opposed to the Vienna Actionists’ use of perverse actions to challenge the law of the father, Mike Kelley’s Manipulating Mass-Produced Idealized Objects, 1990, a performance in which naked performers, including Kelley, play with fluffy toys and dirty bottoms, is a tongue-in-cheek parody of perverse actions which suit the contemporary landscape of liberalism, where play-acting to create shock and an infantile seeking of punishment is par for the course. I agree with Foster’s reading of the art of abjection, which maintains that while many artists jump on the bandwagon of abjection by merely reifying the dirty body, other artists offer more potential for social critique than this reification of bodily substances and matter. One such artist is Robert Gober, whose work could also be said to exhibit the abject body in scenarios of infantile perversion, but these scenarios are always staged in relation to the parameters of the law, where distinctions between the clean and proper body and the abject body are in constant tension. Untitled, 1991, a wax cast of the severed lower half of a male torso jammed against the skirting on the floor, exhibits the fetishisation of the part object that characterises perversion and also alludes to the pervert’s fascination with holes, here represented as plugholes that puncture the decapitated torso. The vulnerability

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of this bodily fragment stems from its exile from the rest of its body and its compulsion to show itself regardless of the disgust its diseased limbs might trigger – the drains look like an illness reminiscent of the AIDS epidemic, which features more overtly in other work by Gober, and the hand-inserted hairs in the wax add to the unhealthy pallor of this corpse-like entity. Gober’s work stages the abject body as homosexual, installations such as the sitespecific one at the Dia Center for the Arts, New York in 1992 – which used newspaper stories referring to deaths from AIDS – often alluding to homosexual bodies deemed to pollute the status quo. The homosexual body is classified socially as abject, as being marginal, and therefore dangerous, to dominant society. This is where psychoanalysis intersects with social anthropology. Mary Douglas, an anthropologist that Kristeva refers to in Powers of Horror, states that in all cultures margins are dangerous.8 For Douglas, the abject has to do with impurity, an intermixture of elements that should be kept apart. Gober’s installations constantly force things together, such as the juxtapositioning of Wedding Gown with Cat Litter, two plaster-cast bags, against the backdrop of his Hang-Man Wallpaper (all 1989), a staging that brings together ideals of purity and images of guilt, the kitty litter symbolising the absorption of the stench that mirrors the repression of the marginal, whether psychic or societal, of that which is deemed dirty and at odds with the purity of the clean and proper body. The wedding dress was sewn by Gober and modelled on an American doll, to symbolise the ideal social ritual from which homosexuals are mostly excluded. The kitty litter should remain outside, but here in the gallery installation is a reminder of dirt and its eradication. The wallpaper’s repeated image of a lynching in conjunction with a white man lying in bed, taken from an eiderdown box, is intended to probe the question of what troubles the sleep of middle America, reminding us of the bodies that have been and are still being cast out as being different, other, abject. In the best of his work, the simultaneous forces of attraction and repulsion draw the viewer’s fascination towards the threat to stable identity as well as propelling him/her to perform the expulsion of the abject as that which reinforces the subject’s boundaries. Some of Mike Kelley’s installations also exhibit this power. The thrift-store toys that featured in Kelley’s early work signified abject bodies in terms of class. These discarded toys were doubly abject in that they were initially used by the lower classes – handmade knitted things – then re-used by the underclass. Aside from this class commentary, which is named as such in his work Lumpenprole – the title referring to the term Marx gave to the underclass from which he hoped revolution would spring – Kelley’s installations, in elevating these toys to the category of art, also initiated a critique of the ideal body adhered to in art. The classical art object, like the body beautiful, does not bear the traces of its labour. It is a finished body, symmetrical and whole. Kelley’s thrift-store toys



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are unfinished in the sense of being in various states of decomposition. His displays also put back in the sexual elements of toys that the manufacturing industry leaves out in its adherence to the ideal of the finished body that is smooth and sexually neutral. For Kelley these discarded toys are emblems of the unruly bodies of children, which are abjected in favour of the civilised body of the docile good citizen. Kelley exposes the repressed premises of this cultural ideal, placing the knitted and stuffed toys in perverse configurations that play with scale and projection, as in Arena #7 (Bears), 1990. His work has also examined the abject bodies of the criminal. Pay for your Pleasure, 1988, is a corridor of posters of philosophers and writers who allude to transgression and violence in their philosophy, mostly in overblown tones of grandiosity and outrageous statements. However, this excess is culturally sanctioned. Unsanctioned excess occurs in the actual acts of criminals. At the end of the corridor, a painting of a clown done by the serial killer John Wayne Gacy confronts us with the unlawful excesses which we cast out of society into prisons yet which retain a fascinating hold upon the population. Why do we sanction the unlawful when it is presented within the frame of art? Art therapy is deemed to be good for criminals, a way of socialising them into the distinctions between good and evil, but Kelley shows the abject failure in the premises of this ideal. No art activity ever stopped a murderer

16. Mike Kelley, Arena #7 (Bears), 1990.

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and no wholesome images ever created a humanity freed from evil, yet we need to believe in the altruistic potential of art. Art allows us to perform the expulsion of the abject almost as a ritual catharsis. On one level, artist Paul McCarthy could be seen as indulging in the worst of infantile perversions. Performances such as Grand Pop, 1977, are replete with his signature ingredients of tomato ketchup, mayonnaise and brown sauce and the enactment of humiliating scenes of bullying and rambunctious behaviour, mainly by McCarthy on himself and on the props that he uses. In Bossy Burger, 1992, his ketchup splattered cook’s uniform and the surrounding wreckage of a mock cookery lesson for baby-doll soup parodies the wholesome vision of food on TV cookery shows. McCarthy has stated that his performances act out the underbelly of capitalist consumer desire, its fallout so to speak. In his performances and videos, bodies are gone awry, fluids leak everywhere and objects disintegrate, nowhere more so than in the film he collaborated on with Mike Kelley in 1992, where they dismantled the innocence of Joanna Spryi’s children’s story Heidi. The artists, Kelley playing Heidi, McCarthy her grandfather, attack the sculptural standins for the other characters with an over-emphasis on the dummies’ orifices and secretions using homemade fluids and liquid matter. The film, which is more like documentation of a puppet show gone severely wrong, is just over an hour long, and its relentless repetition challenges our endurance and indulgence in the artists’ rambunctious antics. The focus of Kelley’s, McCarthy’s and Gober’s use of abjection questions the ideal bodies that inhabit dominant cultural forms and structures such as art, abject art being heralded as a reaction to the consumerist ethos of Neo-Geo art. In their work, the abject is probed as a cultural term, not simply reified as bodily essences and substance, as in the work of Smith and Pondick. The scene of abjection could be said to stage a kind of truth of the damaged body and diseased body, a body which is perhaps fetishistically sought after in an era where cosmetic surgery and airbrushing techniques manufacture bodies without blemish or sign of bodily excess such as fat, hair and wrinkles. Whether the assertion of a damaged body is enough in itself to counter the cultural impetus towards perfection is questionable. Kristeva says that we are no longer protected from the abject by paternal law, therefore it manifests itself everywhere. Indeed one could even see the perfected bodies of surgery and advertising themselves as somewhat abject in the sense that, in their striving for perfection, these bodies become somewhat monstrous and thereby threaten normalised boundaries. For example, fashion models are distorted to look sick or alien-like, and surgery can generate botched Frankenstein-like features. Kristeva sees art having a cathartic role to play in the proliferation of abject chaos. ‘In a world in which the Other has collapsed, the aesthetic task […] amounts to retracing the fragile limits of the speaking being, closest to its dawn, to the bottomless

17. Paul McCarthy, Grand Pop, 1977.

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“primacy” constituted by primal repression.’9 The contradiction here is that in plumbing these abject depths, the artist still has to shape them. It is difficult to do this without elevating them into forms and substances that are either tinged with the sublime, as in Serrano’s or Chadwick’s photographs, or that solidify the boundaries that constitute the repulsion and attraction characteristic of the abject, as in some of Smith’s and Pondick’s work. Art historians Rosalind Krauss and Yves-Alain Bois take so-called abject art to task for its emphasis on substances and matter which they claim forecloses any critical evaluation of form and structure. By contrast, they claim to recuperate the operation of abjection as found in Bataille’s philosophy of the informe or the formless. Krauss and Bois, who emerged in the wake of Modernist art criticism, want to enflesh Modernism’s evacuation of the body with bodily abstractions such as horizontality, base materialism, pulse and entropy. These concepts, they maintain, are the operatives rather than the processes of abjection, and they can be present without recourse to the representation of a naturalistic body and its internal organs. They curated an exhibition in 1997 called L’informe: Mode d’emploi, which grouped artworks into these four vectors. They saw this show as being counter to the fashion for bodily fluids and other objects of disgust that were raging in so-called abject art. While Krauss and Bois could be seen as repressing the fleshy body yet again, as well as being accused of dressing up Modernism in the latest trend, the point of their alternative to the dominant trajectory of abject art is to continue the critique of the disembodied nature of the spectator that began with enlightenment modernity in the late seventeenth century and became elevated in the height of Modernism’s idolisation of pure objectivity. So in a positive sense they can be seen as inserting the operation of abjection back into art history rather than illustrating abjection by reifying it in bodily substances and essences, the latter of which dangerously harks back to a naturalistic conception of the body outside history and social change. In Krauss’s and Bois’s four thematic groupings, horizontality has to do with how the formal structuration of an artwork counters the axis of sight taken by a passive viewer who stands erect in front of a work. For example, in her discussion of Cindy Sherman’s photographs, Krauss insists on the horizontal address of the photographic planes of the image rather than honing in on their display of bodily secretions, as in Untitled, 1987. For Krauss, Sherman’s photographs deal ‘a low blow to the processes of form’.10 This reading shifts the emphasis away from the content which, as Mulvey claimed, can easily be fetishised. For Krauss it is the downward gravitational pull of the images which is more of a challenge to the spectator’s idealisations and expectations than the content. While I admire Krauss’s reading against the grain here, I am not entirely convinced by it, given that it involves bypassing the content of



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Sherman’s images. ‘Base Materialism’ is based on Bataille’s scatological notions of ‘the science of filth’ in which all phenomena are brought down to the same level of putrescent value, a shift in emphasis which works to undermine traditional materials and hierarchies. We might think of Mike Kelley’s work here, although Krauss and Bois are careful to avoid dealing with his work in terms of its abject content and instead focus on how it might operate as a process of alteration or desublimation. ‘Pulse’ challenges the Modernist exclusion of temporality from the visual field. Again this links with horizontality, in that pulsation involves an endless beat that punctures the disembodied self-enclosure of pure visuality, and according to Krauss incites an eruption of carnality.11 ‘Entropy’ invokes a sinking, a spoiling, an irrecoverable waste, as evidenced by Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, which I shall look at in Chapter 8. This is a very different conception of the abject body. The figurative and literal body is nowhere to be seen, but an artwork is said to induce or evoke effects which are abject and scatological. However, the structurally abject body that Krauss and Bois bring to attention is a rarified art-historical argument about spectatorship that makes little sense to viewers uninterested in the history of art criticism. While Krauss’s approach might dismiss Kiki Smith’s work as being about substances and essences, Smith’s concern with ‘our relationship of being physical and our relationship with other people’s physicality’ and the ‘different meanings of what skin means to you’ opens up different questions about bodily experience and the artwork as a conduit for those experiences that relates more to how we live than to art history.12 While there is much to agree with in Hal Foster’s analysis, which connects abject art’s impetus of ‘speak your wound’ to other forms of popular culture, such as therapy chat shows, which condone and encourage a non-critical parading of damage as a kind of ur-ground of experience, it may be radical enough for art to present the facticity of alternative versions of bodily experience rather than also having to critique the claim to truth of the damaged body. While one needs to be vigilant in not simply reasserting the naturalised body, which, in its conservative versions, pits gender and racial difference as being purely biological and as outside of or immune to cultural environmental factors, one needs equally to insist on the value of the evolutionary nature of embodied experience, i.e. that the body is not a static category. In relation to the wounded or abject body, it is useful to remember that the purely affective response that might be elicited by a piece of art need not result in a loss of critical self-consciousness. The process of abjection forces us to recognise that temporally losing one’s faculty of judgement may be necessary to processing material that we cannot be fully cognisant of but that is embedded in the cells and corpuscles that inform our intersubjective worlds.

Chapter 7

Black Narcissus

Whereas for Freudian psychoanalysis, sexual identity is organised around incestuous fantasies that operate in the mind as memories, […] the reality behind memories of collective black trauma forges a different subjectivity and relation to certain iconic representations of the black body.1 Before leaving the paired complicity of narcissism and abjection behind, I want to turn to the reading by the psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon in his classic book Black Skin, White Masks (1952) of Lacan’s paranoid separation of self in the mirror-stage. Black Skin, White Masks has directly and indirectly inspired a number of contemporary artists such as Isaac Julien, Steve McQueen and Lyle Ashton Harris, to name but a few.2 Fanon’s racialised reading of Lacan would also find echoes in the work of a number of black women artists such as Lorna Simpson and Carrie Mae Weems who, in the 1980s, explored what they perceived as gaps in Laura Mulvey’s reading of the gaze in ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. Fanon’s appropriation of Lacan’s ‘The Mirror-Stage as Formative of the Function of the I’ situates the narcissistic drama in a troubled socio-political theatre of interracial identifications. While for Lacan the bodily schema that alienates the self from itself and creates an internal lack or split in the subject is unmarked by difference, another scene emerges when the body is marked by race. To paraphrase Fanon, when the black man looks in the mirror he does not simply see an idealised form of a fragmented self; instead he sees his mirror reflection as already fractured by a white gaze that constitutes him from the outside as ‘other’. Fanon maintains that the black man sees in the mirror a fragmented body comprised of shards of a ‘“thousand details, anecdotes, stories” – “battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism,



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intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, [and] slave ships…”’.3 The scopic gestalt which Lacan maintains as being fundamental to the, albeit delusional, constitution of the subject, cannot be formed – it is instead shattered and ‘put together again by another self’, thereby creating a double alienation.4 In this process, Fanon claimed that the white man reduces the black man to a being without subjectivity, who simply embodies the cast-out elements of white society, its fantasies and fears of danger and fragmentation. In this scenario, then, the black man appears like a phobic object that the white man must subjugate to ensure the stability of his own image. The black man is, so to speak, doubly split, a split which is further aggravated in what Lacan refers to as the Symbolic register of language. Lacan’s ‘The Mirror-Stage’ gives an account of the enmeshed nature of the Imaginary realm of reflection and the Symbolic register of language in the sense that while, in terms of the former, the infant (mis)identifies himself in the image of wholeness reflected back to him in the mirror, this misrecognition is affirmed by the gaze of the Other, let’s say the mother, who is of course situated in the Symbolic register of language. The mirror identification is thereby bolstered by language. Fanon explores the linguistic underbelly of imaginary identification, giving the example of being on a train and asking another passenger, ‘“I beg your pardon, sir, would you mind telling me where the dining-car is?”. The passenger responds: “Sure fella. You go out door, see, of corridor, you go straight, go one car, go two car, go three car, you there.”’5 The use of ‘pidgin’ subjugates the black man as inferior, positioning him as that which is other to the white man, a foil for the white’s man’s own alienation from himself, which he disavows in his misrecognition of himself as superior and as synonymous with his ego ideal. The colonial gaze originates from this dialectic, reducing the threat signified by black skin as difference by situating the black man as primitive and inferior. Speaking ‘pidgin-nigger’ closes off the black man’s subjectivity and fixes him as a specularised other, who easily transpires into a fetish object that shores up the white man’s delusional superiority and supports his fantasies of erotic domination. Homi Bhabha, in his analysis of Fanon’s work, describes this process as operating on the aggressive/narcissistic register of the mirror-stage. The other, as black man, acts as both a narcissistic guarantor of the white subject’s wholeness and poses a problem for that very fantasy, the potentially destabilising threat of which thereby engenders the aggression of racism as a defence mechanism to keep the other in his place. The signifier ‘black skin’ both fixes identity and signifies its undoing in paradoxically opening up this realm of fantasy, a factor less explored by Fanon than by more recent commentators on his work such as Bhabha, relating to visual culture and art. ‘In the objectification of the scopic drive, there is always the threatened return of the look; in the identification of the Imaginary relation, there is always the alienating other (or mirror)

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which crucially returns its image to the subject; and in that form of substitution and fixation that is fetishism there is always the trace of loss, absence.’6 A paradox ensues whereby blackness becomes a signifier of that which needs to be made invisible, but is also negatively desired. The black man internalises the inscription of race on the skin, epidermalising this relation which casts him as other, inferior and invisible in his all-too-visible visibility. On the one hand, he is fixed ‘as a chemical solution is fixed by a dye’, but on the other hand he becomes a projection screen onto which the various myths, fantasies and fears about the other are deposited in the bid to secure the white colonial subject.7 Although debates have now shifted to explore transnational identities in a global context, the traces of this colonial history are not easily erased. In the 1990s there was a return to Fanon in relation to the critical discussions that emerged around the politics of representation in the work of visual artists of the African diaspora. Although his work was accused of misogyny, homophobia and a tendency to accept the phenomenological situating of the black man in the terms borrowed from French philosophy including Lacan, Fanon become a touchstone for artists in thinking through the politics of representation in relation to race. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall called this shift in the politics of representation the new ‘black narcissus’,8 seeing it as being comprised of artworks that attempted, as it were, to heal the shards of the mirror-stage by creating idealisations of the black body, as well as interrogating the fantasies that are projected onto and constitute this body. These fantasies have gender connotations. The black American writer bell hooks describes how she was puzzled in her initial foray into feminist theory about the binary that equated the female with the body, the male with the mind, as, for her, Black males have always been seen as more body than mind. Full recognition of this difference would have disrupted the neat binary gender polarities much feminist and psychoanalytic theory embraced. For the black male body to receive substantive critical attention within psychoanalytic discussions, distinctions must be made between conventional ways of seeing the male body and the way racism disrupts and layers that understanding – the way it informs notions of identification, desire, fantasy.9 hooks cites Kobena Mercer as saying that Psychoanalytic concepts now float freely in debates on cultural politics, but there is still a stubborn resistance to the recognition of unconscious phantasy as a structuring principle of our social, emotional and political life […] It is in the domain of race, whose violent and sexy phantasia haunts America daily, that our need for an understanding of the psychoanalytic reality of phantasy, and its effects in the body politic, is greatest.10



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If the black male body was feminised by its alignment with nature, then the representation of the black female in relation to desire and visual pleasure was seen as even more problematic given that her positioning in the bodily schema of the mirror-stage rendered her an invisible counterfoil against which the white female body could be objectified as idealised, tropes pictured so cogently in Manet’s Olympia, 1863.11 If, in theories of the gaze, the white female was positioned as an object which denied her a place to look and desire on her own terms, the black female was doubly silenced, although nonetheless hyperbolically represented as sexually available, as exemplified in images of the Hottentot Venus, whose body and genitalia was exhibited and denigrated as the epitome of feminine freakishness and animality in nineteenth-century Britain and France.12 So the question of how female black artists could represent themselves as a desiring subject was fraught. Black narcissism was disavowed and black female narcissism was invisible. Hall describes 1990s black art as a ‘re-working of the abjected black body through desire’.13 This black narcissus would produce new corporeal schemas which rewrite the self using the black body as a ‘light-sensitive “frame” or “screen”’ for a re-epidermalisation.14 Already in this description there is a hint of the importance of photography to this politics of representation – in the sense that, as the technique of analogue photography positivises the negative, so too would these new images of the black body. A key exhibition in London’s ICA in 1997, Mirage, extended the notion of what this re-epidermalisation might mean, not simply as political correctness, but as an interrogation of the internalised fantasies of blackness that circulate in both white and black culture as a result of incorporating the oppressor’s gaze. One of the dominant myths and/or fantasies that circulate in black male culture as a defence against being cast in the feminised position as Other to the white man is the insistence on a hypermasculinity that fears homosexuality and any associations with effeminacy. Exposing and challenging this myth, Lyle Ashton Harris’s performative photographs enact feminised versions of black masculinity. In Construct #10, 1989, the artist poses provocatively in a vest and tutu which fans out from his penis, the pose taking on the empowering guise of a self-fetishisation in which he playfully turns himself into an image of the phallus, knowingly displaying that which he does not have. Sisterhood, 1994, part of a series of photographs in collaboration with Ike Ude, shows them both dressed in smart camp attire with heavy make-up, highlighting both the masquerade as well as the variability of black masculinity. Less overtly homosexual but nonetheless homosocial is Steve McQueen’s Bear, 1993, in which two black men wrestle, the activity taking on overtones of a relational eroticism rather than the exotic hypermasculinity associated with the commodification of images of black sportsmen. Importantly, McQueen’s video operates on a formal level which,

18. Lyle Ashton Harris, Construct #10, 1989.



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rather than simply representing the ambiguity of these black bodies, generates a phenomenological space in which their bodies seem to extend into the space of the viewer. The camerawork and editing create a dynamic space that impinges on the viewer’s physicality, so that one loses the distance that might normally be implied by the framing of a fight. This phenomenological presentation of blackness in which it becomes an incorporative space is something that McQueen extended into later work, in which black bodies are shown in documentary narratives that make us question our implications in histories and economies of race. While creating hypnotically seductive images, McQueen avoids fixing the black body in the scopic regime through his use of sound and screen space. In McQueen’s installation Carib’s Leap/Western Deep, 2002, first shown in the cavernous site of the then defunct Lumiere Cinema in London, a screen in the first space shows an image of black bodies falling in slow motion in a vast amorphous blueness, an ambiguous image that alludes to a horrific historical event – in 1651 a large number of Caribs threw themselves over the cliffs onto the rocks below rather than surrender to French soldiers. The screen in the adjacent space shows a more documentary-type film of mine workers whose descent into the interior of the deepest gold mine in the world, the Tautona mines near Johannesburg, South Africa, is made palpable to the viewer by means of the heightened soundtrack and the angles of the shots, which shift from immersive close-ups to distanced observational shots that engage the viewer in a range of spectatorial and sensorial re-alignments so that our comfort threshold is crossed and we begin to question our implication in their fate. Through his use of sound and montage, McQueen creates a phenomenological space that is both particular and general: general in the sense that it provokes our sensory identifications with bodies and sites that are foreign; particular in the sense that we are made aware of the real suffering of those depicted in the images without being able to subjugate the image in the aggressive register of narcissism. Film theorist Kaja Silverman, writing about Isaac Julien’s film Looking for Langston, 1989, a black and white, fantasy-like recreation of high-society gay men during the Harlem Renaissance, discusses how the cinematographic lighting illuminates its protagonists in such a way as to generate an alternative mode of narcissistic identification, what she calls heteropathic identification and which operates by means of a kinetic shift towards bodies that are different from one’s own imaginary schema. This is opposed to idiopathic identification, which cannibalises the other so that the other fits into and is subjected to that imaginary schema.15 The former models the visual register on movement and shape, and thereby has the potential to generate alternative positions and subjects, whereas the latter becomes fixated on a static image of objectification which judges the other as either a successful or failed mirror reflection of the self. McQueen’s work could be

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seen as operating in the former register of heteropathic identification, a mode of address which is crucial to counter the fetishism of the scopic realm and to the continuance of addressing political issues in a current context where, as Jean Fisher says, ‘cultural marginality [is] no longer a problem of invisibility but one of excess visibility in terms of a reading of cultural difference that is too easily marketable.’16 In Édouard Manet’s Olympia, 1863, the image of the black woman historically served to underscore the whiteness of the prostitute’s body, rendering the former invisible while highlighting the fetishistic desirable of the latter, hence the importance for black women artists to examine this whiting out of the female black body and to reclaim visibility. But of course this was also riddled with problems as the female black body’s visibility was equated with availability. The photographs of Carrie Mae Weems explore this negation of the black female’s subjectivity in the process of othering in the mirror relation. In Mirror, Mirror, from the Ain’t Jokin’ series, 1987–88, a black woman holds a mirror, at which she looks sideways and in which a black fairy godmother character is reflected, the accompanying text underneath the image reading: ‘LOOKING INTO THE MIRROR, THE BLACK WOMAN ASKED “MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE WALL, WHO’S THE FINEST OF THEM ALL?” THE MIRROR SAYS, “SNOW WHITE, YOU BLACK BITCH, AND DON’T YOU FORGET IT!!!”’ This image speaks to the inherent idealisations of female whiteness that abound at an unconscious level in black culture – witness the availability of skin-whitening products as well as the fact that black Barbie dolls only became popular when made over in Caucasian features with straight hair.17 In Weems’s reworking of the narcissistic gaze, the point is less about exposing the defensive structure of narcissism and more about the importance of recognising the right of black female subjectivities to the mirror recognition necessary to desire. Weems’s Untitled (Kitchen table series), 1990, was constructed around the time that Laura Mulvey’s aforementioned article was becoming very popular: everybody and their mama was using it, talking about the politics of the gaze, and I kept thinking about the gaps in her text, the way in which she had considered black female subjects. [ …] All the pieces in the Kitchen Table series highlight ‘the gaze’ […] to start creating a space in which black women are looking back […] and challenging all those assumptions about the gaze, and also questioning who is in fact looking, How much are white women looking? How much are black men looking?18 In this series, Weems created photographic narratives that addressed the complexity of gendered relations in the everyday lives of black women. In one of the images, the positioning of the black woman between two black men – the poster of Martin Luther King on the wall and the man in the foreground at the table with whom she plays cards – her hand shielding

19. Carrie Mae Weems, Mirror, Mirror, 1987–88.

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her gaze, his gaze turned to her, complicates the structures of looking delineated by Mulvey, i.e. narcissistic identification and voyeurism. We look, but are unsure of the nature of the drama we are presented with. The direction of the gaze is withheld and relayed between the men and the woman. We are uncertain with whom should we identify, as the image represents internal desires and experiences between protagonists in such as way as to remove the fetishism that inheres to photographs of the black body, which depend on stasis and objectification, as in Robert Mapplethorpe’s image Man in Polyester Suit, 1980. However, the Mapplethorpe image is also complicated by the fact that, while the fetish object can be seen to stabilise the identity of the gazing white man, feeding his narcissism as it were, the fetish also threatens to undo his identity. As Kobena Mercer says in relation to this image, The dialectics of white fear and fascination underpinning colonial fantasy are reinscribed by the exaggerated centrality of the black man’s monstrous phallus. The Black subject is objectified into Otherness as the size of the penis signifies a threat to the secure identity of the white male ego and the position of power which whiteness entails in colonial discourse. Yet the phobic object is contained.19 Thereby the white male viewer is returned to his safe place of identification and mastery, but at the same time has been able to indulge in that commonplace fixation with black male sexuality as something dangerous, hyper-virile and exotic. Lyle Ashton Harris’s photograph of, and in collaboration with, Renée Valerie Cox in which she poses wearing enlarged comical prostheses on her breasts and buttocks that mimic the engravings of the Hottentot Venus again challenges the gaze to consider the anthropological fantasies that operate in colonial ethnographic classifications of other races as freakish and animalistic. The discomfort raised by such an image is mitigated by a clever use of humour reminiscent of how artists Coco Fusco and Guillermo Peña acted out such classifications in their performance Undiscovered Amerindians, 1992–94, in which they stage themselves as caged colonial subjects who are put on display for the delectation of the colonisers. The paradox of this satirical commentary is that more than half of the visitors to the museums who came upon the performance believed that their fictitious Guatinaui identities were real. The work performed a ‘reverse ethnography. [ …] Our cage became a blank screen onto which audiences projected their fantasies of who and what we are. As we assumed the stereotypical role of the domesticated savage, many audience members felt entitled to assume the role of coloniser, only to find themselves uncomfortable with the implications of the game.’20 Lorraine O’Grady’s 1991 installation of a series of black and white photomontages entitled Body is the Ground of My Experience also posed questions about the racialised body as shaped by history but also as a site of resistance to simplified socio-historical readings. In the Gaze



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and Dream quadriptychs that comprise one series in the installation, the portraits of black men and women exhibit an alternative genealogy to the mirror-stage – a giving birth to oneself shaped by an inner dream of what you think you look like, rather than simply being subjected to the camera’s objective gaze. Each portrait has a small-scale version of the same image photomontaged in front of it, the full-scale image appearing as if for a surveillance gaze, the smaller insert representing what the subjects think they look like, their imagined inner life, the subtle doubling generating a minute space of resistance to the camera’s scrutiny. In the photomontage The Fir-Palm, foliage of a New England fir tree grows from a tropical palm trunk that in turn springs from an African woman’s navel, the image not only referring to O’Grady’s cultural background, but also to the split between nature and culture that allowed the colonial gaze to subjugate other races as being closer to nature and therefore inferior. However, this work not only shows the dialectic of nature and culture that defines history, but also insists on a recuperative erotics of the body. It was ultimately in being reduced to the body as defined by the white gaze that the black body was robbed of itself, hence the importance of celebratory images of the black body rather than simply analytical ones. The final image in the group, The Clearing: or Cortez and La Malinche, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, N. and Me, with its interracial pairings and displays of sexual intercourse, both alludes to desire and colonial rape, uncomfortably showing the proximity between the erotics and violence of domination. To some extent, the recognition and deconstruction of black identity and subjectivity in art in relation to psychoanalytic theory reached its heyday in the 1990s. As Kobena Mercer says, the ‘present-day regime of corporate globalism in the art world has de-coupled’ political empowerment from cultural visibility and ‘ushered in a new regime of multicultural normalisation’.21 While psychoanalytic theory provides a useful tool for examining the underlying fantasies at work in our identifications and desires, black artists no longer feel obliged to overtly foreground race as the predominant theme in their work, seeking the right to work on aesthetic and formal issues on a par with white artists whose ethnicity is assumed rather than questioned. If ‘black narcissus’ went some way towards recuperating the traumatised, mutilated and denigrated black body, there is also a case to be made for continuing this project until a black subject can act as a universal subject rather than always being positioned as Other. For artist Lorna Simpson, The thing I think I have most difficulty with…is the thing about the black figure… how much ‘politicised’ space this figure takes up. For instance, Kiki Smith does work about the body; she can do a sculpture out of resin or glass, it’s kind of this pinkish Caucasian-ish tone, and her work is interpreted as speaking universally about the

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body. Now when I do it I am speaking about the black body…But at the same time, this is a universal figure…. 22 As she says about her more recent work in film and video which feature a variety of ethnic identities, Latin American, Indian, Korean, African-American, Asian, These characters aren’t seen as a kind of stepping–off point towards a universalism. They’re generically seen as black characters or as people of ethnic groups. Whatever the subject of my work, it will always first be categorised in those terms. I have my own utopian sense that at a certain point people’s relationship to this work will change, that it will not come to the forefront as ‘Oh, they’re black!’23 Simpson’s early work was read in terms of picturing the archetypal black woman. From 1995, she moved progressively from imaging the figure, usually black females with their backs to the audience or their faces blanked out, to making serigraphs on felt panels imaging urban exteriors and interiors and accompanied by text that gives voice to the underlying dynamics of raced and gendered identities that are invisible yet might inhabit these empty spaces as moments in a film noir. bell hooks described one of Simpson’s early works, The Waterbearer, 1986, as recasting the history of the black female by giving her her own space in which to gaze, a space unavailable to the audience, but which, through the back-turned figure’s pouring of water from vessels of different eras, bears witness to ‘that space of grace wherein the soul finds sanctuary, recovers itself’.24 Simpson has also presented images of hair, using it as a signifier that links different generations of black women, her clinical yet poetic forensics undoing its fetishistic connotations and releasing it as a signifier of beauty and desire in African-American culture. However, Simpson’s meditation on black subjectivity can be usefully aligned to Lacan’s mirror-stage in a way that addresses the paradoxical notion of a universal black subject. In the series of photographs Easy for Who to Say, 1989, the faces of the five female figures are blanked out and replaced with one of the five vowels. Under each polaroid is a plaque engraved with a word beginning with the associated vowel – ‘Amnesia’, ‘Error’, ‘Indifference’, ‘Omission’, ‘Uncivil’ – the work being visually reminiscent of Kelly’s use of Charcot’s classifications of hysteria in her exploration of white female sexuality, here further complicated by the excess of a raced identity upon whom the injunction to speak correctly is enforced. In her white shift and under the glare of studio lighting, Simpson’s woman appears as if subjugated by a medical gaze, race having been considered a symptom in proximity to hysteria. While Kelly’s strategy was to refuse to image the body directly by using clothing and text to infer it, Simpson uses gridded formats that fragment the reflective gestalt body and sharply allocates the black female body in a linguistic register, which



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predetermines her existence, but also interestingly, provides networks of resistance in their failure to signify her inner experience. But the work also has a more universal address, which is not to deny the complications of race and gender, but to eke out a space for a wider spectatorship. The work makes me think of Lacan’s dictum that there is a void at the heart of the subject that we fill with signifiers which communicate with one another rather than express our intimate sense of being. In exposing these signifiers in the guise of vowels that bar access to the narcissistic register of the face and eye contact, Simpson’s work goes beyond simply pointing to the social conditions which interpellate blackness as inferior and performs the phantasmatic nature of identity per se, including race, which, while being overdetermined as a signifier, is nonetheless a filling out of a loss that cannot be represented, i.e. the subject’s traumatic relation to death. Magdalena, 1992, is comprised of six polaroids and two engraved plastic plaques. The pairs of images on the left-hand side and on the righthand side both display a white shoe box, the plaque under the left-hand pair reading ‘at her burial I stood under the tree next to her grave’. The middle pair of photographs display a pair of women’s shoes, in one image facing forwards, in the other turned away from the viewer, while the plaque under the right-hand pair of white shoe boxes reads ‘when I returned the tree was a distance from her marker’. What is imaged here is not only the temporal displacement of memory in relation to the seeming stasis of photographic representation, but the absent body that can only be invoked in the face of its disappearance in death. Magdalena represents both a particular narrative, the loss of a parent and their history, and a universal narrative, the gaps in knowledge generated by the encounter with mortality.

Chapter 8

Repetition and the Death Drive

The displacement of memory formalised by the text on the plaques in Simpson’s Magdalena signifies an absence at the heart of the work that mirrors the impossibility of experiencing our own death. Although we are certain we will die, we cannot have ‘knowledge’ of this experience. While our desire for knowledge remains thwarted, our unconscious drives impel us to return again and again to this subjective end point. The contradictory force of the death drive is something that Freud would grapple with in his infamous essay ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, 1920, which remains hotly debated and has given rise to numerous interpretations, as well as being of interest to artists due to its concern with the dynamic of repetition, a dynamic which speaks to the tension inherent in creativity between form and its disarticulation which I have been exploring in various guises throughout this book.1 A useful way of getting a handle on ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ is to say that there are two components of the death drive in Freud, one of which desires homeostasis, which Freud calls the Nirvana principle, and the other of which is bound up with repetition compulsion and masochism. Art can be tied to either of these strands, depending on whether an artwork is on the side of binding the chaotic force of the death drive or repeating its disruptive impulses. Although the death drive, Thanatos, might be seen as being in conflict with Eros, the pleasure principle, in fact they are linked in Freud’s economic perspective on mental processes – the direction of the death drive that desires homeostasis serves the pleasure principle’s conservative nature, in that it seeks the diminution of any excitation that might cause a disturbance to the mental apparatus. Excitation here would be synonymous with an increase in energy or tension, and the goal of pleasure would be to alleviate this. But the strangeness



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of ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ is that it oscillates between two kinds of pleasure, one of which seeks the harmonious balance of the psyche, the other strand seeking pleasure from the repetition of unpleasurable experiences and from an increase of excitation in the psyche. This leads Freud to remark on the ‘mysterious masochistic trends of the ego’,2 which for the literary critic Leo Bersani are less mysterious if one attends to how the ego is constituted by means of fragmentation – what Bersani calls ‘self-shattering’ and which I referred to in the introduction in relation to the idea of a primary masochism that goes beyond the dualism of sadism and masochism. Following Freud, Bersani maintains that the evolution of the ego is both a source of pleasure and pain, pleasure in the sense of gaining a stabilised identity, pain in the sense of knowing that this identity is at the cost of losing an unmediated relation to one’s body. Those egos that cannot bear this pain project it to the outside in acts and impulses of varying degrees of sadism – think of the numerous defence mechanisms we have looked at throughout this book – while other egos turn this pain back on themselves. For Freud there are three distinct types of masochism, erotogenic, feminine and moral, the erotogenic type being the basis for the other two. Erotogenic masochism is an originary stage of psychic evolution, whereby the ego is shattered into being by the influx of libidinous forces. To ensure the survival of the organism, these forces get projected out onto external objects, but can easily be introjected again, forming a secondary masochism which Freud deliberates as moral masochism, in which the subject is beset by an unconscious sense of guilt for an imaginary crime that he feels he needs to be punished for – think of the protagonists of Dostoevsky’s novels. Feminine masochism, which Freud situates in relation to fantasies of castration, is closer to what we associate with masochism in the popular imagination – performances whose content is of being gagged, bound, painfully beaten, whipped, etc.3 For Bersani, though, it is the existence of a primary erotogenic masochism that offers an answer to why we derive pleasure from the repetition of unpleasure, a question which Freud is at pains to account for in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’. Bersani calls this primary masochism ‘selfshattering’, and says that pleasure can be derived from re-encountering the fragmentation and decomposition that the ego denies in order to become a stable subject.4 What causes the ego pain is difference, whether this is the difference of others (external objects) or the difference within its own nature. And while the pleasure principle, Eros, seeks to eliminate difference and create a homeostatic ego, there is also a part of the ego that seeks to repeat the unpleasure (frustration) brought about by the introduction of the external (different) object into its universe, because that object, while threatening, also introduces erotic pleasure. In order to understand this further, we need to make the distinction between instinct and the Freudian drive, which is crucial to thinking beyond the pleasure principle. The ‘breast’

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satisfies the infant’s hunger, thereby satisfying the instinct, but this external object also introduces a pleasurable sensation derived from the contact between mouth and breast. The infant wants to repeat this sensation, so the next time it feels hungry Freud says it hallucinates the breast. This experience is both pleasurable and frustrating, as the infant is attempting to achieve satisfaction by means of fantasy. The real breast is no longer enough to satisfy him, a gap having opened up between objects of need, which satisfy instincts, and objects of desire, around which the drives circulate, propelling the human subject to seek out objects which will always generate some degree of unpleasure due to the inherent gap between need and desire. But this unpleasure paradoxically satisfies the drives at an unconscious level. It is almost as if the ego were at the behest of agents beyond its control that seek to unsettle it at every turn. To stabilise the drives, the subject might position the object rigidly in place by a perverse adherence to the letter of the law, which aims to close the gap between need and desire, making them synonymous with one another. This is the root of sadism. On the other hand, the subject, turning itself into an object upon whose body the de-fusion of the instincts is enacted or performed, uses an attachment to fragmentation and decomposition to create an identity that enjoys suffering, deriving its pleasure from the repetition of unpleasure. How does this relate to art? Let’s deal with the conservative position first. Norman O. Brown, an American writer in the 1960s, put forward the not uncommon view that all cultural artefacts operate under the sign of the death instinct.5 We displace our fear and denial of mortality onto cultural artefacts such as art which we store in museums as monuments to the death instinct. Artworks then become objects of consolation that pacify the anxiety that might be aroused were we to confront our mortality. They become testaments to our civilisation and its future legacy, almost like totems that ward off the gods of destruction and extinction. The conservative view of art situates it as putting an end to internal disturbance and as reflecting back a good image of ourselves, which extends to intellectual satisfaction as well. Western avant-garde art sought to challenge the classical principles of unity and harmony, favouring rupture and dissonance – think of Surrealism – but these qualities have become aestheticised to the point where they have become almost as classical as those which they set out to oppose. The conservative nature of the ego attempts to eliminate the disruption that ensues from the masochistic drives which push at the limits of signification and recognition. For Freud, the social address of art means that it is on the side of the pleasure principle, as even when it presents painful experiences there is a yield of pleasure in their working through. Freud separates art from the ‘tendencies beyond the pleasure principle’ which are ‘more primitive than it and independent of it’.6 However, Freud had only a very cursory knowledge



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of Surrealism and of course had not seen contemporary art, which could be said to tap into these ‘more primitive’ tendencies. Summing up Freud’s view, Sarah Kofman says that [n]arcissism lulls one into sterile self-contemplation or, in the case of collective narcissism, lulls society into contemplation of its own values: art as ‘reflection’ is conservative […] Erected to conquer death, art as a ‘double’, like any double, turns itself into an image of death. The game of art is a game of death, which always already implies death in life, as a force of saving and inhibition.7 The artist whose life and work are not only synonymous with the conservative strand of the death drive and Freud’s notion of the desire to return to homeostasis, but which also expose the dynamic of repetition compulsion is Andy Warhol. Warhol’s art practice epitomises the desire to control the death drive by imitating the mechanical operations of a machine, whose input and output are equivalent and which lacks tension. The content of his imagery is often derived from images of death in the media – the electric chair, skulls, car crashes and movie stars like Marilyn Monroe, whose proximity to death made them seductive. He subjects these images to a blanket serial repetition, albeit including subtle differences caused by the glitches of the screen-printing process. However, these indexical traces of difference are minimal. The irony is, though, that in his attempt to reduce difference to zero, he is compelled to keep on working over the trauma of death, much in the way that the fetish object in protecting against anxiety also generates it and continually needs to be redone. Mike Kelley’s Craft Morphology Flow Chart, 1991, is a tongue-in-cheek monument to the idea of art as a substitute object that provides comfort in the face of death. Laid out on tables, his knitted toy-monkey dolls are reminiscent of corpses on mortuary slabs or museological artefacts awaiting classification and measurement. These objects do not meet our expectations of art objects as idealised representations, being second-hand toys plucked from the scrapheap of surplus production. Paradoxically, though, when I encountered this installation at the ICA, London, in 1993, I found it generative of that inner disturbance that characterises the second aspect of the death drive, the masochistic tendencies of the ego which Bersani situates on the side of the life force as unproductive expenditure rather than productive preservation. In highlighting the deathly tropes of cultural production and displaying the obsessive compulsion involved in collecting and art-making as repetitive practices in which uncanny doubles of the self proliferate, the work unleashed the very anxiety these defence mechanisms are used to protect against. Being presented with these pathetic, dysfunctional, humanoid objects, one is reminded of the earlier passions that these objects were once bound up with. A sense of ineradicable loss bursts through the dam of cultural repression and begins to break through the clinical display of these objects as art. We thereby re-encounter the unpleasurable

20. Mike Kelley, Craft Morphology Flow Chart, 1991.



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pleasures of unbound libidinous affects, which were enacted on the bodies of these toys as ‘surrogate’ objects of the self. In exposing the passionate vicissitudes of these ‘surrogate’ objects, Kelley’s work performs a critique of Freud’s notion that art redeems loss. In Freud’s essay ‘Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood’, he writes that Leonardo recreates the fantasy of the mother’s smile in all his paintings, attempting to make good on a loss that was either felt as real or as something absent yet desired (Leonardo was brought up in his father’s and stepmother’s house).8 While for Freud the work of art is a projection which puts an end to internal disturbance and makes possible the hallucinatory satisfaction of a wish, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ suggests an account of art that repeats trauma, which would be on the path of the death drive as a seeking of masochistic pleasure rather than conservative homeostasis. In this model, even Leonardo’s enigmatically smiling women could be seen as the repetition of a trauma and an over-investment in the signifier of the smile. Rather than restoring his mother’s smile to himself, Leonardo could be seen as being compelled to repeat it as a moment of loss, which generates a desire beyond the object of the smile as such. One of Freud’s starting-points in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ is the question of why shell-shocked soldiers repeat their war traumas in their dreams. From this example of repetition compulsion, he further explores the phenomenon using a story from family observation which is commonly referred to as the story of the ‘fort-da’. Freud witnesses his one-and-a-half-yearold grandson throwing a cotton reel in and out of his cot. The infant makes the sounds ‘o-o-oo’ as the reel is thrown out, its return accompanied by the sound ‘da’, which Freud, along with his daughter, interprets as the German ‘fort’ meaning gone, ‘da’ meaning here. Freud reads this game as a symbolisation of being able to control the mother’s disappearance and appearance so that, rather than waiting and being dependent on her, the infant is now able to represent her absence to himself, exchanging ‘the passivity of the experience’ for ‘the activity of the game’, which for Freud signifies a sense of mastery even as it points to the remembered unpleasurable event.9 Lacan interprets this story somewhat differently, saying that it signifies the beginning of the subject’s submission to the object cause of desire, which Lacan calls the petit objet a, whereby the object plays us, keeping us attached to a scrap of the real (primary narcissism) which we have lost and which we henceforth attempt to fill with objects of desire.10 Even Freud points to the double-edged nature of this scenario. In an intriguing footnote in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, he describes the child greeting the mother’s return with the words ‘bebi o-o-o-o!’, saying that in his solitude the child has ‘found a method of making himself disappear. He has discovered his reflection in a full-length mirror which did not quite reach the ground, so that by crouching down he could make his mirror image “gone”.’11 This is a

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much less masterful solution to the pain of loss, whereby the child acts it out by using his own image as a ‘surrogate’ object for himself. We often find ourselves attracted to harmful or destructive objects, as they allow us to repeat this pain, as if next time round we will master it, but even in this failure, or perhaps because of it, we experience the other kind of pleasure from unpleasure that Freud tries to track in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’. While art’s formalisation of the processes of loss and destruction has a conservative element in the sense of possessing a binding, symbolic aspect, art that interrogates the realm of disintegrating form, operating as it does on the threshold between stability and dissolution, exhibits the dynamic of repetition compulsion that characterises the death drive. For example, the artist Eva Hesse would continually write in her diaries about her anxiety about what she was making, how her objects were completely absurd, yet she was compelled to produce them. Hesse’s sculptural objects challenge the desire for coherence that characterises visual gestalt in that they are structured in an anti-gravitational manner, the materials used, such as latex and rubber, being deployed in ways that work against themselves, their fragility evoking bodily sensations that hover between emergence and dissolution. In her use of minimalist principles of seriality, repetition is imbued with a psychic desire which Lucy Lippard described as being in the service of cancelling binaries such as ‘“hardness/softness, roughness/smoothness, precision/chance, geometry/freeform, toughness/vulnerability, ‘natural’ surface/industrial construction”’, even as the work presents these dualities in productively unresolved tension.12 Her repetitious forms are always in danger of collapsing in on themselves, as if teetering on the brink of the tension between the life drive (Eros), which tends towards binding, and the death drive (Thanatos), bordering on disintegration, the material units of the work subjecting us to the contradictory ebb and flow of this energic field. While Hesse used the grid structure and serial repetition that characterises much of the work of her minimalist contemporaries Donald Judd, Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt, she upped the ante in using these tropes in an irrational, absurdist manner. In works such as Sans 11, 1968, Hesse’s grids are exposed as unstable and wonky, each latex square being unpredictably not quite the same as the next one in the sequence. Hesse destabilises the ideal geometry of the form and creates novelty within the ordered chaos of repetition. As art historian Briony Fer says, Hesse ‘subjectivised the drive to repetition that exists not just within the self but in culture and that makes that psychic spread everywhere – beyond herself – to our relationship with ordinary things’.13 Untitled (Three Nets), 1966, consists of three inky-black papier-mâché balls suspended in bag-like holders made of black painted rope which precariously dangle from the wall, their weight seeming to succumb to the force of a gravitational pull towards



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the floor. The spherical-like forms perch on the brink of evolving into spheres proper or collapsing into a chaotic material mass. There is a similar tension in the work of Robert Smithson, Hesse’s peer and friend, and his ideas of site/nonsite.14 Art historian Margaret Iversen argues that Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, 1970, is an attempt to render the death drive visible, which for Smithson aligned with the psychoanalytic ideas of Anton Ehrenzweig in his book The Hidden Order of Art. Ehrenzweig used the terms differentiated and dedifferentiated vision to discuss the processes of binding and unbinding that ensue from the tensions between Eros and Thanatos which are deployed in creative practice. Written in 1967, the book is referred to in Smithson’s own writings and offers a more user-friendly approach to the death drive.15 Ehrenzweig maintained that the ego’s temporary decomposition is necessary for creative artistic creativity. He associates this creative dedifferentiation with the death drive or Thanatos, but notes that ‘we are not engulfed by death, but are released from our separate individual existence.’ Thanatos in other words ‘tends toward entropy, a levelling down of the difference between inside and outside and a diminution of internal tension through externalisation (excreting, expelling)’.16 Dedifferentiated forms and vision tend towards the uniformity of inorganic matter, while organic forms are highly differentiated and organised. Smithson’s deployment of entropy as the drive towards the dissolution of highly formed matter echoes Hesse’s desire to work with material forms that continually erase their implied geometric structures. For example, Metronymic Irregularity 1, 1966, consists of two wall-mounted wooden panels which are linked by frenetic entanglements of cotton-covered wire that protrude from irregular grid points on the panels and leap across the space between them. The wires can be seen as connecting the two panels but also as violently slashing the surfaces of both the panels and obscuring the space between them, thereby rendering it inaccessible. Hang Up, 1966, which Hesse deemed her most successful attempt to create ‘a big nothing’, creates a weird loop between the protruding steel wire that erupts from the top and bottom opposite corners of a wall-mounted frame and the variable shadow it casts on the floor, which depends on gallery light and the position of the viewer. The steel protrusion implies a barred sense of space which is continually being undermined by the way the (im)material loop between steel and shadow suggests a continuous encircling of this zone of obscurity. The entropic and cyclical thrust of this looping is further enhanced by the gradation of tone from light to dark of the cloth covering the frame.

21. Eva Hesse, Hang Up, 1966.



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According to Bersani, art or literary works that mine the structural effects of the death drive as an unpleasurable pleasure exhibit forms which feature repetition and blockages to narrative. Narrative continuity and resolution are aligned with satisfied pleasure, whereas forms which are unstable and/or obsessively repeated without a sense of closure generate tension and anxiety. The ethical implications of these kinds of practices can be situated in relation to Lacan’s suspicion of the sovereignty of the ego, ‘which he thought led people to greater isolation and so also to greater aggression, and he naturally turned with interest to the power of the death drive to unbind, or undo, the ego’.17 But we have a great resistance to unbinding, and both Smithson’s and Hesse’s work have been narrativised in relation to their respective biographies. Hesse’s fascination with empty rectangular forms has been read as relating her to a working through of her mother’s suicide by jumping out of a window when Hesse was a child, while Smithson’s fascination with the red corpuscular soil of the Great Salt Lake has been related to his brother’s death from a rare blood disease aged nine, two years before Smithson was born.18 My purpose here is rather to note how their experiments with form destabilise space in such a way that it empties itself, turning the inside out or outside in, creating a duality that is impossible to inhabit in three-dimensional space but that echoes the entropic motion of the death drive, which, in seeking disintegration, inevitably spews out new forms. Iversen echoes this when she says that Spiral Jetty ‘enacts a symbolic ritual allowing temporary sway to the death drive’,19 oscillating between the ecstatic moments of the site where perception is dedifferentiated – ‘perception was heaving, the stomach turning…I had the red heaves as the sun vomited its corpuscular radiation’ – with the rubble of the nonsite exhibited in the gallery characterising the more stable moments of this ebb and flow.20 (The nonsite refers to the photographs and gridded formations of rocks Smithson exhibited in the gallery.) For me Hang Up, like much of Hesse’s work, invokes a masochistic body in the tension it creates between materiality and immateriality and in terms of how it attempts repeatedly to cancel the notion of the frame as a window onto the world. I do not, however, experience this body as being directly related to Hesse’s illnesses or prehistory, which has been the tendency in much critical writing: Anna Chave’s literal description of Contingent, 1968–69, as looking like ‘“a ghastly array of giant soiled bandages, or worse yet, like so many flayed, human skins (distantly evocative of the Nazis’ notorious use of human flesh to make lampshades)”’ (Hesse’s family fled from Nazi Germany in 1938); Anne Wagner’s insistence that Hesse’s ‘practices of both drawing and sculpture may have been in some definitive sense the products of unconscious processes – and as such among the means she used to come to terms with the loss of her mother’.21 Granted Wagner does situate this unconscious content as being screened

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or propped behind strictly artistic concerns and that it is the latter which allow the viewer access to the psychic charge of the work rather than knowledge of the artist’s biography. Art is a metaphorical and material working over of and through bodily feelings, so that while the work relates to Hesse’s feelings of being a body in space and time, these feelings are transformed by the formal language available to her, to which she brings an awareness of the intimate qualities of materials, their translucency and opacity. Through this working over of materials, Hesse creates structures that allow the viewer to experience generalised fantasies of loss and absence. In the encounter with objects, which are in the process of uncoupling the rigidities of binary thinking, we re-find that intermediate space where form and its diffusion tussle without resolution. Attending to the metaphorics rather than the literalism of the death drive allows us to consider Hesse’s work as a seeking to erase difference that, in coming up against particular material conditions and constraints, produces even more difference, exceeding the initiating binaries of surface/depth, order/chaos, male/female.22 We are momentarily released from the confines of the ego and returned to the ‘mysterious masochistic trends of the ego’, which derives enjoyment from contradiction, ambiguity and deformation over and over again.

Chapter 9

Returning to Melanie Klein

The consideration of art as a form of repetition compulsion can make it seem as if it is being ‘framed in terms of theoretical regression’.1 Feminist-inspired art practices in the 1990s that referenced the body were especially susceptible to this mistaken assumption. We saw earlier how Julia Kristeva’s theories of the semiotic and abjection were crucial in asserting a preOedipal psychic imaginary that was instrumental for considering women’s art practices in particular, but the prefix ‘pre’ tended to associate these spaces with regressive psychosis in relation to symbolic norms and consistency. In fact, Kristeva goes so far as to call works of art ‘experimental psychoses or experimental autism’, although she sees these acts as profitable in giving voice to states of morbidity.2 Wanting to situate these kinds of psychic spaces in a slightly different light, art historian Mignon Nixon looked at Louise Bourgeois’s artwork through the lens of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s theories. Her essay ‘Bad Enough Mother’, 1995, was notable in situating an alternative conceptual framework for artwork on the body, one that diverges from and perhaps even forms ‘a critique of psychoanalytic feminist work of the 1970s and ‘80s’ which privileged signifiers of ‘pleasure and desire over hatred and aggression’.3 For Freud, as for his follower, the Austrian-born British psychoanalyst Klein, hatred is the earliest emotion, predating our intersubjective relations with the world. Klein made hatred and aggression the lynchpin of her theories, and the renewed interest in her work in art discourse of the mid-1990s charts a shift in the relationship between art and psychoanalysis, in which the focus moves from questions of representation, as in, for example, Mary Kelly’s work, to notions of how art might engage affect and primitive emotional states.4

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While Kleinian psychoanalytic theory has had its art-historical proponents, mainly in 1950s Britain through the philosopher Richard Wollheim’s championing of art critic and painter Adrian Stokes’s Kleinian-inspired writings, in the 1990s climate of postmodernity Klein and other object-relations theorists such as D.W. Winnicott were not thought to have much to offer in relation to the contemporary world of mediation, whereas Lacanian psychoanalytic theory aligned with the dominant ethos that identity was constituted by means of signifiers external to the subject and was, therefore, precarious at best, illusory at worst.5 Even within the worlds of psychoanalysis, there is a split between the Lacanians on the one hand and the Kleinians on the other, stemming in part from Lacan’s critique of Klein – although he admired her therapeutic results, he considered her an instinctual practitioner and a crude materialist. It is interesting that there has been a resurgence of her ‘theories’ in contemporary art discourse at the very time when there is a renewed interest in the physical materiality of the art object. Of course, there have always been artists who found Klein’s theory of reparation, in which art is situated in terms of a repairing of the damage done to the mother’s body in phantasy,6 crucial to thinking about the rationale for their art practices, but these therapeutic leanings were not taken seriously in an art discourse informed by critical perspectives on the nature of representation and mediation. In a Kleinian or an object-relations approach, artworks tend to be reduced to being about the relation to the maternal body per se, which is what feminist-informed artists have always been so careful to negotiate in order to avoid their work on the female body being equated with nature and being seen as outside of culture. The value of Nixon’s approach is that she rescues a psychoanalytic theory which was seen as regressive, even biologically predetermined, and shows how in a contemporary context it can provide a valuable critique of the over-emphasis on language and thereby allow for a means of reconsidering the materiality of art objects, which relate to the affective body and early emotional states of being. Klein expanded on Freud’s ideas in the 1920s and 1930s in Britain, where she spent most of her working life. Unlike Freud, for whom the development of the ego is carved from the id, for Klein the infant has a primitive residual ego from birth which incorporates the two innate instincts of love and hate. For Klein as well, we all have a psychotic core. Her theories pivot around two phases, which she calls the paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive position. Needless to say, as in Freud, these developmental phases are never completely overcome in a teleological way, and they oscillate throughout one’s life. It is important to remember that Klein’s account of infantile phantasy is literally that: it may sound bizarre presented coldly in this context, but Klein’s fantastical narrative explains feelings and anxieties presented to the analyst by her mainly child patients. The paranoid-



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schizoid position is a violent one. The infant is riddled with psychic aggression that is not only constitutional but also directed at the mother in an effort both to possess and destroy her, because she is perceived as the source of all good things, which the greedy infant wants. But it is not a case of simply going out to get them, as the infant is constitutionally set up to see the same object as being both good and bad, so that the mother is seen as being a container of objects that are conflictingly both good and bad. In this realm of phantasy, these objects are the classic Freudian ones of breast, faeces, penis, to which Klein adds milk and other children. For instance, the infant perceives the breast as being both good and bad. To resolve the conflict produced by this dilemma, the infant uses defence mechanisms such as ‘splitting’, whereby the bad part of an object can be prevented from contaminating the good part – hence the good breast and the bad breast – and ‘introjection’, whereby the good parts of an object can be taken into itself. The infant can also disown a bad part of the object, including aspects of itself, by means of ‘projection’ – the infant literally projects its negative feelings onto another object, thereby keeping the good part of the object safe or, if that is not possible, it projects its positive feelings onto another object to keep them safe from its own internal aggression. The infant then identifies itself with these positive feelings at a distance, a process Klein calls projective identification. If this sounds like a war, it is, and as in any war defence mechanisms incite retribution – the projected bad part object can become a persecutory object that haunts the infant making him/her paranoid and fearful of being invaded by the split-off bad object. The infant’s psychical life is also imbued with envy, which acts to destroy the efficacy of the infant’s defence mechanism of splitting, as envy can destroy the good object which was split off from the bad object in order initially to protect it. All wars take place on a terrain, and this one takes place in relation to the mother’s phantasised body, upon which all manner of brutality is wreaked, these psychical processes being bound up with the physiological ones of sucking, biting and cutting. However, wars tend to come to an end, however provisionally, and this one reaches its conclusion in the depressive position whereby the infant arrives at an awareness of the damage s/he has wreaked and begins to see the mother as a whole person. The infant integrates the split-off good and bad part objects and begins to perceive that there is only one mother with good and bad features. S/he feels guilt at its own destructive impulses and wants to repair the damage – hence the term reparation, where the driving force is the anxiety to make the object whole again through love. In the shift from one position to the other, there is a corresponding shift from the focus on internal objects to the external world. However, the anxiety generated in the depressive position is never overcome, and one is never, so to speak, finished with the mother. Contemporary Kleinians attribute the work of symbol formation, art

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and culture to attempts to regenerate the mother in phantasy. The foregone nature of this conclusion has been off-putting for artists and art theorists, but Nixon begins a more fruitful discussion about the relation between contemporary art and Kleinian theory, linking them via the psychic and material processes of anxiety and aggression. Nixon’s analysis is careful to underplay the dominance of the phantasy of the mother’s body as the figure to which art is addressed, instead underscoring the creatively productive forces of anxiety and aggression. She emphasises the theatrical staging of aggressive phantasy in the work of artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Rona Pondick, claiming that their objects are structured via the forces of aggressive phantasy. Bourgeois is a classic case of an artist whose awareness of psychoanalysis comes across in the narratives that she weaves around her work. In relation to her work Cell (You Better Grow Up), 1993, Bourgeois says that ‘[t]he world that is described and realised is the frightening world of a child who doesn’t like being dependent and who suffers from it’.7 Bourgeois was a reader of both Freud and Klein and, although she was sceptical about psychoanalysis, she nonetheless cast her autobiography using its terminology. While her work is not illustrative of Kleinian theory, the base, bulbous, materiality of some of her forms conjure up a universe of aggressive vicissitudes. The first time I encountered Bourgeois’s Janus Fleuri, 1968, I was struck by the in-your-face quality of its unwholesome viscerality. The bronze object was suspended from the ceiling at eye level, so there was no escaping its central mass of bulbous, cloaca-like matter that pushed through the classically rounded yet sexual forms in which it was ensconced. I was confronted or even assaulted by a seductively nauseating tactility cast in the material of sculptural permanence and austerity. For me, the value of Nixon’s return to Klein to discuss such artworks is that rather than seeing the qualities of visceral materiality as regressive and mute, she offers a way of conceiving of them as addressing the conflictual symbolic universe we occupy internally and which structures our relations to the external world. And, more importantly, the Kleinian symbolic universe offers a much welcomed alternative to the Freudian model of castration as being the bedrock of sexual identity. In a Kleinian model, ‘The first object of aggression is not, as it is in the Oedipal-centred Freudian model, the father, and not even the mother, but a series of part objects – breast, milk, penis, children, womb – to which the infant fantasises the connection of other part objects – mouth, teeth, urine, faeces – in frenzied attacks enacting, according to Klein, the force of the death drive.’8 In the Kleinian universe, the force of the death drive rather than castration is seen as being pivotal to the structure of the psyche, with the infant’s paranoid-schizoid universe being riddled by the will and fear of destruction. In Klein’s downplaying of castration and her assertion of an innate and originary aggression lies the possibility of a feminine position not constituted by lack and absence, as in Lacan and Freud

22. Rona Pondick, Little Bathers (detail), 1990–91.

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respectively. ‘[T]hrough this shift of emphasis from sexual development to aggression and the death drive, the conventional construction of femininity and masculinity as opposed on axes of agency and passivity, aggression and nurturing – axes drawn to diagram the negotiation of the castration complex – is radically, if inadvertently, destabilized.’9 Although Klein calls the early stages of development ‘the femininity phase’, and although she later conservatively asserts that boys and girls take up predetermined genital positions in relation to gender, her theories of early development allow Nixon to focus productively on ‘sexual identifications [that] are multiple and complex’.10 For Nixon, artists such as Rona Pondick, whose installations consist of casts of teeth, limbs, cartons of milk, etc., strewn on the floor and suspended from the ceiling, can be aligned with the Kleinian operations of biting, sucking and secreting, processes that characterise the oral-sadistic impulses of infantile aggression. Similarly Janine Antoni’s 1992 Gnaw series, in which large cubes of lard and chocolate are literally bitten into and gnawed by the artist, can be interpreted according to how the aggressive forces of oral-sadism enable new symbolisations of the male art-historical canon, here imbuing the neutrality of minimalist form with a dysfunctional underbelly. The waste material of Antoni’s Gnaw series was sculpted into another series of works, Lick and Lather, two female busts which could be seen as making the object whole again, but whose stability as desirable objects is materially undermined by being derived from the physical processes of orality as well as being cast in organic materials that will decay over time. For Nixon, the most emblematic image of this creative aggression is the 1982 photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe of Bourgeois holding her 1968 sculpture La Fillette. She says, In Mapplethorpe’s photograph, Bourgeois made herself the very image of the bad enough mother: the mother who grins at the patriarchal overvaluation of the phallus, who parodies the metonymy of infant and penis, and in whose hands the phallus becomes penis or in other words slips from its status as prevailed signifier to become one more object of aggression and desire.11 Nixon is here alluding to the parity of part objects in the Kleinian universe of phantasy: penis, breasts, milk – all are objects of desire and attack. Although Klein’s ‘emphasis on the importance of the mother in infantile phantasy […] should not be mistaken as a reconceptualisation of sexual difference’, Nixon’s reading of artworks through the lens of Kleinian phantasy does open up a more fluid play of difference reminiscent of the mobility of the fetish that I explored in the Chapter 3, whereby objects are exchanged in a relay of equivalences, the penis becoming a part object alongside other objects rather than a privileged signifier of the phallus.12 For

23. Louise Bourgeois, Fillette, 1968.

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Nixon, this photograph portrays a phantasy of turning psychoanalysis against itself, using the part object against the phallus and humour against the fetish. What emerges in this account is another possibility for the female artist that acknowledges the play of internal aggressive forces which are undifferentiated by gender rather than always already solidified in a coded gendered body. Subjectivity is still structured through loss as destruction, but the latter is also generative of replacements that are not substitute objects for a missing penis, as in the Freudian register, but emerge from the visceral actions of biting, sucking and cutting, which are imbued with psychic desire and can be re-enacted by the artist in the register of materials. As Bourgeois says, ‘My subject is the rawness of the emotions, the devastating effect of the emotions you go though. The materials are my means.’13 Nixon also discusses the work of Rachel Whiteread through a Kleinian lens, situating her work in terms of a material structuring of loss characterised by depressive rather than aggressive anxiety. She reads Whiteread’s casts of the underside of bathtubs and beds, or the interior spaces of rooms, as an evacuation (a loss) of the aggressively desiring body, which relates to the process of reparation characteristic of Klein’s depressive phase. Given that Whiteread’s casting process either remakes an object or turns its surrounding space into an object that bears traces of past damage (use), it is tempting to see her work as a materialisation of reparation. However, there is a slight risk in the application of Kleinian theories to artworks that involves bracketing infantile experience off from the signs and signifiers of adult communication. The beauty of the photograph of Bourgeois holding La Fillette is the knowing humour at work. Humour does not exist in the infantile world. It is an adult form of communication that allows us to speak about things indirectly and gain pleasure from the sense that we have somehow managed to get away with saying something else. I cannot leave the Kleinian universe without mentioning Klein’s paper ‘Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse’, 1929, which is crucial to the relation between art and psychoanalysis using a Kleinian framework, but which also relates to my argument about the artwork being an encounter with an erotics of loss. Klein’s 1929 paper puts forward an idea that continues to be of interest to artists, i.e. that absence is constitutive of creativity. Klein discusses an article by Karin Michaelis called ‘The Empty Space’, about her friend the Swedish artist Ruth Kjar, who, prior to taking up painting was subject to bouts of depression and feelings of internal emptiness. Kjar’s initial motivation to paint supposedly began with an incident in which her painter brother-in-law took back a painting he had loaned her, the empty space left on the wall resonating with Kjar’s own sense of emptiness. Klein aligns this feeling of emptiness with her view of female castration, which relates to the empty space the woman feels in her body deriving from the girl’s Oedipal frustration, which



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leaves her with an ‘unsatisfied desire for motherhood’.14 In Kjar’s case, the feeling that there is something lacking in her body motivates her to produce a series of paintings in response to the blank space on the wall, which, it should be noted, is only recognised as an absence when something that was there was taken away. The fact that this absence was brought into being by a symbolic gesture is useful to keep in mind in the face of Klein’s tendency to resort to biology and to map feminine castration onto the girl’s real absence of a penis. As I said previously, the value of Klein’s theories is that she accords similar aggressivesadistic phantasies to both girls and boys prior to their separation into separate sexes predetermined by biology in the genital phase. In terms of creativity, the processes of splitting, projection and introjection could be said to generate a wealth of symbolic activity that is pre-linguistic yet nonetheless signifying. All these processes involve creating absences to some degree, in the sense of taking things, whether stealing them or destroying them, from one part of the object, the mother’s body, and situating them elsewhere. However, Klein insists that, due to a later identification with the mother, the girl relates to these absences differently in that they become a source of depressive lack that she cannot get over. For Klein it is the ‘deep dread of the destruction of internal organs’ that may lend women greater susceptibility to these kinds of feelings of dejection,15 whereas the boy is said to sublimate his anxiety into ‘more sustained and objective creative work’.16 It is the case that in relation to the artists in this book, as well as in my experience of teaching art students, female artists/students are generally more susceptible to feelings of inner doubt and depression in relation to the body and its symbolisation in materials. But it is hard to say how much of this anxiety is sustained by cultural expectations of femininity and how much of it stems from the proximity of the female body to the inner workings of biology. While Kjar’s social position allowed her the opportunity to paint, she also suffered the disbelief of her husband and brother-in-law, who thought the paintings had been done by a professional artist, not this untutored woman. Currently, female artists have visibility in the art world, but they still face obstacles in achieving the same recognition as their male counterparts. While there has been social change that affords opportunities for women to engage in ‘more sustained and objective creative work’, change occurs at a much slower pace in the psyche, and so we still have to deal with the vexed question of femininity and its culturally over-determined relation to the negative attributes of depression, melancholia and hysteria. Klein interprets Kjar’s paintings, one of a wrinkled old woman, the other a portrait of her mother as a young, strong, beautiful woman, in terms of reparation, as follows: the portrait of the wrinkled woman represents the damage done to the mother’s body, with the portrait of the mother in her youth exemplifying reparation and the working through of sadistic phantasy.

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As Briony Fer says, for art historians such as Adrian Stokes ‘[t]he greatest power art has is the achievement of a state of unity which ultimately overcomes the trauma of loss and its sadistic repercussions’.17 But we might want to be a bit more adventurous with Kleinian theory and say that, on the contrary, art allows us to confound the unity and symbiosis of reparation, that it allows us to continue to wreak havoc on bodies and materials but without remaining, as perhaps psychoanalysts might see it, stuck in a sadistic-aggressive dynamic of destruction. I don’t know whether Kjar continued to paint after the production of her initial series of paintings, but if we think about some of the artists mentioned in this and the previous chapter, we see the different ways Bourgeois and Hesse formalised traumatic experiences to produce novelty from within the chaos of aggressivity. Even when real traumas such as Bourgeois’s incestuous family drama and the suicide of Hesse’s mother may operate as a background to their work, these traumas are distorted by the psychic processes of symbolisation which operate between ideational and fantastical images as well as the physical constraints of working with materials within specific artistic contexts that refer to, expand on and break with previous traditions. One might remember the dream-work and how its processes of distortion and substitution in condensation and displacement took on a life of their own in relation to a play of images and words in which the latter are ‘representatives’ of ideas rather than direct translations of them. The meaning of these ‘representatives’ cannot be reduced to a knowledge of the artist’s traumas, as the work of art is a social production addressed to viewers who encounter it with their own traumas and desires. The tension between processes of expression and obscurity that occur in Hesse’s and Bourgeois’s works epitomises the dynamic tensions of loss and possession that characterise the Kleinian universe of the schizoid-paranoid. Here we find the psychotic motivation of loss as a desiring mode of creativity rather than a debilitating lack, and it is this desiring mode of creativity that may be replicated in artistic processes and materials later on. What seems key to me from both my own and Nixon’s reading of Klein is the necessity to tolerate anxiety and the losses it instigates. This toleration can be broached through art practice where the artist is continuously producing and reproducing images and things that do not simply allay this anxiety but heighten it. But this heightening of anxiety in art is a ‘pleasurable unpleasure’. It is here that identity is most fluid, yet paradoxically most realised, because it is dispersed across the registers of doing, undoing and redoing that characterise the aggressivity of the death drive. We need artworks to replicate these processes, which are self-abnegating, yet intensely personal. If art is a defence against anything, it is a defence against the impersonal form of these processes, i.e. the subjugation of others which leads to war.

Chapter 10

‘Real-Making’: A Transitional Phenomenon

As we have seen throughout this book, many artistic practices involve some degree of fetishism and obsessional impulses. As psychoanalyst Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel admits, ‘[t]he relationship between creation and perversion is enigmatic’, although she posits a separation between ‘the pervert’s obvious affinities for art and beauty’, which she says are premised on idealisation and mendacity, and the diversion of pre-genital energy into the pursuit of cultural achievements.1 Needless to say, not all artists would agree with her. Mike Kelley produced a body of work in the 1990s that addressed the slippage between these distinctions. Kelley’s arrangements of thrift-store toys in gross configurations or clusters highlight the fact that ideal notions of cultural achievement are premised on the repression of waste and failure. Our failure to achieve the strictures of the ego ideal leads us pathologically to project our ideals onto cultural artefacts such as art, which can return a beautiful mirror reflection back to us. Kelley’s artefacts have failed already. They are discarded objects that we no longer need, the emotional significance they once had having been cast on the scrapheap. More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid, 1987, a tapestry comprised of these abandoned and no-longer-significant knitted toys and dolls, exposes the emotional ambivalence of sublimation as a cultural ideal and brings the pre-genital sexual origins of creativity into relief. Stitched together in this bizarre tapestry, the morphology of these objects signifies at least two things. On the one hand, there is the fact that these toys are made by adults in the image of how they perceive childhood – an idealised state of innocence and cuteness. On the other hand, these toys display the signs of their labour, which is given an emotional value that in turn accrues debt. ‘If each one of these toys took six hundred

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hours to make then that’s six hundred hours of love; and if I gave this to you, you owe me six hundred hours of love; and that’s a lot. And it adds up because if you can’t pay it back right away it keeps accumulating.’2 Kelley refers to the British psychoanalyst and paediatrician D.W. Winnicott’s theory of transitional phenomena in discussing his work from this period, as it designates ‘an intermediate area of experience, between the thumb and the teddy bear, between the oral eroticism and true object-relationship, between primary creative activity and projection of what has already been introjected, between primary unawareness of indebtedness and the acknowledgement of indebtedness (Say: ta!)’.3 In Winnicott’s infamous essay ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena: A Study of the First Not-Me Possession’, he discusses the process of disillusion undergone by the infant in his/her shift from inner fantasy to outer reality by means of a transitional space which mediates outer reality for the infant. This transitional space or intermediate zone of experience in which the infant begins to make distinctions between the mother (outer reality) and inner fantasy, unlike as in Freud, ‘is not a separation but a form of union’.4 It is a zone of experience related to play which Winnicott sees as neither inside nor outside but as a process of reality-making that is intrinsically creative. This intermediate zone of experience is crucial to the expansion of the imagination and general mental well-being of the subject. Winnicott goes so far as to say that it is fundamental to the formation of a true self, the defences of the false self being erected if flaws occur in the interrelation between inside and outside being facilitated by what he variably calls the mother-environment or the good-enough mother. We might baulk at Winnicott’s placing of responsibility for the infant’s development on the mother, a conservative, even moralistic, view that is hardly mitigated by his insistence that society has to enable her to do this.5 However, Winnicott’s theories have impacted on thinking about art as a processual activity, because the transitional object, unlike other psychoanalytic objects, is not a lost object, but a developmental one that leads us to conceive of the infant’s play as an early version of later cultural activity. The transitional object does not simply refer to an object per se, for example the breast, but is the first object that the infant recognises as ‘Not-Me’. It could be a toy, but equally it could be something as trivial as a piece of fabric, often a blanket or a piece of cotton. Transitional phenomena appear in the intermediate zone of experiencing and enable the establishing of the boundaries between inner psychic reality, in which the infant believes it has created the world, and the external world as experienced by two persons in common. If everything goes well in the path from inner reality to external objective reality, the transitional object, which only makes sense from the perspective of the infant, gradually loses meaning because the infant’s attention is taken up by an expanded range of cultural interests. ‘At this



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point my subject widens out into that of play, and of artistic creativity and appreciation, and of religious feeling, and of dreaming, and also of fetishism, lying and stealing, the origin and loss of affectionate feeling, drug addiction, the talisman of obsessional rituals etc.’6 For Winnicott, the first things on the list are the more desirable outcome of the process of gradual disillusion. However, he also hints at a much more complex transitional space, which contains the ingredients of magical thinking, hallucination and obsession that characterise artistic practice. He says ‘[i]t is well known that after a few months infants of either sex become fond of playing with dolls, and that most mothers allow their infants some special object and expect them to become, as it were, addicted to such objects’ (italics mine).7 For Winnicott, these objects magically appear on the infant’s horizon and are acknowledged but not repudiated by the parents. ‘The transitional phenomena are allowable to the infant because of the parents’ intuitive recognition of the strain inherent in objective perception, and we do not challenge the infant in regard to subjectivity or objectivity just here where there is the transitional object.’8 However, parents will eventually insist that the infant makes judgements between what is clean and proper and what is dirty. The transitional object is ultimately relegated to what is morally perceived as dirty. Kelley is interested in how these codes of clean and proper bodies get projected onto the handmade toys that he used in this period in his work. To parents, the doll represents a perfect picture of the child – it’s clean, it’s cuddly, it’s sexless, but as soon as the object is worn at all, it’s dysfunctional. It begins to take on characteristics of the child itself – it smells like the child and becomes torn and dirty like real things do. It then becomes a frightening object because it starts to represent the human in a real way and that’s when it’s taken from the child and thrown away.9 For Kelley what is even more insidious in terms of modelling the infant on the toy is that toys have no genitalia, which are displaced by other abnormal bodily features such as enlarged heads. When the stuffing starts to show, it is time to exchange the toy for a new one, and we move in the direction of sublimation as idealisation and the fixation on the ego ideal and art that bolsters this conception of ourselves. Winnicott is careful to distinguish the transitional object from the fetish object, the one having to do with the necessity of illusion which is healthy, the other to do with the ‘delusion of a maternal phallus’, which leads to pathology, but as Kelley’s work highlights, the separation of these realms is difficult to maintain.10 However, there is another approach to transitional phenomena. One of the most important characteristics of transitional phenomena is the object’s ability to survive the attacks the infant vents on it in the process of interrelating subjective conception and objective reality. In a chapter in Playing and Reality ‘The Use of an Object and Relating Through Identifications’,

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first published in 1971, Winnicott puts forward a much more dynamic account of the transitional object in terms of the relation between creativity and destruction. In everyday parlance, we take for granted what we mean by ‘the use of an object’. However, Winnicott makes a distinction between object-relating and object-use that is valuable for thinking about art practice. He states that ‘[o]bject-relating is an experience of the subject that can be described in terms of the subject as an isolate’ rather than merged in self-containment with the mother-environment.11 In this intersubjective relation, which is characterised by projection and introjection, ‘the subject is depleted to the extent that something of the subject is found in the object, though enriched by feeling’.12 We can all recognise this dilemma of intersubjectivity. Our infantile omnipotence is challenged by our relations to others, which although they bring their own rewards are also a source of frustration and neurotic compulsion as we struggle for our own subjective integrity to be maintained in the intersubjective relation. Winnicott implies that one of the conditions of true recognition between subjects is a move away from self-containment and relating to subjective objects to a shift into the realm of object-usage. The object in object-usage is somehow purified of projections. Rather than seeing one’s self in the object, one sees the object as real in itself. [F]irst there is object-relating, then in the end there is object-use; in between, however, is the most difficult thing, perhaps, in human development; or the most irksome of all the early failures that come for mending. The thing that there is in between relating and use is the subject’s placing of the object outside the area of the subject’s omnipotent control; that is, the subject’s perception of the object as an external phenomenon, not as a projective entity, in fact recognition of it as an entity in its own right.13 While Winnicott’s terminology is slightly ambiguous here, his assertion of how the object might be purified of the subject’s projections in object-usage is reminiscent of how Marina Abramovi´c in her early performances attempted to purify her own and others’ projections to reveal the underlying illusions of identity and ideology. While there is literature on Abramovi´c’s troubled relation both to her mother and father and to the former Yugoslav state where she spent her early life, I am not claiming that Abramovi´c’s search for a realness beyond projective identity was the result of the failure of the maternal environment per se, although Abramovi´c has made allusions to this in some of her work. Rather I want to take her performances as examples of a trajectory towards object-usage. In early performances such as Rhythm 10, 1973, in which she stabbed at the spaces between the fingers of her outstretched hand until she drew blood, repeating the ritual using 20 different knives, Abramovi´c explored the boundaries of her body-object’s existence in time – each time she drew blood she changed knives and rewound the tape recording of



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the previous stabbing sequence, playing it in an attempt to make the repetition coincide with the past mistakes and rhythm, an impossible gesture, but stemming from the desire to empty the mind of its wandering in time and to exist fully aware in the present. Abramovi´c, interested in the effect this was having on the audience, says that ‘[h]e wasn’t sure anymore, he was unbalanced and this made a void in him. And he had to stay in this void. I didn’t give him anything.’14 This desire to withhold comfort from the audience is not out of meanness but stems from a need to dissolve the defence mechanisms of the false self (selves) that we develop to enable us to withstand the threats and impingements of everyday life. Abramovi´c’s work is a search for the true self not in the sense of identity but in the sense of being, which Winnicott relays: ‘This sense of being is something that antedates the idea of being-at-one with, because there has not yet been anything else except identity. Two separate persons can feel at one, but here at the place that I am examining the baby and the object are one.’15 It is almost as if Abramovi´c is using the space of performance as an arena in which to stage controlled aggression against the self to purify it so that it becomes a field of potential energy, one that antedates intersubjectivity as Winnicott articulates it. Abramovi´c’s practice could be seen as a prolonged self-analysis, oscillating between the desire to create a void in herself and her audience that would transcend the splitting that consciousness entails, and her collaborations with the performance artist Ulay, which ranged

24. Marina Abramović, Rhythm 10, 1973.

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over the years 1975 to 1988, in which they attempted to turn two bodies into one energic body which they referred to as ‘”That Self”’.16 As well as their directly relational pieces, such as Relation in Time, 1977, in which they sat for 17 hours back to back with their long hair tied into a continuous bun, the couple experimented with altered states of consciousness and ascetic practices. After spending a year in the Australian desert, Abramovi´c and Ulay undertook the durational performance Nightsea Crossing, an epic tableau vivant which they performed 12 times between 1981 and 1987. At the end of one instance of this performance, where the pair sat opposite each other staring for 16 days without eating or speaking, Abramovi´c recounts having experienced Ulay as a body of white light, a vision she related to the monks she visited at Dharamsala, who were surprised she had achieved this state of being without the sustained meditation practices normally required. Abramovi´c was using the art space to achieve a liquid knowledge that transcends mind/body divisions and directly apprehends reality. Rather than psychoanalytic literature, which finds such mystical experiences suspect since the split in the early days of psychic exploration between science and the paranormal, Abramovi´c looked to Buddhist philosophical teachings and other spiritualist literature, although the intensity of her production of the self as an object that withstands use can be productively related to Winnicott’s process of object-usage, although Winnicott would never condone masochistic practice as a way to get there. In an early video performance, Art Must be Beautiful, 1975–76, in which Abramovi´c harshly drags a metal brush and comb through her hair for up to an hour, her endurance of pain attempts to transcend her own narcissism and the art world’s desire for that narcissism, the action exemplifying the desire to attack the body as a surface of projections and fantasies. It is almost as if in this phase of object-relating, Abramovi´c has to damage the body or put it in danger as a way of ridding it of neurotic attachments. One could also think of Abramovi´c’s attempts to attain unconsciousness in Rhythm 4, 1974, in which she used an air blower on her face at high pressure. The audience in the next room watched on a monitor, which only showed her face, so they were unaware that the distortion of Abramovi´c’s features was due to a temporary loss of consciousness, whereas they thought that she was under water. The performance to video The Onion, 1995, shows Abramovi´c naked eating a raw onion and recounting areas in her life that distress her: the Yugoslav war, the absence of a social life, etc. Peeling an onion not only causes tears, but also quite literally refers to the equation that is commonly made between the layers of identity and the skin of an onion. Abramovi´c is interested in unravelling these layers. As Mary Richards says, ‘This performance can be read as provocatively illustrating the socio-cultural construction of identity, but also reveals the socio-cultural framework that requires continuous and repetitive acts of small-scale



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masochism to maintain the illusion of stable subjectivity fundamental to this structure.’17 Abramovi´c’s use of the onion to instigate a simulated breakdown to purge herself of her neurotic obsessions is done for the sake of resurrecting a purified body that can stand resolute in its objecthood. Abramovi´c attempted this in her infamous early performance Rhythm O, 1974, in which 72 objects, including a loaded pistol, were laid out on a table for the audience to use on her body as they wanted. Turning herself into an object for others, it was as if Abramovi´c was attempting to transcend that condition, enacting on her own body the destruction and survival of the object that Winnicott says is crucial in object-usage. In this process, after object-relating, comes the destruction of the object by the subject, and ‘then may come “object survives destruction by the subject”’, whereby the object stands outside, being simply a projection screen for fantasies.18 While her later work is more theatrical and loaded with symbolic resonances, there is a sense in which it is still addressing the bareness and fragility of life and presentness. In pieces such as Balkan Baroque, 1997, exhibited at the Venice Biennale in the Italian pavilion after the offer to represent Yugoslavia was controversially rescinded, Abramovi´c re-enacted elements of her autobiography in an attempt to emerge newly born from the ashes or bones. The piece involved two copper sinks and one copper trough filled with water, referring to ritualised cleansing; three projections, one of her mother, one of her father, one of Abramovi´c, daughter of a Serb and a Montenegrin, in which she by turns dressed in laboratory clothing recounted a tale of how to kill a Balkan wolf rat and dressed seductively performing a Balkan folk dance, both enactments addressed to those parental imagos. Abramovi´c herself sat surrounded by piles of bones which she spent hours and days cleaning, the ritual being both a mourning for the traumatic events that had ravaged her homeland and a redemption of the living body in the face of deathly ideology. In the ritual of cleaning the bones, she was bringing the starkness of mortality into relief to challenge the disavowal of death in war, what is referred to abstractly as ethnic cleansing and strategic casualties. Abramovi´c makes vivid for us that destruction in fantasy is necessary to objective perception and the creation of a shared reality beyond subjective projection. I don’t think Winnicott would perceive Abramovi´c’s work in a favourable light due to its masochistic trajectory, but she could be said to be exercising the capacity to put the object outside subjective control by means of an aggression that comes from and is dealt with from within the intermediate area of experience rather than being projected outside in the pathology of war and conflict. Abramovi´c’s kind of aggression is necessary and warranted in the creation of the ‘quality of externality’ that Winnicott sees as being integral to joy in life.19 While Balkan Baroque could be seen in terms of reparation, for Winnicott, while reparation was one source of artistic

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performance, he also situated the impetus for art in the aggressive impulsions of pre-genital eroticism, which has a much more ruthless attitude towards the object in its desire to bring about a relation to a real rather than to a substitutive external object.20 Abramovi´c reprised the meditative staring of her earlier practice with Ulay in Nightsea Crossing in The House with the Ocean View, 2002, first performed in New York after 9/11, partly in response to the trauma the city had undergone in the aftermath of the bombings. The durational performance involved Abramovi´c living on a platform in the gallery with all her actions surveyed eight hours a day by gallery-goers, one of whom could also view the scene close up using the camera placed in the centre of the gallery, but this play with exhibitionism and voyeurism entailed that whoever chose this view would in turn be projected to the rest of the gallery from the platform. However, this play with the gaze was overridden by a much stronger desire for co-emergence between subjects. In ‘Mirror-role of Mother and Family in Child Development’, another chapter in Playing with Reality Winnicott talks about the importance of the mother’s face as a containing gaze rather than a purely reflective

25. Marina Abramović, The House with the Ocean View, 2002.



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mirror. ‘[T]he mother is looking at the baby and what she looks like is related to what she sees there.’21 The capacity of the mother to give back what the infant is giving out in terms of a durational gaze is important to the ‘beginning of a significant exchange with the world, a two-way process in which self-enrichment alternates with the discovery of meaning in the world of seen things’.22 Viewers of The House talk about being held in Abramovi´c’s unflinching gaze, which operated not only as a challenge to the telescopic scrutiny invited by the camera in the gallery space, but also as a counterpoint to it, generating instead a reciprocal staring between the audience and Abramovi´c that had a healing quality, it being purely reflective rather than demanding anything. Abramovi´c sets up situations in which viewers can encounter the intermediate zone of experience in which object-use allows us to be present in the moment rather than projecting onto the past or the future. This is especially true of her most recent work, The Artist is Present, 2010, in which Abramovi´c spent three months sitting motionless opposite changing audience members at MOMA in New York during the museum’s opening hours. Speaking about the power of performance to change not just the performer’s life but also the one who is witnessing the performance, Abramovi´c described viewers after sitting for some time: ‘maybe six, seven, eight minutes – they would enter this zone where sound disappears. I disappear. They become mirrors of themselves. And these incredible emotions surfaced.’23 One of Winnicott’s questions was to ask what constituted creative living. He said that while we might bring our patients back to health, what about bringing them back to life, to a sense of liveness, alluding to a more vital sense of being than simply existing without being overwhelmed by some neurotic symptom. Culture was one such medium for self-realisation, or what Adam Phillips in his book on Winnicott refers to as ‘real-making’, which may involve the unleashing of aggression rather than its curtailment or renunciation.24 Life as such is the goal of Abramovi´c’s performances, not her personal life but the sense of life as a generative forcefield of vitality. Art can be a space to re-encounter the painful pleasures of this half-forgotten dimension of being.

Chapter 11

New Skins for Old

As we saw in the previous chapter, the staging of pain by using her body as a prop was an important trope in Abramovi´c’s work. While critics have related Abramovi´c’s work to her own psychosomatic and psychological childhood traumas of reacting to a disciplinary mother and complex political affiliations or dis-identifications with her parental imagos, she more tellingly claims, ‘Valie Export [artist] said a very interesting thing. She said that if I inflict pain on myself in order to liberate myself from the fear of pain, then pain is okay. […] But there is another type of pain that has something to do with mental limits, about which there is so much to learn.’1 After Abramovi´c’s split with Ulay, she began experimenting with crystals and the idea of ‘a state of illumination [which] is nothing other than a chemical transformation of the body in which energy is crystallising’.2 In Dozing Consciousness, 1997, she lay on the ground for 30 minutes, her face buried in semi-clear quartz crystals. The crystals operate as a material conduit for a healing exchange of immaterial energy that flows between artist and viewer, much in the way that the infliction of pain operated in earlier works. While the latter approach appears violent, it has an equally transformative aim to unite body and mind, not just for the artist but for all the participants or witnesses of the work. The psychic investments in these kinds of bodily transformations, whether evidenced through the materiality of pain or of energy (immaterial energy also being a palpable thing), relate to fundamental ideas about the boundaries between the inside and the outside of the body. The material marker of that boundary is skin, but the skin, like the psyche, is both porous and sealing and therefore a liminal site of complex exchanges between inner and outer realities. We see this in art that uses the skin by artists such as Abramovi´c and Pane,



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but also Franko B, Ron Athey and Kira O’Reilly to name but a few. We also find these complex exchanges articulated in the theories of the French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu, whose work in books such as The Skin Ego, first published in French in 1974 as Le Moi-Peau, has been available to the English-speaking world since 1989, but has renewed relevance in the current shift in art discourse from an emphasis on the linguistic to the somatic.3 Anzieu’s ideas are suggestive for art practice because, unlike some psychoanalytic ideas which tend to be more ideational and abstract, Anzieu is a veritable materialist, who poses the question of thought being as much an affair of the skin as of the brain. The key to Anzieu’s theories is the Freudian dictum that the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego. For Anzieu, following on from but extending Freud, every psychical function develops by supporting itself upon a bodily function whose workings it transposes onto the mental plane. Freud calls this process propping, i.e. the ego is propped on the body. This means that every thought is predicated on a bodily inscription whose traces inform the construction of the psyche. The skin is the bearer of the physical traces of holding and touching, traces which are tactile and non-linguistic and are foundational for the development of ego consciousness. These traces inform the ego in its function as a mechanism that filters and processes the external world. The actions of holding and touching, which come from the outside world, are processed internally by the infant, and it is the constant feedback loop between these inner and outer registrations that enable the ego to develop its function as a filter for processing new experiences or for allowing further inscriptions. The skin ego or ego skin is the name Anzieu gives to this psycho-physiological entity. In fact, Anzieu goes so far as to use the biological development of the embryo as a narrative of the ego’s development, and he gives much weight to how, at the gastrula stage, the skin takes the form of a sac through the invagination of one of its sides, thus forming the two layers necessary for existence outside the womb, the ectoderm and the endoderm. The endoderm’s surface becomes modified by constant exposure to the outside, to heat, cold, touch, forming a crust which becomes ‘baked through’ by stimulation to present favourable conditions for protection of the organism but which also retains its identity as a receptive surface for new stimuli. Novelist A.S. Byatt evocatively describes the sensation of the newly born baby as ‘skin for the first time on skin in the outside air which was warm’.4 The endoderm protects the body-psyche. The other face of the skin, the ectoderm, turns towards the inside of the body-psyche, where there is no shield from internal stimuli. To protect itself, the embryonic ego skin projects some of these stimuli outwards, at the same time as it receives traces of external perceptions that are filtered or communicated through the endoderm. At this early stage, the baby is mainly a passive receptor of stimuli unaware of the boundaries between its own

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and the mother’s body. The boundaries of the body image are acquired in the course of the child’s detaching itself from the mother. The representation of this boundary functions as a ‘stabilising image’ and a protective envelope for the ego. According to Anzieu, the securing of this envelope of warmth around oneself protects the emerging subject from three risks: one, of stealing the other’s skin; two, of having one’s own skin stolen; three, of being clad in the poisonous gift of the other’s skin. These would all be negative results of the separation process. But as we have seen, the ego is rife with defence mechanisms and repressions. Anzieu uses the motif of skin to explore these mechanisms, and his writing is littered with evocative metaphors, which all allude to masochism, seeing as how skin is the erotogenic zone that corresponds to sexuality involving cruelty.5 However, the other component of this erotogenic zone is a desire for contact, which we see both in the way that lovers tend to enjoy spending time stroking one another’s skin and in the pleasure derived from the therapeutic creams and treatments offered by the cosmetic industry and spas. Unlike these activities that stimulate and nourish the outer skin, the aforementioned artists all damage the surface of their skin in their art, literally probing the layers underneath, an action that in another context would be considered a sign of mental instability. In art, these stagings of flayed skin are deemed acceptable because of their collective transformative effects, which seem to hark back to the ritualistic nature of Greek theatre and the notion of catharsis, as well as to Medieval practices of blood-letting for the purposes of healing. The continued desire for such experiences, both at the level of the individual and the group, could be said to relate to the pleasures of continuous transformation and mutation that occur in Greek mythology, for example in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The motif that pervades in Anzieu’s writing is the Greek myth of Marsyas. Apollo sentenced Marsyas to be suspended upside down from a tree and flayed as punishment for challenging Apollo’s musical prowess. Marsyas’s blood flows and transforms into a crystal-clear river that regenerates the surrounding land, its rushing creating a music that continues to rival Apollo’s, albeit in transformed guise. It is also the case that the myth of Narcissus, taken to be negative by both Freud and Lacan, also involves mutation, in that upon wasting away Narcissus is transformed into a flower. These bodily transformations are important motifs in art and myth, ways of escaping the singular entrapments of the body as well as relating to Bersani’s concept of ‘self-shattering’. While the art of cutting into the skin in the aforementioned artists’ work could be seen as pathological failures of the protective function of the skin ego and as a compulsion to derive pleasure from the raw exposure of flesh in lieu of having a stabilising internal image, it could also be seen as restoring the ego to a time before it took on the defensive mechanisms of an armoured surface.



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Although Anzieu attributes nine functions to the skin ego, its three main characteristics are containing, protective and strengthening functions, all of which can be haunted by a destructive toxic aspect. The skin ego supports the psyche just as the skeleton supports the body; it contains psychical contents, just as the skin covers the entire surface of the body and contains the external sense organs. Failure of the containing function leads to anxiety and the creation of defence mechanisms. An instinctual excitation that is diffuse, scattered, non-localisable, non-identifiable and unquenchable results when the psychical topography consists of a kernel without a shell. The ego substitutes a shell of physical pain or even more psychical anxiety which can act as a protective device preparing the organism against further shock. The ego wraps itself in pain as a protection against pain, what Anzieu calls an envelope of suffering. The inability to do this produces the converse, a colander Ego which feels as if all its thoughts and feelings are leaking out of it. Not having enough of a protective shield results in what Anzieu calls the amoeboid Ego, while overcompensating by building up an excessive protective layer results in the crustacean Ego. The image that is conjured in my mind here is Anthony Gormley’s universalised sculptures of the human form, artworks that take for granted the solidity of the human form and its material support. Although Gormley is contemporary with the artists I have been exploring in this book, by and large, those artists question the integrity of form and are much more likely to be conveying images of bodies that are either leaking, damaged or attempting with some difficulty to become whole. If the ego is first and foremost a projection of the body onto the psyche, it makes logical sense that the psyche’s projections onto the body or a ‘surrogate’ object will be precarious rather than solid, as the interrelation between body and psyche is dynamic rather than fixed in time. Given this, one could consider Gormley’s sculptural bodies akin to the motif of the crustacean Ego in the sense that these objects are intractably wellprotected, which is why they are so popular. They offer us surfaces that are impenetrable and immune to change, which is always scary. By contrast Kiki Smith’s sculptures, which also reference the classical body, suggest decay and disease, even when she casts them in bronze. In her early work, she talks about how she shifted from exploring images of the body from Gray’s Anatomy to thinking of the skin as a system. As she says, Skin is the surface, or boundary line, of the body’s limit. The skin is actually this very porous membrane, so on a microscopic level you get into the question of what’s inside and what’s outside. Things are going through you all the time. You’re really very penetrable on the surface, you just have the illusion of a wall between your insides and the outside. Now, more and more, people are talking about the skin as an organ doing repair work and performing different functions within the body.6

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In Nervous Giants, 1986–87, which consisted of panels of muslin fabric embroidered with a diagram of the nervous system and other anatomical references, Smith was interested in the attempt to mend or to create an all-over surface, the work’s process addressing the repair and reconstruction of bodily boundaries. Each of the squares that comprise the two aluminium grids in the wall relief Untitled (Skins), 1992, corresponds to every square inch of skin on an average adult, adding up to the surface area of one human body diced. Interestingly, as with Hesse’s appropriation of the coolness of the minimalist grid, Smith also imbues this abstract geometry with psychic, bodily, resonances. The allusion to diced skin might be considered as manifesting the masochistic fantasies of the flayed body, and it is the case that this image surfaced in a number of Smith’s works, such as the sculpture Virgin Mary, 1992, in which the pose shows the vulnerability of the woman’s body, exposing her organs, flesh and bloody interior on the outside. Again, we might see this object as grotesque and, in the terms we are looking at here, exemplifying the deficiencies of an ego skin, but, as I argued in the chapter on abjection, such objects allow us the opportunity to renegotiate our bodily and cultural boundaries of inside and outside and between protection and defence. By being forced to confront in the visual register the traces of the tactile that we have forgotten, we may begin to question the projections and fantasies that underlie our belief systems more generally. Or, in a strictly psychoanalytic sense, we might begin to reactivate the rigidity of our own defensive ego skin mechanisms. This is an arena that would be given special emphasis in the late psychotherapeutic artwork of the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, in which Anzieu’s tenet that creativity needs both preservation and regeneration would find literal expression. While on the one hand Clark’s early work appears very different to her later psychotherapeutic artwork, they are united by an interest in the role of art in releasing energies that might contribute to social change. A blocked-up process allows no possibility of change, and while the ego needs to be sealed it also needs to be open in order to receive new inscriptions of the body that restore energy and by implication affect the social body as a whole. I have no evidence that Clark was familiar with Anzieu’s ideas, but she was well-versed in psychoanalytic literature and spent much of her life in analysis, as did many of the artists I have looked at in this book. Clark also suffered a number of physical injuries, which would also have propelled her towards ideas of healing. Interestingly, the German artist Joseph Beuys maintained that illnesses are almost always spiritual crises in life in which old experiences or phases of thought are cast off in order to permit positive changes. Clark was initially part of the Rio de Janeiro-based Neo-Concrete group founded in 1959.7 She shared the group’s interest in ‘living organisms’, but though her early work employed the geometric abstraction which was heralded by the group, her interest in integrating the poetic



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and everyday life evolved into a more direct approach in which contact between materials and viewers was essential. In the later stages of her career, Clark began using her objects as props in psychotherapeutic work. Paramount to understanding her work is Ferreira Gullar’s statement in the Neo-Concrete Manifesto, 1959, that the work of art, rather than being perceived as an object was a ‘quasi-body’, which tallies nicely with the idea of a surrogate body or object.8 Her early series of geometric abstract sculptures Bichos (Beasts), 1960–63, rather than being purely formal experiments, were conceived as propositions of social change in that each metal plate was hinged in such a way that it could be moved in relation to the other plates to create different configurations. The idea was that through handling and reshaping the objects a corresponding change would occur in the viewer-participant. Although these objects have become stabilised through exhibition in glass cases and now seem like purely Modernist experiments in form, the initial impetus that they grew from was the desire to propose encounters in art in which boundaries between individual and collective experience could be re-articulated, art here acting as a microcosm of greater social change in Brazil. She shifted from making geometric sculptures to presenting objects called ‘Relational Objects’, for example Sensorial Hoods, 1967, which incorporated eyepieces, ear coverings and a small nosebag, which the audience was invited to wear to heighten and engage the senses. Attempting to link the stages of her work’s development, Guy Brett observes that this work still invoked abstraction in the sense of a ‘dialectic of abstract qualities which are also physically experienced, such as heaviness and lightness, fullness and emptiness, warmth and cold, light and dark’.9 Given the framework of psychoanalysis and art, these objects could be considered as auxiliary skins in which touch could reconfigure the inner and outer skins of individual and social bodies. Growing disillusioned with the relation between art and politics, Clark eventually left Brazil for Paris in 1968 and went on to create more psychophysiological art encounters in which exchanges between subjects and objects as mutually informing surface skins could take place. A turning point had been the propositional work Caminhando (Trailings), 1964, in which the audience was given instructions to cut along the length of an object made from strips of paper twisted 180 degrees whose ends were glued together in such a way as to transform them into a Mobius strip. The ‘user’ had to avoid cutting the same spot upon completion of each circuit until finally one can cut no longer, the object regaining its front and back sides but without losing its identity as a continuous trail of paper. The metaphorical connection here to the skin ego is that rather than the object relating to the subject as a result of projection, both are being reconfigured in the process of action, the object providing ‘an indispensable means between sensation and the participant’.10 Moving from singular works to creating interpersonal dialogues, Clark made

26. Lygia Clark, The I and the You: Cloth-Body-Cloth series, 1967.



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The I and the You: Cloth/Body/Cloth, 1967, in which two thick plastic overalls were to be worn by a man and a woman, their eyes covered by hoods. Through slits cut in the plastic to create pockets and cavities in the suits, the participants would discover aspects of the other’s body through a tactile register, reconfiguring their preconceived body schemas. Clark saw plastic ‘almost like ectoplasm that links the bodies in a nonmaterial way’, as if creating a kind of placenta through which the body could be reborn.11 If, as Anzieu maintains, the skin ego contains psychical contents like a sac which is awakened by maternal handling, Clark’s objects can be seen as re-invoking early experiences of handling and redirecting their negative, perhaps more toxic, aspects, which she referred to as imprisoning Phantasms that inhibit our engagement with the vital life force. Her final works had a more psychotherapeutic dimension, although she was adamant that she is not a psychotherapist. Clark was creating a relational terrain in-between art and psychotherapy, which exhibitions of her work find impossible to convey. Most of the final works took place in her apartment in Paris, where she conducted twice or thrice weekly sessions with clients in a series called Estruturacao do self (Structuring the Self) using her Relational Objects. This practice derived from an infamous performance-type work called Baba Antropofágica (Anthropophagic Slobber), 1973, which loosely drew on the cultural metaphor of Oswald de Andrade in his Manifesto Antropofago, 1928, which claimed that Brazilian artists needed to cannibalise the Western other and excrete it, so to speak, to gain credence in the global art world. The metaphor borrows from anthropology, but also links to psychoanalysis and the cannibalistic incorporation of the other in the construction of identity in the early phases of development. Clark transforms the motif to evoke a collective healing ritual where all members of the group, the collective body, can be given a new identity through the cannibalisation of one member of the group, the one who sacrifices themselves, but is also renewed in the process. The work involved a group of people being given a spool of coloured thread which they were told to place in their mouths. They sat on the floor around one member of the group who agreed to lie down blindfolded and covered his/her entire body with the thread that fell wet from their mouths, wrapping the person in a prosthetic endoderm. They then proceeded to tear at the tangle of saliva-moistened thread to release the person from this cocoon. After the ritual, members of the group share their experience verbally. ‘The idea is that a person vomits life-experience when taking part in a proposition. This vomit is going to be swallowed by the others, who will immediately vomit their inner contents too. It is therefore an exchange of psychic qualities and the word communication is too weak to express what happens in the group.’12 While this may seem in some ways far from Anzieu’s emphasis on a stabilising

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ego skin, the ritual is enacted to transform the participants by vomiting the poison of the phantasmatic ghosts which keeps them imprisoned in neurotic versions of selfhood, thereby healing the toxic aspects of the Self. The collective ritual itself becomes the ‘surrogate’ or quasi-object that holds the fragmentation that ensues during the creative regression of the event, almost like the environmental mother that Winnicott spoke of which allows for the destruction and re-finding of boundaries necessary to becoming ‘real’ to oneself. In these rituals, a person was allowed to hold onto something like a stone or pebble to help them in the negotiation of boundaries that might be occurring in their breach, a gesture reminiscent of the irrational but necessary attachment a child might have to a piece of cotton wool or blanket in Winnicott’s theorising of the transitional object. While the self undergoing the ritual changes, this object remains the same, its vital resoluteness, enabling a self to survive the ejection of the old self in metaphorical vomit, so to speak.13 In effect, Clark’s psychotherapeutic sessions extended the sense of being reborn through the senses that she herself experienced in relation to her assemblages of ‘worthless materials’ – shells, pebbles, aluminium, wool, water. One of her experiences describes her discovery. She had injured her wrist in a car accident. Her hand was encased in a plastic bag tied with an elastic band which kept some hot paste in place. She tore off the bag, blew it up, sealed it with the band, then tried to hold a pebble in place on its surface by pressing into the pumped-up bag, and felt a sense of something being reborn. This work was named Pedra e Ar (Stone and Air), 1966. The art historian Yves-Alain Bois evocatively describes experiencing this work in Clark’s studio: ‘I felt as though I were clumsily helping a very delicate animal to give birth. The delicate fort/da of the little pebble stayed in my memory for a very long time, partly because it was related to the idea of a bodily, transpersonal memory, a generic memory.’14 Clark would continue to use such ‘worthless materials’ in her psychotherapeutic sessions, using them to cover the participant’s body in order to re-educate the senses and the ego boundaries of inside and outside. Her notion that re-staging the trauma of separation in a holding environment or quasi-object enables the dissolution of entrapping defensive fantasies is different from the ostensibly masochistic performances that expose the body’s interior flesh – apparently Clark was appalled by a curator’s comparison of Baba Antropofágica to Gine Pane’s work. Rather, the relational interplay between psychic immaterial energies and bodily material ones allows us to reconnect with the sensory, transpersonal ground of being that generates the possibility of forming a new ego skin, one open to the outside, yet fully cognisant of its inner sonorous landscape.

Afterword

Currently, there is a renewed interest in the bodily origins of the psyche, especially in the cultural turn to affect that has followed in the wake of poststructuralism’s linguistically based analyses of the subject.1 This affective turn, which focuses on pre-linguistic traces, does not, however, simply return us to bodily and gender essentialism, but tries to think the body prior to its social constructedness in order to reconsider the dynamic between them. It is beyond the scope of this book to go into the vast emerging literature on this shift in emphasis, which tends to view the unconscious, if it views it at all, as a forcefield of energy rather than a hydraulic machine that structures relations between subjects and objects according to the dynamic of repression and desire.2 In this shift in weight, Freud is relegated to the Modernist project, which can be associated with ‘alienation, separation, negativity, violence and destruction as strategies of the radical and inventive’, whereas, as Catherine de Zegher suggests in her essay on artists Lygia Clark and Maria Maiolino, ‘the Twenty-First century may very well be developing a changed criticality increasingly defined by inclusion, connectivity, attaching and constituting attitudes, and healing too.’3 She, like other art historians such as Griselda Pollock who are engaged in psychoanalytic theory, theoretically locates this shift in relation to the work of artist and psychoanalyst Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, who has developed the concept of a matrixial gaze which is focused on co-emergence and borderlinking rather than the Freudian/Lacanian separation between subjects and objects, which is linked to the paternal gaze. Although her insistence on ‘the maternal womb/intra-uterine complex’4 rather than the phallus makes her work distinct from the object-relations theories of Klein and Winnicott, her emphasis on the intersubjective relational field has more in

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common with them than with the Freudian/Lacanian axis of thinking. In the current trend in art-critical discourse, which embraces relational theories of the subject, it is often forgotten that Freud’s theories are themselves relational, his focus on negativity not only having to do with his time of writing, which spanned the lead up to two world wars, but also telling us something fundamental about the destructive aspects of the psyche which needs to be borne in mind in relation to ethical interrelations between subjects. While we may need new concepts of the subject to enable us to articulate relations between others for whom the Western conception of the subject may not feature on the cultural horizon, we cannot will away our originally destructive histories, either individual or social. While I have ended this book with more of an emphasis on healing and transformation, I have put more weight on the masochistic qualities that can be engaged in art practice as transformative of the sadistic-aggressive projections of the psyche, thereby offering the potential for an ethical stance between subjects and objects that does not impose the will to either recognise or confront the other. While recognition of the other is often seen as a desirable ethical goal, this stance stems as much from the narcissistic side of the self as does confrontation with the other and so invokes the aggressivity of the mirror-stage. On the other hand, in engaging the masochistic drives art provides a safe zone (perhaps akin to Winnicott’s transitional space) in which the self, whether artist or viewer, confronts not the other but him- or herself as an object. This destabilisation of the self as a unified subject allows us to consider an ethics beyond thinking of the self and the other as two autonomous but separate subjects. Rather, in the field of aesthetic practices the psychic turning back of the sadistic drive onto the self which splits the self into both subject and object in an unpleasurable pleasurable self-shattering creates both self and other as inherently fragmented, yet able to tolerate that fragmentation. Julia Kristeva puts it, This process could be summarized as an interiorization of the founding separation of the sociosymbolic contract, as an introduction of its cutting edge into the very interior of every identity whether subjective, sexual, ideological or so forth. This in such a way that the habitual and increasingly explicit attempt to fabricate a scapegoat victim as foundress of a society or counter-society may be replaced by the analysis of the potentialities of victim/executioner which characterize each identity, each subject, each sex (italics in original).5 Kristeva sees aesthetic practices as crucial to the negotiation of these poles of subjective experience. As we have seen in this book, artworks can create situations in which dualities are productively held in tension without being resolved. This is pleasurable for the psyche because it resonates with the unconscious drives, which do not categorise or judge in the



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way we do in conscious life. Artworks could be said to release us from having to make binary distinctions at a conscious level, creating situations in which the ego no longer has to control the object or possess it in sadistic acts. It no longer has to defend itself against the object by making itself rigid and inhibited. The ego finds pleasure in tracing the pathways of its own diffusion, which allow it to make contact with the repressed identifications through which it forms its identity. Referring back to Winnicott, it is as if, in this aesthetic engagement, we arrive at being rather than identity. Bersani’s analysis in The Culture of Redemption echoes my sentiments here. He puts forward a theory of sublimation in which ‘the disinterestedness generally associated with art…is the sign not of a lack of affect but rather of a drive so pure that it covets no objects.’6 This field of passion without an object links to my analysis in Chapter 8 of the force of the death drive and its impulsion towards a deformation that generates the pleasure of unpleasure, an excess of pleasure that cannot be measured and quantified in the conservative pursuit of happiness. It also resonates with the state of presentness that Abramovi´c sought to achieve in her performances in which self and other are transformed into an energic field. Given the scope of this book, which explores the interrelationship between art and psychoanalysis in terms of how I have encountered it both in teaching art students and in looking at and thinking about art practices as well as my own reading of selective psychoanalytic literature, I cannot do justice in this conclusion to more recent psychoanalytic approaches to the relational, such as Ettinger’s or that of psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin.7 I simply want to conclude by pointing out that there is a current trend towards theories of this kind, and to insist that Freud still has a value here. Although his phallocentrism is risible, his insistence on the materiality of thought and the processes of distortion by which ideas get attached to images is still useful to thinking about the dynamic tensions involved in making art or relations. While Ettinger insists that ‘[m]atrixial potentiality does not replace the phallus; it operates along a different conscious track,’ her emphasis on linking and attunement occludes the resistance an object might have to entering into relationship.8 In fact, rather than a new theory of the relationship between art and psychoanalysis, I think that her work addresses a similar ethics to that of Kristeva and Bersani in which intersubjectivity is comprised of partial objects and identifications, and I am not convinced that inventing new terms to ground this ethics in the feminine alters its basic premise. More tellingly for the parameters of this book are the ramifications of Freud’s relational components of masochism and sadism. The result of sadism is war, whereas, although unreflective masochism in life is also destructive of relations, art can channel the masochistic drives so as to give expression to aggression in a way that makes them available for cultural

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becoming rather than extinction. Art teaches us the erotics of relation where the subject’s mastery is overtaken by the sensory exposure to spaces of unresolved dualities which we can learn to inhabit with pleasure rather than fear. Psychoanalyst, curator and cultural critic Suely Rolnik asserts that the artist has the ‘privilege to incarnate in the work the perception of life that pulsates in things, autonomous from the person’.9 These pulsations are not harmonious – in fact they may be violent – but their value lies in their capacity to reawaken in us the pleasure of making oneself disappear in the mirror.

Notes

Introduction 1

2 3

4 5

6 7

Alfred Adler, on breaking with Freud, gave his school the name of ‘Individual Psychology’. C.G. Jung used the title ‘Analytical Psychology’. See Richard Wollheim, Introduction to Freud, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, p.1. This is in contrast to psychoanalytic writer Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, who sees art as a form of perversion. Kristeva interviewed by Charles Penwarden in Rites of Passage: Art for the End of the Century, Stuart Morgan and Frances Morris, with contributions by Stephen Greenblatt, Julia Kristeva, Charles Penwarden, London: Tate Publications, 1995, pp.21–27, at p.23. See Freud’s essay ‘On the Economic Problem of Masochism’ (1924) in The Penguin Freud Library, vol.11: On Metapsychology, London: Penguin, 1984, pp.409–26. Of course some artists such as Bob Flanagan use their own bodies as objects upon which to create theatres of pain, although in his case one could argue that his body is a surrogate ‘object’ that allows him vicariously to experience as pleasure the ravages waged on his actual body by cystic fibrosis, from which he died in 1996. Sigmund Freud, ‘On the Economic Problem of Masochism’, p.418. Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art, New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1986, p.60.

Chapter 1 1

2 3 4 5 6 7

The Interpretation of Dreams was first issued in 1899 and subsequently published in 1900, with numerous revised editions in Freud’s lifetime. See especially Part 11, ‘Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis “Dreams”’ (1916 [1915–16]), The Penguin Freud Library, vol.1, London: Penguin Books, pp.111–266. Sigmund Freud in Richard Wollheim, Introduction to Freud, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, p.67. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), The Penguin Freud Library, vol.4, London: Penguin Books, 1976, p.473. Jacques Derrida, ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, Writing and Difference, London, Melbourne and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978, p.220. Susan Hiller, Thinking about Art: Conversations with Susan Hiller, ed. B. Einzig, preface Lucy Lippard, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996, pp.112–13. Ibid., p.118. Ibid., p.128.

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René Magritte, René Magritte, text by A.M. Hammacher, trans. James Brockway, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1973, p.121. See Penny Florence, Mallarmé, Manet and Redon: Visual and Aural Signs and the Generation of Meaning, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, especially Chapter 3, pp.46–83. Ibid., p.59. Hiller, Thinking about Art, p.117. Malcolm Gee, Ernst: Pietà or Revolution by Night, London: Tate Gallery, 1986, p.23. Imagine was aired on BBC1 on 22 June 2010. Florence, Mallarmé, Manet and Redon, p.57. Breton in David Lomas, The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000, p.1. Ernst in Lomas, The Haunted Self, p.92. Stezaker in ‘The Encounter with the Real’, interview with John Stezaker by Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Lynda Morris, dispatch 123, exhibition pamphlet, Norwich Gallery, April 2006, unpaginated. Ibid. In a conversation with Christophe Gallois and Daniel F. Herrman, Stezaker discusses how he had to come to terms with Surrealism and psychoanalysis which, in 1978, he was still very ambiguous about. See John Stezaker, exhibition catalogue, London: Ridinghouse and Whitechapel Gallery, 2010, p.42.

Chapter 2 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13

Susan Hiller, Thinking about Art: Conversations with Susan Hiller, ed. B. Einzig, preface Lucy Lippard, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996, p.123. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock, intro. Hugh Haughton, London: Penguin Books, 2003, pp.121–62, at p.125. Ibid., p.134. Ibid., p.127. Ibid., p.133. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1993, p.11. In a more recent exhibition at Sadie Coles Gallery, London in 2010, dummy replicas of these original family members were used to create a theatrical mise-en-scène that was more akin to movie-prop scariness than uncanny frisson. In postmodernity, the uncanny often migrates from being an unconscious feeling of anxiety and disorientation to becoming a self-conscious design principle, for example The Uncanny Room, an exhibition held at Pitzhangar Manor, Ealing, London between 19 July and 25 August 2002, which consisted of a group of artists and designers whose work was claimed to be linked to the qualities of the uncanny that I have discussed. While the work in this exhibition, mainly by designers, was definitely odd, including objects such as writhing lamp shades to eccentrically elongated upholstery, it is questionable whether the odd or eccentric can generate the sensation of the uncanny. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, London: Reaktion Books, 2006, p.43. Ibid., p.46. Bellmer in Robert Webb and Peter Short, Hans Bellmer, London: Quartet Books, 1985. Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, p.49. Mike Kelley, ‘Playing With Dead Things’, The Uncanny, exhibition catalogue, Arnhem: Sonsbeek, 1993, p.25. Stezaker in conversation with Christophe Gallois and Daniel F. Herrman, John Stezaker, London: Ridinghouse and Whitechapel Gallery, 2010, p.37.



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14 Ibid., p.38. 15 Jeff Wall, ‘Photography and Liquid Intelligence’, Jeff Wall, London and New York: Phaidon, 1996, pp.90–93, at p.90. 16 See Laura Mulvey’s ‘A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai): From After to Before the Photograph’, Oxford Art Journal, 30/1 (2007), pp.27–37 for her discussion of the technological uncanny in relation to Wall’s work. 17 Lydia H. Liu, The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010, p.218.

Chapter 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21

Parveen Adams, The Emptiness of the Image: Psychoanalysis and Sexual Differences, London and New York: Routledge, 1996, p.32. This is a paraphrase of Octave Mannoni’s 1964 article on fetishism, ‘“Je sais bien…mais quand même”: la croyance’, Les Temps Modernes 212, pp.1262–86. Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant, intro. Mike Gane, London: Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1993. See Laura Mulvey’s essay on Sherman for a discussion of this homology. Laura Mulvey, ‘A Phantasmagoria of the Female Body: The Work of Cindy Sherman’, New Left Review 188 (July–August 1991), pp.137–50. Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, p.110. Mulvey, ‘A Phantasmagoria of the Female Body’, pp.146–47. Ibid., p.150. Ibid. Adams, The Emptiness of the Image, p.40. Ibid., pp.46–47. Ibid., p.124. It is worth mentioning in this regard how the filmmaker Isaac Julien used images of cultural fetishism, i.e. men dressed in bondage gear in tableaux alluding to sado-masochistic theatre, echoing the pornographic codes that Mapplethorpe also plays with, but Julien recasts the fetishistic impetus of single models in solo frames to show models posing in groups, which allows other connotations such as homosexual friendship, solidarity and communities to come to the fore. Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, p.39. See Katy Kline’s essay ‘In or Out of the Picture: Claude Cahun and Cindy Sherman’, in Whitney Chadwick (ed.), Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism, and Self-Representation, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1998, pp.66–81. This article was first published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol.10, 1929. It was reprinted in Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan (eds), Formations of Fantasy, London and New York: Methuen, 1986, pp.35–44. Joan Rivière, ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’ (1929), in Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan (eds), Formations of Fantasy, London and New York: Methuen, 1986, pp.35–44, at p.38. Stephen Heath, ‘Joan Rivière and the Masquerade’, in Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan (eds), Formations of Fantasy, London and New York: Methuen, 1986, pp.45–61, at p.49. Ibid., p.50. Mulvey, ‘A Phantasmagoria of the Female Body’, p.146. John Fletcher, ‘Versions of Masquerade’, Screen 29/3 (1988), pp.43–70. Katy Kline, ‘In or Out of the Picture: Claude Cahun and Cindy Sherman’, in Whitney Chadwick (ed.), Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism, and Self-Representation, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1998, pp.66–81, at p.68.

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Chapter 4 1

I am borrowing this crude term from Anne Enright, the Irish novelist, whose book Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, 2004 is a non-psychoanalytic, non-fiction account of contemporary motherhood. 2 This was poignantly demonstrated in Kelly’s retrospective at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester in 2011. Five parts of Post-Partum Document were exhibited along with a black and white film loop of a close-up of a woman’s hands (Kelly’s) stroking her pregnant belly. The film, Antepartum, 1973, evoked both the strangeness of the pregnant body and a sense of a celebratory intimacy and transformation. Interestingly, when this film was first shown in 1974, it was juxtaposed with a film of a woman operating an industrial machine, thereby exhibiting female manual labour rather than a purely celebratory jouissance. 3 Lacan was famous for using abstract formula called ‘mathemes’ to refer to the subject’s position of desire and relation to language. The barred ‘S’ was one of his infamous mathemes, and signified that the subject does not know what his/her true desire is because s/he is barred from it by language. Kelly claims that she found these mathemes poetically evocative, although many critics found her use of them alienating and obfuscatory. 4 Interim as a whole consists of four parts, Corpus, Pecunia, Historia, Potestas. 5 Norman Bryson, ‘Interim and Identification’, in Mary Kelly’s Interim, New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990, p.30. 6 Parveen Adams, The Emptiness of the Image: Psychoanalysis and Sexual Differences, London and New York: Routledge, 1996, p.88 7 While Lacan’s ideas mainly proliferated in the UK art school in the 1980s, at a symposium on filmmaker Michael Snow in Bristol’s Arnolfini Gallery in 2000, one of the panellists, the artist and filmmaker David Dye, mentioned the importance of ‘The Mirror-Stage’ to him as a student at Central St Martins in the 1970s. 8 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16/3 (Autumn 1975), pp.6–18, at p.18. 9 Mary Kelly interviewed by Maria Walsh, Art Monthly 346 (May 2011), pp.1–4, at p.4. 10 Peter Gidal quoted by Mary Anne Doane, ‘Women’s Stake: Filming the Female Body’ in Constance Penley (ed.), Feminism and Film Theory, New York: Routledge, 1988, p.217.

Chapter 5 1

Joan Copjec, ‘The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan’, October 49 (Summer 1989), pp.53–71, at p.58. v 2 See Zizek’s discussion of this in his article ‘Looking Awry’, October 50 (Fall 1989), pp.30–55. 3 Margaret Iversen, Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007, p.11. 4 Parveen Adams, The Emptiness of the Image: Psychoanalysis and Sexual Differences, London and New York: Routledge, 1996, p.114. 5 Geneviève Cadieux, http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/artnow/Genevièvecadieux/default.shtm, accessed 16 May 2011. 6 Adams, The Emptiness of the Image. 7 Lamella can be vaguely translated as ‘manlet’, a condensation of ‘man’ and ‘omelette’, and Lacan uses the term to refer to a part object that survives without the body. See http://www.lacan.com/zizalien.htm, accessed 13 October 2011. 8 Ibid., p.118. 9 See Freud’s essay ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’ (1914), The Penguin Freud Library, vol.11: On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, London: Penguin, 1991, pp.59–98. 10 Hal Foster, ‘Obscene, Abject, Traumatic’, October 78 (Fall 1996), pp.107–24, p.108. v



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11 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Chapter 5, http://www.literature.org/authors/shelley-mary/frankenstein/chapter05.html, accessed 16 May 2011. 12 Krauss was Foster’s PhD supervisor. 13 Krauss, ‘Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism’, October (1976), pp.50–64, at p.52. 14 Ibid., p.51. 15 Although used slightly differently by different psychoanalysts, the term generally refers to our real and fantasmatic relations with our earliest others, i.e. the parents and family, but imagos also incorporate the past and cultural traditions. These fantasms determine how we apprehend the world. Exploring them allows us to become freer of them. See http://www.enotes.com/psychoanalysis-encyclopedia/imago, accessed 13 October 2011. 16 For a dynamic reading of Freud’s account of scoptophilia in his essay ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’, see Julie Levin Russo’s essay ‘Show Me Yours: Cyber-Exhibitionism from Perversion to Politics’, Camera Obscura 25/1: 73 (2010), pp.131–59. See especially p.137, in which she suggests the notion of a transitional free-floating form of self-display. 17 Ibid. 18 Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 19 Adam Phillips in Bersani and Phillips, Intimacies, p.113. 20 Leo Bersani in Bersani and Phillips, Intimacies, p.123.

Chapter 6 1 2

Toril Moi, Sexual Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, London: Methuen, 1985, p.161. See Julia Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater’, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi, New York: Columbia University Press, 1987, pp.160–86. 3 See Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Julia Kristeva on Femininity: The Limits of a Semiotic Politics’, Feminist Review 18 (Winter 1984), pp.56–73. 4 For more information on this, see Jones’s survey essay in Artist’s Body, ed. Tracey Warr, London and New York: Phaidon, 2006, pp.16–47. 5 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. L.S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982, p.3. 6 Foster, ‘Obscene, Abject, Traumatic’, October 78 (Fall 1996), pp.107–24, at p.117. 7 Ibid., p.118. 8 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London: Routledge, 1991, p.121. 9 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p.18. 10 Rosalind Krauss, ‘“Informe” without Conclusion’, October 78 (Autumn 1996), pp.89–105, at p.95. 11 Rosalind Krauss, in Rosalind Krauss and Yves-Alain Bois, Formless: A User’s Guide, New York: Zone Books, 1997, p.32. 12 Kiki Smith in Francesco Bonami, ‘Kiki Smith: A Diary of Fluids and Fears’, Flash Art 26/168 (January–February 1993) pp.54–55, at p.55.

Chapter 7 1 2

Coco Fusco, The Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings, London and New York: Routledge, 2001, p. 5. See especially Isaac Julien’s film Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks, 1996, which explores the life, work and ideas of Fanon and his homophobic remark that there is no homosexuality on Martinique, the island where

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4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16

17

18 19

20 21 22 23 24

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Fanon was born. Fanon, accused of both misogyny and homophobia, provided a literature for the diasporic generations of black artists to critique processes of identification and desire in terms of race. Fanon in Stuart Hall, ‘The After-life of Frantz Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skin, White Masks?’, in Alan Read (ed.), The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, London: Institute of Contemporary Arts and Institute of International Visual Arts Seattle: Bay Press, 1996, pp.12–37, p. 18. Ibid., p.18. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, London: Pluto, 1986, pp.35–36. Homi K. Bhabha, ‘The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism’, in M. Gever et al. (eds), Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1990, p.84. Fanon in Hall in Read (ed.), The Fact of Blackness, p.20. Ibid., p.20. bell hooks, Art on my Mind: Visual Politics, New York: New Press, 1995, p.205. Kobena Mercer in hooks, Art on my Mind, p.205. See Lorraine O’Grady’s essay ‘Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Subjectivity’, in Amelia Jones (ed.), The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, London and New York: Routledge, 2003, pp.174–87. The figure of the Hottentot Venus was based on the black South African woman Saartjie Baartmann, whose genitalia were put on public display in Paris’s Musée de l’Homme after her death. Images of her heavily endowed breasts and enlarged protruding buttocks were characterised in colonial literature at the time as a symbolic of ugliness and sexual availability. Critiques of this stereotype have featured in artworks by Lorna Simpson, Renée Green and Renée Cox in collaboration with Lyle Ashton. Hall in Read (ed.), The Fact of Blackness, p.20. Ibid., p.20. Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World, London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Jean Fisher quoted by David Deitcher, ‘A Lovesome Thing’, in The Film Art of Isaac Julien, Introduction by Amanda Cruz, essays by David Deitcher and David Frankel, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY: Center for Curatorial Studies, ca.2000, p.22. This range of dolls produced by Mattel in 1987 is called the Shani range. See Ann Ducille, ‘Black Barbie and the Deep Play of Difference’, in Amelia Jones (ed.), The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, London and New York: Routledge, 2003, pp.337–47. Carrie Mae Weems in hooks, Art on my Mind, pp.84–85. Kobena Mercer and Isaac Julien, ‘True Confessions’, in The Film Art of Isaac Julien, exhibition catalogue, Introduction by Amanda Cruz, essays by David Deitcher and David Frankel, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY: Center for Curatorial Studies, ca. 2000, p.59. Coco Fusco, english.emory.edu/Bahri/UndiscAmerind.html, accessed 23 May 2011. Mercer quoted by David Deitcher, ‘A Lovesome Thing: The Film Art of Isaac Julien’, in The Film Art of Isaac Julien, p.22. Lorna Simpson quoted by Huey Copeland, ‘“Bye, Bye Black Girl”: Lorna Simpson’s Figurative Retreat’, Art Journal 64/2 (2005), pp.63–77, at p.76. Lorna Simpson in Kellie Jones, Thelma Golden and Chrissie Iles (contributors), Lorna Simpson, London and New York: Phaidon, 2002, pp.19–20. hooks, Art on my Mind, p.100.



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Chapter 8 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22

The most cogent accounts of Freud’s death drive, which are relevant to this chapter, are Jean Laplanche’s Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. and intro. by Jeffrey Mehlmann, Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976 and Leo Bersani’s The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art, New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1986. Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920), The Penguin Freud Library, vol.11: On Metapsychology, London: Penguin, 1984, p.283. Sigmund Freud, ‘On the Economic Problem of Masochism’ (1924), in The Penguin Freud Library, vol.11: On Metapsychology, London: Penguin, 1984, pp.409–26, at p.416. Bersani, The Freudian Body, p.57. See his book Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History, London: Sphere Books, 1968. Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, p.286. Sarah Kofman, The Childhood of Art: An Interpretation of Freud’s Aesthetics, trans. Winifred Woodhull, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988, p.128. Sigmund Freud, ‘Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood’, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock, intro. Hugh Haughton, London: Penguin Books, 2003, pp.43–120. Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, p.286. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, London: Penguin Books, 1991. Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, p.284. Lucy Lippard in Anne M. Wagner, ‘Another Hesse’, October 69 (Summer 1994), pp.49–84, at p.62. Briony Fer, The Infinite Line: Re-making Art After Modernism, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004, p.118. See Margaret Iversen’s Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007. Judi Carson also points this out in her essay ‘On Critics, Sublimation and the Drive: The Photographic Paradoxes of the Subject’, in Parveen Adams (ed.), Art: Sublimation or Symptom, London and New York: Karnac, 2003, p. 79. Ehrenzweig’s notion of the death drive is derived from a combination of Freud and his follower Melanie Klein’s theories, which I shall look at in the next chapter. Iversen, Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan Barthes, p.77. Ibid., p.74. Wagner, ‘Another Hesse’. Iversen, Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan Barthes, p.85. Robert Smithson in Iversen, Beyond Pleasure, p.85. Wagner, ‘Another Hesse’, p.61 and p.74. In response to Wagner’s critique of Chave’s evocation of soiled bandages and flayed skin in relation to Contingent, Chave wrote, ‘I will have to leave it to others to decide whether this image is any more extreme than Wagner’s evoking the window Hesse’s mother jumped through in relation to the cloth-wrapped picture stretcher that forms the basis for Hang Up’. See October 71 (Winter 1995), pp.146–48, at p.147. See Briony Fer’s essay ‘Bordering on Blank: Eva Hesse and Minimalism’, Art History 17/3 (September 1994), pp.424–49, at p.439. Although for Fer Hesse’s work is ‘characteristic of sadistic process’ in relation to ‘the mourning of the maternal object’, Fer’s point about mining psychoanalysis for a metaphorics of the unconscious is useful.

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Chapter 9 1 2 3

4

5

6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Mignon Nixon, ‘Bad Enough Mother’, October 71 (Winter 1995), pp.71–92, at p.72. Julia Kristeva interview with Rainer Ganahl, in Sylvere Lotringer (ed.), Revolt, She Said, trans. Brian O’Keefe, New York and Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2002. Nixon, ‘Bad Enough Mother’, p.72. Nixon’s essay also includes the artists Rona Pondick and Rachel Whiteread. It forms the basis of her later book Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2005. Teresa Brennan’s definition of affect as a feeling in search of a name situates affect in more proximity to bodily sensations than to language per se. See her book The Transmission of Affect, New York: Cornell University Press, 2004. British art critics such as Adrian Stokes in the 1940s and 1950s and Peter Fuller in the 1980s emphasised the biological elements in Freud and KIein to discuss artworks as being a working through of relations with the mother and as having an explicit psycho-sexual dynamic that revolves around fixed notions of male and female. More recently in film theory, Michael O’Pray has resurrected this tradition in his Film, Form and Phantasy: Adrian Stokes and Film Aesthetics, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Leo Bersani also uses Kleinian ideas in his The Culture of Redemption, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990 in relation to literature in particular and art more generally. In this chapter, I shall mostly use the more Kleinian term ‘phantasy’, as distinct from fantasy, the latter being more of a conscious elaboration, the former being part of the primitive unconscious which for Klein we are all born with. Translators of Freud tend to use fantasy, because for Freud unconscious wishes lie beneath fantasies, whereas for Klein phantasy is on a par with the unconscious wish. Louise Bourgeois in Charlotta Kotik, Louise Bourgeois: The Locus of Memory: Works 1986–1993, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994, p.71. Nixon, ‘Bad Enough Mother’, p.81. Ibid., p.80. Janice Doane and Devon Hodges, From Klein to Kristeva: Psychoanalytic Feminism and the Search for the ‘Good Enough’ Mother, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992, p.13. Nixon, ‘Bad Enough Mother’, p.85. Doane and Hodges, From Klein to Kristeva, p.12. Louise Bourgeois in Kotik, Louise Bourgeois, p.71. Melanie Klein, ‘Early Stages of the Oedipus Complex’ (1928), The Selected Melanie Klein, ed. Juliet Mitchell, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986, pp.69–83, p.79. Ibid., p.79. Ibid., p.81. Briony Fer, ‘Bordering on Blank: Eva Hesse and Minimalism’, Art History 17/3 (September 1994), pp.424–49, at p.439.

Chapter 10 1 2 3

Chasseguet-Smirgel, Creativity and Perversion, London: Free Association Books, 1985, pp.89 and 92. Kelley interviewed by John Miller in William S. Bartman and Miyoshi Barosh (eds), Mike Kelley, Los Angeles: A.R.T. Press, 1992, p.18. D.W. Winnicott, ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena: A Study of the First Not-Me Possession’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis XXX1V (1953), pp.89–97, at p.89.

4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Notes

145

D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, London: Brunner-Routledge, 2001, p.98. Winnicott’s idealisation of motherhood has to be situated historically in relation to the necessity for hope and rebuilding society after the Second World War. Women, having worked in munitions and other heavy industry factories during the war, were relegated to the home and given the task of nurturing and care with which they are often associated. Winnicott, ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena’, pp.89–97, at p.91. Ibid., p.89. Ibid., p.96. Kelley interviewed by Miller in Bartman and Barosh (eds), Mike Kelley, p.86. Winnicott, ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena’, p.96. Winnicott, ‘The Use of an Object and Relating Through Identifications’, Playing and Reality, 2001, p.88. Ibid., p.88. Ibid., p.89. Marina Abramovi´c in Mary Richards, Marina Abramovi´c, London and New York: Routledge, 2010, p.85. Winnicott, ‘The Use of an Object and Relating Through Identifications’, p.80. Kristine Stiles, ‘Cloud With Its Shadow’, Marina Abramovi´c, London: Phaidon, 2008, p.80. Richards, Marina Abramovi´c, p.29. Winnicott, ‘The Use of an Object and Relating Through Identifications’, Playing and Reality, p.90. Ibid., p.93. For more on this, see Chapter 4, ‘The Appearing Self’ in Adam Phillips, Winnicott, London: Fontana Press, 1988, pp.111–26. Winnicott, ‘Mirror-role of Mother and Family in Child Development’, Playing and Reality, 2001, p.112. Ibid., p.113. Marina Abramovi´c in ‘The Artist is Present: Marina Abramovi´c Interviewed by Iwona Blazwick’, Art Monthly 349 (September 2011), pp.1–8, at p.5. Phillips, Winnicott, London: Fontana Press, 1988, p.127.

Chapter 11 1 2 3

4 5

6 7 8 9

Marina Abramovi´c interviewed by Klaus Biesenbach, Marina Abramovi´c, London: Phaidon, 2008, p.22. Marina Abramovi´c in Kristine Stiles, Marina Abramovi´c, London: Phaidon, 2008, p.94. Anzieu’s work has become more popular in the English-speaking world through publications such as Steven Connor’s The Book of Skin, published in 2004, although it has been in circulation at least as far back as the early 1990s, when I began teaching a seminar course on it for undergraduates in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design. A.S. Byatt, Possession: A Romance, London: Vintage Books, 1990, p.107. As Freud says, ‘[i]n scopophilia and exhibitionism the eye corresponds to an erotogenic zone; while in the case of those components of the sexual instinct which involve pain and cruelty the same role is assumed by the skin’: Pelican Freud Library, vol.7: On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works, London: Penguin Books, 1977, p.84. Kiki Smith interview with Carlo McCormick, Journal of Contemporary Art, http://www.jca-online.com/interviews. html, accessed 26 September 2011. Other members of the group include Helio Oiticica, Pygia Pape, Amilcar de Castro, Franz Weissmann, Reynaldo Jardim and Theon Spanudis. Ferreira Gullar in Guy Brett, ‘Lygia Clark: In Search of the Body’, Art in America (July 1994), pp.56–63, 108, at p.59. Ibid.

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10 Lygia Clark in Rolnik, ‘Molding a Contemporary Soul: The Empty-Full of Lygia Clark’, http://caosmose.net/ suelyrolnik/pdf/molding%20_john_nadine.pdf, p.14, accessed 11 January 2011. 11 Ibid., p.16. 12 Lygia Clark in Guy Brett, ‘Lygia Clark: In Search of the Body’, Art in America, July 1994, pp.57–108, at p.62. 13 I’d like to thank my editor Liza Thompson at I.B.Tauris for this allusion to metaphorical vomit. 14 Yves-Alain Bois in Lygia Clark and Yves-Alain Bois, ‘Nostalgia of the Body’, October 69 (Summer 1994), pp.85– 109, at p.87.

Afterword 1 2

3

4 5 6 7 8 9

See Patricia Ticineto Clough, with Jean Halley (eds) The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, Durham, N.C. and London: Duke University Press, 2007. See Clare Hemmings, ‘Invoking Affect: Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn’, Cultural Studies 18/5 (September 2005), pp.548–67 for a very good survey of the recent turn to affect in cultural theory as well as a cogent argument for scepticism in the face of the claims of liberation being made in its name. Catherine de Zegher, ‘The Inside is the Outside: The Relational as the (Feminine) Space of the Radical’, Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture 4 (2002), http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue4IVC/de_Zegher.html, accessed 21 February 2011. Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, ‘Matrixial Trans-subjectivity’, Theory, Culture & Society 23 (2006), pp.218–22, at p.218. Kristeva in Mary Kelly, with contributions from Margaret Iversen, Douglas Crimp and Homi K. Bhabha, London and New York: Phaidon, 1997, p.104. The citation is from Kristeva’s essay ‘Women’s Time’. Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1990, p.101. Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination, New York: Pantheon Books, 1988. Ettinger, ‘Matrixial Trans-subjectivity’, p.220. Suely Rolnik, ‘Molding a Contemporary Soul: The Empty-Full of Lygia Clark’, http://caosmose.net/suelyrolnik/pdf/ molding%20_john_nadine.pdf, p.22, accessed 11 January 2011.

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Derrida, Jacques, ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, Writing and Difference, trans. and intro. Alan Bass London, Melbourne and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978, pp.196–231. Doane, Janice and Devon Hodges, From Klein to Kristeva: Psychoanalytic Feminism and the Search for the ‘Good Enough’ Mother, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London: Routledge, 1991. Ettinger, Bracha Lichtenberg, Matrix: Halal(a) – Lapsus: Notes on Painting, trans. Joseph Simas, Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1993. Ettinger, Bracha Lichtenberg, ‘Matrixial Trans-subjectivity’, Theory, Culture & Society 23 (2006), pp.218–22. Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks, London: Pluto Press, 1986. Fer, Briony, ‘Bordering on Blank: Eva Hesse and Minimalism’, Art History 17/3 (September 1994), pp.424–49. Fer, Briony, The Infinite Line: Re-making Art After Modernism, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Fletcher, John, ‘Versions of Masquerade’, Screen 29/3 (1988), pp.43–70. Florence, Penny, Mallarmé, Manet and Redon: Visual and Aural Signs and the Generation of Meaning, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Foster, Hal, ‘Obscene, Abject, Traumatic’, October 78 (Fall 1996), pp.107–24. Foster, Hal, Compulsive Beauty, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1993. Freud, Sigmund, ‘The Dream-Work’ (1916), The Pelican Freud Library, vol.1: Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, London: Penguin Books, 1973, pp.204–18. Freud, Sigmund, ‘Femininity (1933)’, The Pelican Freud Library, vol.2: New Introductory Lectures On Psychoanalysis, London: Penguin Books, 1973, pp.145–69. Freud, Sigmund, The Pelican Freud Library, vol.4: The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), London: Penguin Books, 1976. Freud, Sigmund, The Pelican Freud Library, vol.7: On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works, London: Penguin Books, 1977. Freud, Sigmund, ‘Fetishism’ (1927), The Pelican Freud Library, vol.7: On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works, London: Penguin Books, 1977, pp.345–58. Freud, Sigmund, ‘Female Sexuality’ (1931), The Pelican Freud Library, vol.7: On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works, London: Penguin Books, 1977, pp.367–92. Freud, Sigmund, ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’ (1914), The Penguin Freud Library, vol.11: On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, London: Penguin, 1991, pp.59–98. Freud, Sigmund, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920), The Penguin Freud Library, vol.11: On Metapsychology, London: Penguin, 1984, pp.269–338. Freud, Sigmund, ‘On the Economic Problem of Masochism’ (1924), The Penguin Freud Library, vol.11: On Metapsychology, London: Penguin, 1984, pp.409–26. Freud, Sigmund, ‘Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood’ and ‘The Uncanny’, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock, intro. Hugh Haughton, London: Penguin Books, 2003, pp.43–162. Gee, Malcolm, Ernst: Pietà or Revolution by Night, London: Tate Gallery, 1986. Hammacher, A.M., René Magritte, trans. James Brockway, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1973. Heath, Stephen, ‘Joan Rivière and the Masquerade’, in Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan (eds), Formations of Fantasy, London and New York: Methuen, 1986, pp.45–61. Hiller, Susan, Thinking about Art: Conversations with Susan Hiller, ed. B. Einzig, preface Lucy Lippard, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996. hooks, bell, Art on my Mind: Visual Politics, New York: New Press, 1995. Iversen, Margaret, ‘Fashioning Feminine Identity’, Art International 2 (Spring 1988), pp.52–57. Iversen, Margaret, Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007. Jones, Ann Rosalind ‘Julia Kristeva on Femininity: The Limits of a Semiotic Politics’, Feminist Review 18 (Winter 1984), pp.56–73.



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Julien, Isaac, The Film Art of Isaac Julien, exhibition catalogue, Introduction by Amanda Cruz, essays by David Deitcher and David Frankel, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY: Center for Curatorial Studies, ca. 2000. Kelley, Mike, ‘Playing With Dead Things’, The Uncanny, exhibition catalogue, Arnhem: Sonsbeek, 1993, pp.4–27. Kelly, Mary, Imaging Desire, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1996. Kline, Katy, ‘In or Out of the Picture: Claude Cahun and Cindy Sherman’, in Whitney Chadwick (ed), Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism, and Self-Representation, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1998, pp.66–81. Kofman, Sarah, The Childhood of Art: An Interpretation of Freud’s Aesthetics, trans. Winifred Woodhull, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Kotik, Charlotta, Louise Bourgeois : The Locus of Memory: Works 1986–1993, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994. Krauss, Rosalind, ‘“Informe” without Conclusion’, October 78 (Autumn 1996), pp.89–105, at p.95. Krauss, Rosalind, ‘Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism’, October (1976), pp.50–64. Krauss, Rosalind and Yves-Alain Bois, Formless: A User’s Guide, New York: Zone Books, 1997. Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. L.S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Kristeva, Julia, Revolt, She Said, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Brian O’Keefe, New York and Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2002. Lacan, Jacques, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan, intro. David Macey, London: Penguin Books, 1991. Lacan, Jacques, ‘The Mirror-Stage as Formative of the Function of the I’, Ecrits, New York and London: Routledge, 1980. Laplanche, Jean, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. and intro. Jeffrey Mehlmann, Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Liu, Lydia H., The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Lomas, David, The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000. Mary Kelly: Interim, exhibition catalogue, essays by Norman Bryson, Hal Foster, Griselda Pollock, Marcia Tucker, New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990. Mitchell, Juliet (ed.), The Selected Melanie Klein, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. Mitchell, Juliet, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, new intro. Juliet Mitchell, London: Penguin, 2000 (originally published London: Allan Lane, 1974). Moi, Toril, Sexual Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, London: Methuen, 1985. Moi, Toril (ed.), The Kristeva Reader, New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Morgan, Stuart and Frances Morris, Rites of Passage: Art for the End of the Century, with contributions by Stephen Greenblatt, Julia Kristeva, Charles Penwarden, London: Tate Publications, 1995. Mulvey, Laura, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16/3 (Autumn 1975), pp.6–18. Mulvey, Laura, ‘A Phantasmagoria of the Female Body: The Work of Cindy Sherman’, New Left Review 188 (July– August 1991), pp.137–50. Mulvey, Laura, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, London: Reaktion Books, 2006. Mulvey, Laura, ‘A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai): From After to Before the Photograph’, Oxford Art Journal 30/1, (2007), pp.27–37. Nixon, Mignon, ‘Bad Enough Mother’, October 71 (Winter 1995), pp.71–92. Nixon, Mignon, Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2005. O’Pray, Michael, Film, Form and Phantasy: Adrian Stokes and Film Aesthetics, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Pajaczkowska, Claire, Perversion (Ideas in Psychoanalysis), Cambridge: Icon Books, 2000. Phillips, Adam, Winnicott, London: Fontana Press, 1988. Pollock, Griselda (ed.), Psychoanalysis and the Image: Transdisciplinary Perspectives, Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.

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Read, Alan (ed.), The Fact of Blackness : Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, London: Institute of Contemporary Arts and Institute of International Visual Arts and Seattle: Bay Press, 1996. Richards, Mary, Marina Abramovi´c, London and New York: Routledge, 2010. Rivière, Joan, ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’ (1929), in Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan (eds), Formations of Fantasy, London and New York: Methuen, 1986, pp.35–44. Rolnik, Suely, ‘Molding a Contemporary Soul: The Empty-Full of Lygia Clark’, http://caosmose.net/suelyrolnik/pdf/ molding%20_john_nadine.pdf, accessed 11 January 2011. Russo, Julie Levin, ‘Show Me Yours: Cyber-Exhibitionism from Perversion to Politics’, Camera Obscura 25/1: 73 (2010), pp.131–59. Silverman, Kaja, The Threshold of the Visible World, London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Lorna Simpson, contributors Kellie Jones, Thelma Golden, Chrissie Iles, London and New York: Phaidon, 2002. Smith, Kiki, interview with Carlo McCormick, Journal of Contemporary Art, http://www.jca-online.com/interviews. html, accessed 26 September 2011. Stezaker, John, ‘The Encounter with the Real’, interview with John Stezaker by Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Lynda Morris, dispatch 123, Norwich Gallery, April 2006. John Stezaker, texts by Dawn Ades, Michael Bracewell and John Stezaker in conversation with Christophe Gallois and Daniel F. Herrman, London: Ridinghouse and Whitechapel Gallery, 2010. Vidler, Anthony, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1993. Wagner, Anne M., ‘Another Hesse’, October 69 (Summer 1994), pp.49–84. Wall, Jeff, ‘Photography and Liquid Intelligence’, Jeff Wall, London and New York: Phaidon, 1996, pp.90–93. Walsh, Maria, ‘Corpus: Mary Kelly interviewed by Maria Walsh’, Art Monthly 346 (May 2011), pp.1–4. Webb, Robert and Peter Short, Hans Bellmer, London: Quartet Books, 1985. Wilson, Siona, ‘From Women’s Work to the Umbilical Lens: Mary Kelly’s Early Films’, Art History 31/1 (February 2008), pp.79–102. Winnicott, D.W., ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena: A Study of the First Not-Me Possession’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis XXX1V (1953), pp.89–97. Winnicott, D.W., Playing and Reality, London: Brunner-Routledge, 2001 (originally published London: Tavistock, 1971). Wollheim, Richard, Introduction to Freud, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. de Zegher, Catherine, ‘The Inside is the Outside: The Relational as the (Feminine) Space of the Radical’, Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture 4 (2002), http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue4IVC/de_Zegher.html, accessed 21 February 2011. v Zizek, Slavoj, ‘Looking Awry’, October 50 (Autumn 1989) pp.30–55. v

Index

Abjection 2, 5, 6, 71–72, 74–75, 78, 80–82, 105, 128 Abramovi´c, Marina 6, 118, 120–24, 135 Art Must be Beautiful (1975–76) 120 The Artist is Present (2010) 123 Balkan Baroque (1997) 121 Dozing Consciousness (1997) 124 The House with the Ocean View (2002) 122, 123 The Onion (1995) 120 Rhythm 10 (1973) 118, 119 Rhythm 4 (1974) 120 Rhythm O (1974) 121 Abramovi´c and Ulay 120, 122 Nightsea Crossing (1981–87) 120, 122 Relation in Time (1977) 120 Acconci, Vito 62–63 Airtime (1973) 62 Centers (1971) 62 Adams, Parveen 38–39, 52, 59–60 Antoni, Janine 110 Gnaw (1992) 110 Lick and Lather (1992) 110 Anzieu, Didier 6, 125–28, 131 attunement 65–66, 69, 135 Bacon, Francis 60, 65 Barthes, Roland 32

Bataille, Georges 35, 74–75, 80 Bellmer, Hans 5, 28–31, 36 La Poupée (1935) 29 Bersani, Leo 7, 38, 40, 60, 65, 95, 97, 103, 126, 135 Bhabha, Homi 83 Billingham, Richard 56 Ray’s a Laugh 56 black narcissus 6, 84–85, 91 Bois, Yves-Alain 80–81, 132 Bollas, Christopher 65–66 Bourgeois, Louise 4, 5, 6, 23–25, 105, 108, 110–12, 114 Articulated Lair (1986) 25 Cell (Glass Spheres and Hands) (1990–93) 25 Cell (You Better Grow Up) (1993) 108 Femme Maison (1947) 23 Fillette (1968) 110, 111 Janus Fleuri (1968) 108 No Exit (1989) 23, 24 Breton, André 17, 74 Brett, Guy 129 Brown, Norman O. 96 Bryson, Norman 51, 52 Cadieux, Geneviève 58–59, 65 Hear Me With Your Eyes (1989) 58, 59

152

Art and Psychoanalysis

Cahun, Claude 40–41, 43, 44, 55 Untitled (Self-Portrait) (ca.1928) 43, 44 Calle, Sophie 63–64 Suite Venitienne (1979) 63–64 Canova, Antonio 39 The Three Graces (1814–17) 39 castration 9, 15, 22, 29–30, 35–36, 39, 45–46, 58, 69, 71, 75, 95, 108, 110, 112–13 Chadwick, Helen 69–71, 80 Meat Abstracts (1989) 69 Piss Flowers (1991–92) 69 The Oval Court (1984–86) 70, 70–71 Chapman, Jake and Dinos 11 Little Death Machine (Castrated) (1993) 11 Charcot, Jean-Martin 49, 92 Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine 115 Cixous, Hélène 49 Clark, Lygia 6, 128–32, 133 Baba Antropofágica (Anthropophagic Slobber) (1973) 131–32 Bichos (Beasts) (1960–63) 129 Caminhando (Trailings) (1964) 129 Pedra e Ar (Stone and Air) (1966) 132 The I and the You: Cloth-BodyCloth series (1967) 130, 130–31 Cox, Renée Valerie 90 Crimp, Douglas 52 Da Vinci, Leonardo 99 De Zegher, Catherine 133 death drive 4, 6, 94, 97, 99–101, 103–4, 108, 110, 114, 135 depressive position 106–7, 112 Derrida, Jacques 13, 17 Douglas, Mary 20, 76

dream-work, the 3, 4, 9–15, 17–18, 20, 114 Duchamp, Marcel 30, 35 Dutoit, Ulysse 38 ego skin, the 6, 125, 128, 132 Ehrenzweig, Anton 101 Ernst, Max 4, 9, 15–17, 23, 30 Pietà or Revolution by Night (1923) 15, 16 Ettinger, Bracha Lichtenberg 133, 135 Fanon, Frantz 82–84 femininity 30, 36, 40–41, 43, 46, 48–49, 53–54, 65, 69, 71, 110, 113 Fer, Briony 100, 114 fetishism 2, 4, 5, 30, 34–36, 38–41, 45–46, 48–49, 56, 71, 83–84, 88, 90, 115, 117 Fisher, Jean 88 Florence, Penny 14 fort-da 99 Foster, Hal 61, 65, 74–75, 81 Freud, Sigmund/Freudian 1–6, 9–15, 17–18, 20–23, 27, 29–31, 36, 38, 43, 45–46, 49, 58–61, 64–65, 69–71, 82, 94–97, 99–100, 106–8, 112, 116, 125–26, 134–35 Fusco, Coco and Peña, Guillermo 90 Undiscovered Amerindians (1992–94) 90 gaze, the 5, 36, 39–41, 43, 49, 54–61, 64–65, 67, 82–83, 85, 88, 90–91, 122–23 Gee, Malcolm 15 Gober, Robert 4, 11, 75–76, 78 Slides of a Changing Painting (1982–83) 11–12 Untitled (1991) 75



Wedding Gown, Cat Litter, HangMan Wallpaper (all 1989) 76 Gormley, Anthony 127 Grace, Della (Del LaGrace Volcano) 39–40 The Three Graces (1992) 39 Hall, Stuart 5, 84 Harris, Lyle Ashton 82, 85–86, 90 Construct #10 (1989) 85–86, 86 Sisterhood (1994) 85 Herbart, Johann Friedrich 2 Hesse, Eva 6, 100–4, 114, 128 Contingent (1968–69) 103 Hang Up (1966) 101, 102, 103 Metronymic Irregularity 1 (1966) 101 Sans (1968) 100 Untitled (Three Nets) (1966) 100 Hiller, Susan 4, 11–13, 15 Belshazzar’s Feast, The Writing on Your Wall (1983–84) 12, 13 Dream Mapping (1974) 12 Hitchcock, Alfred 22, 57 Psycho 22, 57 Holbein the Younger, Hans 57–59 The Ambassadors (1533) 57, 59 Holt, Nancy 62 Holzer, Jenny 5 52–53 hooks, bell 84, 92 hysteria 49, 92, 113 Irigaray, Luce 49 Iversen, Margaret 58, 60, 101, 103 Jentsch, Wilhelm 27, 30 Jones, Amelia 72 Julien, Isaac 82, 87 Looking for Langston (1989) 87

Index

153 Kelley, Mike 5, 31–32, 75–78, 97–99, 115–17 Arena #7 (Bears) (1990) 77 Craft Morphology Flow Chart (1991) 97–98, 98 Lumpenprole (1991) 76 Manipulating Mass-Produced Idealized Objects (1990) 75 More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid (1987)115 Pay for your Pleasure (1988) 77 Kelly, Mary 1, 5, 45–55, 58, 69, 92, 105 Interim (1982–84) 49, 50–53, 50, 51 Post-Partum Document (1973–79) 46–47, 49 Klein, Melanie 3, 4, 6, 23, 41, 105–8, 110, 112–14, 133 Kofman, Sarah 97 Koons, Jeff 5, 72 Krauss, Rosalind 61–63, 80–81 Kristeva, Julia 3, 4, 5, 6, 68–69, 71–72, 76, 78, 105, 134–35 Kruger, Barbara 5, 52–53 Lacan, Jacques/Lacanian 3–6, 13, 45, 48, 52–54, 56–58, 60–62, 65, 67, 70–71, 82–84, 92–93, 99, 103, 106, 108, 126, 133, 134 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 2 Levine, Sherrie 35–36, 52 Urinal (1996) 35–36 Lippard, Lucy 100 Magritte, René 11, 13–14, 18 Rape (1934) 11 Manet, Édouard 85, 88 Olympia (1863) 85, 88 Manzoni, Piero 35 Canned Shit (1961) 35

154

Art and Psychoanalysis

Mapplethorpe, Robert 5, 40, 56, 90, 110 Black Males 56 Patrice (1977) 40 Man in Polyester Suit (1980) 90 Marsyas, Greek myth of 126 Marx, Karl 5, 34, 76 masochism 4, 6, 7, 94–95, 121, 126, 135 masquerade 5, 40–41, 43, 71, 85 McCarthy, Paul 78–79 Bossy Burger (1992) 78 Grand Pop (1977) 79 McQueen, Steve 82, 85, 87 Bear (1993) 85 Carib’s Leap/Western Deep (2002) 87 Mercer, Kobena 84, 90–91 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 56 Modernism 72, 80 Mulvey, Laura 28, 30, 32–33, 36, 38–39, 41, 53, 56, 61, 71, 80, 82, 88, 90 narcissism 2, 5, 6, 31, 43, 52, 54–56 Nixon, Mignon 105–6, 108, 110, 112, 114 Oedipus 9, 10, 15, 46 O’Grady, Lorraine 90–91 Body is the Ground of My Experience (1991) 90–91 oral sadism 110 Other, the 65, 71, 78, 83–84, 87, 131, 134 otherness 63 Oursler, Tony 30, 31 The Influence Machine (2000) 31 Owens, Craig 52 Pane, Gina 124, 132 paranoid-schizoid position 106–8, 114 Peirce, C.S. 52 perversion 4, 34, 75, 78, 115

petit objet a 3, 99 Phillips, Adam 15, 65, 123 pleasure 6, 7, 36, 38–39, 48–50, 53, 55, 58, 60, 62, 64, 69, 71, 85, 94–96, 99, 100, 103, 105, 112, 114, 123, 126, 135, 136 Poe, Edgar Allan 27 Pollock, Griselda 133 Pondick, Rona 74–75, 78, 80, 108–10 Baby (1989) 75 Little Bathers (detail) (1990–91) 109 pre-Oedipal 68–69, 105 Rank, Otto 21 Ray, Charles 30, 32 No (1992) 30 Oh Charlie Charlie Charlie (1992) 30 Redon, Odilon 4, 14 The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Moves Towards Infinity (1882) 14 Rego, Paula 10–11, 14 The Policeman’s Daughter (1987) 10 reparation 106, 107, 112–14, 121 repetition compulsion 6, 32, 94, 97, 99, 100, 105 Rist, Pipilotti 61, 66–68 Gravity Be My Friend (2007) 66, 67 Open My Glade (Flatten) (2000) 66 Rivière, Joan 40–41, 43 Rolnik, Suely 136 sadism 95–96, 135 Schneider, Gregor 4, 27 Dead Haus Ur (2001) 27 Die Familie Schneider (2004) 27 Ur Haus (1985–) 27 self-shattering 95, 126, 134 semiotic 52, 68–69, 71, 105

Serra, Richard 62 Boomerang (1974) 62 Serrano, Andres 5, 74–75, 80 Madonna and Child (1989) 75 Piss Christ (1987) 74–75 Sherman, Cindy 5, 31, 36–43, 52, 61, 65, 71, 80–81 Untitled (1985) 36, 37 Untitled (1987) 80 Untitled Film Still (1977) 41, 42, 43 Silverman, Kaja 87 Simpson, Lorna 82, 91–93, 94 Easy for Who to Say (1989) 92 Magdalena (1992) 93, 94 The Waterbearer (1986) 92 Smith, Kiki 5, 72–74, 78, 80–81, 91, 127–28 Blood Pool (1992) 72, 74 Nervous Giants (1986–87) 128 Untitled (Skins) (1992) 128 Virgin Mary (1992) 72, 73, 128 Smithson, Robert 6, 81, 101, 103 Spiral Jetty (1970) 81, 101, 103 Stehli, Jemima 5, 54–55 Chair (1997) 54 Strip (1999–2000) 55 Table 1 (1998) 54 Table 11 (1998) 54 Stezaker, John 17–18, 32–33 Mask XXXV (2007) 18, 19 Negotiable Space 1 (1978) 18 Stokes, Adrian 106, 114 Surrealism 2, 11, 17, 18, 72, 74, 96, 97 Surrealists, the 9, 15, 17, 20, 30, 45 surrogate object 6, 99, 100, 127, 129, 132 Tausk, Victor 31 transitional object, the 3, 6, 116–18, 132

Index

155 Tykkä, Salla 64–66 Lasso (2000) 64 Ulay and Marina Abramovi´c 119–20, 122, 124 uncanny, the 4, 20–23, 25, 27–33, 71, 97 unconscious, the 2–4, 10–11, 13, 14, 17, 18, 20, 21, 25, 30, 35, 56–57, 84, 88, 94–96, 103, 133, 134 unheimlich 21 unpleasure 95, 96, 100, 114, 135 Vidler, Anthony 22 Vienna Actionists 75 von Hartmann, Eduard 2 von Helmholtz, Hermann 2 voyeurism 36, 55, 58, 64, 90, 122 Wagner, Anne 103 Wall, Jeff 33 Dead Troops Talk (a vision after an ambush of a Red Army Patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986) 33 Milk (1984) 33 Warhol, Andy 36, 97 Gold Marilyn (1962) 36 Weems, Carrie May 82, 88, 89 Mirror, Mirror (1987–88) 88, 89 Untitled (Kitchen table series) (1990) 88, 90 Whiteread, Rachel 4, 25–26, 112 House (1993) 25, 26 Winnicott, D.W. 3, 6, 31, 65, 106, 116–23, 132–35 Wollheim, Richard 4, 106 v

Zizek, Slavoj 57 v